Re: Is it true?
Hmmm…
Went and did some reading… guess what I found?
More than 18,000 marriages out of a total 60,000 solemnized in different parts of the Kingdom during 2001 have already ended in divorce, media reports say. According to study conducted by Al-Saif, the Islamic courts have been approving 25 to 35 divorce cases every day in the country. Most of the divorces occur in the first three years of marriage and a majority of divorced women had married under the age of 20.
According to S Mohammad Al-Saif, another Saudi sociologist polygamy is responsible for 55 percent of the divorces reported. A vast difference in age is also causing divorce. A total of 16,725 weddings out of 81,576 ended in divorce between March 2000 and March 2001 --20.5 percent of all marriages. Dr. Ebtisan Halawani of the Jeddah-based King Abdul Aziz University surveyed 158 Saudi divorcees. The main causes of breaking away for women from their husbands were ill-treatment, violence and hot temper", reported Arab News quoting the sociologist. The report said, some of them revealed to the researcher that their separation was the result of the non-committal attitudes of their husbands toward meeting family’s financial needs.
About 38 percent of the divorcees said that the involvement of their husbands in illicit relationships led to broken marriages. IIn one case a woman was locked up by her husband in a hotel room and he left the country, leading to their separation, Arab News report said. This sociological problem, attributed to the growing influence of individualism and lesser influence of religioun on family life. The UAE and some of the other Gulf countries too face the same problem of divorces.
source: http://www.keralamonitor.com/yeme.html
Even more interesting was this one saying half of marriages in the country are ending in divorce and the source was… aljazeera - definitely not western media
According to Saudi media, half of marriages in the country end in divorce.
The high number of forced marriages in the kingdom is believed to be the main reason behind the growing divorce rate.
source: http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=7898
…so I would still assert on par