Muslim Women’s Divorce Rights and the Promise of the DMMA in India

By Sarina Tareen

Discussions on Muslim women’s rights in India did not begin with a debate over instant triple talaq. The struggle for legal protection and access to justice can be traced back to the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act (DMMA), 1939. A landmark law that granted Muslim women the right to petition courts for divorce on specific grounds. Before that act, women had limited legal avenues for action, especially under the dominant Hanafi school of Islamic law in South Asia. The law empowered women’s legal rights. It established an important future reform concerning gender justice within Muslim personal law.

Before understanding the law, it is important to remember that Islam does not consider marriage to be an irreversible bond. Marriage is meant to provide peace, dignity, and companionship. If that purpose is no longer being served, there are ways for both men and women to end the marriage. While men traditionally have the right to pronounce talaq, women can seek divorce through khula or judicial procedures. Section 2 of DMMA allows women to obtain a court order when their husband has vanished, denied them maintenance, been jailed, neglected family duties, remained impotent, or treated them cruelly. The Act was revolutionary because it legally acknowledged a woman’s right to divorce an abusive or neglectful husband without compromising on her faith.

While the DMMA gave women the right to seek divorce, it said very little about what happens afterward. Issues such as maintenance, child custody, division of property, and long-term financial security remained unclear. As a result, many divorced Muslim women continued to face economic hardship. Another challenge is that Muslim personal law in India remains largely uncodified. Unlike countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, and Egypt, where family laws have been consolidated into legal codes. Indian Muslim women frequently rely on a mixture of judicial rulings, fragmented laws, and community interpretations.

This can result in unequal justice and inconsistent results. Women’s rights became a subject of renewed debate after the controversy over instant triple talaq (talaq-ul-biddat). This practice enabled a husband to divorce his wife instantly by saying the word “talaq” three times at once. Women’s rights organizations, especially Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), have criticized the practice as a violation of women’s constitutional rights and Islamic principles of justice. The Supreme Court, in its landmark judgment of 2017 in the case of Shayara Bano, ruled that triple talaq is unconstitutional. Two years later, the practice became illegal through the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Marriage Act 2019.

These reforms marked significant progress, but challenges remain. Protecting Muslim women’s rights cannot depend on ending just these practices. Legal procedures remain costly and time-consuming. Especially for poor and rural women. Social stigma discourages many women from seeking justice. Research shows that divorced Muslim women still face discrimination. Many also bear the burden of economic hardship completely. The 1939 DMMA was definitely a landmark. It began to open the doors of the courtroom for Muslim women who had been shut out long ago. But almost 90 years later, the same question still exists: Is the right to divorce sufficient if women continue to suffer from the absence of protection, dignity, and financial security after the end of marriage? For many activists and scholars, the question is not whether a marriage can be terminated, but whether it can be ended in a dignified, secure, and equal way.