Recently, the Supreme Court of India decided that in the case of Muslim ladies as well, living in India, even if they are divorced, they are due alimony from their husbands. That created quite a lot of… A lot of raw in India. Raw in India and particularly from the ulama who are now pressing the government that the law should be amended and that the Muslim women should be deprived of this right of alimony as long as they have been paid their mehar and the period of iddat has passed.
Huzoor, has any comments to make on this? Yes, in fact I… you can please sit down. When I first heard of it, I appointed two Ahmadi scholars to thoroughly investigate the whole matter from the point of view of Islamic jurisprudence and write articles on this. So, after receiving those and some instructions, we prepared a representative essay on this subject, representative of Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya’s view. And I sent it to Qadian to have it published as our point of view. So, in reality, no government has a right to interfere in religious matters, generally speaking, and the people should be left to their own religious practices and religious views, unless they violate other people’s laws.
If Christian laws, in some ways, are not kind enough to men, to some Christian men, what right do I have to interfere and say, no, Christian men should get more rights? If Christian laws are not, in any way, just enough to distribute the properties of dying parents or dead parents to the children equitably, what right has a Muslim to insist, or a Muslim government to insist, that the laws of inheritance as enunciated by the Holy Quran will be applicable to the Christian children as well? This is wrong. So, in principle, we disagree with the interference of the government. But, on the other hand, we must bring into focus the malpractices of the Muslims in India with regards to the Islamic laws.
Now, when they avoid Islamic laws in spirit and create ugly situations where the rights of women are trampled upon in the name of religion, and in the name of such a beautiful religion as Islam too, then something should be done to rectify the situation. If it is not done by Muslims, then the governments who see to the general rights of their people, their public, get a sort of edge into the matter. A foothold where they can attempt to redress things.
So, this is exactly the situation which invited this decision. In Muslim law, the alimony for ladies is fixed. The spirit is that if some lady is divorced, she has some capital for her own safety and safeguard in future. And that alimony normally should be related to the income of the husband. If this is not carried out in spirit, then two ugly situations evolve. Number one, either it is exaggerated beyond all proportion to a sum which is not at all practical, so that never a husband can give divorce to the wife because at least at the time of divorce he has to give that money to her.
So, sometimes it was insisted by the ladies’ parents that the alimony should be exaggerated. Say, for an ordinary person it’s not possible, for instance, a clerk in the government to pay 100,000 rupees in India by way of alimony. So, the wives’ parents would insist that it should be that much so that you can never divorce her. That is the understanding. Sometimes it is exactly the opposite. The husband’s side gained the advantage by reducing the alimony to the barest minimum.
On the plea that the Holy Prophet ﷺ fixed this alimony for his wives, or on the plea that Hazrat Ali fixed this much for his wife, no, they don’t bring into focus the financial conditions of both the Holy Prophet ﷺ and Hazrat Ali as well as the relevant value of the money of that time as compared to the value of the money of today. And there is such a big gap, and so much that we do not know, that it is impossible to work out just on these two facts. So the best possible approach would be to be realistic, to understand the spirit of the Holy Qur’an and its injunctions, and to carry the spirit into practice. And the spirit is that if the lady is divorced, or something happens to the husband, she has something of her own to look after herself.
If that spirit is not carried in India, and the government comes across very pitiable cases of ladies suffering a lot, who have been divorced and nobody is there to look after them or guarantee their respectable living, so the government would get a handle to interfere in such matters. So the fault is on both sides. But still in principle one should deny this right of the governments to interfere. What they should have done was a much better way we can propose. They should have insisted that the Islamic injunctions should be carried in spirit, like it is done in our community. Hazrat Musleh Maud also faced this problem.
So he worked out a formula and said that according to the Islamic spirit of alimony, I propose that the minimum should be six months’ income of the husband. And normally it is better if it is one year’s income of the husband, and if the alimony is fixed between the two, it would become a reasonable amount which could be employed. And moreover, according to the Ahmadiyya approach, this alimony is not only given at divorce. In fact, the moment the girl and the boy get married, the alimony is due.
So that if it is more welcome, if the husband pays the alimony immediately after the marriage or sometimes even before the marriage is carried out, I mean that ceremony is solemnized. In that case, that would be a capital sum for the lady. She could employ that capital and increase it for untoward times. So this is the best explanation of the situation which I can make. But as far as the scholarly discussion from the Islamic jurisprudence point of view is concerned, there is so much to be referred to in the original books that I don’t remember it by heart.
So I am not indulged in that sort of discussion. I thought you were going to demonstrate his case. I was afraid. But would it not be reasonable to index-link the meher? When I was married 45 years ago, the meher was fixed at six months’ salary at that time. And in 45 years’ time, due to inflation… By the way, by the word alimony, I perhaps misunderstood you. I had dowry in mind. Is the word alimony also applicable to dowry? In the Supreme Court decision, they have differentiated between meher and alimony. Generally speaking, could they mean one and the same thing? Not really, sir. Not to my mind.
So I should be corrected there then. Whenever I said alimony, in that context I meant dowry, not alimony which is given after separation by way of maintenance. They are two different things. So alimony in Islam is for a limited period after the divorce. It cannot be extended beyond that period. But the remedy which I had in mind was dowry, not alimony. So you better replace the word alimony with dowry and then things will be all right.
