The Right to Divorce in the Tension between the CEDAW Convention and Imami Jurisprudence: From the Essential Elements of Divorce to the Wife’s Delegated Authority

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Jurisprudence and Uṣūl, Faculty of Jurisprudence and Uṣūl, Qom Seminary, Qom, Iran.

2 Department of Fiqh and Usul, Al-Mustafa Online University, Qom, Iran

Abstract

This study aims to elucidate the position of Imami jurisprudence regarding Article 16 of the CEDAW Convention and the question of the right to divorce. The family and Islamic society remain in a continuous struggle against imposed Western values, and the scholarly defense of religious foundations is an undeniable responsibility.
Using an analytical-argumentative method, this article extracts juridical evidence from the principal sources of the Ahl al-Bayt school (peace be upon them) and also examines the views of certain relevant Western scholars. The article is organized into two sections. The first addresses the text of the Convention, the concept of rights, and Western scholarly perspectives on equality, showing that even within the Western philosophical tradition, the notion of absolute equality between men and women is not beyond dispute. The second section explains the position of Imami jurisprudence through the concepts of divorce, its pillars and categories, khulʿ and mubarat, the wife’s delegated authority in divorce, and the underlying rationale of this right.
The findings indicate that, although Imami jurisprudence places the right to divorce in the hands of the husband, it restrains this right through ethical limitations and legal conditions. At the same time, a wife may attain separation through three avenues: recourse to the religious judge in cases of hardship and intolerability (ʿusr wa ḥaraj), resort to khulʿ and mubarat, and stipulating delegated authority over divorce. This threefold structure demonstrates that the Islamic legal system does not leave a woman trapped in an unwanted marriage. By contrast, under the شعار of “equal rights in divorce,” the CEDAW Convention overlooks these juristic subtleties and, by disregarding the natural differences between men and women, offers an unrealistic solution. The principal danger lies in the pressure exerted on Islamic states to remove their reservations, including those concerning Article 16; hence, scholarly resistance to this trend is an unavoidable necessity.

Keywords

References

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