The ta’liq (from the Arabic ta’līq, “suspension”) is the conditional or suspended talaq (divorce) pronounced by the husband — most characteristically immediately after the marriage contract — by which he declares that his wife shall be regarded as divorced from him should certain specified conditions come to pass. The institution is widespread in the Mohammedan world and is the chief adat safeguard against the husband’s otherwise absolute right of repudiation, but in Acheh it is entirely absent. Snouck Hurgronje treats this negative peculiarity as one of the most distinctive features of Achehnese marriage.
According to the law, a conditional talaq may be pronounced in numerous ways, most minutely defined in the books of jurisprudence. The essence of the matter is that if the husband has said, “If such and such a thing happen, my wife is divorced,” the actual thing referred to need only take place in order to make the talaq a determinate fact. The ta’liq can be used for sundry purposes: as an oath (“If I lie in this, my wife N. is divorced”), as a threat of chastisement in case of disobedience, or — most importantly — as a means of improving the wife’s position. The husband may declare, “If I beat you, or leave you for a month without support, or forsake you for a year, then you are divorced.” The husband cannot be compelled to such a declaration, but his voluntary pronouncement once given cannot easily be retracted; should he declare that he thought better of his intentions, he would entirely forfeit the confidence of his acquaintances.
In Java and most of the Netherlands-India this protective form of ta’liq has hardened into an adat known as the ta’liq-adat. The bridegroom, in conformity with an agreement with his parents-in-law, declares immediately after the marriage ceremony that his wife may regard herself as divorced by him if he takes a second wife, gives her no house of her own, fails to maintain her, deserts her, or ill-treats her. The great majority of bridegrooms require the assistance of the official who concludes the marriage contract for the proper form of the declaration. This ta’liq-adat supplies, in Snouck Hurgronje’s analysis, a practical substitute for the faskh (judicial separation) which the law indeed permits but furnishes no sufficient practical means to enforce: the wife can prove desertion or non-maintenance only with difficulty, and her remedy at law is reduced to invoking the civil authority to compel the husband to fulfil his obligations.
There are, however, two regions in the Indian Archipelago in which the ta’liq-adat is unknown — Acheh and the Menangkabau territories. In both, the woman is, so far as lodging and maintenance are concerned, practically independent of her husband, since she continues to form an integral part of her own family and lives in her own gampong rather than in his. The protective function which the ta’liq discharges elsewhere is there supplied by the matrilocal adat itself: a husband who ill-treats or fails to maintain his wife simply finds the door of her parents’ house closed against him, and the marriage is in effect at an end. The absence of the ta’liq in Acheh is thus not a defect but a structural feature of a marriage system in which the wife’s security rests on kinship rather than on contract, and in which the hakam and the teungku rather than a written instrument regulate the dissolution of marriage.
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.