Mona Siddiqui's opening lecture of her Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Women's Rights at the University of Cambridge, March 2014. strategicdialogue.org/humanitas Much of the practice of Islamic personal law is still located in classical jurisprudence where marriage and divorce laws are essentially viewed as performative utterances. Intention, wording and finality are fundamental to the validity of the marriage contract and the end of a contract. Texting, that most modern of communication is expression through technology but not oral utterance. Yet, recent cases in some Islamic countries shows that judges are allowing Muslim men to divorce via text. Contrary to popular perception and practice, divorce is not a simple process in jurisprudence but with the aid of texting, any possibility of ethical considerations towards the wife is being ignored. * Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge designed to bring leading academics, practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and co-ordinated in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and in Oxford by the Humanities Division.

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