Mick Hartley

In Saudi Arabia you can go to the police to complain about being abused by your husband, but they won’t do anything, because you’re unaccompanied by your male guardian – your husband:

A woman in her 50s from the southern town of Khamis Mushayt is appealing to the region’s governor to intervene to break off her marriage to a man she says has abused her on numerous occasions.

“I have no option but to seek the mercy of the governor after the Shariah court rejected my plea for divorce from my husband who had been torturing me both mentally and physically,” Um Hassan told Arab News yesterday.

The woman claims the judge told her that her only option was “khula,” a form of divorce initiated by women that requires them to reimburse dowry paid to them by their husbands at the time of marriage.

But Um Hassan says that she has given the best years of her life to her husband and shouldn’t have to pay him anything now that he considers her past her prime.

“I told the judge ‘why should I return the dowry while my husband enjoyed all my youth and now that I am old he throws me away as a worn-out piece of cloth?’ It is my right that he protect me or divorce me honorably,” she said.

Um Hassan is currently living with her elderly mother and her husband has not allowed her to see her two daughters since she ran away from him eight months ago. The judge declined her request to see her girls, saying she’ll just have to wait until they’ve grown up and have been married. Um Hassan has a son, too, but she says he is also abusive.

Um Hassan claims that she fled because her husband would beat her. She claims that one of her daughters threatened suicide because of the domestic abuse erupting around her. When she went to the police, she was told that the police could do nothing because she was a woman coming to them without her mahram — her legal male guardian, who is the same person from whom she was seeking protection.

I imagine that the only thing unusual about this case is the fact that the woman is determined enough to see this through and call the Sharia court’s bluff by taking the case to a higher level.