Wife takes ‘divorce by text’ to court

A woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband’s declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid.

After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him which read: “I divorce you because you didn’t answer your husband,” it was reported in the state-run daily newspaper al-Akhbar.

In line with Sharia, men do not need to go to court to file for divorce. A unilateral declaration of divorce by a man, repeated three times, formally ends a marriage. It was the third time that Mrs Abul Nasr, an engineer from Cairo, had received such a text message.

If a family court declares the couple divorced, it would be the first reported case of divorce by SMS in Egypt. The practice has been much debated across the Muslim world and some Islamic countries have banned it. According to Egypt’s state-run statistics bureau, a couple files for divorce every six minutes.