Nearly a year ago, Passport noted that Finnish PM Matti VanHanen, ever the classy guy, dumped his girlfriend via a text message. Ha, ha. But in the Muslim world, apparently there's a serious debate going on as to whether divorce by SMS is valid, and some countries have even had to explicitly ban the practice. In Egypt, however, the law remains unclear:

An Egyptian woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband's declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid, a state-run newspaper reported on Thursday.

After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him saying "I divorce you because you didn't answer your husband," Al-Akhbar said.

In line with sharia (Islamic 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.

Egypt actually has a hybrid legal system, meaning that contrary to what most people seem to think, sharia law is already in place in many areas of jurisprudence (though Christians have their own religious courts). A return of the caliphate is not nigh, but if you're a woman in a place like Egypt, the growing Islamicization of the country is bad news indeed. Let's hope the judge rejects this divorce-by-SMS nonsense, if he hasn't already.