Many disputes in rural Zanzibari Islamic courts concern whether or not a divorce has taken place outside of court. Zanzibari men have the right to divorce their wives unilaterally through repudiation without the approval of the wife or the court. The wife need not be present at the episode of repudiation for it to be legally valid, and it is therefore common for men to divorce their wives while away from them. As a result, women often rely on the structural events of divorce rather than an actual statement of repudiation as evidence of the end of a marriage. These structural events are the prominent experiences that a rural Zanzibari woman undergoes at the time of divorce. The most important are leaving her husband's home to return to her family and the removal of her marriage goods from her husband's home. Disputes about divorce arise when women want to remarry or when men ask their former wives to return to them and resume married life. While some women agree to return, others seek official validation for the alleged divorce in Islamic courts by requesting an official divorce receipt. This article examines women's divorce experience and analyses three court cases to demonstrate how disputes about alleged divorce arise and what happens when they are taken to court.One of the cases was opened by Shindano, a woman about sixty years old, who came to court to ask for a receipt verifying that she had been divorced by her husband, Abu Bakr. She related her husband's many violations of his marital duties and the anguish he had caused her. She said he divorced her, but later he came to her home and announced that they were still married and demanded that she return to him. She said, 'He chased me out of his house, he got rid of all my vyombo (marriage goods) that were in the house and put them outside, and now he says that he didn't divorce me!' In court, the clerks asked her for Abu Bakr's written statement of repudiation as proof of divorce. She did not have such a paper, and so the clerks told her to bring her husband to court. When he came to court, Abu Bakr said that he had not divorced her and had never intended to do so.The second case was opened by a young woman called Zaynab, in her early twenties, who had a similar story. She came to court claiming she was divorced because her husband, Rashidi, had told her to leave his home. She left, and when she went back to ask for the divorce paper, he refused. She said that he told her to go home again and insulted her
This article explores contemporary Latter-day Saint conceptions of evil in northern Utah through considering both the lived experiences of spirits and the didactic tales of spirits that are a rich part of local folklore. Latter-day Saints are visited by both benevolent and malevolent spirits. These encounters with spirits are connected with local conceptions of “righteousness,” a moral framework that is centered on positive action. Malevolent spirit visits are typically understood as the consequence of “unrighteous” actions or as impediments to exceptionally righteous activity; indeed, the most righteous actions are perhaps the most spiritually dangerous. Negative visitations reflect a cultural framework of evil as a human phenomenon that results from the temptations and distractions of an aggressive, external cosmological force—Satan. Righteous and unrighteous actions both attract the interest of Satan, and therefore invite the possibility of evil to disrupt the moral order.
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