17032026 - q28
58.1 (Khawla bint Tha'labah and her husband, Aws ibn al-Samit. In pre-Islamic Arab custom, there was a practice called ẓihār, where a man would say to his wife something like, “You are to me like the back of my mother.” This was a harmful statement: it did not formally divorce the wife, but it suspended the marriage in a way that left her neither properly married nor free to remarry. It may sound like “just a saying,” but in the society where ẓihār existed, words—especially solemn, formulaic ones—had legal and social force. Before Islam, Arabian customs treated certain declarations as binding acts. When a man said to his wife, “You are like my mother’s back,” he was not making a casual comparison. He was invoking a culturally recognized formula that placed the wife in a category of permanent prohibition, like a mother. However, unlike a proper divorce, it did not dissolve the marriage. The wife was no longer treated as a lawful spouse, but she was also not free. She could not rema...