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October 26, 2006

Iran: Muslim Cleric Supports Wife-Battering

Despite the protestations of Muslim apologists like Yvonne Ridley who claims that women are equal and "liberated" under Islam, one verse in the Koran - Sura 4:34 - openly justifies the beating of a woman for disobedience.

"Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme." (Dawood's translation)

In Iran, states AKI, Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi has issued a fataw, in which he says it is lawful for a man to hit his disobedient wife.

Shirazi is based at the holy city of Qom, and has written on his website that "the Koran first of all advises a man to try and convince his wife to obey to him in a polite way and through advice, then by refusing to have sexual relations with her and, finally, if all this will have failed to make her reason, with physical punishment."

The cleric said that punishment "must be light and considered an exceptional event, like surgery in case of a serious illness."

This is probably not what was originally intended. Translators such as Pickthall use the term "scourge". There is nothing "light" in such a choice of word. The Arabic word darab/darba, employed in the test of the Koran means primarily to beat. Not to tap, not to beat "lightly", but to strike with force. It does have another meaning - "to avoid" - which has very occasionally been used as an interpretation by some Muslim apologists. As the Sura already deals with "avoiding" a wife sexually, as a step towards getting her compliance, "avoiding" is highly unlikely to have been the meaning of the word in the original text.

Shirazi states that men must not use "physical punishment which leaves signs and wounds." He says that women are "masochistic and sometimes they have a crisis and need light physical punishment to get back to normal."

AKI quotes Azam Taleghani, daughter of the late late Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, who is a supporter of women's rights in Iran. She believes that the fatwa was an "offence to women". She said: "It is not right to issue a fatwa based on texts written over one thousand years ago without taking into account today's reality. If we learn that someone hits their wife on the basis of these statements we will report them along with Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi to the judicial authority of the Islamic Republic."

Unfortunately, the whole edifice of fundamental Islam relies upon the literal interpretation of the Koran. Iran's sharia-based laws, including stoning to death of adulterers, would collapse without an unswerving adherence to the literal truth of the text of the Koran.

When in Iran, women are expected to wear the chador, an all-enveloping garment like a burka, her bruises will not be visible. Only if a woman has the audacity to scream while she is being Koranically "disciplined" or is disobedient enough to tell others, would anyone know if her husband had followed Shirazi's fatwa.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at October 26, 2006 9:04 PM

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