As described in Chapter 2, the Islamic juridical vacuum is not a jurisdiction controlled by Muslim leaders; rather, it is generated by the women who respond to suffering by leaving their husbands in the context of social structures where the concept of Islamic divorce matters. This high degree of agency observed in these situations – also demonstrated and underlined by other researchers (Liversage, forthcoming) – stand in stark contrast to typical descriptions of Muslim minority women as helpless and passive (Petersen, 2018). Just to be clear, I do not intend to suggest that only women may be in vulnerable positions. This is clearly not the case, as demonstrated by Katharine Charsley and Anika Liversage (2015). However, as my focus is on how the Islamic juridical vacuum is generated, I do not delve more deeply into men’s vulnerabilities, although I agree with Charsley and Liversage that this is an area of study that needs more attention.
In this chapter, I investigate where the vacuum emerges, the kinds of situations that generate it, and the contours of how Islamic legal rules are negotiated within it. The focus of the chapter is on the three types of situations that generate the vacuum: Islamized coercive control, honor-motivated control, and the need for closure. My data demonstrates that in these three situations, some women are willing to invest significant resources in their pursuit of Islamic divorce, even if they are not Muslims. There are other contexts in which women may want an Islamic divorce, but their experiences are not severe enough for them to invest significant resources, and therefore, the vacuum generated is insignificant. Such cases play a minor role in the emergence and institutionalization of qadis and Islamic divorce councils.
To avoid misunderstandings, I note that it is impossible to identify the “event” that generates the vacuum. As this chapter demonstrates, the vacuum is generated by women’s agency, but it is agency that is confined by the social structures that the women navigate. I describe the dynamics of agency and structure without making claims about any single one being an original, primary, or something akin to root cause. The root cause is deferred, always directing attention to other phenomena that constitute root causes (Derrida, 1973).1
1 Historical Roots of the Vacuum
While women’s agency – their responding to suffering – is what generates the Islamic juridical vacuum, their actions are performed within a discursivity that has historical roots. Using de Certeau’s (2011) terminology, this may be expressed as women’s tactical maneuvering within a field that is structured by a strategic power. Stated in plainer English, Islamic divorce rules are ways of doing things inherited from the countries from which Muslims have migrated, but in the absence of the legal institutions that structure such practices in the country of origin, new practices emerge in the Islamic juridical vacuum in Denmark.
Interestingly, school of thought is an insignificant variable in the diaspora practices that emerge. To take an example, both Turks and Pakistanis follow the Hanafi school of thought, but while Pakistanis tend to demand an Islamic divorce in addition to a civil divorce, Turks typically regard a civil divorce as a full divorce. These two practices constitute ways of doing things that have a history in their respective countries of origin. In Turkey, a modified version of the Swiss civil code concerning family law was promulgated in 1926, abolishing Islamic law, and with time, civil divorce became the norm for the vast majority of Turks (Koçak, 2010, p. 262). By the late 1980s and early 1990s, religious-only marriages in Turkey had plummeted to just 4.89 percent, although distributed unequally across the country, with 22.4 percent in eastern Anatolia and only 2.2 percent in western Anatolia (Yilmaz, 2015, p. 55). This indicates both that strong state institutions matter (cf. Clarke, 2018; Jones, 2020), and that using secular legal institutions is normative in Turkey, even if some parallel legal practices may still exist. In Pakistan, on the other hand, Islamic divorce is regulated by the Muslim Family Law Ordinance of 1961, which demands Islamic divorce procedures (Lau, 2010, pp. 415–417). This legal code is part of a tradition that goes back to the British Raj, which promulgated the Anglo-Muhammadan Law in 1858 – a codified body of remodeled Islamic laws covering family affairs. As the state courts, staffed by both British and Indian judges, were seen by many as illegitimate in their supplanting of muftis and qadis (Islamic legal personnel), parallel legal institutions emerged and were institutionalized in the late 19th century. Thus, a legal tradition emerged in parallel with the state institutions, and this is still operational today. John R. Bowen (2016) and Justin Jones (2020) have demonstrated that the parallel legal institutions that have emerged in the United Kingdom after mass migration from India and Pakistan in the 1960s comprise adaptions of these already existing parallel legal practices in India and Pakistan.
Other histories produce different diaspora situations. Arshad Muradin, for example, describes how the role of the imam as a mediator in family dispute resolution was taken over by professionally trained mediators with the modernization of the Moroccan state. However, in the Netherlands the old institution of the imam has been revived. As Muradin explains:
Historically, Moroccan traditional society had its own informal dispute resolution processes based on tribal (qabaliyya) and customary (ʿurf) laws to resolve interpersonal disputes. Although the chief of the tribe or the eldest member of the family typically acted as mediator, conciliator or arbitrator, the imam of the mosque was also among the actors who, in addition to his religious duties and responsibilities, had a social role to assist and advise people living in the neighbourhood surrounding the mosque. Imams were considered wise and respected persons, both for their religious knowledge and for the example they set in their society. … The position of the imam sometimes allowed him to become a spokesperson for a child, especially in times of family crisis, which gave him permission actively to reason with arguing spouses in the private setting of the mosque or home. This mode of intervention by imams is still present today in small remote villages; however, with the modernisation of Moroccan cities and the arrival of new actors in the field of family counselling, such as professionally trained mediators, their role is now predominantly confined to the religious domain. In the absence of the authority and control of the extended family and tribe in the Netherlands, the first generation of Moroccan migrants has naturally fallen back on the traditional role of the Moroccan imam as mediator and dispute resolver. (Muradin, 2022, p. 56)
The patterns found in Turkish (Liversage & Petersen, 2020), Bosnian (Karčić, 2015), Pakistani (Jones, 2020), and Moroccan (Muradin, 2022) ways of doing things are also present in my data, but extending beyond these nationalities. For example, when I asked Abdi, a Lebanese Muslim leader introduced in Chapter 5, why people in his community often say kitab kitābi2 rather than nikah, he explained that this was because in their country of origin, the maḏūn, a kind of village mayor, would register a nikah by writing it in his book. Abdi added that couples may also just get engaged, which is called ḫuṭūba in his community. When entering an engagement, al-Fatiha (the first chapter of the Quran) is recited, rings are exchanged, and going forward the couple is allowed more privacy to get to know each other before entering into a nikah. However, Adbi and other elders in his community also complained that the new generation, born and raised in Denmark, misunderstand how things ought to be done. They regard kitab kitābi as engagement, thereby, in Abdi’s eyes, conflating engagement and nikah. In fact, this is how I first came across the phenomenon. Young people explained to me that they had done kitab kitābi, which was written as a nikah contract (ʿaqd al-nikāh), but they added that they were free to end the engagement (kitab kitābi) by merely informing their fiancé and throwing the document in the trash can. Or they could enter into a full nikah with their fiancé, which would require an additional ritual.
It is important to note that in fieldwork Islamic legal practices are not as neat as they appear in the Lebanese example; rather, there is a lot of discussion and confusion over what the rules are, and people are generally aware of differences between theory and practice. Moreover, local dynamics in Denmark may influence the actual rules. As explained in the introduction, Somalian women tend to be able to end a nikah by merely declaring themselves Islamically divorced, thus living out the Somalian proverb “rather divorced 30 times than live in an unhappy marriage” (Jesuloganathan, 2010). However, Somalians who have become Salafis can experience nikah captivity, and conflicts between clans in individual cases can also cause nikah captivity.
To sum up, Islamic divorce practices are inherited ways of doing things that are adapted to a diaspora situation in which there are no legal institutions that structure or enforce Islamic rules. Further, these ways of doing things can vary considerably between ethnicities/nationalities as can attitudes towards Islamic divorce processes and gender equality. Pew Research’s global survey demonstrates that only 8 percent of Muslims in Malaysia believe that a woman should have the right to divorce her husband, but this figure is 94 percent in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Similarly, 96 percent of Muslims in Malaysia believe that a wife must always obey her husband, but this figure is 34 percent in Kosovo (Pew Research Center, 2013, pp. 93–94).
Table 2 gives an estimation of the size of the vacuum in Denmark. It demonstrates that the number of Muslims who demand religious approval of divorce is significantly higher among Muslims than in the population at large. Individual women may disagree on the question of whether a religious divorce needs approval from a religious authority, but they are nevertheless partially bound by such rules if their (ex)husband or family endorse them.
Estimation of the size of the Islamic juridical vacuum
It should be noted that Table 2 is not an accurate estimate of the vacuum. Rather, the numbers here are too low, as it is not generally agreed that a religious authority must be involved in Islamic divorce processes. In other words, Table 2 does not count other ways of ending a nikah apart from approaching a religious authority – hence the probability that the figures are skewed.
2 Making Islamic Divorce Rules in Diaspora
The rules of Islamic divorce are continually negotiated in the Islamic juridical vacuum between individuals, families, extended families (also abroad), communities, Danish authorities, Muslim leaders, and Islamic institutions. This means that Muslim leaders and Islamic institutions may, to the extent that they engage with Islamic divorce cases, take part in the negotiation of Islamic divorce rules, but they are seldom able to dictate the rules, especially not in hard cases.
Some male Muslim leaders from countries with religious family law either insist that one must divorce Islamically in addition to civil divorce, or that the Islamic validity of civil divorce is dependent upon the husband’s signing the divorce papers in the Agency of Family Law. The first view is evident from my interview with Hassan, who is an imam in a minor city in Denmark:
Petersen: If the man says “I want to divorce” at the Danish Agency of Family Law, and thereby divorces there, is such a divorce valid as an Islamic divorce?
Hassan: No.
Petersen: What if the man requested the divorce [in the Agency of Family Law]?
Hassan: No, we must do an Islamic divorce.
Petersen: OK, so if the husband has signed the divorce in the Agency of Family Law, then?
Hassan: That is invalid. One must do it Islamically.
Hassan sees civil and Islamic divorce as two unrelated phenomena: “because you were married Islamically, you must also divorce Islamically”. He is also fully aware of the hardship this may cause women, but if women ask him, he feels obliged to answer in accordance with his beliefs. Other Muslim leaders believe that the consequences of a civil divorce are more ambiguous, as Kamal explains,
Petersen: But is it then correctly understood that the Islamic divorce they get [from the Agency of Family Law] is Islamically valid?
Kamal: Yes.
Petersen: And if the husband does not sign it and it is without his consent?
Kamal: Well, that is a bit more disputed.
When Kamal states that the Islamic validity of civil divorce is disputed, he refers to ongoing discussions among Danish Muslim leaders. While some agree with Hassan, others, such as Idris – an imam in the al-Hikma Mosque which is presented in Chapter 8 – believe that if an Islamic authority has followed Islamic reconciliation procedures without success, he can then pass the case onto the Agency of Family Law, whose decision thereby becomes Islamically valid. A former imam in one of Denmark’s most popular and influential mosques, Mostafa Chendid, goes even further. In 2015 he published a book in which he argued for the Islamic validity of civil divorce (Chendid, 2015); however, the effect of this argument, if any, is minor. This is demonstrated both by the fact that most of Chendid’s colleagues have not read the book,3 and by Chendid’s inability to enforce his view.
By stating that Islamic divorce is necessary either in some or all cases, Hassan, Kamal, Idris, and others indirectly generate the demand for it. This may affect women because it lends legitimacy to the Islamic legal claims made by the husband and/or family holding them in nikah captivity. Here it is noteworthy that neither Hassan, Kamal, nor Idris are able to offer Islamic divorce with a stable social effect. They merely make these statements because that is what they believe, and they begrudge the fact that Muslims have been unable to found a national Islamic divorce council that can deliver haqq (divine justice) to women. Some Muslim leaders – including Idris – blame the Danish state, which he says has provided imams with marriage licenses but no divorce licenses. This view may seem odd, but from Idris’ perspective so does the notion of imams performing civil marriages, as there is no Islamic legal precedence for such an act within fiqh. In his view, imams have taken over part of the registrar’s role – registering marriage – but have had their hands tied by not also being delegated the power (sulṭa) to divorce people.
The effect of the opinions of Hassan, Kamal, Idris, and other Muslims that Islamic divorce is a requirement in addition to civil divorce must not be overstated. The power to determine sharia rules in individual cases primarily lies with the (ex)husband or family, while Muslim leaders generally play a secondary role, although the parties in a case may mobilize Muslim leaders’ opinions in a conflict. In 2021, for example, a woman publicly proclaimed that she was now Islamically divorced based on a divorce issued by an imam without the consent of her husband. However, her husband took the Islamic divorce document to Haitham, who believed it to be void because the Muslim leader who issued the divorce had not sent three notifications about it to the husband before issuing it. Concerns surrounding annulment of an Islamic legal performance are well-documented in other studies too, illustrating – as argued in Chapter 1 – that divorces in the Islamic juridical vacuum that require an act of presence are deferred, not final (cf. Eijk, 2019, pp. 52–53; Jaraba, 2019, p. 85; Liversage & Petersen, 2020, pp. 218–221). With Haitham’s evaluation in hand, the husband could now counter his (ex)wife’s claim. In short, Muslim leaders are often played in Islamic divorce conflicts.
Muslim leaders do not proactively police women; husbands and families do. Rather, Muslim leaders are reactive in the sense that people may mobilize their standpoints in conflict, but Muslim leaders will not enter into such conflict of their own volition. When I inquired of Haitham about his declaring Islamic divorces void he referred to the British procedure of sending three letters as correct, and because the correct procedures had not been followed the Islamic divorce was void. He then added that he does not make evaluations of specific cases, but he is always willing to explain the rules as he understands them, and then people can make up their own minds.
The position of Muslim leaders in the Islamic juridical vacuum demonstrates why studies that only sample trained Islamic authorities produce biased results that sometimes vary significantly from the majority of Muslim opinions. For example, there is an almost unanimous agreement among Islamic legal scholars that Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men, but in a poll conducted in Denmark in 2024, 54 percent of Muslims answered yes to the question “If you have/had a daughter, would you accept that your daughter married a person who was not Muslim?” (Bigum, Vibjerg & Momme, 2024). This demonstrates a discrepancy between ordinary Muslims and Muslim leaders, and the latter group to some extent adapts to the views of the former. This is also evident in discussions among Muslim leaders about the process of mock conversions in relation to Muslim women who enter into a nikah with non-Muslim men.
Muslim leaders are part of the ongoing negotiations of sharia practices in Denmark, but their influence should neither be under- nor overstated, although there is a tendency to do the latter. In what follows – as per the program laid out in Chapter 1 – I study sharia in the locations where I have observed it being produced, beginning with women in relationships dominated by what I call Islamized coercive control.
3 Islamized Coercive Control
In 2007, Evan Stark (2007) coined the term “coercive control” to denote a behavioral pattern whereby men entrap women in their lives. Further investigation, especially by psychologists and criminologists, has demonstrated that it has a common format (Crossman & Hardesty, 2018; Smith, 2021). Coercive control relationships typically begin with the experience of falling in love, followed by a high degree of commitment within a short time; however, this commitment is unidirectional:
For them [controlling men] a commitment is like getting their partner to sign an airtight contract that gives them rights and their partner responsibilities. Most people are completely unaware of the significance and consequences of giving commitment to someone with control issues; it is risky because in the controlling person’s head the commitment can never be withdrawn. Only they can end the contract, and in a way that suits them. (Smith, 2021, p. 69)
Smith underlines that controlling men expect commitment “to them rather than from them, and for life” (Smith, 2021, p. 65). While women may not feel that they have committed, controlling men typically insist at an early stage that they have made a commitment for life. That is, the airtight contract often only exists in the man’s head. This is the beginning of the coercive control pattern:
Once controlling people feel they have a commitment, and the rights they feel that bestows, they will seek to get compliance from their partner to things they see as proving and establishing that commitment. This will be an ongoing process throughout the relationship, and that is the heart of the process of coercive control in an intimate relationship. (Smith, 2021, p. 71)
Coercive control is a behavioral pattern that is mainly studied among majority women in North America and Great Britain, and, therefore, knowledge about coercive control in minority populations is limited. However, studies demonstrate that marginalized people such as migrants are particularly vulnerable to coercive control (Smith, 2021, pp. 109–110; Uddin, 2023, pp. 12–13).
In what follows I demonstrate a sub pattern of coercive control, which I call Islamized coercive control, or religious coercive control expressed with Islamic semiotic resources (cf. Sharp, 2014). The aim is to demonstrate how the Islamic juridical vacuum is generated by a behavioral pattern that is well-studied in majority populations, but takes a slightly different form when it is expressed within an Islamized framework. To be exact, the application of Islamic semiotic resources in coercive control patterns is the cause of nikah captivity, and when women try to escape such relationships, they often use Islamic divorce as an escape strategy, believing that if they just obtain an Islamic divorce the control will end; however, this is seldom the outcome. Rather, the violence is merely projected onto the person who interferes with the man’s coercive control: the Muslim leader, who issues the divorce.
Before embarking on this analysis, it is important to underline that religious coercive control is a behavioral pattern that has been identified across religions (Mulvihill et al., 2022), but below I focus on Islam.
Even during the commitment phase Islamized coercive control deviates from normative coercive control. This is evident in my informants’ entering into a nikah, which means that the otherwise non-articulated commitment becomes explicit. Some take the form of arranged or forced nikah, and others of boyfriends with whom women have entered into a nikah. Amira, a descendant of Arab immigrants, entered into a nikah in her late teens:
Petersen: Did you choose him yourself?
Amira: It was a person that I chose myself. … I was in love with him. That was it. That was just how it was. It was actually the first person I fell in love with.
Petersen: That was it?
Amira: Bam, then we got married [entered into a nikah], because I also wanted to move out, because I wanted to get away from all the stuff going on at home.
It is common in segments of the Muslim minority to Islamize both dating practices and relationships by expressing them as forms of nikah (Bøe, 2018; Jorgensen, 2023). In Amira’s case this meant that her first boyfriend became her husband rather than the first in a series of youth relationships, as is the typical pattern in the majority population. Thus, expectations at the inter- and intra-family level meant that Amira could not choose whether to enter into a nikah or merely have a relationship, but she could choose her own partner.
Nikah introduces the notion that the spouses will practice Islam to one another, whatever that means in the given context (Schultz-Knudsen, 2021, pp. 93–97), and it often creates the expectation at the inter- and intra-family level that the couple will move in with each other and have children. This is also reflected in Amira’s nikah. Not only did she enter into a nikah with her first boyfriend, she also soon moved in with him and felt the pressure to have children with him. In other words, she felt that she had to live up to the expectations that a nikah produced in her social context. Yet Amira explains that she was not ready to have children, even if, according to her friends,
[Having children] is the right thing to do. That means that you have no right to ask questions. Actually there was a person who … told me, “You have no right to be egoistic.” … My network consisted only of women who were also married, but they all had a child or two, and we were just around 20 to 21 years old back then. And I was the only one who did not want to have children. … And then there was one of my friends, in quotation marks, she said to me, “Why do you not want to have children?” I told her, “I don’t know; I would like to wait until I am done with my education.” I used that as an excuse. But then she told me, “I think that is very selfish, because how can you just think about yourself.” … And of course, because it was my friends, I started to think, “OK, yes, I am being a bit selfish”, and then I began to think like this about myself.
Amira never had children. Her nikah was deteriorating fast and, although the process was turbulent and put Amira under significant pressure to accept her role as a wife, her husband ultimately consented to Islamic divorce after a period of nikah captivity. This demonstrates a clear difference between having a boyfriend and entering into a nikah; what could have been a flirt, a kiss, and a break-up, became a husband, a home, and a divorce.
Amira’s experience that nikah leads to children is echoed by many other women. As Jasmin,4 who converted to Islam in her youth and entered into a nikah with her Muslim boyfriend, explains:
Jasmin: You know, it is like this idea that now that we are married, then we must have children. And I was not interested in children.
Petersen: Where does this idea come from? Was it his parents or him who wanted children?
Jasmin: It is like, the community. It is like, once you are married then you must also have children … you know, it was his parents, the neighbors, and everyone.
Voluntarily childless people are stigmatized in many cultures as childlike, irresponsible, and selfish (Ermers, 2018, p. 56). There is nothing inherently Islamic or un-Islamic about this; Muslims may produce sharia and Islam as either encouraging having children or emphasizing individual choice. However, the vast majority of my informants experienced pressure to have children.
Coercive control is enforced with reference to jealousy and loyalty codes (Smith, 2021). The jealousy code manifests itself in the controlling man’s insistence that it is the responsibility of the woman to handle his jealousy, and he expects her to do this by limiting her contact with others that may provoke these emotions in him. With time, women in coercive control relationships begin governing their own behavior to avoid quarrels triggered by their partner’s jealousy, gradually leading to social isolation (Smith, 2021, pp. 78–80). In Jasmin’s nikah the jealousy code was not initially expressed with Islamic semiotic resources, but over time, as her husband became more religious, he began to use Islamic concepts to legitimize his enforcement of the jealousy code:
Petersen: Is there a difference in your experience of control between the time when he was not religious and his becoming religious?
Jasmin: Yes, because he uses Islam against me, you know. For example, when I want to visit my family, he says that you are not allowed to travel more than so and so far away without a guardian, and I have not given you permission. And like, for example, sometimes he also said, “Remember that you have no reason to; you should not even leave the house. Ask [son] to take out the trash. You have no reason to leave the house.” So I was not even allowed to take out the trash.
Petersen: … to what extent were you yourself convinced of the legitimacy of these claims?
Jasmin: I knew that it was correct. I cannot remember whether it is 50 or 70 kilometers that a woman is allowed to travel without her husband – the claim is not incorrect. That is what is written. Also, the part about her not being able to leave, because a woman’s responsibility is at home, you know. Everything outside is the responsibility of the husband.
Her husband’s method of producing Islam is not based on textual study. Rather, his upbringing has provided him with a repertoire of Islamic semiotic resources with a meaning potential that he utilizes to construct a discourse with which he can dominate Jasmin (cf. Ackfeldt, 2024). However, it should be noted that, as with so many other Islams, each of her husband’s arguments “can easily be expanded so as to be made” (MacIntyre, 1981/2014, p. 9), that is, the claims could be derived from the sources; one can use Islamic semiotic resources in everyday life without knowing the background, or having read any texts. Likewise, Jasmin also used Islamic arguments (or mobilized Islamic semiotic resources) in her attempts to create a bit of freedom for herself in the relationship:
I was not allowed to do anything, and I was not doing anything. After we moved to [location], I became totally isolated. The only people I saw were his sisters and I could feel that I was starting to go nuts. And then I wanted to study, and I was not allowed to, and then it was like, but would it then be possible for me to begin studying Islam? Again, I could use Islam because then it was like, “It is a duty within Islam to seek knowledge.” But then there were no [Islam classes in the area]. So I had to travel to [location], but then he ultimately thought that it was too expensive, considering that I would only be there for a couple of hours, and what about the children, and that sort of thing.
Other studies have demonstrated how women mobilize religion to counter religious coercive control and that the confidence provided by religious literacy can significantly empower women (F. Ahmed & Krayem, 2021, p. 38; Al-Sharmani & Mustasaari, 2020). Jasmin explains that Islam evoked pleasant emotions in her. To her, Islam constituted a discursive space in which she felt a degree of control. Moreover, her husband paid her respect and recognition for her Islamic practice. Performing piety was of importance in the family and enforced with violence if necessary: “My children did not fast because they wanted to; they fasted because they were afraid of getting beaten.” Like his mother, Jasmin’s oldest son found Islam offered a good coping strategy and also noted that Islam could shield him from some of the violence:
You know, my children were also hit, because they did not pray. And my son … found out that the more religious he was, the more he could use religion as a screen – not as a screen but as a shield. So, if he was very religious and really stuck to the doctrine within Islam – you know like praying and all these basic things – then he was sort of protected. And he got status through it.
Enhancing one’s status through acquiring religious knowledge or through religious practice is a common phenomenon (Ermers, 2018, p. 52), but in this context it is practiced as a survival and coping tactic, while also being a way of expressing loyalty to a husband’s or father’s principles and values. Thus, Jasmin’s and her son’s piety may simultaneously constitute a genuine private religious practice on a personal level, a display of loyalty within the coercive control pattern on the relationship level, and an enhancer of Jasmin’s social status on the intra- and inter-family levels.
While the jealousy code isolates women and cuts them off from social support, the loyalty code is a way for controlling men to ensure and maintain the compliance of their partner. As Smith defines it,
The loyalty code is imposed through a series of hidden tests designed to make someone choose between two sides and prove their devotion to the controlling person. It is an effective method to remove or control the influence others may have over the victim. Very often friends and family will be the focus. Friends may be considered “a bad influence” and family may be described as “trying to split up” the relationship. The victim may be manipulated to see less of their friends or family, or be responsible for making sure they “like” the controlling person or at least act as if they do. It is a very common part of coercive control that victims are required to present a happy face to others; it is a loyalty test. If outsiders become suspicious, or the controlling person is criticized, there will be consequences for the victim. A happy front can be a protective factor, but it increases the control and the things that support that control. (Smith, 2021, p. 81)
Everyday control in accordance with the loyalty code may take many forms of minute regulation from cooking and cleaning to demanding full custody of children, or men may demand that their partner, as a sign of obedience and loyalty to them, beat the children when they misbehave. All of these methods of control and more were present in Jasmin’s nikah, and some were expressed with Islamic semiotic resources. Coercive control, irrespective of who practices it, “often focuses on stereotypically female roles and expectations, like domestic work, childcare and sexual reputation and behavior” (Smith, 2021, p. 210). Traditional gender roles may be legitimized, as well as objected to, using Islamic semiotic resources, but in Islamized coercive control relationships it is the former.
While beatings in coercive control relationships are typically blamed on the women in the form of “look what you made me do” (cf. Smith, 2021; Walmsley-Johnson, 2018), Jasmin’s husband added a religious frame of reference in the form of his interpretation of the Quran 4:34, which he said allowed him to physically discipline Jasmin. But even everyday things like food waste could be inserted into an Islamic frame: “One thing that he would go crazy over was if there was food waste, because you know it is haram to throw anything away.” Other areas of control were expressed as loyalty – without Islamic semiotic resources – but this may be because these events took place before Jasmin’s husband became more religious:
He made me give up custody of our children. … And he always turned it around to, [if I did not give up custody] I would use it against him. … He called the Agency of Family Law and said that he wanted full custody of our children, and that I would like to give this to him. Then we were called for a meeting. … We went to the meeting, and they asked me, “Do you want to give full custody to him?” and [I answered], “Yes, I do.”
Jasmin’s husband got full custody. However, it should be remembered that Jasmin was not married under Danish law, so to the Agency of Family Law Jasmin and her husband were girlfriend and boyfriend. The consequences of giving custody of children to a controlling man is that if she flees to a women’s shelter with the children, it could be considered kidnapping. This is one tactic among several that controlling men use to cut off their wives from support by the authorities. Another tactic is to insist that their partner demonstrate their loyalty by beating their children when they misbehave, and then recording this on their cell phone. Should their partner report them to the police, or they have to negotiate custody in the Agency of Family Law, the husband can use his recordings to make a strong argument against his former partner. Similarly, such recordings make it hard for the police to raise a case against the controlling man in court, even if the beating is part of a coercive control pattern. However, few cases get that far because men use this type of recording to blackmail their former partners and thereby control their interaction with the authorities.
“Sexual abuse is nearly always present in coercive control” and this is also the case in Jasmin’s nikah (Smith, 2021, p. 123). This is one of the areas where men’s repertoire of Islamic semiotic resources consistently play an important role in almost all the cases I have documented. That is, men – often supported by religious leaders and families – understand being sexually available as the duty of a good Muslim wife.
Jasmin regarded the religious grounding of her husband’s sexual demands as more than just claims about what Islam is; they were grounded in narratives about Mohammad: “you can justify these things with reference to religion and say, ‘The Prophet did this and that, and he also beat his wife and this and that.’” This is also something Jasmin was taught in the Islam classes she attended in the mosque. She remembers her teacher repeatedly stating, “You are not allowed to say no [to sex], you may not reject him.” This was also the dominant view in her husband’s family and in the social networks her husband allowed her to be part of. In other words, the idea of sexual availability as the duty of a wife was produced at all levels in Jasmin’s life, but as she explained with reference to many such Islam productions, she did not herself know the textual grounding: “The crazy thing is that I do not even know where [it comes from]; whether it is written in the Quran or hadiths. I have just heard these things repeated so many times that, you know, when they are repeated enough times then it just sticks.” When Jasmin specified the mosque she had attended and gave me the name of the female teacher, I was not surprised, because I have heard other women talk about the content of this teacher’s Islam classes, and Jasmin is not the only person who has been affected by it. It may be that this teacher would be appalled to hear how controlling men act, but the effect of her teachings on women like Jasmin remains the same, nevertheless.
There can be situations in which it is contradictory to insist that sex must be both voluntary and a duty, but Muslim leaders typically circumvent this problem by presenting an ideal nikah in which the spouses’ sexual drives are synchronized so that they satisfy each other’s sexual needs when they arise. Hassan – the imam presented in the previous section – states that “the wife has the right to have sex and the husband has the right to have sex, you know, with each other”, but then he goes on to explain that there must not be any compulsion:
You are not allowed to have sex under compulsion [stated with emphasis], not at all – even if you have been married for 50 years. Yes, this must be very clear. In Islam sex is an interplay between husband and wife. Within Islam it is said that there is a special language for sex. One can read each other’s eyes, one can read each other’s emotions, and that is how it must be. Because I will never in my life accept someone who wants his wife [i.e., to have sex with his wife] if she says “no”. I will never accept it; that is rape. Even if they are married. Because as Muslims we must not be like animals. Because I think, if you force your wife, that is inhumane. You cannot do that, because she is a human being and has feelings, and that is how it must be.
All Muslim leaders I have interviewed strongly resented the idea of physical compulsion, but many also seemed unaware of psychological compulsion. Some even idealized nikah as a relationship in which the wife merely does not (or must not) feel resentment, restraint, or reservations in relation to having sex with her husband – a relationship in which sex is merely a wife’s chore among others, as it is her husband’s chore to be the bread winner. However, such pressure may legitimize abusive behavior. As Sara describes her nikah to an imam in a Danish mosque:
There is also rape – that is, many rapes – and I have been frozen due to fear [during these rapes]. And there he has used quotes from the Quran, which he has turned to his own advantage – that I will be damned if I do not have intercourse with him. … He has used Islamic literature very crudely; it required me to read it up on it to find out that it was not true the way he presented it – the way [in which] he turned it to his own advantage.
As previously mentioned, religious coercive control is similar across religions and the use of scripture is well known. In a British study a female Christian informant stated, “[My husband] would tell me … that the Bible said that my body belonged to him. So, he could do with it as he pleased” (Mulvihill et al., 2022, p. 9). Making oneself sexually available without feeling lust is also routine in non-religious coercive control relationships, and refusing a partner may result in physical compulsion that takes the form of rape.
While men may use religious discourse to control their partner, women may simultaneously use religious discourse to cope with their husband’s controlling behavior. As Jasmin explains,
The religion means that you can live with it [rape]. For example, the sexual violence – you can justify it, because if you tuck it away under religion, like: but do this, because then it is for the sake of God, then you are a good wife, you are a good Muslim according to Islam, because you put up with being raped. Then you are a good Muslim. This means that you can leave [the rape] with dignity. Then there is dignity in being raped. Because then you are a good Muslim.
Jasmin had involuntary sex and had been maritally raped for years, but by framing this as her fulfilling the duty of a Muslim wife she was able to preserve her dignity. Rather than being a rape victim she was an obedient Muslim wife, and she could live with the latter symbolic framework. The quotation is one among many instances in my interviews with Jasmin that demonstrate that she produced an Islam that made her able to cope with the coercive control, while also internalizing bits and pieces of her husband’s Islam. While involuntary sex is common in coercive control relationships, the coping ability provided by religion leads to a higher bar of tolerance, as Jasmin explains: “With religion I could survive in it, which you cannot when it is for the sake of house peace [only]. At least not for that long.” This higher bar of tolerance has also been observed in other studies in which women fear ostracism and stigmatization if they leave their husbands (Liversage & Petersen, 2020).
The role religion played in Jasmin’s feelings of self-worth played into a vicious circle where she was dependent on religion to cope, but this made her even more vulnerable to her husband’s weaponizing Islamic semiotic resources against her. As Jasmin explains,
But this thing that, when Islam is utilized then it is like – or religion – then it is a little like you become a bad person if you do not do it. It is like. It is a very powerful weapon, which does not really have anything to do with the fear of being hit, because it is not nice to be hit, but to be perceived as a bad Muslim or a bad person is even worse.
This illustrates the element religion can contribute to coercive control relationships: Jasmin is dependent upon her identity as a good and obedient Muslim wife in order to cope with being raped while preserving her dignity, but this also makes her vulnerable to her husband’s using religion to control her. In other words, Jasmin’s striving towards being recognized as a good Muslim by her husband makes her vulnerable to his use of religious discourse as a tool of control. Yet it is also important to observe how Jasmin used Islamic semiotic resources to cope, to find peace, and to negotiate a bit of freedom, exemplified by her unsuccessful attempt to register for Islam courses; similarly, her son used Islamic semiotic resources to protect himself. Thus, it is important to observe the many different motivations for producing Islam, and their function.
A controlling husband continuously charges a symbolic tax when he insists that his wife obeys the jealousy and loyalty codes. “What all these actors offer is a show of discursive affirmation from below, which is all the more valuable since it contributes to the impression that the symbolic order is willingly accepted” (Scott, 1990, p. 58). The flow of symbolic tax is of vital importance, because if the flow stops – if the wife rebels, for example – the man’s identity is transformed into that of a tyrant. In other words, once the woman stops affirming her husband’s norm, his identity is affected. Therefore, rebellion triggers a violent response from controlling men and conflicts can escalate rapidly if women do not re-submit and re-affirm their husband’s norm. Smith explains that “hitting the brake is a high-risk strategy” and that “friends and children can get hurt or killed if they challenge the controlling person” (Smith, 2021, p. 67). This is echoed by Jasmin: “In the very moment I said stop, I ended up in a women’s shelter. My daughter was kidnapped, and I ended up in a women’s shelter.” When she eventually returned home, her husband warned her against ever leaving him again:
“If you ever go to a women’s shelter again or contact the authorities, then I will send some Polish people to rape your mother and father.” That really stuck with me. Later, some people told me, “But that was just empty words”, right? The problem is that with all the sick things he did in addition to this, you know. Consider if he actually did it. You know, I do not think he would, but on the other hand, neither did I want to test him. It is like when we went to a women’s shelter … I did not contact my mother until 14 days later because I was afraid that something had happened to her or my grandmother.
Like so many other women living with controlling husbands, Jasmin was under continuous surveillance, most of which she only realized years later. Her husband had installed a GPS tracker in her car, surveillance software on her phone, and microphones and cameras in their home. This also limited her access to help from the authorities. Jasmin tells of how her husband texted her the first time she fled to a women’s shelter. He wrote, “I know other people who are at that women’s shelter you are at, so you might as well come home. Otherwise, I will come and get you as soon as the staff has gone home. Then I will be given access [by someone else].” This is what happened. When the staff had gone home, Jasmin’s husband arrived to collect Jasmin and the alarm button did not work, so she ultimately returned home with her husband.
Jasmin’s description of how women’s shelters struggle to provide women with security from men and families has also been demonstrated by researchers (Danneskiold-Samsøe, Mørck, & Sørensen, 2011), and Jasmin experienced time and again that the authorities failed to keep her safe. This is an important point as minority women’s mistrust of the police is often explained as cultural, and while there may be some truth to this, it should also be noted that it is common for women in coercive control relationships to have little faith in the authorities’ ability to protect them, based on experience. This is one of the reasons why battered women return to their violent husbands, which often baffles outsiders; however, these women are doing so to manage their own safety. One of Smith’s informants captures this well: “They knew he was capable of it [murder], but they kind of looked at me like I couldn’t be that scared if I kept going back. But I was too scared not to go back, if you know what I mean” (Smith, 2021, pp. 41–42). This is what is known as security behavior, which is present in all coercive control relationships. The women’s behavior becomes oriented towards managing their own safety, typically through compliance with their partners’ controlling behavior. This is echoed by Jasmin who explains, “It was like life or death; it sounds extreme, but I knew what he was capable of”, adding that her husband had a criminal record and possessed a gun.
About four years after having fled to the women’s shelter, the violence escalated again, and this is when Jasmin saw Islamic divorce as a way out:
Jasmin: You know, it was so bad. You know, it was like, I was afraid that he would kill us – especially the oldest of the boys. He thoroughly beat him, and I did not know what to do. I could not. He [the oldest boy] ran away and came back again. He was so afraid, and he was [pause].
Petersen: And then you sought out an imam, or someone with knowledge of Islam.
Jasmin: Yes, it was [Muslim leader] I spoke with, and I also talked with [imam] before I [pause]. It was those two I contacted.
Jasmin moves on to explain that the Muslim leader and the imam from whom she requested an Islamic divorce, asked her whether she fulfilled her wifely obligations. According to both of them, her husband was not allowed to force her to have sex, but then again, she was not allowed to refuse him. They suggested that Jasmin should do her utmost to perform her role as a good and obedient wife, and then they promised the relationship would improve. This kind of advice not only resembles the advice Fatma was given in The Mosques behind the Veil (see Introduction), it is widespread among religious leaders across religions (Mulvihill et al., 2022; Sharp, 2014).
This is a decisive moment in the analysis because it demonstrates that Jasmin imagined that obtaining an Islamic divorce would end her husband’s coercive control. This is what Haitham referred to when he stated that women come to him “with an expectation that they can just write to me and then I will straighten their husband out, kick him out, and take her under my protection” (quoted in the previous chapter). However, this is a wild overestimation of a Muslim leader’s power, and the most likely outcome of his issuing an Islamic divorce document is that the husband’s violent behavior will also target the Muslim leader himself. This is what I referred to in the previous chapter as the security risks of getting involved in Islamic divorce cases.
To identify Islamic divorce as the solution is to follow the logic of the Islamic semiotic resources with which Islamized coercive control is expressed, and this is the main reason why some social workers also understand such cases as being about Islamic law (see Chapter 1), thereby erasing the power dynamics and behavioral pattern of coercive control. Controlling men – Muslim or non-Muslim – will typically resist any attempt by outsiders to separate them from what in their mind is their property (Smith, 2021, pp. 117, 131). Refusing to accept an Islamic divorce is the religious equivalent of insisting on the validity of the airtight contract of commitment (see p. 93).
4 Islamized Post-separation Violence
Coercive control can last a lifetime (Smith, 2021, p. 127), and even if a woman manages to separate herself physically from her partner, the coercive control often continues in the form of what I call Islamized post-separation violence (Ornstein & Rickne, 2013). As explained by Khulud, an immigrant to Denmark from Iraq who has divorced under Danish law and moved out of the marital home, but not Islamically divorced:
Islamically, I was still his wife, so whenever he wanted, he would call me and say that he wanted [to have sex with] me. He said that it was his right as my husband. I was honestly in shock when he said it. I said to him, “How can you possibly want me to come home to you, just so you can have sex with me? Yes, it is your right, but you know that I do not want to.” He just said that he did not care – it was his right, and he wanted to uphold it. I said, “Fine.” I would come over to him, knock on the door and come in, and then I would undress. … I cannot explain the mental state I was in when he forced me to come over to him. It was [pause] like I was not in my own body. It is unlike anything else I have ever experienced. (Liversage & Petersen, 2020, p. 172)
When Khulud talks about being forced to comply, she is referring to security behavior. That is, she is managing her own security by complying with her (ex)husband’s demands. This case is very similar to one of Smith’s (non-Muslim) informants, Lara:
Very quickly she learned that if she allowed Chris to rape her (and those are her own words) then she would buy herself around three weeks’ peace. This was not a man who was under any illusion that Lara wanted his attention. He was a man who was enjoying his power over her. (Smith, 2021, p. 98)5
Similarly, Khulud’s (ex)husband would sometimes ask her to come to his place just to humiliate her. When she had undressed, and was standing naked in front of him, he would “look at me and say that he had changed his mind. He did not want to have sex after all” (Liversage & Petersen, 2020, p. 173). The difference between Lara and Khulud is the semiotic resources used to express the control, and the consequences of these resources having a religious frame of reference. The pattern of Islamized post-separation violence has also been identified by Farrah Ahmed and Ghena Krayem (2021, pp. 39–40) who call it emotional exploitation.
Danish police officers who come in contact with this kind of case are often frustrated with Islamized post-separation violence because women resign themselves to the pattern of having sex with their (ex)husbands rather than mobilizing the penal law against them. One police officer narrated a case in which a woman was repeatedly visited by her (ex)husband who lived in the Middle East, and just when the woman was ready to report her (ex)husband, she became pregnant to him and changed her mind; she no longer had the energy to go through the legal process. The police officer ended the story by stating that the woman will probably never have the energy to do something about this, adding that it is not the first time she has become pregnant in this way. Similarly, police officers who come in contact with Islamized post-separation violence cases are frustrated that the men in question enter into new nikah relationships while keeping their (ex)wife in nikah captivity.
Although Islamic polygamy is not illegal in Denmark, there is a widespread notion that it is; indeed, the belief was continuously repeated in the documentary Mosques behind the Veil, and to the best of my knowledge, this inaccuracy was not addressed during the intense debates that followed its airing. Interestingly, this widespread notion sometimes influences cases, because men and imams become afraid of getting a prison term for facilitating or practicing Islamic polygamy. In the following case, the social worker talks about a woman who experienced Islamized post-separation violence and was therefore trying to obtain an Islamic divorce, and the notion that Islamic polygamy is illegal played an important role in her success:
We had a case, ongoing for more than a year, where we – where it was a huge [problem] – because he kept turning up in her home. You know, a very violent man whom she was married to when she was 14 years old. … In the end she found some pictures in a way that is better not disclosed – I think this was on his telephone – that documented that he had married again, and then she calls the imam [who had facilitated the second nikah] and says, “What the hell do you think you are doing? I will report you to the police.” Then she got her [Islamic] divorce and he stopped turning up at her home.
The imam got frightened and managed to secure the woman an Islamic divorce, but the social worker added that the ex-husband “has since then sent his brother with one of his friends to thoroughly beat her boyfriend”.
Jasmin’s attempt to get away from her husband was the main motivation for her requesting an Islamic divorce, but it was just one tactic among many. At one point her husband actually divorced her, but as Jasmin says, “Actually, it did not matter much. I was a bit like – the religion, I was just so sick and tired of it, so whether we had become divorced or not, that did not matter to me.” Neither did this Islamic divorce matter practically, as her ex-husband raped Jasmin twice after his divorce statement anyway. Jasmin explains the rape by saying, “In the end I could not continue to refuse him, so in the end it was just a way of avoiding conflict.” This follows the same pattern as for Lara, Khulud, the cases that frustrate my informants in Danish police, and other cases that I have observed: Jasmin managed her safety by having sex with her ex-husband.
Thus, Islamic divorce may also lead to Islamized post-separation violence. In weaponized divorces women may, for example, make an agreement with their husbands that their children must not grow up with a stepdad. Such agreements come in many variations, but what they all have in common is that the woman is not allowed to enter into a nikah with another man until her children are adults. Accepting such a weaponized talaq does, however, spare the woman from getting raped in a pattern of post-separation violence. Furthermore, it should be noted that even if it is not a weaponized talaq, the former husband may police the woman and keep other men at bay.
To sum the up, Islamized coercive control creates a demand for the presence of official sources of Islamic divorce; women contact Muslim leaders in the hope that their issuing an Islamic divorce will get them out of the coercive control relationship. This means that the demand in this type of cases is generated by an Islamized pattern of a commonly known phenomenon, coercive control.
5 Honor
Muslim migrants to Denmark mainly arrive from countries that in the World Value Survey score high in traditional as opposed to secular values and high in survival as opposed to self-expression values. That is, Muslim migrants to Denmark mainly come from countries in which religion is important, large families are idealized, social conformity rather than individualistic self-realization is striven for, traditional gender roles are normative, and divorce is stigmatized (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). As can be seen in Figure 4, Denmark is at the diametrically opposite end of both these scales, to the degree that all Muslim majority countries in the survey have two negative scores while Denmark has two positive scores that are second only to Norway and Sweden. Migration from the African-Islamic group to the Protestant Europe group is the furthest one can travel on the World Value Survey.
The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map – World Values Survey 7 (2023)
Source: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org (accessed 25 September 2023)
The effect of migration between two geographical regions that are dominated by such different values has been repeatedly documented in surveys that display significant differences in values between minority and majority populations in Denmark (e.g. Bonnerup, Christensen, Kærgård, Matthiessen, & Torpegaard, 2007; Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; Research, 2011, 2014, 2018, 2019a, 2019b).
Honor is a contested term (Abu-Lughod, 2013), and it is, therefore, important for me to underline that I understand honor as a universal phenomenon – present in all cultures – but Western and non-Western honor has typically been described in different terms, thus indicating that there are honor cultures and non-honor cultures (sometimes also called dignity cultures). While descriptions of honor cultures will use the word honor, descriptions of non-honor cultures will typically use the word morals to describe the same phenomenon. I do not support this view of distinguishing between honor and dignity cultures because it essentializes a universal phenomenon and ascribes it to just a segment of cultures; rather, following Robert Ermers (2018), I understand honor to be about morals, and then investigate moral norms in the social field. However, I continue to use the word honor as this is closer to how my informants conceptualized the moral norms (e.g. izzat, sharaf, and namuz) that regulate the focus of this analysis.
People have honor if they follow moral norms but lose their honor if they break with them. However, such norms vary significantly between groups depending on values, and the disciplining of individuals varies with the degree of entitativity (Ermers, 2018, pp. 68–136). In groups that belong to the African- Islamic group in the World Value Survey, sex outside marriage, for example, is typically seen as highly immoral (Ermers, 2018, p. 56), whereas being sexually inexperienced at the time of marriage constitutes deviant behavior in Danish majority culture. Further, groups characterized by a high degree of entitativity will tend to discipline members of their group whereas groups with low degrees of entitativity will tend to see members as individuals with a right to self-realization.
When descendants of migrants grow up in Denmark, they must simultaneously navigate the value systems at either end of the World Value Survey, each with their methods of socialization and discipline. Their loyalty to either value system will continuously be tested because they may be suspected of being deviant in both groups. This may cause considerable oscillation or lead descendants to live double lives: one in accordance with their family’s values and one in accordance with the majority society’s values (Hviid, 2014; Otterbeck, 2010; Petersen, 2022c). Simultaneously, minority parents, irrespective of religious beliefs, may fear that their children are engaging in immoral behavior – in this case, that they are becoming too Danish (cf. Van Kerckem, Van de Putte, & Stevens, 2013). Such suspicion sometimes leads to honor-motivated control as a response to existential fear caused by the potential for stigmatization, ostracism, and rejection which are typical outcomes of the immoral behavior associated with their children’s immersion in Danish youth culture (Ermers, 2018, p. 10).
Women who experience honor-motivated control at the social level often also experience coercive control at the partnership level (Ridley, Almond, Bafouni, & Qassim, 2023). However, unlike in Jasmin’s case, selected because it contained no honor-motivated conflict – thus making it possible to isolate the coercive control pattern in the analysis – in the following I isolate the honor-motivated control pattern by focusing on two cases in which there is no coercive control at the partnership level. As with Jasmin’s case, I have de-centered Islamic divorce so that its importance is more proportional to its role in my informants’ life stories.
6 Arranged and Forced Nikah
There are two concepts available in Danish to describe significant family involvement in choosing a partner with whom one enters into a nikah: arranged marriage and forced marriage. I call these phenomena arranged nikah and forced nikah to be as specific as possible and to avoid confusing civil marriage with nikah. Arranged and forced civil marriages are possible, but it is a fair assumption that these are relatively rare compared to arranged and forced nikah. I have only collected a single case in which a woman (Julie) was forced into a civil marriage, but this was done in a mosque without her knowing that she had entered the marriage. If women in forced nikah are also in a forced civil marriage it is typically because their nikah from abroad has been registered in Denmark as a civil marriage.
Salma6 was born in Denmark to two migrant parents. Because they believed that she was becoming too Danish and her interest in boys and youth life was jeopardizing family honor (sharaf), Salma was sent her to her parents’ country of origin to live with the extended family and become socialized into her parents’ culture. When Salma came back to Denmark – while still in school and under legal age – her parents arranged a nikah between her and a man twice her age. As Salma explains,
So, when I was XX and a half [years old] I became engaged [entered into a nikah] and, what is it called, and actually I see, I mean, I have nothing in common with him and he seems much older and not at all my type. You know, he was not at all the type of man I would have chosen myself, but I actually see him as my springboard to get away from home, to be allowed to live my own life and be allowed to decide what I want and what I don’t want, and to decide to finish my time in school, and all these things. So, it was not a forced marriage, but it was very arranged by older men who forced [me], because I was told that this [marriage] was my [only] option. Of course, I had the opportunity to say “no”, but it was kind of in the atmosphere that there was no alternative. I had to get married.
Salma initially objected to the notion that she was forced to enter into a nikah, because she consented to it and, therefore, she was not forced. This reflects the discursivity found in the Danish language, Danish media, and Danish law, which is centered on consent as the key variable that determines whether one has been forced or not, but I argue that this is too constrained an interpretation to reproduce Salma’s experience discursively (Anitha & Gill, 2009). Salma entered into a nikah, but she only did so because it let her escape an even worse situation and because more subtle power dynamics coerced her to do so. She has partially picked up on these power dynamics, which is evident in her statement that “it was kind of in the atmosphere that there was no alternative”.
Consent is a characteristic of Salma’s – and many other women’s – forced nikah. Therefore, the part that provides the impetus – the coercion – must be identified in how consent is secured (cf. Chantler & McCarry, 2020). It is evident in Salma’s case that the knowledge of her impending nikah was disseminated through most of her family, but Salma had not been informed. This is a strong indication of the collective planning of Salma’s consent. When I pointed this and similar variables out to Salma three years later, she changed her mind and stated confidently that this was a forced nikah. Unfortunately, consent is the most common variable used in legal codes – including Danish law – and that means that only a narrow segment of forced nikahs are covered by the law (Julios, 2023). In Denmark a mere four forced nikah cases can be found between 2004–2023 in the legal database Karnov,7 and of these only two were convicted.
The nikah failed to live up to Salma’s ideal of romance, partnership love, and falling in love, idealized in the contemporary Danish youth culture into which she was socialized (Foucault, 1988; Giddens, 1992):
Salma: We got XX child(ren) but there has never been any love. We have never fallen in love. … I learned to respect him because he was the father of my child(ren). We lived parallel lives … because it was not an alternative to get divorced.
Petersen: Why not?
Salma: Because that was something my parents emphasized, that I had to make it work. I soon found out that he had a problem with alcohol. I spoke with my parents about it, but they refused to listen. Regardless, I was not getting a divorce, because what would people say?
Salma’s story is echoed by Elham,8 whose parents also thought that she was becoming too Danish and therefore sent her to live with extended family in their country of origin. While abroad, Elham was coerced into entering into a nikah with a man, but because she spent more time abroad, she internalized much more discourse than Salma, even to the degree of her becoming able to produce emotions that were partially sympathetic to the discourse in her extended family (Barrett, 2017; Lazarus, 1994).
Because Elham tells her story within two incommensurable discursivities simultaneously, she often struggles to find the right words, frequently changes directions, and continuously re-evaluates events. Indeed, Elham’s very wide discursivity enables her to produce a narrative that is so rich in its inclusion of perspectives that it becomes incoherent. She tells it from her own perspective, that of being coerced into a forced nikah, simultaneously with a narrative from her husband’s and father’s perspective to the effect that she entered into an arranged nikah. Elham explains that,
Coercion, that is when you say “no” [to becoming married]. You know, I said that I did not want to marry anyone in [country], but then it was like, “But you have to”, because that is the only option. So, it is probably there that I think, coercion; but I would probably to some extent say that my conception of reality was also a bit twisted. … If I lived in [country] and understood it from their context and understanding, it would not seem like a forced marriage. Then it would maybe just be like an arranged marriage where someone had exerted a bit of pressure, and people have maybe thought that it was for your own good.
Elham’s nikah was a forced nikah; she is very clear about that. However, like Salma, she emphasizes the agency involved in her entering into the nikah. Both Elham and Salma experienced being held captive by their families in harsh conditions, so the nikah also offered them a way out of a situation they regarded as even worse. As Elham explains,
The conditions I lived under before I got married were quite violent. You know, there was a lot of violence, and I was literally held in a room, and [sometimes] I got nothing to eat for days. You know, it was like really slave-like conditions until I got married. And then that with – after having been held captive … – experiencing that thing with a man who actually likes you. You know, like getting that satisfaction that there is someone who thinks that I am, you know like, that satisfaction of knowing that there is actually someone who thinks that I am, like, worth something, right. So, there was of course that thing, right. You know, like, right. And this is somewhat oddly complex. Like that with, and it was also. But it also, became, you know, like, very complex. Like that with, like, and maybe it was also. But it also became like – how should I explain it? You know, it became like a forced dream in which I now had to feel how fantastic this is.
I have included a passage in the above quotation where Elham speaks in broken and incomplete sentences, which is something that occurred multiple times during the interview when the two incommensurable discursivities came into conflict and she struggled to produce coherence. In this instance, Elham arrives at a description of incommensurable emotional discursivities, which she expresses in the paradox of a dream in which she is coerced into feeling that her nightmare is fantastic (or motivated to adopt this as a coping strategy).
Once Elham and Salma had entered into a nikah, they had no other choice than to remain there and perform the role of a wife according to the norms of the family. Salma actively tried to make the nikah work for years, mainly by trying to help her husband become a better man, by helping him reduce his alcohol consumption, for example, and find a job. Salma worked hard to find happiness for herself and her husband in the nikah for more than ten years whereas Elham was focused on escaping the nikah and maintaining her perception of reality prior to her being sent to her parents’ country of origin. However, as a coping strategy she seems to have partially synched her emotions to the situation, and therefore, she was not unaffected by the discursivity of her social context abroad. As she explains,
You know, it [the nikah] was not violent [at all]. In fact, here was a man who actually thought I was amazing. Meanwhile, I knew that it was a completely twisted world that I was part of right there, because it is like, I should never have been there. I should never have been married to this man. You know, he was not the kind of man I would normally have gotten together with. … Sometimes one’s perception of reality can become quite twisted, and for some reason it cannot always be translated nor be explained.
Elham points to a discursive no man’s land where the incommensurability of discursivities means that no discourse can be produced, or once a discursive enunciation is produced it is immediately deconstructed by the production of another discursive enunciation that is incommensurable with the former. It is a state of internal chaos and turmoil. This is also expressed linguistically when Elham changes course again and again, sometimes mid-sentence. For example: “regardless of whether it was a forced marriage, or what it was, or how we should define it, I have as a person chosen to sign it [the nikah contract] – or, chosen and chosen. [short pause] I have signed it.” Here Elham goes back and forth between discursivities and then ultimately merely states what is a fact: she signed the document. Being able to reflect in this way within such a wide discursive space can be a disadvantage, as Elham explains:
Sometimes it is also a bit of a curse that, you know – and it is a bit of a tendency for me in some way – that I in some way understand the enemy’s standpoint, or something like that. It is the same thing with my father, that I chose to forgive him, and, you know, all those things.
Both Elham and Salma are able to feel empathy for their former husbands and they also understand their parents’ actions; however, this does not mean that they sympathize with them. Their emotional connections to their own story go far beyond common Danish discourses on forced nikah, and, interestingly, neither Elham nor Salma are in sync with expectations that they should only feel hatred, disgust, and horror when reflecting on their experience. To them, it is much more complicated.
7 Honor-Motivated Control
Salma could not see any way out of her nikah, so her efforts focused on making her husband a better partner and a better father to their child(ren). However, this was not without its ups and downs. As Salma explains, “We actually had a lot of situations where I had left him and had moved to a women’s shelter or to my parents’ house. I told them that I wanted to divorce, but nothing ever came of it.” Salma’s parents showed care for their daughter by taking her side in these conflicts and putting pressure on their son-in-law to become a better husband; however, divorce was out of the question, because of her parents’ fear of stigma and being socially ostracized.
Salma ultimately decided to leave her husband and move to her own apartment with the child(ren), and this became the beginning of an honor-motivated conflict involving significant parts of her ethnic community. As Salma explains,
Almost all of the XX community knew that I had been divorced [i.e., had moved out of the marital home]. You know, imagine a neighbor who lived three flights further down the block, whom I did not know beyond greeting her with hello and goodbye, she actually knocked on my door one day. … She thought it was a pity [the breakdown of the nikah], and a pity for the child(ren), and she thought we should give it another chance. … I am a decent person, so I do not tell [strangers] what the actual reason is, and I do not want to expose him … also because of the child(ren). You know, he was deeply alcoholic and had given up on life, and just sat there on the sofa [every day]. That is not the kind of man I want to be married to.
It is common for people who in some way belong to the same social entity to get involved, “not as malicious interference on the part of the community, but as doing the family concerned a service” (Ermers, 2018, p. 82). Salma is unable to give her reasons for leaving her husband because the disclosure of this information would reflect badly upon her character and would dishonor her (ex)husband. However, it was soon rumored that Salma had abandoned her husband because she was having an affair, as Salma later realized:
It turns out that it was my ex-husband who had started those rumors. He felt belittled and he felt that he was a failure because I had left him. So, now he put gasoline on the fire by starting these rumors about my having had an affair, and that I was sleeping with other men, and these sorts of things.
In other words, Salma’s husband started an honor-motivated conflict to punish her for having left him. During our conversation Salma would switch to Arabic when short of Danish words and in need of more accurate terminology. The Arabic words she would loop into the conversation were primarily related to honor such as sharaf (honor), hašimtinā (you have dishonored us), qaḥba (prostitute), ḫīyāna (short for ḫīyāna zauǧiyya, adulterer).9 The absence of religious terminology made me curious, and I began to inquire about her choice of words. When I asked Salma why she used the term ḫīyāna, she specified that she meant it in the sense of being unfaithful. I then asked whether this term had religious connotations, to which she first answered “no”, but then added, “Partially … it is embedded in the sense that you are doing something bad, something you are not supposed to do because religion says so.” I therefore inquired about the distinction between ḫīyāna and zina (adultery) to which Salma answered, “Zina, that is mostly if one wants to use the religious term”, adding that this was not a word that was commonly used in her community.
The terms ḫīyāna and zina belong to two different discourses that have a topical overlap in that both concern morals. This explains why Salma first categorized ḫīyāna as a non-religious term, but then, once she realized that the term covers morals, recategorized the term as partially religious, only to categorize it as non-religious compared to the concept of zina. The point of this linguistic exercise is to demonstrate that the otherwise rich religious language which Salma could have employed to tell her narrative does not feel right to her – it is not the kind of language she and people in her community use. Similarly, Salma did not feel sinful, she felt shame, both on the individual level (Ger: Scham) and on the social level (Ger: Schande). While the feeling of being sinful did not emerge, it had especially hurt her to be called ḫīyāna as this is a very powerful word in relation to sharaf.
In other words, the divorce conflict at private, relationship, and intra-family levels was about honor first, and Islam second, if at all. Only at the inter-family or community level did it become more of a religious matter; when Salma later approached an imam, for example, it became a religious matter, at least for the imam who issued the divorce (see below). This is not to say that Salma is not religious; she is: “Religion means a lot to me. You know, I am a Muslim. I believe in God, and I believe you must be a good person and behave well.” However, Salma understood herself as being divorced once she had made the decision to leave her husband; her moving out and her declaring the nikah over was sufficient for her.
Honor-conceptualized norms, rather than religion-conceptualized norms, are also evident in how Salma’s family members reacted to the rumors about her. They experienced vicarious stigma and their actions were oriented towards putting an end to it. Salma explains that, once the rumor of her having sex with strangers began, her family put her under significant pressure:
That is when my older brother calls me and says, “You fucking whore. … You have dishonored us (hašamtinā). … People are talking about you in the streets”. So, I say to him, “Who talks about me? About what?” My brother says, “Well, you are fucking not divorced yet, and you are fooling around with other men …”. So that is what made the difference for me so I am now fearing for my life.
While Salma is stigmatized as a ḫīyāna and qaḥba, her brother may experience the stigma of cowardice for not doing enough in relation to his sister’s rumored breaching of moral norms (cf. Ermers, 2018, p. 9; Sayegh, 2020, pp. 78–80). This is a well-known dynamic in honor-motivated conflicts. There is a causative relation between the effect Salma’s actions have on her brother’s identity and his social standing, and his reaction. This effect of vicarious stigma, and his reaction, oriented towards ridding themselves of it, was mirrored in other family members’ treatment of Salma.
Once the honor-motivated conflict had begun, Salma had to go underground and was on the run for years. She frequently moved to new locations, and in the process, she lost her friends, lost contact with her child(ren), lost her job, dropped out of her education, built up a debt of approximately 130,000 EUR, gained a lot of weight, and became mentally unstable, meaning that she was hospitalized in a psychiatric institution several times. In an attempt to bring an end to the honor-motivated conflict, she eventually turned to an imam. Salma explains that,
So, I said to him [the imam], “Listen, I am really tired of constantly being told that I am not divorced. For me this does not really matter, but can you help me with it [getting divorced]?” Then he said, “Yes, of course.” Then I explained the situation to him, and he said, “Can I have you husbands telephone number?” Then he called him and said, “I am sitting here with a woman who says that she is not divorced from you.” I had already told the imam that we had not been together for ten years. Then the imam says, “Are you willing to let yourself become divorced, or let your wife divorce you?” Then my ex-husband says, “Yes.” Then the imam say, “Farewell and thank you.” And then he writes up the divorce document.
While Islamic semiotic resources from time to time have emerged in the honor- motivated conflict, honor has been the master signifier. That is, the Islamic semiotic resources have been given a meaning and function in the conflict in relation to socially defined moral norms (honor). Although the imam is fully aware of this discourse, for him, this is about Islam. Thus, the conflict is “translated” from being about honor to being about fiqh in the Islamic legal process. Salma clearly states that the Islamic divorce did not matter much to her, but the potential effect of her getting out of an honor-motivated conflict did matter.
It is, however, important to note the connection between honor and religion. Acting Islamically toward one another is a way of demonstrating moral integrity, and the imam can largely oversee and pass judgement on whether people’s behaviour is Islamic/moral. If parties are susceptible to such judgement, the imam is in a position of authority, and this is what enables him to persuade a husband to consent to Islamic divorce, and vice versa: if the parties and the wider community are unaffected by the imam’s passing Islamic/moral judgement he is not in a position of authority.
The social effect of the divorce was caused by the husband’s acceptance of the divorce and its being witnessed by a morally impeccable witness, the imam. Thus, the case produced a presence in the form of the imam’s calling the husband and exerting pressure on him, posing as an Islamic authority, a status that the husband accepted, leading to his acquiescence in the Islamic legal process. The point is that while the imam may have acted within a religious discourse, the husband’s performance had an effect within both the religious and the honor discourses. In short, women experiencing constraints because of the honor discourse produce a demand for Islamic legal performances. Put in Rappaport’s terms (see page 46), the religious discourse of being in a nikah constituted mere “meaning” to Salma, in the sense that she could understand it; however, it was not meaningful to her, and, therefore, she did not feel bound by it. It was only because it mattered to her family and community that she turned to an imam.
The damage done by an honor-motivated conflict is not undone once the conflict is over. Towards the end of our conversation, Salma said, “If you ask me whether I would make that decision [of leaving my husband] again today, I am not sure I would say yes.” She wonders whether her life might not have been better in a nikah with a bad husband, considering the consequences of divorcing. The cost of being the focus of an honor-motivated conflict for more than ten years may have been greater than that of an unhappy nikah. It should also be noted that while the abovementioned divorce meant that Salma was later able to reconcile with her family, she is still experiencing stigma as a divorced woman among her ethnic peers; yet now that she is again part of her family, her father sticks up for her and defends her in public.
Elham’s story follows a similar pattern, although she did not receive threats to her life at any point and her conflict remained intrafamily. In what follows I emphasize Elham’s high degree of agency because this is a typical characteristic of almost all the Islamic divorce cases that I have observed (cf. Liversage, forthcoming; Liversage & Petersen, 2020). This agency is important because it generates the juridical vacuum. Without it no Muslim leaders would be framed to act as qadis, and the vacuum would not exist because it is a consequence of women’s navigating a field dominated by the strategic power of their family or community (Certeau, 2011) or, as I demonstrate below, Elham must tactically navigate in accordance with her family’s and (ex)husband’s discourse to obtain an Islamic divorce with social effect.
Elham left her forced nikah by fleeing while on a visit to Denmark, which prompted her family, and especially her father, to start pressuring her to return to her husband. In an attempt to bring an end to this pressure, Elham obtained an Islamic divorce document from the female imam, Sherin Khankan, and sent it to her father. Elham explains that she “needed them [her family] to react to it, just a little bit”, but they did not. Therefore, she tried to assert her status as a divorced woman by claiming a right associated with it: that of entering into nikah with another man:
Elham: I expected them to react to it [the divorce], but they did not. It is not until I said that in the new year or soon, I will marry again – or something like that – and I have the right to do so, because I am divorced.
Petersen: Did you do this to provoke a reaction?
Elham: Yes, because I wanted them to understand that this khula actually means that I am free, and that I can marry another person. … You know, for them not to recognize that I am divorced and then see me marry another person, that is extremely sinful. That is unthinkable in their world.
This demonstrates how Islamic divorce performances in the vacuum are deferred. Elham gets no reaction from her family, so she is unsure whether the Islamic divorce has happened at the social level or not. She explains that the divorce in the Mariam Mosque had personal meaning for her – it gave her closure – but the social effect did not occur. That was obvious from her family’s reaction. Her (ex)husband travelled to Denmark soon after and, in collaboration with Elham’s family, put her under significant pressure to return to the nikah. This meant that Elham, with the help of Danish police, went temporarily underground until her husband had left Denmark again. Yet, Elham explains, “In the ensuing months, an uncle from [country], another one from [country], all these family members continuously came to put pressure on me because they do not recognize that I am divorced. None of them threatened me though.”
Elham’s husband returned Denmark to make another attempt to restore the nikah, asking for forgiveness and pleading with her to return, while also underlining that because he had not signed the divorce, they were still in a nikah. After his last visit, Elham had gone underground twice due to her family’s chasing her, and now that he was back, the Danish police wanted her to do so again (for the fourth time in a year). This pattern led Elham to plan her husband’s divorce performance in compliance with the norms of her family. As she explains,
And this is when I realize … that I cannot take on this fight without speaking the same language [as my family and husband]. I cannot maintain a progressive fight against a conservative community. So, either I have to say, “You know what, screw this”, and then run the security risk for eternity, or I can talk their language. … I do not know what happened, but I got this crazy idea that … OK, he is in the country. This means that I can actually get him to [sign a divorce]. I know that it will be very difficult, but there is a chance that he may be able to sign a divorce document himself. … So, I contact a couple of imams … and I get hold of Ahmad to whom I tell my story.
Elham adds, “I had a lot of preconceptions [about imams].” She expected that they would take her husband’s side, but this is not what happened. Instead, Ahmad took an active part in devising a tactic to end the nikah so that both Elham and her husband could get on with their lives. Elham wanted it to “happen in a way where he [her (ex)husband] experienced – if that is the right way of putting it – that now we got divorced together. Maybe it was also a matter of dignity [for him].” However, when Elham contacted Danish police, they strongly advised against this, insisting that a divorce was not necessary as Elham was not married – at least not in their system, according to the civil registry – and they would not provide security for the Islamic divorce event. Therefore, Ahmad suggested that he would meet with Elham’s husband alone, and that became the plan. Elham contacted her husband and put him under pressure, telling him,
Now you are here [in Denmark]. If you in any way want to see your child(ren) again, you must sign the divorce document. … Listen, if you do not recognize that I have divorced you then you must recognize it in another way, so you have the opportunity to sign now, because I fully recognize that I am divorced from you. I am doing this for you, because I can see that you do not understand that we are divorced. So, I am doing this for you, and if you in any way want to see your child(ren) again then this is what you need to do. … This is the second time you just show up out of nowhere. You cannot come here again and again. That is not an option, just so you know.
As agreed, Ahmad contacted Elham’s husband, but after some texting back and forth, Elham’s father called Ahmad. He was furious and made it very clear that he was going to take part in the meeting, and this ultimately spoiled Elham’s and Ahmad’s plan, as she explains:
I had hoped that my father after all would have some respect for an imam and not, you know like, push his own agenda, but that is what he did for an hour or an hour and a half. My ex-husband was not permitted to say a word. … Ahmad really tried to have this conversation with my father, but he could see that it was completely impossible. My father was furious and very aggressive. Ahmad simply could not stop him, and in the end, he said, “There is nothing I can do. You must deal with this in the family.” He gave up, and he said [later], “I could see that your father leaned back and relaxed.” I know my father well, and I know what kind of man he is. He must have felt like, yes, he had won and gotten everything as he wanted it, and he did not want me to get divorced from this man.
Ahmad advised Elham to contact a British Islamic divorce council, adding that as her (ex)husband was very conflict adverse he would most likely not reply to any of the letters from the council; therefore, Ahmad reckoned, Elham would probably get the divorce without any delays. However, Elham did not like this idea:
I was so pissed, and I was not fucking10 going to yet another place [to get divorced]. … This was simply not acceptable. And I could just feel that I had to disregard – not give a damn – about the police having said, “You should not meet up with him”, you know those security measures. … So, I said to Ahmad, “Listen, it must not end here, you must help me with this. I will do everything I can to get him [the (ex)husband] to you. You must divorce us.” I was simply so desperate because I could not take it anymore.
After the unsuccessful meeting when her father had blocked the divorce, Elham contacted her (ex)husband and agreed to meet with him, just the two of them. She adds that it was not without some anxiety, and as she could not get the police to provide security, she arranged for them to meet in a public place:
I did not know whether he would show up, but I was just so desperate to get him to Ahmad so that he could sign [the divorce documents]. So, approximately two and a half hours go by, and then he shows up with a huge bouquet of flowers … and thinks that I intend to give him another chance … and he says that he is not going with me to the imam. That is not why he is here. He has come to talk with his wife.
Nevertheless, Elham convinced her (ex)husband to go with her to Ahmad’s office. During the ensuing meeting, Elham’s (ex)husband agreed to divorce, but he did not want to sign the papers then and there. He needed some time to reflect, but he promised to come back the day after and sign the divorce document. However, as he never showed up, Elham raised the pressure on him by reporting him to the police for psychological violence (for similar cases, see Bowen, 2016, pp. 81 and 86; Liversage & Petersen, 2020, pp. 218–221). This could put an end to his dream of some day in the future immigrating to Europe. Therefore, he almost immediately agreed to circumvent Elham’s father and sign the divorce documents in secret. As Elham explains,
My ex-husband knew that if he told my father that he was going to sign the documents, he would put a stop to it, but he was under severe pressure now, because he had been reported to the police. I think it was very difficult to be him. … There he stood in between the daughter and father. I had reported him, so he knew the personal consequences it could have for him. And this is a classic example of how a man is subject to the same social dynamics [as women] in a way. He experienced social pressure. … I mean, even if he wanted to say, “OK, now I understand that she wants to leave [the marriage], and I accept that”, he alone cannot just end the marriage. There is a whole collectivist system, which must also accept it.
This case demonstrates the importance of divorcing within the right discursive space, following the procedures it dictates. Neither Khankan nor Ahmad were able to perform a divorce, but Ahmad was ultimately accepted as an Islamic authority in terms of a person qualified to write up an Islamic divorce paper (he was not present at the signing). Elham’s (ex)husband signed the document in front of two witnesses, and Elham sent a copy to her father, who accepted the termination of the nikah. Elham notes that the two Islamic divorces that she had played different roles for her:
It is like that divorce from Sherin [Khankan], it helped me on the psychological level, but the social effect was missing. But I got that [the social effect] the second time around. I know it is rather recent, but I know that I can sit now, even in conservative circles, and my father cannot say that we are not divorced. Maybe some people will show up and express anger over the fact that we have divorced, but no one will show up and demand that I do not divorce. They simply have to recognize that it [the divorce] is there.
While both Elham’s and Salma’s divorces are one-page Islamic juridical documents in the two respective mosque’s archives, the longitudinal perspective on their cases demonstrates that honor played an important role in their production. It may be that these documents are saturated in Islamic discourse due to their authors’ perspectives, but the demand that caused them to be written emerged within discourses with honor as its master signifier. Neither Salma nor Elham showed signs of emotional attachment to these divorces – they constituted meaning but were not meaningful to them. Rather, Salma and Elham felt emotions of injustice, and constructed their right to Islamic divorce based on what they felt was just.
While coercive control is about ownership (Smith, 2021, p. 76), “honor is synonymous to a reputation of morality” and “dishonor and disgrace signify a reputation of being immoral” (Ermers, 2018, p. 68). This means that the control exerted within these two behavioral patterns have different foci: controlling men coerce their female partners to claim them as possessions, whereas people belonging to the same social entity coerce people to comply with moral norms because of an existential fear of stigma, ostracism, and rejection associated with misbehavior, also known as vicarious stigma or stigma by association (Ermers, 2018, pp. 96–97). This distinction is important in relation to emotions because individuals must be socialized into these moral norms to feel the shame related to breaking social rules. That is why Salma is socialized into feeling powerful emotions when called ḫīyāna, and Jasmin is not. Rather, Jasmin had powerful emotions related to dignity and needed to find ways of coping with those. In other words, one must be socialized into feeling the emotions that are used in control patterns.
8 Getting Closure and the Religious Dimension
In addition to the three abovementioned motivations to obtain an Islamic divorce – getting out of Islamized coercive control, ending Islamized post-separation violence, and ending an honor-motivated conflict – women may also be motivated by the desire for closure or for religious reasons. While Jasmin and Salma were solely motivated by the social effects, Elham needed closure and got this from the Mariam Mosque.
Farrah, Ahmed, and Funston (2021, pp. 37–42) list closure and the religious dimension as two separate motivations to seek Islamic divorce, but I suspect that this distinction is to some extent a matter of semiotic resources. Some women frame their need for closure in religious terms while others do not. There are women who feel that they are committing nushuz (a wife’s violation of her marital duties), but it is more common among my informants to feel that exemption from religious rules is justified due to the circumstances. That is, their perception of haqq is synchronized with their sense of justice. It may be expressed in terms of the first, but it is commonly regulated by the latter.
Closure and religious reasons are of significant importance to the individuals who experience such needs, but they are seldom pursued with the same urgency and desperation as when social effects are important. This means that they contribute less to the overall demand, and they tend to generate less vacuum because the social effect is less important. However, as I demonstrate in Chapter 7, these variables may be significant in the sense that they change women’s perspective on themselves and the world around them, leading them to live as though divorced. Elham is a good example of this. She first got divorced for her own sake in the Mariam Mosque and then divorced again to secure the social effect.
Although many of my informants have been subjected to various forms of religious coercive control, only a segment was significantly influenced by it. Even in some of the hardest cases I have collected, women would insist on their own interpretations of Islam. Nour, for example, stated:
What I have actually done – this is how I live by my religion – is that I read the Quran myself, and then I feel my gut and common sense, and then I look to see if there are others who have the same opinion, and if they do, I investigate who these people are. Are these people I share values with? Is it someone whose opinion I can vouch for? And then I will take it from there. If I can, then the way I have interpreted it makes sense to me, and if I cannot, well, then I keep looking until I find an answer that matches both my view of life and Islam.
Similarly, religious ideas have sometimes saved my informants from doing harm to themselves and/or the people they care about. As Ayan, who was forced into a nikah as a minor and had lived with an abusive husband her whole life, explained:
I have been ill for XX years with, what is it called, depression – I was really far below. I could have taken my own life too, and I had planned to do so, and the worst thing is that I planned that I would also take my youngest [daughter] with me because I thought that if I do not take her with me, then he [my ex-husband] would have brainwashed her after I was dead, and then he would marry her off to someone else – someone from [country], a cousin or something – and then it would start over [with my daughter]. Then she would become a new Ayan, and I did not want that, so she had to come with me. That is how far down I was. But Islam says that you must not commit suicide. You shall not kill. And that was what held me back every time. No, you are not allowed to do that, and no, you may not kill her. She has the right to live on, even if I am not here.
Ayan obtained an Islamic divorce approximately a year prior to the interview. My point in highlighting the above is to demonstrate that religion may be produced in a wide variety of ways and play markedly different roles in my informant’s lives, but my analysis, with its focus on the Islamic juridical vacuum, erases such descriptions as they are, strictly speaking, not relevant to my argument because they do not generate a significant amount of vacuum.
9 A Vacuum Generated by Women’s Agency
Together with other agents in the field, a segment of Muslim leaders maintain the notion that an Islamic divorce is needed in addition to a civil divorce but they do not try to maintain a jurisdiction as imagined in the epistemic community of presence; rather, they are pressured by women who face serious problems – Islamized coercive control, Islamized post-separation violence, and honor-motivated control – to take the role of qadi upon themselves. In other words, the Islamic juridical vacuum is generated by women’s responding to suffering. This is an important observation because this means that the vacuum is generated by the high degree of agency exhibited by a group of women who are often portrayed as passive or having little agency.
The power to end a nikah is not vested in the imam. Rather, in hard cases, husbands and families are the ones who decide. Women may approach Muslim leaders because they believe that such people are in a position to make interventions in the social field, but as Elham realized, they are seldom able to deliver on such hopes. This rather surprised Elham, who today has a deeper understanding of Muslim leaders’ position in the social field. Jasmin’s experience is different. She approached a Muslim leader and an imam who both refused to help her, even to the degree of engaging in religious coercive control and supporting her husband. Such an experience is not uncommon and it does not – as in Elham’s case – dispel the myth about Muslim leaders as powerful qadis. Therefore, when these women tell their stories in the Danish media, they report that powerful imams with judicial power refuse to issue Islamic divorces, because their experience and observations do not lead them to believe otherwise.
Before moving on to Part 2 of the book, I would like to remark that I have only briefly touched upon the role of discrimination, racism, and hate speech, even though studies have demonstrated that these play important roles in the underreporting of coercive control and honor-motivated control among women in Muslim minorities (Wright, 2022; Krayem & Funston, 2023; Krayem & Krayem, 2021). I have made similar observations, and I have observed how this also affect converts. Julie – mentioned earlier in this chapter – for example, explains that her contact with her family caused major conflict, and therefore, no one reacted when she disappeared after her forced civil marriage:
[The contact] has been semi-interrupted since I converted at the age of XX until six, seven, eight years later. You know, there has been contact, but it was really bad. So, when I disappear for a year, this did not have big consequences.
Similarly, Sara was reluctant to report her husband’s abusive behavior to the police as she feared that it would confirm stereotypes about Muslim men and Islam. This was also a barrier for her in relation to her narrating her story, as she did not want to contribute to a discourse that causes her and other Muslims to suffer racism, discrimination, abuse, and violence from non-Muslims.
Likewise, I have not dedicated much space to the problems related to women’s obtaining an Islamic divorce under Islamic law outside Denmark. Without such a divorce document, women may not be able to visit their family elsewhere, and if they marry another man in Denmark, they may be charged with polyandry in the country where they were initially married. In addition to this, women may be held in marital captivity under Danish civil law – and by extension in nikah captivity – if their residence permit is dependent upon their civil marriage (Slot, Thomsen, Laursen & Hansen, 2023). While the above and similar problems are present in my data, I have excluded them because they were not relevant in relation to my arguments concerning the Islamic juridical vacuum. Nonetheless, they constitute significant problems with major impact on women’s lives.
Readers of Derrida will notice that I have taken liberties in my reading of his work. Maybe I have even read something into Derrida’s text which he did not mean to say (Derrida, 1977). However, considering Derrida’s way of reading texts, I am sure he would not have minded.
As the Arabic words are important in this analysis I have transliterated them all.
When I became aware of this book in 2019, I began asking my informants about it, but I did not encounter a single Muslim leader who had read it, although many were aware of its existence.
Jasmin has read and approved my presentation of her story without suggestions for revisions.
Smith’s emphasis.
Salma has read and approved my presentation of her story, only suggesting the revision of a sentence related to her brother.
Karnov is not a complete database of all legal cases in Denmark, but cases that are as rare as forced marriage are likely to be included.
Elham has read and approved my presentation of her story without suggestions for revisions.
As the Arabic words are important in this analysis I have transcribed them all except for sharaf and zina.
Swearing like this is a common way of adding emphasis in Danish, and thus, there is nothing unusual about Elham’s using swear words in this context.