Talaq (Achehnese taleuë, from the Arabic ṭalāq) is the form of divorce by which a Muslim husband repudiates his wife. In Acheh, as C. Snouck Hurgronje emphasises, the talaq is “of less frequent occurrence than in other parts of the Archipelago.” The reason lies in the structure of Achehnese matrilocal society: the husband “feels himself under a deep obligation, for many obvious reasons, to the family of his wife, his relations with whom border on dependence.” This dependence withholds him from breaking the marriage tie “for the many trifling reasons which in other places, as in Java for instance, give rise to such separations.” Neither momentary anger nor the cooling of first love, but “violent and irreconcilable differences between the pair form the cause of most cases of taleuë which occur in Acheh.”
The ordinary Achehnese talaq is the triple repudiation pronounced all at once. The law permits three separate talaqs against the same wife, the third being irrevocable; in Acheh, however, where the talaq is “not an expression of ill-temper, but the means used to terminate a position which has become impossible,” the permission to pronounce three at the same time has been made use of from the earliest times, “so that a divorce is necessarily composed of three parts.” There are two customary forms. In the first, the husband takes three fragments of ripe betel-nut (lhèë kréh pinéng masak) and hands them over one by one with “a kind of dignified anger” to the wife, saying “one taleuë, two taleuës, three taleuës, thou art to me but as a sister in this world and the next,” and then gives notice of the dissolution to the teungku. In the second, he betakes himself to the teungku of a neighbouring gampong and charges him with the task of giving notice in writing — a surat taleuë addressed to “the Teungku, the Keuchi’ and elders of the gampong,” wrapped in a cover of fine cloth (lapèë surat) costing about two dollars. Where the threefold form has been used, recall (ruju’) is excluded, and the parties can only be reunited if the wife has in the meantime been married to another man and separated from him.
The conditional talaq (tal’iq or “suspended” talaq) — the formula “If such and such a thing happen, my wife is divorced” — is also known in Acheh, though it is less pervasive than in some other parts of the Archipelago. As in Java and the Malay states, the husband may suspend the talaq over his wife as a threat in case of disobedience, and the woman may, with her husband’s consent, “purchase” from him one of the three talaqs in his possession, a transaction known in the Arabic law-books as khul’ and in Achehnese as the “redemption of a divorce” (teuböh taleuë). The ‘iddah — the period during which a divorced woman may not remarry — is fixed by Achehnese adat at three months and ten days, except in the case of pregnancy. The comparative rarity of the talaq in Acheh, together with the ease with which women in matrilocal Achehnese society could maintain themselves after a divorce, gave the divorced woman a position far more favourable than that of her sister in Java, where divorces were frequent and the woman’s social standing after dissolution often precarious.
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.