“After the success of #TurnOffYourPhoneLine the #DivorceYourWife campaign has been launched, [real] men should write #It’sDone.”
This, the description of an Arabic-language hashtag that was meant to be a social media joke, but which soon escalated.
Like #TurnOffYourPhoneLine, the movement encouraging mobile users to boycott telecoms services in protest at unfair rates, #DivorceYourWife also originated in Lebanon before spreading to its Jordanian neighbors.
Let's go, divorce your wife campaign... Turn off your phone line and divorce you wife, what do you think? (Photo reads: After the great success of #TurnOffYourPhoneLine, check out the #DivorceYourWife campaign)
As it increased in popularity, the trend inevitably encountered condemnation from those who saw it as sexist and disrespectful:
Please can you stop this patriarchal joke, "the launch of the campaign: divorce your wife"?
I cannot really appreciate the light heartedness of sharing "divorce your wife." This making light of divorce is a blight and its not funny. I don't like these repugnant posts which insult women and humiliate them, and which it seems many people discuss as if they were a joke.
The creators of the playful hashtag could not have anticipated, however, that their greatest critique would come from Jordan’s fatwa department.
In a ruling issued on Sunday, the department accused #DivorceYourWife of representing nothing less than “a mockery of women and the family, and a complete disregard of their feelings.”
"This is contrary to the purposes of Islam which are about the maintenance of the family and protecting them from all kinds of abuse and recklessness," the ruling added.
The fatwa department concluded that the hashtag had no cultural purpose other than to weaken marriage bonds and to distract people from real issues.
While the hashtag might seem amusing, divorce is regulated according to religious law in Jordan, meaning that Muslim men can verbally divorce their wives without justification. However, women who wish to separate from their spouses face the much more difficult task of convincing a judge, and surrender many of their rights in doing so.
In fact, Jordan currently has the sixteenth highest divorce rate in the world, and the highest in the Middle East, according to The Telegraph. Meanwhile, Lebanon saw a 28 percent increase in divorce cases in 2015, local paper The Monthly reported last year.
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