Women in Islam - Marriage and Sexuality

Marriage and Sexuality

In contrast to the Western world where divorce was relatively uncommon until modern times, and in contrast to the low rates of divorce in the modern Middle East, divorce was a more common occurrence in certain states of the late medieval Muslim world. In the Mamluk Sultanate and Ottoman Empire, the rate of divorce was higher than it is today in the modern Middle East. The Quran is explicit in addressing zawaj al-hall, or a disrupted marriage, where a man intends to remarry a former wife for a second time; (2:230) indicates that for the second marriage to be lawful for the former husband, the former wife must have been remarried during the intervening time to a second man since the renunciation of the previous marriage. The intention behind this Quran passage was to end abuses of the right to marital renunciation dating from ancient customs.

In medieval Egypt, Al-Sakhawi recorded the marital history of 500 women, the largest sample of married women in the Middle Ages, and found that at least a third of all women in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria married more than once, with many marrying three or more times. According to Al-Sakhawi, as many as three out of ten marriages in 15th century Cairo ended in divorce. In the early 20th century, some villages in western Java and the Malay peninsula had divorce rates as high as 70%.