NPR

Muslims In India Ask Top Court To Ban Instant Divorce

To end his marriage, a Muslim man in India only needs to say 'talaq,' meaning divorce, three times. A growing movement wants to change this practice.
Seema Parveen, 42, has been divorced by three different men. In India's Muslim community, a husband can divorce his wife by saying <em>"talaq"</em> — Arabic for divorce — three times.

Married at 14 and divorced by 16, Seema Parveen had a marriage as brutal as it was short.

Now 42, Parveen remembers her husband threatening to hurl her from the balcony of their home. She blinks back tears recalling his rage when she bore him a daughter and not a son.

"His whole family was upset," she says. In conservative northern India where they lived, boys are preferred over girls — who have been traditionally viewed as a burden. When her daughter was one month old, Parveen went to stay with her mother. "That's when my husband wrote. "

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