Would it have made any difference if Iqbal Abul Nasr had answered a missed phone call from her husband? Would he still have sent her a cruel text message stating: “I divorce you because you didn’t answer your husband.� I doubt it.

In line with Shaira law, men do not need to go to court to file for divorce. A unilateral declaration of divorce by a man, repeated three times, formally ends a marriage. It was the third time that Mrs Abul Nasr, an engineer from Cairo, had received such a heartbreaking text message.

She is now seeking clarification from a court on whether it is legally binding, and if so, it would be the first reported case of divorce by SMS in Egypt.

The practice has been much debated across the Muslim world and some Islamic countries have banned it. According to Egypt’s state-run statistics bureau, a couple files for divorce every six minutes. That seems a very high figure to me.

Talk about taking the cowardly way out. What country doesn’t want to preserve marriages and provide stable communities, rather than make divorce so instantly available? Where is the sense in it?