A few feet away, a young woman named Samia leaned against a filthy wall. People jostled around her, trying to spot their names on a handwritten list of 150 divorce cases to be heard that day by a single judge. Samia, who was granted a divorce three years ago on the ground that her husband beat her, was an island of resigned calm. I go to court all the time because my husband keeps appealing our divorce. Her mother chimed in.
Appeals are for murderers and criminals.
Meanwhile, the man goes out and gets married and has a happy life, while the wife has to wait. Even with Egypt's new law, a wife who wants a divorce over the objections of her husband will have to return to him any money or property that he paid her upon the marriage. That provision was the price paid for the support of leading Muslim authorities. It refers to a decision by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who once permitted an unhappy woman to leave her husband but required her to return the garden he had given her when they married. And here, the language of religion is most convincing.