Manama: A Saudi woman has pledged to pay her husband SR55,000 if he agrees to divorce her only five days into their marriage.
The pledge was accepted by the court looking into the case filed by the husband against his wife for abandoning their home. The husband told the court that he wanted his wife back.
However, the wife said that she did not want to live with the husband after she discovered that he had a difficult character and that he was not religiously committed. She also complained that he watched immoral shows, local Arabic daily Al Madina reported.
The husband denied the charges and insisted on his wife returning home.
Attempts to reconcile the spouses by an expert committee failed after the wife said that she was adamant to obtain the divorce.
According to the daily, the SR55,000 Dh53,866 the wife was willing to pay for the divorce papers was part of the SR70,000 dowry the husband had offered.
However, the wife and her family do not have the full amount to repay and they are making lots of effort to raise the money, the daily said.
Online comments called for better efforts to reconcile the spouses and said that the court should not have granted the divorce quickly.
“This is truly amazing,” a blogger writing under the pseudonym UHL commented. “A divorce after five days is a shock. How could the wife judge the character of her husband so quickly. Ample time should be given to the spouses to get along.”
Saudi Arabia has one of the highest divorce rates in the region amid reports that it reached 40 per cent.
Last year, the Kingdom’s Grand Mufti warned that some of the divorce cases were caused by the sordid interpretation of dreams and visions by charlatans on television channels and online sites.
“There are private channels that broadcast programmes claiming to have the ability to interpret dreams and visions,” Shaikh Abdul Aziz Al Shaikh said. “They receive phone calls and they provide answers. It is a lucrative business and has nothing to do with understanding visions.”
