Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER NINE

MARRIAGE

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Page 210


According to Islamic law, a man may divorce a woman by pronouncing any words of repudiation or dismissal. He may recall her twice, but if the words are repeated three times, he may not marry her again unless she has in the meantime been married to someone else. Normally, a man divorcing a woman repeats the words three times on the spot to make sure. Once a woman is divorced under Islamic Law, she should wait a period of one hundred days - iddet - before marrying again, or if she is pregnant, until forty days after she has borne the child. All this the villagers know. They claim to practice this system of divorce. Yet they do not in actual instances bother whether a woman separated from her husband has been formally divorced or not, and I never heard of anyone refraining from marriage because of the iddet. When I raised this issue, they asked `And who will cook bread and take care of the children while we wait?'

Nowadays no one adjudicates disputes according to the Islamic law. No formal pressure exists which can coerce a man, and thus the whole system rests on the built-in sanctions of reciprocity, self-help and public opinion. Before 1926, courts did exist which enforced a code based on the Sheriat. Before such a court it was even possible, on very limited grounds, for a woman to obtain a divorce from her husband.

So long as formal sanctions existed for breaches of the rules formal sanctions which carried the authority of both State and Prophet - it was in theory possible to enforce one's rights. In practice, it is obvious that large areas of the society of the Ottoman Empire - most rural and tribal areas - must have fallen outside the direct influence of the courts and made little if any use of them. I cannot therefore decide whether the present disregard for the Islamic rules, and certain abuses arising from this disregard, were normal in these villages in pre-Republican Turkey. Perhaps people in the villages always ignored the Sheriat when it suited their book. But I suspect that so long as people believed that the rules they recognised were the same as those enforced by urban courts, at the very least, these rules would carry more weight and be more effectively sanctioned by informal local sanctions. If I am right, then in this type of area, Ataturk's reforms have so far increased disorder in marital relationships.

The sanctions which in fact hold spouses together and en-

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