Khul’ (Ach. teubòh taleuë, “redemption of a divorce”) was the form of divorce available to an Achehnese wife by which she purchased her release from her husband. The institution, known in the Arabic law-books as khulʿ, consisted in the wife’s purchase of a talaq from her husband. In such a contract even a single talaq was irrevocable, as was implied in the very idea of purchase. In Acheh it was called the “redemption of a divorce” (teubòh taleuë), and it usually cost the wife double the amount of the jinamee (the marriage-gift or its Achehnese equivalent). Cases of such bought divorce were however rare, and only to be met with among the lower classes.
Khul’ was the resource of a woman who had exhausted the more usual measures of compulsion. In Achehnese practice, where the ground of divorce was incompatibility of temper, it was almost always the woman who urged her husband to the final step of giving the “three talaq”. If he was slow to yield, she imprisoned him in the house, generally in the inner room, until he met her wishes by giving her the “three pieces of betelnut”. He might easily set himself free from this temporary confinement, but most men were ashamed of the diabolical outcry raised on such occasions by their wives, who summed up all their evil characteristics, real or imaginary, in the most unflattering form in the hearing of the whole gampong. Where these measures proved fruitless, the wife might have recourse to khul’.
The institution had a particular importance among the princes of the Native States. A prince who wished to wed a concubine with child, but already had four wives, could not give his wife a single talaq—for then he would have to await the conclusion of the ʿiddah and the period of rujūʿ allowed for recall—nor a threefold divorce, for although he might then immediately wed another, he could not later remarry the divorced one as he wished to do. He therefore selected the khul’ method as the only one which combined the power of eventual remarriage with immediate separation. Some teachers even held that the khul’ could take place more than three times without preventing a renewal of the marriage, and the princes of the Native States adhered to this dictum.
The comparative rarity of khul’ in Acheh, like the comparative rarity of the talaq itself, testifies to the relatively high position of women in Achehnese society. As Snouck Hurgronje remarks, the woman was mistress of the house (pringròh); men exerted themselves to obtain wives of social standing not inferior to their own; and the throne had been occupied for more than half a century (1641–1699) by four successive female rulers. The ʿiddah was observed in Acheh lasting three months and ten days after divorce (or four months and ten days after the death of the husband), in accordance with Mohammedan law. But the wife who could enforce the three talaq by public pressure had little need of the costly remedy of khul’, which survived chiefly as a legal fiction for princely convenience and as a last resort of women of the lower classes.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.