There are many of those families; I have married them.1 And we do not have a justice system in Denmark for Muslims, and we cannot get divorced in an Islamic way in the municipality or in the church, so it is the imams who take over that role in relation to divorce. (Interview with Hassan, February 2019)
…
When Muslims call, the imam can only give advice and guidance. Imams cannot give haqq because they do not have the power to do so. (Interview with Abdel, February 2019)
…
People come to me to hear what Islam says. Therefore, I give them Islam. (Interview with Yasir, October 2022)
∵
Hassan, Abdel, and Yasir state that when people come to them, they are looking for Islamic answers, so that is what they deliver. This means that if people want an Islamic divorce, they are the guarantors of fiqh rules being followed. None of them are aware of how marital problems are often put in Islamic terms in the process leading up to a woman’s request for Islamic divorce. When cases are presented to them, divorce has typically become an Islamic right that women expect them to enforce.
Many women see Muslim leaders as an avenue of action but, as explained in previous chapters, this does not necessarily mean that women request Islamic divorce for religious reasons – some may even be non-Muslims. As Tanya Walker (2016) has demonstrated, women will often adopt a religious display as a way of furthering their case in front of a religious authority, and even if they are devout Muslims, they do not necessarily consider Islamic divorce institutions legitimate, but they may need their performance to navigate social dynamics.
All three Muslim leaders quoted above were born abroad and arrived in Denmark during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. They are partially autodidacts but have also studied some topics with a sheikh and/or taken short intensive Islam courses (cf. Liengaard, 2008). Nevertheless, due to popular demand and the lack of competition, they have become imams. Musa, a well-educated imam whom I present later in the chapter, complained to me that people are invited to deliver the Friday sermon in Danish mosques without having sufficient knowledge, and even “when they are invited again and again they do not bother reading because they are already imams”. Thijl Sunier and Léon Buskens (2022) have suggested that Islamic educational credentials are not necessarily the most important variable for generating Islamic authority, and the trajectory described by Musa is not unusual in a Danish context, although the description is a bit unnuanced (Petersen & Vinding, 2020, pp. 172–174).
In Lene Kühle’s and Malik Larsen’s 2017 survey of Danish mosques they estimate that only one in three imams in Denmark receives a salary, most of these being Turkish imams who are not framed as qadis because Turks primarily divorce in the Agency of Family Law without any parallel Islamic legal process (Kühle & Larsen, 2017, p. 51). This resonates with my observations that Muslim leaders typically facilitate divorce in their spare time without getting paid, a resource constraint that is also evident in other studies. In their study of Islamic divorce in Finland Mulki al-Sharmani, Sanna Mustasaari, and Abdirashid A. Ismail conclude,
The work in the mosques is currently carried out on a voluntary basis and with insufficient resources. According to the interviewees, the education and salaries of the people carrying out dispute resolution and arbitration are not secured, the premises are inadequate, and the lack of coordination between the mosques and other institutions renders their work inefficient in some respects. (Al-Sharmani, Mustasaari & Ismail, 2017, p. 286)
In a Danish context it is often assumed – both by ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims – that the role of qadi is also contained within the role of imam (a title that is not protected), and some imams are willing to adopt the qadi role to help women. This is a new situation in Islamic legal history, one without precedence, which is highlighted when some of my informants try to explain their families abroad that an imam has issued their Islamic divorce. Often family members ask why the imam has issued the divorce and not a qadi or court. From their perspective, the notion of an imam refusing to issue an Islamic divorce upon a woman’s request – a prevalent story in the Danish media – is absurd. Nevertheless, it is partially meaningful in terms of the Islamic juridical vacuum which sucks in imams and other Muslim leaders, to emerge as qadis (as presences).
This new role for the imam has also been observed in studies made in Norway (Bredal, 2018), the Netherlands (Muradin, 2022), and Germany (Jaraba, 2022a), which highlight that it constitutes a departure from their typical role in countries of immigration where the contracting of nikah is normally handled by a registrar. Mahmoud Jaraba (2022a, p. 327) remarks that “contracting and documenting nikah, is a new role for many imams in Germany”, something also noted by Arshad Muradin in his research into family dispute resolution among Moroccan Muslims in the Netherlands:
This study found that Moroccan imams, as agents of religious authority, are nowadays often turned to by the community they serve for spiritual leadership and guidance in times of both joy and sorrow, which leads to their involvement in rituals associated with birth, marriage, divorce and death. In contrast to the current situation in their countries of origin, where imams are primarily engaged in leading daily prayers in the mosque and delivering the Friday sermon, imams in the Netherlands are faced with many demands and evolving roles in Muslim communities. (Muradin, 2022, pp. 55–57)
This chapter has two functions: it provides Muslim leaders’ perspectives on Islamic divorce practices in Denmark, and it describes Islamic juridical practices in the vacuum. The latter is important because it generates the contrast for Part 3 of the book in which I describe the early stages of the vacuum’s transformation into a field that is structured by presence.
Researchers with specialized knowledge of fiqh will want more detail about the fiqh terminology and wording used in the Islamic divorce documents that I present here. I have, therefore, transliterated such information using Brill’s simple Arabic transliteration system. I do not explain the significance or comment on this information as I do not see it as important to the book’s core argument. It is merely meant as a service to readers with specialized interests. While the chapter demands some proficiency in fiqh terminology, it is nothing beyond what can be found in the primer on Islamic legal terminology section in the introduction (see pp. 17–22).
1 Becoming a qadi or Mediator
Khalid2 is a young man living in major city in Denmark, who was born of migrant parents into a powerful clan involved in organized crime. His background provides him with protection and maneuverability, as he explains: “No one touches a member of the family. That is a red line. An attack on one is an attack on all. … If someone does anything to me, my whole family will hunt them down.” At a young age, Khalid became a Salafi Muslim, and, therefore, he did not become involved in the family business; rather, he trained with a sheikh and became a well-known person in the community and beyond due to his missionary work (daʿwa). Khalid’s religious engagement is primarily oriented toward getting people out of gangs, and this means that he is well connected. He explains that even though only some gang members believe in Allah, “There is a social consensus that you do not talk ill of the religion. That would be inappropriate in these communities.” Being a Salafi may give status in gang communities.
People respect Khalid because of his knowledge of Islam and his rigorous practice, which has extended beyond the common one to two year period that many Salafis keep up their engagement.3 Furthermore, he has a reputation for being uncompromisingly oriented towards haqq. He understands this as a characteristic of Salafi Muslims, stating, “You may say much about Salafis – both good and bad – but they are generally more willing [than other Muslims] to put actions behind words when it is about haqq”.
It was in relation to his missionary work that Khalid got his first request to provide an Islamic divorce, and since then he has built the reputation of being able to take action in Islamic divorce conflicts and reach a fair and just result. He points out that most Islamic divorce cases are resolved within or between clans (cf. Bowen, 2016, pp. 22–23; Rohe, 2020; Rohe & Jaraba, 2015), which more or less fits Jaraba’s description of the situation in Germany:
There are some closed off but extended immigrant families in Germany who claim the authority to decide on issues related to marriage and divorce among themselves. If a woman from an extended family wants to obtain a divorce, it is the family elders who claim the authority and consequently decide whether she can obtain a khulʿ based on their customary norms. Generally speaking, these extended families strongly oppose the authority of imams and other Islamic entities, which they view as a threat to their patriarchal family culture and identity. The struggle over religious authority, in some cases, led to tensions between extended families and some imams, who are willing to help women to get divorce without obtaining the approval of either their husbands or extended families. (Jaraba, 2022b, p. 310)
Danish practices are very similar to those Jaraba describes, although I have observed that families and clans – once they have settled a divorce case – sometimes approach a Muslim leader or a mosque to have the agreement put in writing. In such cases, the Muslim leader (whether within or apart from a mosque) merely functions as a notary.
Clans and families may also approach a prominent Muslim leader or a prominent person in the community to act as a mediator or arbitrator. Khalid remarks that imams do not have significant power and, therefore, they are seldom able to solve high conflict cases. Such cases often end up with a prominent person in the community, such as Khalid or someone in a similar position of power; however, as people in general are more respectful in mosque space, imams may use this dynamic to get people to enter respectful dialogue over their problems (cf. Muradin, 2022, p. 61). To act Islamically, as this is understood locally, is a way of demonstrating moral integrity, and thus, the mosque space provides the imam with some influence over defining how Islam must be practiced interrelationally between the parties: for example, that it is un-Islamic to keep a woman in nikah captivity.
Khalid may be a person to be reckoned with but he is not a free agent; rather, he is restricted by his clan’s interests, and he must avoid getting involved in cases that may cause conflicts between his and other clans, or in other ways jeopardize his clan’s interests. If there is such a conflict of interests, there is nothing Khalid can do for the women who request his help, although he may provide his Islamic legal opinion without getting further involved. In the absence of such restrictions, however, he can utilize his position as the member of a powerful clan to make threats or in other ways get people to comply with his decisions, meaning that he has the power to take the weak party’s side in a divorce conflict. When Khalid has resolved such a case, the parties go to the imam who puts the divorce in writing.
Khalid only becomes involved in Islamic divorce cases if there is a conflict, and his first step is always to deescalate it. He remarks that one must be aware of gender dynamics in such situations. Women may frame themselves as victims or show vulnerability, but if men do the same, they will become emasculated; indeed, they are often forced into the role of being tough men who protect the integrity of their masculinity. This might be despite falling apart inside. If the woman starts crying, Khalid remarks, the man often becomes trapped in a difficult situation, because he cannot respond by also crying nor can he become aggressive – he is disarmed and defenseless.
Khalid always tries to get the parties to reach an agreement, but if he cannot, he investigates “to whom haqq belongs” and makes a decision, which he then enforces. He remarks that it is seldom necessary to threaten or in other way mobilize his network in Islamic divorce cases, but it is often necessary in stalking cases. These are the most time-consuming, and are not just between Muslims; he also resolves stalking cases between majority Danes in the local area, often because police interventions have been ineffective.
Khalid knows of cases in which the police have put pressure on imams to issue Islamic divorces, but in the last few years he has noticed that, instead, they have tried to scare imams away from involving themselves in Islamic divorce. Khalid bemoans both practices, but he is especially worried about the latter as there are no other institutions that may issue Islamic divorce papers to women. In other words, Khalid believes that women pay the price for the policy of eliminating Islamic divorce institutions without putting something else in their place. He adds that the police are fully aware of his activities, but they do not interfere because they can see that the activities make sense, and that they are themselves unable to solve these problems.
Khalid’s practice does not constitute a stable presence because his service is only available when it does not conflict with his family’s interests. Furthermore, Islamic divorce cases are time consuming, and Khalid does not have the resources to handle the cascade effect; he tends to prioritize cases in which female converts are in nikah captivity as they are particularly vulnerable due to their having no family support (cf. Eijk, 2019, p. 48). In other words, Khalid oscillates between absence and presence and his ability to help is dependent on his clan’s lack of involvement, or as he puts it, “whether I have my back clear”.
While Khalid is an example of a qadi who uses his clan background to provide haqq, Yasir is an imam in the same area who writes divorces but who does not belong to a powerful clan. He arrived in Denmark in the 1990s and initially lived in an asylum center. At that time, he did not have formal religious education, but he began to lead prayers for other asylum seekers. Then he started teaching Islam, and soon he became the imam of the asylum center (not an official title). After obtaining asylum and moving to a major city, Yasir continued to function as an imam for some of the asylum seekers, teaching and leading prayer. He began studying with a formally educated religious authority, got an ijaza in Shafiʿi fiqh, and became one among several imams in the local mosque. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this trajectory of becoming an imam based on popular demand and the absence of formally educated imams is not uncommon in Denmark.
When I interviewed Yasir,4 he had retired as an imam, but he was still one among approximately five Arab Muslim leaders in the city who issued Islamic divorce documents. He primarily did this from his apartment, but it could also take place in the house of one of the parties or the mosque. Yasir cannot recall his first Islamic divorce case, although he remembers having had cases in the asylum center when he arrived in the 1990s, but he explained that his first divorces after settling in Danish society were performed with the assistance of a priest from the Danish state church. The local priest knew about Danish family law and how to navigate the municipal bureaucracy, which Yasir and other Muslims leaders did not, and he was willing to help. As Yasir and other Muslim leaders gained a deeper understanding of Danish law, cooperation with the priest dwindled.
Yasir is a prominent Muslim leader. He is glad to be interviewed and states from the beginning, “We need to get to the bottom of this.” He believes that the media misunderstands him and other Muslim leaders, and he even offered to call a meeting among imams to have them hand over their divorce archives to me. I refused this offer as I did not want to create expectations in a wide circle of Muslim leaders that I would support their case in return for their delivering empirical material to help my research.
Before getting involved in a case, Yasir insists that the parties to the divorce pledge to accept his decision, but he also remarks that in approximately every tenth case one of the parties chooses not to do so anyway. In high conflict cases where he has issued an Islamic divorce without the husband’s consent (tafriq), men seldom accept it. There is nothing he can do in such cases, but women may – depending on their situation – insist on the validity of the divorce document by mobilizing their clan or family. Thus, as a rule of thumb, women’s Islamic divorce rights – or the de facto rules by which their Islamic divorces are handled – are congruent with the power asymmetry between clans. A woman from a powerful clan can easily get divorced if she is in a nikah with a man from a less powerful family or clan, but she has very few options if she is from the less powerful family or clan; that is, unless she can mobilize a person like Khalid or similar.
Yasir’s first action in every case is to attempt to engineer a reconciliation. This mediation is based on Yasir’s expectation that couples will practice Islam towards one another, and he is quite insistent on trying to reconcile the parties to the nikah rather than facilitating divorce. The reconciliation may follow a variety of patterns; as mentioned in Chapter 4, Yasir’s wife may try to help women find happiness in their nikah before cases are passed on to Yasir, who has a number of techniques he applies to help the parties listen to each other. He might equip the husband and wife with pen and paper, for example, and demand that they take it in turns to listen attentively to their partner while taking notes without interrupting; a dialogue is opened up at the end. The techniques vary according to the situation, and Yasir estimates that approximately half the divorce requests he receives end in reconciliation. He adds that when only the wife and husband are with him, he can more or less control the situation and avoid fights, but when family members join in, the situation sometimes gets out of hand, leading to brawls.
When deciding cases, Yasir prefers to follow Shafiʿi fiqh exclusively – as this is what he knows – and to avoid other schools out of respect as he is not well versed in them. In terms of Islamic marriage he refuses to facilitate a nikah without a guardian (wali), instead referring such cases to imams from the Hanafi school of thought (this practice of referring cases to other schools of thought to help ordinary Muslims navigate has a long history; see, e.g. Vikør, 2005, p. 314). He criticizes Muslim leaders who make absolute statements about Islam as if there were only one way of being and acting as a Muslim; rather, he believes that it is important to tell people about the possibilities in the Hanafi school, for example, if the Shafiʿi school is too restrictive for the person in question.
Yasir negotiates and makes decisions on child custody, albeit unenforceable under Danish law, unless they are contracted as weaponized talaq and, thus, registered as a mutual agreement with the Agency of Family Law. He states very clearly that when people come to him, they expect Islamic solutions and he takes his role of investigating and finding Islamic solutions for couples very seriously. This means that if a couple has made an agreement about child custody in the Agency of Family Law prior to approaching him, he will not interfere; in such cases Yasir finds compliance between the couple’s choice and fiqh and writes this down in the divorce document.5 Sometimes he must apply fiqh from other schools of thought to construct this fiqh compliance – a flexibility in Islamic jurisprudence that Yasir adds he finds beautiful. On occasion he also sends people off to other imams after telling them something like, “I do not do this, but your solution lies in the Hanafi school, so you must go to the Pakistani or Turkish mosque.” In other words, it is important for Yasir to stay true to his beliefs.
As described above and in previous chapters, a wide variety of agents may get involved in Islamic divorce conflicts, but they are mainly of three types: Muslim leaders (religious leaders), clan elders or family heads, and individuals who can enforce their decisions (like Khalid). The power dynamics are very different from case to case, and much of what goes on in Islamic divorce conflicts involves manipulation of the power dynamics. Sometimes Muslim leaders get support from former gang members who have turned to Salafism – a phenomenon that is also publicly known and which constitutes a rawer version of having a police car parked outside the mosque (see p. 67). As Yaqoub Ali, a former gang member who turned Salafi and became part of The Call to Islam – which supported ISIS – explains,
We take protecting women in divorce cases very seriously. And it has also happened several times that we have sat “packed” with weapons in the mosque if we have known that the person whom a woman wants to divorce was a criminal or insane.6 It has become a thing that imams asks of us from The Call to Islam in complex divorce cases, and when I sit there as protection for the woman and the imams, I always make sure that I have one of my hands placed in the pocket of my hoodie, which I wear over my gown, so that no one can be in doubt about what I hide in there. The intention is that they should feel threatened. (Ali & Meyer, 2024, p. 127)
The three roles I have outlined above should not be seen as absolute and, as the quotation demonstrates, individual cases may be influenced by the involvement of recruited support from Salafis with a violent track record, although even with such support imams sometimes have to pull out of conflicts. Amr, a Salafi imam in a major city in Denmark, has been engaged with missionary work in gangs for years, and this means that he has a group of former gang members as students, which provides him with a degree of protection, allowing him agency in conflicts in a way similar to Khalid. He has, for example, issued an Islamic divorce to the wife of a board member of a popular mosque, a divorce case that had already become violent when other imams tried to intervene. Nonetheless, Amr – like Khalid – is not a free agent. In another divorce case, he promised a woman that he would issue a khula by decree if she returned her dower of little more than 4,000 EUR, yet was unable to enforce this when the wife had paid and the husband suddenly demanded more compensation to consent to Islamic divorce. As it became clear that there was a significant security risk in issuing the Islamic divorce document Amr decided to pull out.
On a sidenote, I should remark that there are a few imams who have a clan background, which means that they can actually issue Islamic divorces without taking great risks. However, it will not be tolerated if they continuously generate conflict and problems for the clan, and my observation is that such imams are often rather conservative. Yusuf, whom I introduce more fully below, provides an exemplar. Such imams are also able to settle penal law cases, but I should emphasize that although the Islamic semiotic resources employed in such cases do matter, their position of authority is not based on their religious status but their clan background. In any case, parallel penal law is beyond the scope of this book, although I have observed Muslim leaders who are involved in both family law and penal law cases.
2 A Dangerous Pose
By being framed as a qadis, Muslim leaders are encouraged to interfere in family affairs or with coercively controlling men. The discursive construction of this pose is one of religious authority, which works by mobilizing Islamic semiotic resources. Yet most people are not influenced by such religious discourse, nor is it part of the fundamental dynamics that need addressing, while both coercive or honor-motivated control are. Abdi captured this effectively in a short statement: “Sharia is one thing, but sharaf [honor] is what is dominant.” In other words, people primarily care about their relations to other people, but fiqh is the language of negotiation.
In some cases, Muslim leaders are able to influence or manipulate the dynamics of honor-motivated and/or coercive control with religious discourse, but this is in no way normative; rather, Muslim leaders’ personal security is typically put at risk if they try to intervene in such control conflicts. This has also been observed by Jaraba in his study of German Islamic divorce practices:
Some imams are afraid of practicing khulʿ by litigation for fear of revenge from the husband or his family. Some husbands take revenge either on their wives or on the imam. During the past few years, there were many cases of uxoricides or murder of wives because of their request for divorce without the husband’s consent. There are also many imams who were severely beaten for their practice of judicial khulʿ. In September 2019, an imam in Berlin told me that he wanted to help a woman to divorce her husband because of his misconduct with her. The husband called the imam and threatened to kill him and his family. For fear of the husband’s retaliation, the imam could not take any action. Imams in Bayern and North Rhine-Westphalia informed me on similar attacks. (Jaraba, 2022b, p. 310)
The pleas for Islamic divorce projected on to Muslim leaders are requests for judicial action. Women expect Muslim leaders to take on the role of qadi and rule in their (the weak party’s) favor, which generates the security risk for Muslim leaders. Such power asymmetries are typically the greatest in cases with female converts to Islam because converts tend to come from nuclear families with little power compared to clans.
From the women’s perspective, the qadis’ absence of actual judicial power is a major problem, as noted by al-Sharmani, Mustasaari, and Ismail: “The interviewees experienced this lack of legal authority as undermining their work. Women in particular need the religious divorce, and the mosque interviewees felt that legal authority would help them to deal more effectively with belligerent husbands” (Al-Sharmani, Mustasaari & Ismail, 2017, p. 283), but it is also a problem for the qadis and Islamic divorce councils: “In difficult divorce cases involving belligerent husbands, the authority of mosques to issue a divorce without the husband’s consent was contested. Some husbands did not accept the mosques’ authority and even threatened committee members, as reported by some of the interviewees” (Al-Sharmani, Mustasaari & Ismail, 2017, p. 280). In short, it is the performance of intervention in a conflict that generates the security risk, and the strongest asset of most Muslim leaders is their ability to pose as qadis; that is, they try to enforce rules as if they had jurisdiction by adopting the pose of qadi without backup in the form of executive power (cf. Bowen, 2016, p. 70). Furthermore, this is how the cascade effect is created, because when a Muslim leader’s pose successfully generates a social effect, this is rumored, leading to requests from many more women who need outside intervention to break free from honor-motivated and coercive control.
The typical Muslim leader who facilitates Islamic divorce in the Danish Islamic juridical vacuum is an immigrant above 50 years of age with an educational level ranging between high school and a PhD in Islamic studies. However, as most well-educated Islamic authorities in the vacuum avoid getting involved in Islamic divorce cases, the former educational level is more common than the latter. As I discuss in Part 3, the opposite occurs in a field in which Islamic divorce institutions are present. Young Muslim leaders tend to take advice from their teachers – typically the well-educated men who do not get involved in Islamic divorce cases – and stay away from Islamic divorce conflicts and avoid posing as qadis at the individual level; rather, the younger generation has been much more focused on founding an Islamic divorce council to solve the problem (see Chapter 6, 7, and 8).
3 Editing Divorce Documents and Adopting the Pose of Qadi
In his study of nikah and Islamic divorce archives in Germany, Mahmoud Jaraba notes that many Muslim leaders understand these as private, not belonging to the institutions which have issued them. Jaraba provides the example of an imam who, when he withdrew his services from a mosque, “took all the marriage and divorce contracts he had drawn up and filed with him. His apartment in Berlin then became the new repository for the documents, even though they contained private information and photographs” (Jaraba, 2022a, p. 329). This also seems to be the norm in Denmark, except for large mosques with imams who are employed long-term.
Yasir is one imam who kept his own physical divorce archive, but unfortunately this was lost in a relocation some years ago, a loss described by Jaraba as a common phenomenon. Nevertheless, when I asked Yasir to go over his computer, he was able to find twelve Islamic divorce documents, issued between 2006–2020. The headings of the documents categorize them as three talaq, two khula, five tafriq, and two unspecified. In nine of these documents, Yasir has signed7 as the editor of the document (muḥarrir waṯiqa), two as imam, and one with just his name. Further, nine of the documents – but not the same nine – are co-signed by people titled wife, husband, father, brother, guardian (wali, wakīl, or wali ʾamr), and/or witness (šāhid or al-wasīṭ al-muḥāyid al-šāhid).
Although I have collected much bigger archives of Islamic divorces, I have chosen to analyze Yasir’s because his practice is comparatively versatile. Furthermore, while most Islamic divorce documents issued by Muslim leaders in Denmark contain just a few lines or a paragraph at most, Yasir often writes up extensive presentations of the cases. He argues that this information is important for the documents’ validity, as it provides the reasons that legitimize the decision to terminate the nikah.
I have written the following analysis to demonstrate how Yasir applies two parallel terminologies. While he applies fiqh terminology, the lines between talaq, khula, and tafriq are blurred, as I will demonstrate – a husband’s stating “you are divorced” may, for example, be framed as a tafriq divorce; meanwhile, Yasir uses the term mutual consent (bit-tarāḍi) to describe actual events prior to their “translation” into fiqh terms. In some contracts this is even called al-ṭalāq bit-tarāḍi. Thus, the following analysis both sets the stage for a further discussion of the application of fiqh terminology later in the chapter, and provides a typical example of how a Muslim leader may operate in the Islamic juridical vacuum, sometimes adopting the pose of qadi.
In the first talaq divorce, it is stated that the couple decided by mutual consent (bit-tarāḍi) to divorce before the nikah was consummated, and that all attempts at reconciliation have failed. This means that Yasir became responsible for writing up a document that both complied with fiqh rules and in which clear testimony to the wife’s virginity was stated: “I confirmed with the couple that nothing [sexual] had occurred between them, and that the wife [name] was still a virgin.” This divorce is not signed by the husband, just Yasir as editor, but inside the document it is stated that the husband has uttered a talaq enunciation (ʾanti ṭāliq min ʿiṣmati) and that he understood what this meant.
The second talaq divorce states that after all attempts at reconciliation have failed, the couple has now agreed to divorce by mutual consent (al-ṭalāq bit-tarāḍi). No information on payment of deferred dower (if such a dower was agreed upon) nor maintenance during the waiting period is mentioned. This omission is normative as husbands do not normally pay these expenses; if they do, they usually make sure to have it clearly stated in the divorce document. The document is signed by the spouses and their guardians, two witnesses, and Yasir as the editor.
The third talaq divorce is worth dwelling on a bit more as it states that the husband will pay the deferred dower and maintenance during the waiting period, which is unusual. This talaq document describes how several attempts at reconciliation have been made prior to the husband’s turning to Yasir for a divorce. The document continues to describe how Yasir tried to argue for reconciliation but the couple did not want to talk about it at all; rather, they had agreed to divorce by mutual consent (al-ṭalāq bit-tarāḍi). It is then specified that the husband will pay maintenance and the deferred dower in installments during the waiting period. This talaq document is a way of putting it on record that the husband divorced his wife in an honorable way. The document goes on to state that the husband has made a talaq enunciation (ʾanti ṭāliq min ʿiṣmati) to his wife in front of Yasir, the wife’s father, and a witness. This section of the document also declares that Yasir has explained to the couple that the divorce is final (baʾina baynuna kubrā), and what this means in practice. Further, the husband pledges that he will complete the divorce procedures under Islamic law abroad. Finally, the document states that the parties must tear up all private photos of each other and delete all video clips and private messages they have exchanged (this statement also occurs in one of the khula documents, one of the tafriq documents, and in one of the untitled documents). This document is signed by the spouses, the wife’s guardian, a witness, and Yasir as editor.
Some Islamic legal scholars would probably expect the first talaq divorce either to be handled under a different rule than talaq or that the husband would pay maintenance during the waiting period. Similarly, they may argue that the second talaq divorce constitutes a khula divorce, and only categorize the third as a talaq divorce. I merely highlight this to demonstrate how fiqh terminology is seldom applied rigorously; it is not a corrective to Yasir’s practice, which is not atypical for Danish Islamic legal practices. As I demonstrate with the next two divorces, even Yasir notes and navigates this ambiguity.
In ten of the divorce documents, Yasir declares in the heading that these divorce documents constitute talaq, khula, or tafriq, but in one document there is no such heading and in another the heading reads “Document terminating a legal marital relationship (waṯiqa ʾinhāʾ ʿalāqa zawaǧīa šarʿia)”. The latter document states that many wrongs have been committed on both sides and that Yasir is unable to decide whether the divorce constitutes talaq or khula, and therefore, it is completed by mutual consent (bit-tarāḍi). This is then followed by a detailed agreement between the spouses, which constitutes a comparatively mild weaponized talaq in which the children will live with their mother but will move to their father’s place if she enters into another nikah. Furthermore, the wife must not demand child support from the father (this bit of the divorce document is quoted on page 71). In return the husband pledges to move out of their home, cooperate in raising their children, and not to claim any of the money from state child support for himself. Finally, the wife waives the deferred dower, and the husband waives the advance dower. This document is signed by the spouses and Yasir, who is untitled.
In the second untitled divorce document it is stated that reconciliation attempts have been made, followed by an explanation of how the two clans involved have come to an agreement described as divorce by mutual consent (al-ṭalāq bit-tarāḍi) and that “each party waived all of its legal rights with the other party”; that is, the husband will not pay the deferred dower, but neither will the wife pay back the advance dower. The words talaq, khula, and tafriq do not appear anywhere in the document, which is signed by the spouses and their guardians, two witnesses, and Yasir as editor.
In the khula divorces, one of which constitutes a weaponized talaq, the power asymmetry between the spouses is more pronounced than in the talaq divorces. In relation to weaponized talaq, Yasir explained that women are often desperate to get out of their nikahs and are therefore prone to enter agreements that are unfavorable to them (this corresponds with Aisha’s description in Chapter 4; see also Petersen, 2021b, p. 373). In such cases there is little Yasir can do other than help the women make the best deal possible, adding that his facilitating a weaponized talaq enables women to escape nikah. He then argued that if he were to refuse to facilitate such processes, these women would be stuck with an abusive husband. In other words, Yasir is against weaponized talaq, but he believes that it is often better than the alternative. Some women are satisfied with this, but other women berate Yasir for not providing haqq. They expect him to act as a qadi and issue an Islamic divorce without their husband’s consent. To this Yasir responds that he has no such power, and there is a limit to what he can do.
Weaponized talaq practices vary between Muslim leaders, some of whom explained that they sometimes put women under pressure to accept weaponized talaq, legitimizing it by stating that the women are in no position to negotiate due to the power asymmetry between the parties. Women who experience such pressure either reluctantly agree or reject such deals, and the latter often accuse Muslim leaders of siding with the stronger party as a way to improve their social relations with prominent people in the community.
In the first two tafriq divorces which I present below, the women have the explicit support of their families, which can be seen from its being their fathers who contact Yasir. In these cases the security risk, if any, is limited to the husbands’ reactions, and Yasir’s option of issuing an Islamic divorce without the husband’s consent is made possible by family support. In the remaining cases family indifference or support is indicated.
In two of the tafriq documents, the woman’s father had turned to Yasir and requested an Islamic divorce because of the abusive behavior of his son-in-law. In the first of these cases, the father had extensive documentation of the economic violence against his daughter, and in the other, it took the form of audio messages sent to his daughter. In both cases, Yasir contacted the husband and was rejected. In the first case, under a subheading in the divorce document saying, “Sharia ruling (al-ḥukm al-šarʿi)”, Yasir states that “based on the above description I sign (ʾuwaqiʿ) this Islamic tafriq between [husband] and [wife] due to harm (bi-sabab al-ḍarar)”. This is followed by his signature as editor of the document. No other person has signed the document. In the second case, the husband had found another wife. The father had without success tried to mediate between the husband and his daughter, but in an audio message sent to the father, the husband stated, “Why do you insist on arbitration? I do not want your daughter. It is over between us (limāḏa al-ʾiṣrār ʿala at-taḥkīm faʾana la ʾurid ibnatika laqad intahā kul šayʾ baynana).” The father called Yasir on the phone and asked him to come to his house to listen to the recording and issue an Islamic divorce document based on it. From the father’s perspective, his son-in-law has divorced himself with this audio message; then again, the father also believes that Yasir’s Islamic juridical performance is necessary for the husband’s statement to take legal effect, an evaluation that indicates that the effect of the husband’s statement is pending authorization.
Yasir insisted that he had to talk to the husband before coming to the father’s house; in other words, the audio message was insufficient. Yet, as the divorce document states, Yasir got a similar answer from the son in law:
His answer, which he sent to me via an audio clip on WhatsApp (I saved it), said that he does not want to talk to anyone, that he has nothing to say, that everything is over, that he has divorced her a second and third time (ṭalaqha maratayn waṯalāṯa), that he does not want her, that he does want her children, that she must stay away from him, and that I must not call or write to him again. He used to tell his wife that the divorce had not occurred because he had uttered disbelief prior to it (talaffada bil-kufr qablahu), and it is as if he does not care about divorce nor care about the punishment for uttering disbelief (bil-kufr) nor that he goes from religion to apostasy (min al-mila ʾilā al-rida).
The document ends with a short summary in which it is stated that Yasir went to the father’s house and brought two witnesses with him. Together they went through the case and listened to the audio recordings, and then Yasir announced his decision to issue a tafriq divorce. That is, Yasir issued a tafriq divorce in which he confirms that the husband has performed a talaq divorce. The document also states that the husband must pay the deferred dower, maintenance for the waiting period, and maintenance for his children. In the final paragraph, just prior to the signatures of the two witnesses and Yasir as the editor, it is stated that “with this we bear witness (našhadu) to the legal separation between the spouses, and we sign it (ʿalayhi nūqiʿu).”
This divorce is not just interesting because it demonstrates how Yasir creatively uses fiqh terminology to achieve social interventions by confirming a talaq enunciation as a tafriq divorce, but also because it demonstrates a preoccupation with a woman’s divorcing a man who, according to Yasir, has declared himself an apostate and who does not want to have anything to do with his former wife. One could argue that just ignoring this case would produce the same result, but that is clearly not how the people involved see it. Clearly, this tafriq divorce was important to the wife and her father and they put significant energy into achieving this result.
In the third tafriq divorce, a woman requested an Islamic divorce due to her husband’s mistreatment. Her family had already tried to get her out of the nikah but failed. Yasir tried to negotiate a khula with the husband, but when this failed, he instead issued a tafriq in which the wife waived the deferred dower and the maintenance during the waiting period. The reason given for the divorce is harm (ḍarar) to the wife and his prolonged absence from the marital home. This divorce may indicate a security risk to Yasir, but the document also states that the husband has escaped prison in Denmark and fled to another country outside the Schengen area. This means that he cannot legally enter Schengen, or indeed Denmark, without being arrested; thus, Yasir is likely to be safe.
In the fourth tafriq divorce, a woman contacts Yasir and asks him to help her obtain an Islamic divorce. However, the husband does not want to talk with Yasir about reconciliation nor khula; therefore, Yasir issues a tafriq divorce based on the husband’s infidelity, his porn watching, alcohol consumption, negligence as a husband, controlling behavior, not observing the fast nor prayer, and cursing God (kāna yaštimu al-ḏāt al-ʾilāhia ʿand al-ġaḍab) when angry. The document contains no information about the dower, and it is signed by the wife, two witnesses, and Yasir as the editor.
Although Yasir has assisted case officers at the municipality with Islamic divorce and elucidation of cases on multiple occasion, the fifth tafriq is the only one of the twelve cases in which representatives of the welfare state are directly involved. It begins with the following:
Three weeks ago, upon invitation from the Agency of Family Law (bayt al-ʾusra)8 in the municipality of [city], I attended and listened in the presence of the translator and the case officer (al-mušrifa al-ʾiǧtimāʿiyya) to [wife] about her problems with her husband [name], and it was as follows:
The document then goes on to describe the chain of events that led up to this moment. The woman had been in a civil marriage and a nikah for more than ten years but the relationship had broken down several times in the past, leading to reconciliation every time. However, three years prior to the wife’s contacting Yasir she had requested that the case officer arrange her divorce. The civil divorce was granted a year later by a court ruling, but as the husband did not attend and refused to sign the civil divorce papers, the wife called Yasir to ask whether this constituted a valid Islamic divorce. Yasir stated that it did not.
The husband lived in another part of Denmark so Yasir passed the case onto a colleague, who gathered the wife and husband for a meeting. As this did not resolve the issue, the woman “turned to the municipality of [city] for help in obtaining an Islamic divorce, and the case officer called me [Yasir] and requested a meeting to discuss the case”. When Yasir attended the meeting, he listened to the whole story and stated that he could not give a legal opinion without having spoken to the husband. Therefore, another meeting was scheduled a week later to which the case officer also invited the husband, a police officer, the wife, Yasir, and a translator (to assist Yasir who does not speak much Danish). This is the meeting that was mentioned at the beginning of the divorce document.
The husband did not turn up, and the case officer called him so that he could talk to the police officer and then with Yasir. In his conversation with the husband, Yasir demanded that he accept khula; when the husband refused, Yasir gave him a week to accept it; otherwise, Yasir would issue a tafriq divorce. This is how the case ended, without any dower transaction. Yasir signed this divorce as imam, and the document has no other signatures.
Yasir’s Islamic divorce practice – although very versatile – is representative of a typical Muslim leader’s Islamic legal practice in the Islamic juridical vacuum: he is significantly constrained, has little influence in high-conflict cases, must maneuver to stay safe while also helping women, and he spends a significant amount of his spare time on Islamic divorce processes.
4 Demand Co-Produces the Rules
Hassan came to Denmark as a refugee in the 1980s. He has a three-year education in Islamic studies at what he calls gymnasium level, and he has taken a few additional courses on an outreach arm of al-Azhar University in his country of origin before his arrival as a refugee in Denmark where he settled in a minor city.
Most of the people who come to Hassan are Arab, and he remarks that with the Syrian refugees’ arrival in 2015 he suddenly experienced a spike in the number of divorce requests. Prior to 2015 he had approximately 1–2 cases a year, but this rose to approximately 5–6 in the years following the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, which generated a higher local demand. Furthermore, some Syrian women demanded divorce without their husband’s consent, which resulted in Hassan’s issuing his first faskh divorce (by 2021 he had issued three faskh divorces). The effect of the refugee crisis was also felt in other countries, as documented by Mahmoud Jaraba:
In light of the growing number of Muslim refugees flowing into Germany since 2015, particularly from Syria, khulʿ by mutual consent has become a controversial topic among Muslim communities. Husbands and wives will not always agree to reconcile their differences, which sometimes lead to brutal conflicts, and, in some cases, ends with the wife’s murder. This is partly due to the different socio-legal contexts between Syria and Germany. For instance, in Syria, the consent of the husband and wife is an essential prerequisite for the dissolution of the marriage contract by khulʿ (referred to as mukhalaʿa divorces). (Jaraba, 2022b, p. 309)
This corresponds with my own observations. Many Syrian women adapted quickly to the legal diaspora situation and opted for Islamic divorce after their arrival in Denmark, demonstrating how demography to a great extent determines demand, which generates the vacuum in which presences of Islamic divorce institutions emerge and collapse. That is, demand varies depending on the ethnic/national origin of the Muslim minority population, but also other variables – class, urban or rural origin, whether kin structures are dominated by clans or small families – may also be important. The point is that demography is an independent variable that largely determines the dependent variable of the vacuum, and this is what produces and forms Islamic legal institutions such as qadis and Islamic divorce councils. Similarly, because socialization influences the demand that is generated, it matters whether a population is primarily made up of immigrants, or their descendants. In short: Islamic divorce practices change with demographic changes.
International politics may also affect the Islamic divorce rules locally in Denmark. After the United States and allied forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban took power, I observed that this changed the Islamic legal situation for some Afghan women in Denmark. In one case, a woman who had her family’s support for a divorce, suddenly had to consider that her (ex)husband’s family had relations with the Taliban, and therefore, her own family, which lived in Afghanistan, would become endangered if she chose to go through with it.
To some extent fiqh concepts constitute signs that “work as resources with which social agents can accomplish a variety of goals” (Vannini, 2007, p. 132). This is definitely the case with some women in nikah captivity, but also men holding women captive, and parents who coerce their children into a nikah to protect the family’s honor. Vannini’s description also applies to at least parts of some Muslim leaders’ practices, but the latter will often – and sometimes almost exclusively – be oriented towards haqq. To take an example, Hassan’s divorce practice is significantly influenced by context. In previous chapters, I have described fiqh terminology as a language of action, but as I demonstrate in this section, it is often adapted to fit social contexts rather than rigorously imposed on cases.
This is evident in Hassan’s framing of khula divorce as talaq divorce. As it is seen as more honorable for men to give a talaq divorce, this is the linguistic frame of many khula divorces, to the degree that Hassan even talked of “normal talaq, where both [spouses] are in agreement”. When I inquired about his use of terminology, he was blunt:
Petersen: If they agree to khula, then you write talaq?
Hassan: Yes, we write talaq.
Petersen: Even if it technically is khula?
Hassan: Yes, exactly. It is better to do it in that way for their own sake. It makes it easier.
Hassan explained that “many women, or many families, do not want to khula dissolution. … They prefer it to say talaq rather than khula”. Similarly, men do not want it to say khula – and definitely not faskh – because it is more honorable for them to give a talaq divorce. Hassan added that women may pay substantial sums of money to get out of a nikah, but he will still write up the divorce as a talaq divorce. This practice was institutionalized to a degree that Hassan’s talaq divorce template contained a line titled “further information” where the woman’s compensation of her husband would typically be stated. Hassan added that abusive husbands refuse to accept divorce documents in which their behavior is described; therefore, even if the divorce is grounded in abusive behavior, the husband is typically persuaded to divorce through compensation, and a talaq document is written up.
Hassan further remarks that in some cases it is important to the involved parties that the divorce document testifies to a talaq by the book, even if it is a khula, because such documents are easier to get approved in Islamic legal systems abroad,
And that thing with khula, you know when we write up the documents, many families want it [the divorce documents] to be approved in the home country. They send them down there. So, when they come to the court, the Islamic court, and you say khula, there are not many legal people down there who accept or like khula. They prefer it to say talaq. So, it is also because people want to be sure that if [they] want to become divorced in the home country … then it must be approved in the home country, and the word khula – many people do not like it, even if it is legal.
The legal process in the country of origin is a process separate from Hassan’s practice, but Hassan’s point is that one can get a khula dissolution in Denmark, write it up as talaq, and then have it easily approved in the country of origin. This phenomenon of registering – or trying to register – Islamic divorces from parallel legal practices in diaspora under Islamic law abroad has also been found in other countries (Bowen, 2016, p. 87; Roald, 2009, p. 112; Saris, 2016 p. 260 n19). As Hassan explains,
You go to the court, hand it in, and state, “We have divorced, and I would like it [the nikah] to be dissolved here [in home country] after my divorce [in Denmark].” Then there is a secretary who registers it and hands it to the judge. The judge looks at it and then sometimes if he is in doubt, or he suspects something, then he requests the partner [husband] or a tawkil, tafwid,9 you know parents or family to come to court so that he can speak to them. Then he is assured before signing, and then he issues a divorce in the home country.
The example above demonstrates how context and demand significantly influence fiqh terminology in the vacuum as Hassan must both tactically navigate social dynamics and take foreign legal systems into account. Other Muslim leaders such as Tarek were even more blunt about the irrelevance of fiqh in his practice.
Tarek is an elderly man who migrated to Denmark in the 1990s. I initially got in contact with him in February 2019 through the local mosque in a major Danish city where I had inquired about Islamic divorce. The imam of the mosque explained that the mosque did not facilitate divorce; this was primarily done by two Islamic authorities – Tarek and Yusuf – out of their apartments. Both taught in the mosque, and in other mosques, but they were not formally affiliated with any of them. Tarek, who has no formal education in Islamic studies, only teaches tajwid (Quran recitation), whereas Yusuf, who has a degree in Islamic studies, teaches a range of subjects, including fiqh.
Tarek and Yusuf do not cooperate and there are significant differences between their Islamic divorce practices. This means that the Islamic divorce practice to which an applicant is subjected depends on who is available at the time the mosque is asked for a reference. After my interview with Tarek, who receives on average ten Islamic divorce requests a month, I wrote in my field diary that he told me directly that fiqh does not matter in his Islamic divorce practice,
Tarek states straight up that he gives advice as a fellow human being. That is, when people come to him, they get his personal opinion as a fellow human being – this has nothing to do with fiqh. I ask how he would handle it if two Moroccans came [to him]; would he use Maliki fiqh? Tarek repeats that he uses his own personal opinion; he evaluates what he as a person believes is just. He listens and gives his opinion based on how he sees this as a human being, which has nothing to do with a madhab [school of thought]. This is exactly how he formulated it.
Tarek’s answer is reminiscent of other informants’ approaches. In a discussion with Haitham about an Islamic juridical document he had written, I asked him, “How is this thought through juridically? Have you based it on something specific?” He answered, “No, no, it is my own pocket jurisprudence [lommejuristik] that applies here.” In other words, Tarek, Haitham, and many others understand nikah and Islamic divorce as something that happens within Islamically defined boundaries, and they use life experience and personal judgement to determine that what is just fits within this framework. This should not be misunderstood as indifference to Islamic rules; it is merely that Islamic rules are not always produced in the ways predicted by Islamic legal theories.
In contrast with the above, other Muslim leaders such as Musa and Yusuf (see below), who are both well-educated in Islamic studies, were rigorous in their application of what they believed to be the correct fiqh terminology. They insisted that if a husband receives any kind of compensation, the divorce cannot be framed as talaq, because the wife’s payment makes it khula. Without my asking or in any way introducing the subject, both Musa and Yusuf critiqued their colleagues as not knowing enough about fiqh to get involved in Islamic divorce cases. Both Musa and Yusuf have emerged as stable presences in the vacuum for short periods of time and have been part of Islamic divorce councils for periods of 1–3 years (i.e., Islamic divorce councils that collapsed due to security issues and the cascade effect).
5 Oscillating Presences
Ronald L. Jepperson (1991, p. 146) writes that the further an observer is from an institution, the more it looks like an institution. That is also the case with imams. Outsiders such as politicians, journalists, debaters, and often Muslim women who rarely attend a mosque – that is, the majority of Muslim women – typically view the imam as a powerful figure who is obeyed by Muslims, yet inside a mosque community people know that this is not how things work. The imam may have a privileged position, but close up, one can also observe all his limitations – one of them being that he is not a qadi.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, women often come to Muslim leaders – and especially imams – with the expectation that they are qadis; if they do not provide haqq some will realize his constraints while others will understand his reluctance as a verdict, that is, an Islamic legal rejection of their divorce application (and it may very well be formulated as such, irrespective of whether the Muslim leader is actually in a position to issue an Islamic divorce with social effect). Such rejections constitute an important element of a typical media narrative in which an imam has denied a woman divorce, with the implication that he could issue an Islamic divorce with social effect if he wanted to. This is how the imam myth, as Haitham called it, is generated and sustained.
The imam myth – or the myth about Muslim leaders being qadis – plays an important role in the Islamic juridical vacuum, because to the women who request help, Muslim leaders already exist as presences, even if they are not. Only if a Muslim leader issues an Islamic divorce upon request is he transformed into a presence, whereupon it will soon be rumored that he can help with Islamic divorce, and then the cascade effect sets in.
The potential institution of the Muslim leader as a qadi extends beyond women in nikah captivity; other Muslims also expect that certain procedures will be followed, such as reconciliation attempts and the sending of three letters, before moving on to divorce without the husband’s consent. These expectations vary from group to group, and Muslim leaders must navigate these – they can seldom define the rules – although some groups are satisfied as long as there is some sort of ritualized sequence of events that the Muslim leader guarantees is the right way of doing things (Bell, 2009). The latter is not the norm, but it does happen – especially when non-Arab Muslims turn to Arab Muslim leaders for help. In such processes the plaintiff will have to accept the Arab Muslim leader’s way of doing things, but it is not uncommon for Arab Muslim leaders to ask non-Arabs to go to their own leaders, because only they know the correct way of doing things in their community. Nonetheless, there is a tendency for Arab Muslim leaders to take on cases among non-Arabs – something that seldom happens the other way around.
Muslim leaders who insist on women’s haqq will typically oscillate between absence and presence. They will issue an Islamic divorce, experience the cascade effect or threats, then reject all cases for a while (absence), and then, at a later stage, emerge as a presence once again, and the process repeats itself. Yusuf (see below) and Musa follow this pattern.
In May 2019, I visited Musa in his home. After greetings and small talk at the door I was invited into a small room with a large sofa, a TV, and wall to wall bookshelves stocked with Islamic literature, but also philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Karl Popper, Immanuel Kant, and others. At one point he also embarked on a discussion of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, when I told him that I especially liked the work of the latter. Furthermore, Musa had a large stock of books on fiqh and other Islamic topics, some of which were worn out completely from heavy use.
Musa performs tafriq divorces in hard cases, and this means that on multiple occasions he has received serious threats from men coming both to his home and to the mosque where he is an imam. When I visited him in May 2019, he explained that he had recently stopped issuing divorces, but the next time I visited, in February 2021, it had been too difficult to reject the women who came to him for help, so he had continued his practice after a break. Now he had again decided to stop as he had recently had a case in which the husband sent thugs to his door to threaten him; he had simply had enough. Furthermore, an angry (ex)husband had been stalking him for a long time, which had worn him down. In other words, if a Muslim leader has once become a stable presence for a short period of time it can be difficult for him to retire because the practice has been established and knowledge of it disseminated; that is, even when retired, people still remember that he has been willing to help with Islamic divorce and they may expect him to do it again.
Threats are not atypical. Among my informants, one Muslim leader had a gun put to his head while in the mosque and another experienced an (ex)husband coming to the mosque with a butcher’s knife, asking who had issued a divorce to his wife. Both of the Muslim leaders threatened in these cases were prominent and well-respected, but their status did not protect them against threats of violence. Death threats usually come via phone calls, but other intimidation strategies are also used. One Muslim leader had a sheep’s head placed on his doorstep to indicate a death threat, and another Muslim leader’s wife was assaulted as punishment for her husband’s issuing an Islamic divorce. In other words, issuing Islamic divorces is not without risk, although no Muslim leader has yet been killed. These threats are seldom, if ever, reported to the police.
Even in cases with a high security risk, Muslim leaders typically try to negotiate khula first; this may produce a stable Islamic divorce without residual conflict because it constitutes a form that the husband will accept, thereby solving the security issue for the Muslim leader. Some Muslim leaders will put pressure on women to accept weaponized talaq in such cases, arguing that it is in their own interest.
Muslim leaders tend to be quite experienced in persuasion strategies and the manipulation of social dynamics and, thus, positioned to put pressure on reluctant husbands; most can tell an anecdote about how they once solved a case with a single phone call. In such cases it is often the religious authority of the imam that persuades the husband, but this also has limitations. Yusuf tells husbands, “If you do not pay the deferred dower [muaʾḫar] then you are liable at judgement day. You must remember that this is her money, and you have stolen it from her.” Yet he also remarks that men generally do not listen or act upon this, and aggressive responses bordering on, or in the form of a declaration of unbelief are not uncommon because men who hold their wife in nikah captivity are not necessarily religious. Manipulation of social dynamics may also include talking to and negotiating with the husband’s significant others or taking advantage of the husband’s mood fluctuations – or his intoxication due to alcohol and drugs – to have him sign an Islamic divorce document, which is then immediately circulated. The latter is not normative, but neither is it unheard of.
If all the tactics fail, some Muslim leaders get creative. One Muslim leader issued Islamic legal documents that imitated court documents from the husband’s country of origin and had them mailed to the husband (with the appropriate homeland stamps). The documents included a passage on how the Danish authorities had also been informed of the divorce. I have observed other tactics that are just as creative, but they are not common. Rather, the most frequent, maybe even dominant, tactic is to give Islamic divorce documents an aesthetic that looks official, using the letterheads and stamps of mosques and other Islamic organizations.
If women come to Musa with civil divorce documents, he issues an Islamic divorce based on these no matter whether the husband has signed the civil divorce or not; however, if women have no such documents he begins with mediation; that is, in the absence of Danish legal documents, he submits to community expectations and follows the procedures expected of him. He adds that, especially when he is talking to young people, it is difficult to get the families to stay out of the conflict. As I wrote in my field diary:
Often the parents [of those divorcing] come with them to see Musa and it can be difficult for him to get the parents to leave the room so that he can talk with the husband and wife alone. Musa makes it very clear that nikah is not a family matter, and that there can be secrets that a couple does not want to share with parents.
As the quotation indicates, Musa’s practice is oriented towards the rights of the individual, and he refuses the notion that the individual must submit to family customs and interests. Likewise, he does not accept weaponized talaq, he has a no-tolerance policy on violence, and he insists that child custody must never be discussed outside the Agency of Family Law.
When I asked Musa whether I could see some of his divorce documents, he gave me his laptop and told me that I could browse his archive as long as I did not describe case-specific content in my research. My browsing demonstrated that Musa – like Yasir – writes his divorces in a Word document, but he only includes a brief description of the reason for the divorce, an explanation of relevant fiqh, and then a conclusion or verdict. Therefore, Musa’s documents are much shorter, and the fiqh terminology is applied more rigorously. When I showed a few of Yasir’s Islamic divorces to Musa,10 he said that he did not like their elaborate style. Nonetheless, he found them very interesting to read because, as he explained, Muslim leaders typically know very little about each other’s work due to the sensitive nature of case content. This low degree of distribution of knowledge of common Islamic divorce practices contributes to the significant variation between Muslim leaders’ ways of dealing with Islamic divorce requests.
Musa added that he has had cases in which a husband wanted to have anal sex with his wife, which she refused, and therefore he raped her, and in another case a man insisted that his wife should have sex with his friend. He did not, however, include this information in the Islamic divorce documents. This underlines the deferred nature of such documents because the omission of important information in relation to these divorces is due to performative expectations. That is, men are more likely to accept these documents if such information is not included, and excluding it avoids causing an unwanted escalation of the conflict. This has also been observed in other studies. Bowen, for example, describes how women complained to a British Islamic divorce council because it included the reasons for divorce, stating that, “We came to get a divorce certificate; we did not come to be certified as quarreling all the time; these [divorce documents] became a charge sheet against me” (Bowen, 2016, p. 86). In other words, Islamic divorce papers must be written with their deferred performance in mind, and the Islamic divorce council changed its procedure based on the women’s feedback.
A few of the divorce documents in Musa’s archive had been signed by some of the most prominent Muslim leaders in the local community. When I asked Musa about this, he explained that this was because some of these leaders are not experts in fiqh, and, therefore, they ask him to write up the cases, and then they sign them together, remarking that this also distributes the security risk, if relevant. This demonstrates how ad hoc Islamic divorce councils sometimes emerge.
Musa’s digital archive contained 153 Islamic divorce documents, of which he estimated that 10–14 constitute tafriq divorces.11 Initially, he was a bit reluctant to let me see his early work because, as he explained, he was embarrassed about the quality, adding, “I did not know any better back then and I have become much better”, referring to his application of fiqh terminology and following the procedures. He then showed me the early templates he wrote for Islamic divorce, and how his Islamic divorce process developed into stable, fiqh-grounded practice within a few years. This underlines that the possession of educational credentials in fiqh is not the most important variable for selection as qadi in the Islamic juridical vacuum; rather, being a prominent leader who is willing to pose as a qadi is what matters.
Some divorces also had a Danish translation, which Musa explained was because Pakistanis and Turks do not understand Arabic; therefore, they used Danish as a common legal language for all non-Arabic speakers. I was particularly interested in why Turks would come to him. I have on rare occasions observed that Turks may become religiously socialized into the nikah and Islamic divorce practices of other Muslim groups, and I also interviewed a Turkish Muslim leader who facilitated Islamic divorce (and polygamous nikah). However, I should stress that these are minor groups of Turks, who follow religious teaching more rigorously because religion plays an important role in their lives. In other words, these are not ordinary Turkish Muslims. I have also observed this among a group of Bosnian Muslims, who follow classes in an Arab Salafi mosque.
Before I left Musa’s apartment, we briefly spoke about a law that was soon going to be passed by the Danish Parliament, which banned nikah with people below the age of 18 (the penal law § 260a). Musa was very happy with this, but he also wondered why politicians did not do more to regulate nikah under Danish law.
Offering a marked contrast to Musa, Yusuf12 is a Salafi, with the highest flow of cases in my sample outside the Hikma Mosque (see Chapter 8). While Musa sees it as his role to provide Islamic divorce, Yusuf says almost the exact opposite. He states that when couples come to him, determined to divorce, he always says, “No, you will not get divorced today.” He adds that men sometimes call him and say, “I want to divorce now”, to which Yusuf replies, “It is not my job to divorce you; I must find solutions for you, so that you can continue living together.” He then adds that ordinary Muslims do not know sharia – he does – so they must follow his instructions.
Muslim leaders with similar practices often highlight the number of couples they reconcile and how this saves the nikahs; however, they receive little to no feedback on the future condition of these nikahs, other than the fact that the couples do not return to request Islamic divorce again – and this is not a good indicator. It is as likely that the women in question just go Muslim leader shopping because they do not consider Yusuf and likeminded leaders conducive to the alleviation of their situation; that is, the reason why at least some couples do not come back to Yusuf for a divorce is that they do not want to be reconciled once again.
The structure of the Islamic juridical vacuum incentivizes Muslim leaders to be conservative because this avoids both the cascade effect and security risks; consequently, their positions and the institutions they build last longer before they collapse, although there is a lower demand for their services which are of little use to women. This means that there may be considerable activity in such councils, that only a few women obtain divorces from them, and that they have a negative impact on many female clients’ lives. The council that was described in the Mosques behind the Veil is a good example of such an institution.
Yusuf explains that he deescalates the conflict in difficult situations, gets the nikah back on track, provides some guidance, and insists that the couple give it another try. If they come back again, determined to divorce, he repeats the process until a few months have elapsed. If they still want to divorce after a few months, he moves the process along to Islamic divorce. He describes such cases as the most common type he sees, but he also has those in which men are violent towards their wives.
When I raise the topic of violence, Yusuf shows his disgust in a facial expression as soon as he hears the word (ʿunf). He gets angry when he has cases in which men are violent towards their wives, adding that the Prophet Mohammad never hit a woman, and that no form of violence is acceptable in a nikah. In his elaboration of this he explains that some Muslim men believe that the Quran 4:34 allows men to hit their wives in a way that does not leave bruises; however, Yusuf does not believe this is allowed because Mohammad only ever allowed a man to slap a woman gently with a quill or a miswak (small root used to clean teeth) to get her attention. He then berates this group of Muslim men for believing that they can just read the Quran and then understand its content in depth without any religious education.
Despite Yusuf’s position on violence, he believes that one must sometimes be lenient. In cases exhibiting mild degrees of violence, he instructs men that this is not allowed and then insists that the couples give the nikah another try. Yusuf distinguishes between violent behavior as a character trait – in such cases men should not be given any extra chances – and violent behavior as a single affective event. In the latter type of case, Yusuf explains that men may get a rage blackout and only afterwards see the consequences of what they have done, and while this is unacceptable, it will most likely not happen again. Hence, he believes such men should be given a second chance, whereas in cases where it is a character trait, they should not. Yusuf has no professional training in patterns of violence and merely uses his personal judgement to evaluate cases, and it is important to note that his assessments of the behavior of violent men are clearly inaccurate. Men who have been violent once will often be violent again (Smith, 2021). Lack of knowledge in this context has also been noted in other studies. Islam Uddin, for example, writing of Islamic divorce practices in England, notes that Imams have limited knowledge of violence and coercive control, and their habit of seeking reconciliation is a major problem:
So how is it that Muslim leaders who engineer reconciliations between women and their abusive husbands remain convinced that they are doing a good job – the right thing? The answer is that they receive no proper feedback; rather, they observe that the woman stays with the husband, or that she never comes back. But why would she, if she was not helped the first time? Staying with an abusive husband is not a solution for the women. (Uddin, 2023, p. 11)
Like Musa, Yusuf acts on his concept of haqq to a much higher degree than other Muslim leaders, and this is why he oscillates. While he will always try to negotiate khula first, as a way of producing a stable divorce for the wife and a secure solution for himself, he is willing to go further than most Muslim leaders in terms of insisting on haqq, even if this puts him at risk. However, in some cases he must still consider his own security, which means that he will not issue faskh divorce in high-risk cases until the husband has been pacified in some way, often in the form of having been reported to the police and arrested. In such cases, Yusuf includes evidence, such as court rulings and reports from hospitals and women’s shelters, to document the violence that led to his verdict, which men may still not accept. In cases of severe violence, Yusuf accepts Agency of Family Law decisions as Islamically valid. In a few cases he has written faskh documents to confirm this, but he prefers to stay out of such cases and merely confirm the validity orally. As previously noted, this is a common pattern also found in other studies. In cases without violence, he does not accept decisions by the Agency of Family Law as Islamically valid.
Yusuf deals with Islamic divorce cases in strict accordance with his beliefs. As he explains, “I am not here to make people happy; I do it to make Allah happy”, adding that he ought not to think about the consequences for himself in his Islamic divorce practice because “it is about haqq”. This means that even when he issues faskh in high conflict cases, they state that the husband must pay the deferred dower – but men do not pay, nor do they accept his decisions. Because of his uncompromising insistence on fiqh rules, Yusuf gets many threats, but he has never been assaulted or in any way bodily injured, although, as explained above, security has sometimes forced him from presence into absence; likewise, the cascade effect has made him resign a few times.
When his Islamic divorce practice peaked, Yusuf got around 10–15 calls a day about marital conflicts and Islamic divorce. People called him at all hours of the day and night, and after some time he was diagnosed with stress and shifted from presence to absence. Among other initiatives, his doctor recommended he stop using his phone, which he did for two years, meanwhile structuring his work routines in a way that would reduce stress. Today, Yusuf puts his phone on silent mode at 10 PM, and he only takes 4–5 cases a day. He also asks people to come to his apartment, if possible.
Yusuf insists that both men and women must live up to expectations in a nikah, and he estimates that seven out of ten Islamic divorce requests are due to men’s behavior. In my field diary I noted Yusuf’s opinion about such men:
They sit at the computer the whole day and do not go to work. They neither help with cooking, children, the children’s homework, nor anything else, and they do not contribute with their salary because they are on social security. They expect women to fix everything, and that they can have sex with them whenever they want. Sometimes, [Yusuf] gets calls from men who want him to talk to their wives and explain that she must obey and wait on her husband. However, Yusuf refuses to do so because in his view this has nothing to do with Islam.
In general Yusuf is frustrated with bad husbands, and he gives fiqh recommendations based on the expectation that men will not practice Islam towards their wives. Yusuf also facilitates nikah, and he believes that many problems related to haqq can be solved at this stage. When his own daughter entered into a nikah, he insisted that no deferred dower was written into the contract; rather, the proposed deferred dower was added to the advance dower because in case of a divorce, his daughter’s future husband would most likely – like most other husbands – renege on paying the deferred dower. Musa advises other couples to do the same as a way of adapting to the situation in Denmark, where there is no Islamic court that can enforce dower payments. He remarks that in the few Islamic divorce cases in which men pay the deferred dower, they typically want him to witness their payment. He adds that other men try to get out of their nikah by terrorizing their wives until they request khula. In that way they cannot be blamed for not paying the deferred dower. Musa is against such practices, but he also notes that at some point women just want peace and will accept almost anything.
Like a segment of Muslim leaders, Yusuf believes that women are emotional, and, therefore, one should think twice before writing a woman’s right to divorce (talaq al-tafwid) into the nikah contract, although this is of course a possibility. This position is similar to that taken by Hassan, who states, “Women are emotional beings – especially when they are menstruating. Therefore, it is not viable if they have the right to divorce, because when emotions run high during menstruation; they end up divorcing their husbands.” However, other Muslim leaders, including Haitham, Hakeem, and Musa, to name a few, firmly believe in women’s right to divorce and would like to see this standardized in Danish nikah contracts.
Musa and Yusuf differ from a Muslim leader such as Hassan, who seldom issues Islamic divorces. Only on very rare occasions – just three times in his career as an imam – has Hassan written up faskh documents, none of which have been accepted by the husbands. However, he still believes that they make a difference for the women:
Hassan: They are very happy because they feel freedom after many years of having struggled to become divorced without succeeding, so when one issues a faskh document she feels really good.
Petersen: Have they [the (ex)husbands] accepted your faskh?
Hassan: No.
Petersen: None of them?
Hassan: No.
…
Petersen: And the men, they continue to insist that they are not divorced?
Hassan: Well, yes, they still hold on to it [their nikah]. I say to them, “You can have your ideas, but we follow the law, Islamic law, just law, and then you may complain, or you may come and do what you want. We cannot continue.”
Petersen: So, the husband does not recognize your authority, but the women do?
Hassan: Women do; men, they do not recognize my [authority]. Exactly.
While Musa and Yusuf sometimes successfully issued Islamic divorces with social effect, this typically never happens with people like Hassan, although, as the above quotation indicates, social effect may not be the only success criterion. Closure, so they can move on with their lives, is sufficient for some women, while the social effect may be important to others.
When we ended the interview, Yusuf recommended I talk to two other Muslim leaders with whom he forms an ad hoc Islamic divorce council on occasion. Like Musa, Yusuf was also involved in a permanent Islamic divorce council for a few years, which collapsed a few years prior to the interview – another event that made him decide on absence for a while, until he again emerged as a presence (an active facilitator of Islamic divorce). I return to the subject of Islamic divorce councils in Chapter 8, but at this stage is sufficient to note that those who oscillate and form permanent Islamic divorce councils are typically the well-educated Muslim leaders. Therefore, when the Islamic juridical vacuum is transformed into a field of presence due to the emergence and institutionalization of a stable Islamic divorce council, this is usually led by educated Muslim leaders and a much more rigorous Islamic legal practice is applied, reflective of Musa and Yusuf’s practices. Islamic divorce councils may take very different positions – as Musa and Yusuf do – but they are characterized by having clear rules and procedures (Comaroff & Roberts, 1981).
6 Geography of the Vacuum
When I called Hassan for the first time in 2019, I gave him a short introduction to my research and asked whether I could interview him. Hassan immediately extended an invitation to his mosque, but he also stressed that if I wanted to give a comprehensive account of practices in his region, I also had to include what he described as rotten apples, and he told me to call Abdel, a Muslim leader in a neighboring city. This was not the first time that I had heard Muslim leaders and women complain about Abdel, nor was it the first time a Muslim leader had asked me to investigate the problematic practices of other Muslim leaders. Fortunately, Abdel also extended an invitation to his mosque, and I was, therefore, able to follow an ongoing conflict between Hassan and Abdel from 2019 to 2021.
Abdel came to Denmark as a refugee early in the 21st century. He gave evasive answers to my questions about his educational background. However, when pressured he claimed to have five ijazas, three of these from the University of Medina, and he estimated that he had the equivalent of 5–6 years formal training at university level in Islamic studies; claims like these of having managed what compares to many years of study in a very short time are not uncommon in Denmark (Liengaard, 2008). Furthermore, he had great respect for a Swedish Salafi preacher on YouTube and explained that he often used the internet to do his research on Islam.
In rural regions, male Muslim leaders typically think of themselves as the person responsible for nikah and divorce within their own zones, understood geographically. In some regions where there is just one imam in the city, or one imam who is much more prominent than others, this causes little to no friction. If a zone has more than one imam but these are of different ethnicities/nationalities, people typically approach the Muslim leader with the same ethnicity/nationality as themselves; thus, likewise, there is little to no friction. On the other hand, in regions such as Hassan’s where there are two imams with the same ethnicity/nationality, this sometimes causes rivalry, which may be about the income from facilitating nikah – fees are typically 130–200 EUR – but it may also be about status.
Hassan and Abdel are imams in neighboring minor cities, which means that they do have their separate zones. However, as there is a significant dissatisfaction with Abdel among Muslims in his city, many people within his zone contact Hassan for religious services such as marriage, nikah, divorce, and exorcism (rukia). Abdel strongly objects to this, especially when people in his zone choose Hassan to facilitate their exorcism and nikah. The income generated by the latter provides a protectionist incentive, but for Abdel it also seems to be about prestige. When people go out of their way to avoid him, it does not reflect well on his reputation. Therefore, Abdel has called Hassan several times to problematize the infringement on his zone.
I interviewed Abdel in February 2019, and observed a significant difference between Hassan and Abdel, which may explain why people may prefer one or the other. Abdel is a self-proclaimed Salafi imam, who insists on following fiqh rules, irrespective of people’s views; he is much less willing than Hassan to adapt these rules, as he understands them, to social contexts. Like Yusuf, he insists that men pay the deferred dower if they want him to issue a talaq divorce document. If men have not paid when the document is issued, he even writes the debt into the document. Moreover, if a woman pays back the advance dower, he calls the dissolution khula, once again irrespective of people’s views. The preference some people feel for Hassan demonstrates how demand – people’s preference for Muslim leaders who deliver what people want – to some extent defines the fiqh rules that are applied.
The notion of zones is a phenomenon that is widespread in rural Denmark, but mainly in the sense that the imam in any respective zone ought to deal with Islamic divorce, even if he does not want to. It is not common for imams to protest another imam’s taking over their divorce cases, because no imam wants them; neither do their families. In Hassan’s words: “Our wives, to be honest, I tell you, they prefer that we do not get involved in divorce cases because it is a headache. They cause problems and conflicts.”
It is improper for an imam not to take the cases in his zone, yet people who are unhappy with the local service may choose to approach a more distant Muslim leader – often in one of the major cities. Hassan is a popular imam, and sometimes he gets Islamic divorce cases from neighboring zones without this causing any friction; indeed the other imams are happy not having to deal with these cases. As he explains about the requests,
Maybe they do not agree with their local imam, and they try another imam and another imam, who will not help – why, I do not know. Then they come to me, and I have received cases from far away. People from Copenhagen have come to me, and I have actually been able to help them; this is also because sometimes the local imam is under pressure if he knows the family.
While the latter problem can be relevant in major cities, there are no zones in major cities; instead, there is a rule which dictates that “the place you have married … is also where you must divorce” (cf. Alqawasami, 2021, p. 978). This rule is sometimes used in rural regions as well, and may cause some dispute over who is supposed to respond to the divorce request.
7 Erasing Islamic Juridical Performances
It is common for Muslim leaders to get phone calls from men who have enunciated a talaq divorce (“you are divorced”) three times – producing a final and irrevocable divorce – and then regretted it. Yusuf frequently gets these phone calls, and he is usually able to help. He does not accept triple talaq as valid, nor talaq enunciations expressed in circumstances such as in anger, when intoxicated, or while a wife is menstruating. These are points grounded in fiqh, but they also have a social function, because employing them enables him to erase Islamic juridical performances. Yusuf explains that on closer inspection at least one and sometimes two of the three talaqs men have uttered turn out to be invalid. That is, men call on him to retract talaq enunciations and he facilitates this by providing them with certainty that one or more of their talaq enunciations was invalid.
Yusuf’s evaluations are, however, affected by context as, in cases where the wife is also asking for his help to escape an abusive husband, he may insist that a talaq enunciation expressed in a moment of anger is valid by claiming that the husband’s level of anger was insufficient to invalidate it. In such cases he does not collaborate in erasing the enunciation. This is echoed by others, such as Hassan:
So, there are many men who say, “But I was angry”, and I say, “Yes, yes, relax; it is not while one is eating cake [that one says], ‘you know honey, you are talaq’”. No, of course people are fighting and yelling at each other, so many men they want to take advantage [of this rule], right, take advantage of that fiqh [rule] if they know it.
Hassan does not accept men’s retraction of talaq enunciations using the abovementioned rule. He states that no man gets so angry that he is not aware of what he is doing. Instead, in relation to women’s requests for divorce he calls the men and insist that they take responsibility for their talaq enunciation:
Yes, I call the husband and say, “What is it you have said to her?” and things like that. And many men try as well as they can to deny that they have said it, but you know, the wife remembers it. She may, for example, remember that he has said it two or three times, and then the husband responds by saying, “No, just once”, and he tries to cheat. And this is where I say, “That is very haram, akhi [that is very sinful, my brother].”
It is interesting to note that these kind of calls to Muslim leaders about talaq retractions, which are quite common, all include the fundamental premise that men are emotionally unstable. However, it is often assumed within the same discourse that men are rational and women emotional, but for some reason this discrepancy is seldom, if ever, addressed (Hassan is an exception here). In her study of Islamic divorce practices in North America, Julie Macfarlane (2012, p. 24) has also observed these practices of erasing talaq enunciations, and, in their study of Islamic divorce in Finland, al-Sharmani, Mustasaari, and Ismail state, “The few cases that were initiated by husbands involved seeking a religious legal opinion (i.e., fatwa) on the husbands’ hasty pronouncements of divorce” (Al-Sharmani, Mustasaari & Ismail, 2017, p. 277). Even Zaki Badawi – one of the founders of the first Islamic divorce council in Britian in 1982 – highlighted this as a dominant problem, remarking,
Generally, the man gets very angry with his wife and says, “You’re divorced” three or five times. We decided that a solution to the problem of how to save such a marriage is to take the Shiʿite or the Wahabi injunction which says that no divorce shall be considered valid unless there are two witnesses. (Badawi, 1995, p. 78)
In other words, the orientation towards applying fiqh in a practical (rather than rigorous) manner that is conducive to easing social situations and respecting people’s intentions is not just a Danish phenomenon.
8 Conclusion
In this chapter I have demonstrated that the notion of powerful imams who control whole neighborhoods constitutes a simulacra above the epistemic ceiling (Baudrillard, 1994/2020). Muslim leaders may be in a position to assert religious authority in some situations, but even the most powerful falls short of the description prevalent above the ceiling.
Knowledge about rules and processes is not well-distributed in the vacuum, which makes it hard to navigate, and it is not just Muslim women who navigate it – representatives of the welfare state also do so. As mentioned in Chapter 2, I sometimes get calls from representatives of the welfare state who want to know which imams they can collaborate with to help their clients. I always refuse such requests in order to avoid an unwanted cascade for my informants; by letting me interview them they signed up as informants, not qadis. I also get calls from social workers who want my evaluation of whether an Islamic divorce procedure on which they are about to embark or have just completed will have any social effect, or how this effect might be secured. In other words, many of the questions Muslim women may have are projected onto the social workers trying to help them. In fact, while writing this chapter, I got a phone call from a security advisor who wanted me to evaluate whether an Islamic divorce document issued by Yusuf was likely to have an effect within the woman’s family.
Islamic divorce practices in the vacuum change with the demography of the field, and the variation between individual Muslim leaders is marked. Women who approach Musa have very different rights to those who approach Yusuf. Both deliver what they call Islam, but they define this in very different ways. Yet even for these two Muslim leaders, who have stabilized their presence in the vacuum for short periods of time, the cascade effect and security issues constitute serious problems. Thus, the more a woman needs the Muslim leader because power dynamics are holding her captive in a nikah, the less he can do for her.
Finally, I would like to add three points that were either not mentioned in the chapter or merely hinted at: 1) Muslim leaders have insufficient understanding of violence patterns, which means that they often make poor evaluations (cf. F. Ahmed & Krayem, 2021, p. 42 ff.). Some Muslim leaders boast about saving nikahs, but many of the cases they describe reflect core characteristics of coercive control, which means that they may be assisting the husband’s regaining control over his wife. In this context, it is important to note that Muslim leaders get no feedback, as the criterion for success is that the women do not come back and ask for divorce again. 2) Many legal systems, including that in Denmark, have legal provisions that are designed to reconcile couples if possible. However, there is a clear difference, as such provisions may merely delay a civil divorce, and no person may be coerced into reconciliation; nor does their access to divorce depend upon their compliance. 3) All informants mentioned in this chapter, with the exception of Abdel, brought up the issue of social security fraud without my asking. This particularly pertains to couples who abstain from civil marriage to qualify for higher social security, or who request a civil divorce but keep living in a nikah. A similar phenomenon exists with polygamous nikah where it is typically the state that pays the maintenance of additional wives through social security (cf. Walker, 2016, p. 125).
Hassan has a marriage license, so he simultaneously performs a civil marriage ceremony and facilitates the nikah.
Khalid agreed to read through my description of him and what he does, and return with feedback if he had any. I did not hear back from him.
This description of Khalid is not just based on a self-assessment. I am also describing his reputation as other people in the community see him.
I had a long conversation with Yasir in February 2021 and interviewed him in his home in October 2022. On both occasions I was assisted by a translator from the local community.
My triangulation demonstrated that this was not true. Rather, plaintiffs have described to me how Yasir would sometimes embark on discussion of child custody whether the women welcomed it or not.
The Danish word is utilregnelig, which means a person whose actions can be hard to predict.
These documents are the digital versions of Islamic divorce documents that have later been printed and signed. I use the verb sign as shorthand for there being a space reserved for a person to sign, indicated by the person’s title and name being printed at the bottom of the document.
I have translated this as the Agency of Family Law because the case officer is mentioned further down in the document as the person from whom the wife requests her divorce. It should be noted that this case predates the reform of the Agency of Family Law in 2019. This means that at the time of the case civil divorce cases were handled more locally than today in an institution called Statsamtet. Although this institution is not municipal, Yasir may believe it to be.
Someone with power of attorney.
I had Yasir’s permission to show these documents to other religious leaders and did so in anonymized form. Furthermore, I made sure to select cases that were as close to generic in content as possible.
I did not have time to go through all the cases on the spot. Rather, I browsed through the archive by selecting cases from different years, using these in the conversation that followed.
This interview was conducted with the assistance of a translator from the local community.