Divorcement, Kashmir Valley: Critical Issues and Concerns; Islamic Appraisals in North-West India

This paper deals with the understanding of divorce “Talaq”, one of the sensitive issues in the Islamic family law. The denigration of women in the communication of “Talaq” was an absolute condemnation after the advent of Islam. Similarly, the dialogue of divorce demonstrates differential “Madhhab” doctrine based appraisals, which elaborates the mechanism of utterance of each school. Therefore, the hermeneutical perspective used as a tool to make quintessence of this critical discourse of “Shariah”, is based upon four hierarchically guidelines; (i) Quran ‘Scriptural’, (ii) Hadiths ‘Traditions’, (iii) Ijma ‘Consensus’, and (iv) Qiyas ‘Analogy’ maintains the Islamic jurisprudence. This paper has been divided into five different sections like:- (i) Introduction: Statement of Problem, (ii) Hermeneutical outlook: A Communicational Interpretation, (iii) Talaq in Islam: Historical and Beyond, and (iv) The Ethics of Divorce in Islam: A Scriptural Appraisal. The efforts are being taken to understand this emerging problem among Muslims, not only in India but elsewhere. This dispute in the contemporary era highlights divorce as a process of communication, as reported by some Muslim scholars, that they instantaneously divorce their wives via email, over telephone, and even through mobile phone text messages. The article critically is in quest of appraisals to unfold the differences between practice and utterance on the basises of Islamic Jurisprudence.