AAN is pleased to publish Islamic scholar John Butt’s* unofficial translation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s Code on the Separation of Spouses, signed by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada on 24 January 2026. In Afghanistan, men can easily and unilaterally divorce their wives in Afghanistan, but women need either their husband’s consent to a divorce, which typically carries financial penalties, or a judicial separation. The 31-article Decree 18 sets out the circumstances in which a court can effect that. The Code also deals at length with absent husbands, including the long and arduous process by which a missing husband may be declared dead and his wife permitted to remarry, but it expressly excludes husbands who have abandoned their wives from having a separation imposed on them by the courts.
You can preview the English translation of Decree 18 online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
The Code draws exclusively on Hanafi jurisprudence, setting out when a judge or court can be involved in the ending of a marriage. Butt’s translation includes extensive explanatory footnotes that clarify legal and religious terminology, identify and provide context for the jurisprudence and sources cited in the Code, and, where useful, point readers to relevant Quranic verses and Hadith. His footnotes also help explain provisions whose meaning or implications may not be immediately apparent from the text itself.
The translation is published alongside Kate Clark’s analysis, Afghan Women Left in Limbo: Decree 18 and the struggle to end a marriage, which examines what the Code means for Afghan women seeking a way out of unhappy marriages. It draws on interviews with women who have sought separation or divorce, as well as lawyers with experience in such cases and finds that, of the twelve grounds for judicial separation listed by the Code, lawyers singled out four that could be useful in seeking to end a marriage: a husband’s obstinacy and wrongful conduct; the husband is missing; lack of compatibility between the spouses; and the ‘prerogative of puberty’. None, though, are necessarily straightforward and are themselves problematic.
Clark’s report takes a special focus on women whose husbands have abandoned them, men who have travelled abroad, fail to pay maintenance and, in some cases, have married again, but still refuse to divorce their wives. It is a particular problem stemming from Afghanistan’s high rates of male out-migration. Clark and the AAN team ask whether Decree 18 helps free women from such marriages, which now exist only on paper, or still prioritises a husband’s right to end a marriage when he pleases.
John Butt’s translation was edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark.
* John Butt is a graduate of the Darul Uloom Deoband in India, the key seminary informing the Islamic thought of most Afghan Sunni clerics, including the Taliban. He went on to have a career in journalism and broadcasting, including reporting for the BBC from Kandahar in the early 1990s on the men who would go on to form the Taliban movement – and setting up radio serial dramas. He published his autobiography, A Talib’s Tale: The Life and Times of a Pashtoon Englishman, in 2021. For AAN, Butt has translated several important texts issued by the Islamic Emirate, including a collection of the decrees, orders and instructions of Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and the Penal Code for Courts. He has also written for AAN on the Islamic thinking underpinning the Emirate’s system of government and laws, in A Taleban Theory of State: A review of the Chief Justice’s book of jurisprudence and A Force for Good, or Source of Coercion? An Islamic scholar reflects on the Emirate’s morality law, his commentary on the Islamic Emirate’s 2024 Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which he also translated for AAN.
You can preview the English translation of Decree 18 online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
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This article was last updated on 20 Sep 2026
