A New Text in Islamic Law

Egypt's state-appointed grand mufti, one of the country's highest religious authorities, recently began offering online imam training. Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa's fatwa Web site receives 3,000 hits a day, and a similar hotline gets scores of calls a day, according to his spokesman, Ibrahim Negm. Almost all the inquiries have to do with family matters, including divorce, he added.

Yet the proliferation of televised preaching and Islamic Web sites has produced a confusing array of voices competing for followers. Broadcast and Internet media can amplify hate or oversimplify a complex religious point. Technology offers modes of communication that the first practitioners of Islamic law never could have imagined.

Conservative and liberal streams within Islam each have used technology to get their messages across. In Egypt, young members of the Muslim Brotherhood movement used blogs last year to urge that the Islamic organization be more inclusive of women and less exclusionary of other religions.

Islamic institutions have adopted Web sites and other technology as a tool to show that Islamic law still provides "pragmatic solutions to contemporary problems," Negm said. "We also believe there has been abuse of technology," he added. "This does not lead us to say, 'Forget it.' That would not be possible."

But text-message divorces represent "a clear-cut abuse of the law," Negm said.

Religious authorities in at least two Persian Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, upheld divorce by text message in rulings between 2001 and 2003. Islamic officials in Singapore rejected it.

Government officials in Malaysia decried the first cases, promising big fines for any man who tried to shed his wife by impersonal text messages.

"We hope . . . that instead of sending messages, you should look at the beautiful wife that you are going to divorce," then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said in 2003. "Maybe she would cry a bit, and you would change your mind."

Malaysia's religious leaders upheld the legality of text-message divorce, and government talk of bans and fines ended.

In Egypt, text messages strike many as far too frivolous a way to end a marriage.

"It has to be face to face, person to person," said Sanaa Mohammed, a 43-year-old woman standing outside a Cairo family court this week. She jabbed two fingers toward her eyes, symbolizing eye-to-eye contact. By cellphone, "it's not respectful."

Mohammed had opted for khola, a provision that allows a woman to divorce her husband without his agreement. Doing so, however, she forfeited the financial settlements that are usually due divorced women.