Under Islamic law, a husband need only say "I divorce you" three times to secure a permanent end to his marriage. This is known as the "triple talaq", not to be confused with the "triple Axel" which, if executed while in bed, will only ruin the bedsheets and possibly lead to permanent injuries.

The Muslim leaders in the village in West Bengal state found out and decreed that Ansari's unconscious utterances constituted a divorce.

"I have not given talaq. When I uttered talaq three times I had taken medicines to help me sleep!"

The religious leaders said that before remarrying, the couple would have to be apart for at least 100 days and that the wife, Sohela, would also have to spend a night with another man and then be divorced by him.

India's minority Muslim population is governed by Islamic personal laws on issues such as marriage, divorce and property inheritance.

Zafarul-Islam Khan, an Islamic scholar and editor of an Islamic newspaper, The Milli Gazette, said: "This is a totally unnecessary controversy and the local 'community leaders' or whosoever has said it are totally ignorant of Islamic law. "The law clearly says any action under compulsion or in a state of intoxication has no effect. The case of someone uttering something while asleep falls under this category and will have no impact whatsoever."

What probably happened of course is that Aftab said Taqal (Move Over), not Talaq (I divorce you). Dyslexia in Arabic can lead to extreme unintended consequences. As in many other Semitic languages, Arabic forms almost all of its words from a three-letter root. Therefore switching letters around is more likely to form an actual word than in English.

[UPDATE 22 Apr 2006 - Aftab Ansari and wife Sohela registered their marriage in an Indian law court to avoid separation, though clerics rejected their marital union. Daily Times India]

In a related matter:

BBC, Malaysia permits text message divorce

Getting a quickie divorce has taken on a whole new meaning in Malaysia after it was decided that a man can divorce his wife with a text message. The government's adviser on religious affairs, the man who counsels Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, said as long as the message was clear and unambiguous it was valid under Islamic Sharia law. "SMS is just another form of writing," Dr Abdul Hamid Othman was quoted by the New Straits Times daily newspaper as saying.

I suppose one could threaten his wife with the admonition that the divorce is on his speed-dial.

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Here we see 11,000 women protesting their accidental divorce from a man they were not married to. Mujib Ali Kabob, a Muslim man from Pakistan afflicted with both obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's Syndrome phoned the women during a telemarketing campaign selling Camel Hair Remover. Mujib would involuntarily yell a triple talaq during the sales pitch rendering the women divorced from him.

Imam Shashliq Babaushka, ruled that even though the women were not married, the divorce was properly legal and that the women would have to sleep with and divorce some other man before they could remarry their present husbands. [OK OK just joking with this last thing]

So, as dark damian points out, all these husbands will have no one to legally beat for a few months. What will they do? Actually, they can still beat and rape other women legally if they just search around for a deserving slut that is not wearing a burqa.