Nodira knew that life would be difficult when her husband left their home in Tajikistan for a job packing trucks in distant Russia, but they had two children and needed the money to survive.
What she never imagined was that their marriage would end, not with a bang or even a whimper, but with the tinny beep of a message on the inbox of her mobile phone.
“Talaq, talaq, talaq” — three short Arabic words flashed across the tiny screen and 29-year-old Nodira was divorced.
PHOTO: AFP
“I was shocked after reading that SMS. I instantly thought it was a mistake or someone’s evil joke. I had bad thoughts in my mind, I wanted to hang or drown myself, or drink vinegar from such shame,” she said.
Stuck working abroad for years at a stretch to escape Tajikistan’s crushing poverty, some men have begun divorcing their wives using short mobile text messages (SMS), sowing confusion, heartbreak and destitution back home.
“What did I do wrong?” Nodira asked. “This question is still torturing me. I was looking after my husband’s parents, was cleaning the yard, washing, cooking for a big family. Everything was on me all these years.”
Tajikistan, a deeply conservative majority-Sunni Muslim country whose rugged mountain peaks form the soaring borders of Afghanistan and western China, has the dubious distinction of being Central Asia’s poorest state.
Following a brutal civil war that killed tens of thousands and decimated the economy in the 1990s, Tajikistan suffered an exodus of its labor force to more prosperous regional powers such as Russia, China and Kazakhstan.
The outflow of migrants and their exposure to new technologies gave Tajik men new and inventive ways to dissolve their marriages, said Dorsultan Shonazirova, a lawyer specializing in women’s rights issues.
“This whole problem with divorces appeared with the beginning of labor migration in Tajikistan in the beginning of the 1990s,” she said.
Under mainstream interpretations of Sunni religious law, a man needs only to pronounce the word “talaq” (divorce) three times to divorce his wife, several Islamic scholars in the region said.
But experts say that he must do so in the presence of his wife, which means that any divorce done by SMS or e-mail should not be viewed as valid.
“Divorce of a wife by her husband via SMS is not acceptable and contradicts Islamic law,” said Kobildzhon Boyev, head of the department that studies fatwas, or religious decrees, at Tajikistan’s Islamic Center in Dushanbe. Still, he admitted that the center had been “seeing more such cases throughout the country.”
It is unclear how many women have been divorced by SMS — although some suspect they already number in the thousands — because most affected women hide the news out of a deep sense of shame, Shonazirova said.
Many women have few legal options because they lack proper documentation of their marriages, usually because they were isolated from the central government during the years of lawlessness following the Soviet collapse.
“Not all the girls had official registration of their marriages, but in the event of divorce, the law should protect their rights to obtain alimony for their children and to split their household in half,” Shonazirova said. “Our Muslim clergy and men’s parents have to call for the respect of Muslim traditions, so that these text message and phone divorces are not recognized.”
But in an isolated and impoverished country still struggling to rediscover its religious traditions after decades of Soviet-enforced atheism, getting out the clergy’s message of disapproval can be difficult.
Khalima Shamsova, 24, was separated from her husband for the better part of five years, during which time she said she suffered endless abuse from his family, whom she had been living with and taking care of.
Angry that she knew how to read — which they took as a sign of immodesty — her husband’s family convinced him to divorce her via SMS, leaving her to care for their nine-month-old daughter on her own.
“It was scary in the beginning that I had to raise my kid without their father. God is merciful, I have my hands and feet and I’ll go to work as a yard-keeper, if it’s possible,” Shamsova said. “I won’t allow my daughter’s early marriage. I won’t let her go through what I did. I’ll let her get an education and find a profession.”
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
RSS