Time for another installment of Stuff Muslims Don’t Like.

#2: Due process for wives.

In Malaysia, Islamic Sharia law allows men to divorce their wives with a triple talaq text message.

Coming to the US?

Well, here’s a small dose of sanity–surprising, I know–from Maryland’s Supreme Court, which refused to recognize Islamic divorce. Yes, you can resist sharia creep:

Saying “I divorce thee” three times, as men in Muslim countries have been able to do for centuries when leaving their wives, is not enough if you’re a resident of Maryland, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals rejected a Pakistani man’s argument that his invocation of the Islamic talaq, under which a marriage is dissolved simply by the husband’s say-so, allowed him to part with his wife of more than 20 years and deny her a share of his $2 million estate.

The justices affirmed a lower court’s decision overturning a divorce decree obtained in Pakistan by Irfan Aleem, a World Bank economist who moved from London to Maryland with his wife, Farah Aleem, in 1985.

Both of their children were born in the United States.

In 2003, Aleem’s wife filed for divorce in Montgomery County Circuit Court.

When he filed a counterclaim, he did not object to the court’s jurisdiction over the case, according to the ruling. But before the legal process could be completed – and without telling his wife – Aleem went to the Pakistani Embassy in Washington and invoked the talaq, in effect attempting to turn jurisdiction of the case over to a Pakistani court that later granted him a divorce.

When they were married in Karachi in 1980, Farah Aleem was 18 and had just graduated from high school. Irfan Aleem was 29, a doctoral candidate at Oxford University in England. As is customary, the couple signed a marriage contract. It obligated Aleem to give his wife the equivalent of $2,500 in the event of their divorce. When they split, he did so, and claimed he owed her nothing more.

Maryland’s highest court disagreed.

“If we were to affirm the use of talaq, controlled as it is by the husband, a wife, a resident of this state, would never be able to consummate a divorce action filed by her in which she seeks a division of marital property,” the judges wrote in their decision.

They said the talaq “directly deprives the wife of the due process she is entitled to when she initiates divorce litigation.”