How should you beat your wife?

In a world where religious texts are considered to be beyond any and all criticism and are literally true then absurd directives are often picked up and promoted as a jolly good idea.

Within the Quran we have this ayat …

Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great. – 4:34 (Picknall translation)

One small observation, a beating is apparently just fine if if the husband simply thinks his wife might rebel, there does not even need to be an actual act of rebellion against the demands of a husband.

Nobody would seriously promote beating your wife as a really great idea in this day and age … right?

Wrong.

Saudi TV

A Cleric on Saudi TV was recently giving explicit instructions on the best way to beat your wife …

In an event where women disobey their husbands, Al-Saqaby teaches in the video that the men should follow the steps below in making sure that the women are corrected.

As AWD News explains …

“The first step is to remind her of your rights and of her duties according to Allah. Then comes the second step – forsaking her in bed. The third step, beating, has to correspond with the necessary Islamic conditions” before taking action. The beating should not be performed with a rod, nor should it be a headband, or a sharp object. Instead, husbands should use a ‘tooth-cleaning twig or with a handkerchief’ to beat their wife. The wife will feel that she was wrong in the way she treated her husband,” says Al-Saqaby.

Ending his controversial teaching, Al-Saqaby says his teaching of how to beat wives is not exhaustive, and that sometimes, men can beat their wives without following his steps when the women go to the extreme by disobeying their husbands.

He also blamed the women for provoking their husbands, expressing shock that some women are ‘stubborn’ to the point that only beatings can bring them to order.

“In addition, sometimes a woman makes a mistake that may lead her husband to beat her. I’m sad to say there are some women who say ‘Go ahead, if you are a real man, beat me’ She provokes them,” he adds in the video.

But That is Saudi Arabia, A bastion of Islamic Lunacy

It is fair to observe that 99% of the Islamic world considers those within the Wahhabi Sect in Saudi Arabia to be complete nuts, and so would suggest that it might indeed be Saudi, but that it is not Islam.

You might want to hold that thought because over in Pakistan the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), a constitutional body of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, responsible for giving legal advice on Islamic issues to the government and the Parliament has just a few days ago declared that it is indeed wholly Islamic and just fine to beat your wives, but laced it for PR reasons with the word “lightly” to make it acceptable to the press …

CII rules women’s protection law ‘un-Islamic’

The bill was drafted after the CII rejected Punjab’s controversial Protection of Women against Violence Act (PPWA) 2015 terming it un-Islamic. The CII will now forward its proposed bill to the Punjab Assembly.

The council has proposed that a husband should be allowed to ‘lightly’ beat his wife if she defies his commands and refuses to dress up as per his desires; turns down demand of intercourse without any religious excuse or does not take bath after intercourse or menstrual periods.

It has suggested that a beating is also permissible if a woman does not observe Hijab; interacts with strangers; speaks loud enough that she can easily be heard by strangers; and provides monetary support to people without taking consent of her spouse.

The rather embarrassing fact here for those that seriously suggest that Islam promotes and protects Women’s rights is that wife beating is not simply a few daft clerics who promote the idea. It is also not just an obscure Hadith that can be dismissed, but rather it is the Quran itself that contains an explicit directive to do so, there is simply no avoiding that.

Placing religious texts beyond any and all criticism is a road that leads to human rights violations on an almost industrial scale, and also manifests and incarnates as ISIS, and so we would be living in a terrible world if all religious people actually did follow their various religious texts literally, but luckily most religious people don’t actually do that and will instead pick the nice bits, accept just those, and happily discard and turn a blind eye to the not so nice bits by perhaps declaring them to have a different meaning, or not for now, or just a metaphor.

Then again, perhaps a far more pragmatic approach taken by many when dealing with such texts is not just to perform mental gymnastics, but instead to come to terms with the rather obvious truth that they are not actually correct at all, and are not the whisperings of a god.

Let’s just grant the possibility that there is a creator God who’s omniscient, who occasionally authors books. And he’s gonna give us a book – the most useful book.  He’s a loving God.  He’s a compassionate God, and he’s gonna give us a guide to live.  He’s got a scribe.  The scribe’s gonna write it down.  What’s gonna be in that book?  I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity.  I mean there is not a single line in the bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a 1st century person.  I mean there’s not one reference to anything.  There are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why.  There’s nothing about electricity.  There’s nothing about DNA.  There’s nothing about infectious disease or the principles of infectious disease.  There’s . . .  there’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of Iron Age barbarism in there and superstition.  This does not. . .  This is not a candidate book  . . .  I mean I can go to any Barnes and Noble blindfolded and pull a book off a shelf which is gonna have more relevance, more wisdom for the 21st century than the Bible or the Koran.  I mean it’s really not an exaggeration.  Every one of our specific sciences has superceded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.  From cosmology, to psychology, to economics, we know more about ourselves than anyone writing the Bible or the Koran did.  And that is a distinctly inconvenient fact for the . . . for anyone wanting to believe that this book was dictated by the creator of the universe. – Sam Harris