Divorce from Missing Husbands: Rizaeddin Fakhreddin and Reform Within Islamic Tradition in Imperial Russia

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,1 Muslim communities in different parts of the world faced a common problem—women’s inability to obtain divorce after their husbands went missing. These women, deprived of provision (nafaqa), could neither sustain themselves financially nor remarry. In response to this situation, Muslim scholars, in their respective communities (Egypt, Ottoman Syria, British India and the Russian empire), produced legal decisions (fatwas) to facilitate women’s divorce. This paper focuses on the responses of Russia’s Islamic scholars to this problem which were collected and published by a prominent religious scholar of the Volga-Urals, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin. Among Volga-Ural Muslims, this problem was entangled with the question of religious authority under Russian imperial rule. I argue that since Russia’s legal pluralism and institutionalization of the ‘ulama under the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly were the main reasons behind the inability to solve the problem of women’s divorce from missing husbands, Fakhreddin initiated this collective deliberation as a preliminary attempt to resolve a legal issue through the consensus (ijmā‘) of legal experts within the framework of the OA. Finding a solution to the problem faced by the wives of missing husbands was inseparable from the question of the transformation of Islamic religious authority under imperial rule.