So you have just got divorced — verbally — by your husband — in the heat of an argument. The argument is over and the husband is apologetic. But as per the fatwabajes, you can not get back together with him just like that. The only way to get back with him is to get married to someone else and consummate the marriage first and divorce this person and get remarried to your first husband. This form of innate social injustice against women is known as Hila marriage. Muslim scholars over the years have said the form of instant and verbal divorce has no legal basis and is not Islamic. But yet in Bangladesh, the people who do business in the name of religion, have made it a new form of business to offer Hila marriage as a service. If the newspaper reports are any guide, reports of this business are cropping up in different parts of the country. All of the ones below are from last month’s newspaper.

A reader in New Nation reports
The most ignorant village leaders led by the Imam of the local mosque of Kusharigaon under the Pirganj upazila in the district of greater Dinajpur excommunicated Abdur Rashid and Morjina Begum for their rejecting the decision of hilla marriage illegally awarded to Morjina, reported a Bengali daily on Monday.

Janakantha reports that after living together for 25 years in a marriage, a fatwa given 25 years ago for a verbal divorce was implemented by a son for her mother. She was given to a 75 year old as a hila wife. The husband passed away few days later in shame.

Bhorer Kagoj reports of 12 such marriages in Gaibandha in two years. It describes the case of an Asma who is a day laborer and who was forced to do a hila marriage at the threat of getting caned by the village elders. The silver lining is that cases has been brought against these fatwabajes. But lives are ruined forever.

Muslim Congress of Canada(MCC) has come out with a protest against such practice and points out the lack of outrage among the Islami parties on this issue . The statement (in Bangla) actually covers the issue very well.

Travesty of fatwa and Hila marriage was highlighted the most in the case of Nurjahan 14 years ago. Shahidul Alam recently did a tribute in his blog. For those of you don’t know that tragic case, below is a blurb written by Rahnuma from that entry.


It was reported in the papers as suicide. On 10 January 1993 Nurjahan, a woman in her twenties from a struggling peasant household from the Maulvi Bazar district of north-east Bangladesh, was found dead from poisoning at her parents’ house in the village of Chattokchara.

Nurjahan Begum, 7th among 9 daughters, had been married five years before the incident. However, her husband abandoned her and she returned home to live with her parents. Later, her parents arranged another marriage for her, but since polyandry is forbidden by Muslim law, it was necessary to discover whether her first marriage had been properly dissolved. Nujahan’s father consulted the village imam (religious leader), who declared that she was free to marry. However, he revoked this later and claimed that the marriage was illegal because the first still stood. A shalish (village council for settling disputes and trying offending villagers) met to judge whether Nurjahan and any of her family members had broken the law. The shalish found Nujahan guilty of fornication, on the grounds that she was still married to her first husband; after debating the punishment, it decided that 101 pebbles should be thrown at Nurjahan and her second husband.

Pebbles were preferred to stones since the intention, reportedly, was to shame the couple rather than hurt or kill them. Nurjahan’s parents were also to be punished; the shalish decreed that they should be beaten with a broom. Nurjahan was made to stand in a hole that was then filled, half burying her, to receive her punishment. As she did so a member of the shalish approached her and castigated her for the shame she had brought on her family. She was not fit to live and should kill herself. Nurjahan was found dead the next day.

Please check the link for the pictures by Shahidul.

On a larger debate of the applicability of Sharia law in Bangladesh, here is a fascinating debate between MCC’s Hasan Mahmud and Jamate Islami’s Muhammad Kamrujjaman, take a look at this transcript from a VOA debate. Unfortunately, this is in Bangla as well.

14 years after the death of Nurjahan, how much progress have we made dealing with these fatwabajes? If the signing of the MOU agreeing to legalised fatwa by the secularist Awami League is any indication, the answer is depressing. Even though court has declared the fatwas illegal, from the reports above it is clear that they are very much in practice.