A woman identified only as “Mina” has requested a divorce from her husband of eight years (they’ve been married eight years, he’s not eight years old), on the grounds that he has not bathed in more than a year.
The state-run Iran newspaper, always a reliable source, quoted Mina as saying that her husband originally had been obsessively clean, taking three showers a day. Evidently, marriage can change a man, or at least it has changed this one, because he now “says he does not like water and does not want to take a shower. . . . Now nobody, including me, my children and his colleagues, can stand him.”
Whether or not this will be a valid reason for divorce under Islamic law remains to be seen. According to CNN, Iranian women normally must prove neglect, abuse, or drug addiction before a divorce will be granted.
Men, on the other hand, can divorce their wives under Islamic law by saying “I divorce you” three times. In fact, in Dubai in 2001, an Islamic court upheld a divorce that a man had obtained by sending the text message “WHY ARE YOU LATE? YOU ARE DIVORCED” to his wife on her cellphone. And he only sent it once, too.