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Mohammedan possessions of Holland, the adat has always within human memory required every man who marries to pronounce a taʾlīq immediately after the conclusion of the contract. The form of this is subject to local variations, but its general drift is everywhere the same, viz. that the wife may regard herself as divorced if her husband forsakes her and betakes himself to some other part of the country for seven months, or beyond the sea for a year (in some places two[1], or if he fails to maintain her for a given period (e. g. one month)[2]
- ↑ In Batavia it is a year in each case, and the following condition is added to the other two: failure to maintain the wife for one month or serious ill-treatment. Even as regards Batavia, Van den Berg supplies misleading information. He might have collected better data from any Batavian; or else as he chose to form his ideas of the adat in the East Indies from printed works which he studied in Holland, he might in place of consulting Sayyid ʿUthmān's tabular treatise have referred to the fatwa pronounced by the authorities at Mekka on the application of that writer, and especially the wording of the application itself to which this fatwa conveys the reply, and which is printed under the title (
Arabic characters). On page 2 in the description of the contents of the taʾlīq at Batavia, we find the following words: (Arabic characters)
- ↑ So that the woman if she wishes to obtain a separation is not bound to prove her husband's incapacity to maintain her.
to (p. 157). In 1888, when I verbally informed Mr. Van den Berg that I had been told of the existence of this adat by many Javanese at Mecca, he denied that any such special custom existed, and when I maintained my ground and proved to him that it did exist at Batavia by referring to an allusion to it in an application for fatwa (verdict of a religious judge) composed by Sayyid ʿUthmān, the most he would allow was that something of the kind might perhaps appear sporadically. In support of his view that it was exceptional, he alleged that he had found no mention of any such adat in the registers of the Mohammedan courts. Since then, as appears in his essay on the Afwijkingen (Bijdr. Instituut, 1892 pp. 485 seqq.), Van den Berg has gleaned some popular information on the subject and finds himself compelled to speak of "the use sometimes made of (the permission) to pronounce a conditional divorce." Not a trace of 'personal observation', though in the introduction to his essay he speaks of notes personally made by him (Van den Berg). Had he taken trouble to enquire, he would have found that the custom is the established rule throughout the whole of Java, its omission being sporadic and requiring explanation; he would have known that among the commonest questions arising before the Mohammedan courts are those which spring from the taʾlīq, the pěrkara rapaʾ as they are called; he would have furnished us with examples of the very characteristic and instructive Javanese and Sundanese taʾlīq formulas, and we should not have to complain of the omission from his essay of the most important technical terms connected with this question such as janji ningratu, janji dalěm and rapaʾ. Now he only supplies the small amount of information given him by certain popular books,—information which he has acquired 20 years too late—draws wrong conclusions therefrom, and gives misleading explanations.
