Judging Marriages

An Italian news agency has reported that an Egyptian cleric has issued a fatwa, a ruling based on religious interpretations, that gives the neighbors of a couple the right to bring them to court to dissolve the marriage.

Here is the news story:

Cairo, 13 March (AKI) - A fatwa or religious edict issued by a senior Egyptian cleric invites people to end their neighbours' marriages if they can prove they are collapsing from irreconcilable differences.

"If the evidence that the neighbours present is verified, the court has the right to make the couple divorce," said Sheikh Jamal Qutb, cited by Dubai-based TV network Al-Arabiya.

Qutb, an Islamic scholar and former head of the fatwa committee at Egypt's most prestigious religious institution Al-Azhar, said that a community, including family members or neighbours, should have the same right to end a marriage as the couples themselves.

However, he said neighbours should try to intervene and solve a couple's differences. If they fail, they can then go to court and present evidence that the marriage cannot be saved.

The cleric also said that a couple's refusal to divorce may be for several reasons, and that a judge should investigate whether these reasons are valid.

In Islam, a man has no right to go back to his wife if he has married and divorced her three times unless she has remarried and divorced from her second husband.

In Islam, only a qualified cleric can issue a fatwa, but, because there is no real centralized ecclesiastical authority, other clerics can issue competing fatwas that countermand the original one. Thus far, there is no way to determine whether other Muslims will abide by this ruling.

It does raise some interesting thoughts, though. I will confess that I have the image of Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched peering through her curtains watching her neighbors, but, what if your neighbors had the right to bring you and your spouse into Divirce Court, would your marriage stand the scrutiny? Do you think such a ruling would help or hurt marriage? What about those who see marriage as a divinely ordained institution? Would they support such a ruling that would allow and encourage them to intervene to help the marriage survive?