India’s Supreme Court Strikes Down ‘Instant Divorce’ for Muslims<br />22, 2017<br />NEW DELHI — India’s highest court struck down a legal provision on Tuesday<br />that allowed Muslim men to instantly divorce their wives, taking a stand against a practice increasingly deemed unacceptable in the Muslim world.<br />Instead of making husbands responsible for helping support divorced wives, the new law<br />left women "to beg at different places for maintenance," she said in the 2014 study.<br />"Muslims should be ready." There are no official statistics on the prevalence of instant divorce in India, but one study found<br />that among a sample of more than 4,700 women, 525 had divorced, 404 of them through triple talaq.<br />That law was a grave disservice to Muslim women, according to Noorjehan Safia Niaz, co-founder of the Bharatiya<br />Muslim Mahila Andolan, one of the Muslim women’s advocacy groups that filed a brief in the Supreme Court case.<br />"Women are talked about as if they are in need of protection, not in terms of their rights." She added, "Nearly every reference to the Muslim woman in the majority<br />and dissenting opinions reduces Muslim women to ‘suffering victims.’ " The Supreme Court has often taken the lead in making landmark changes to Indian law.<br />Of those who voted against, two said the practice was unconstitutional and one said it went against Islamic law.
