When couples separate, the moral and material issues of gender equality receive their hardest test. Even under conditions of legal equality, a broad range of de facto inequalities can operate, including inequalities in access to legal resources, unequal distribution of marital wealth, unequal rights to initiate divorce proceedings, and inequalities in the finding of fault or moral responsibility. Islamic law would seem to be most severely tested here, because it formulates different categories of divorce or annulment for men and women. But, as others have shown in other Muslim settings (Hirsch 1998; Mir-Hosseini (1993; Moors 1995), knowledge of women's and men's outcomes in divorce disputes requires a study of how law is formulated, interpreted, and applied. As we saw in chapter 4, Islamic courts have generally acted to restore to women the shares of inheritance denied them in village settlement processes, even though on the surface the Islamic legal principles appear to be less favorable to women than do the principles of Gayo adat. Is the result comparable in the case of divorce and divorce settlements? To answer the question we return to the Takèngën courts, before ending the chapter with current national debates over polygamy.

Towards equal agency in divorce

Long-standing norms of divorce in Muslim Indonesia were recognizably part of the classical Islamic legal tradition. These norms made divorce a very one-sided affair. A man could “repudiate” (talaq) his wife without providing any reasons.