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Wife Beating in the Qur'an: Difference between revisions
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→Modern Views and Perspectives on the Meaning of Qur'an 4:34
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==Modern Views and Perspectives on the Meaning of Qur'an 4:34== | ==Modern Views and Perspectives on the Meaning of Qur'an 4:34== | ||
The view that men should beat their wives flies in the face of modern conventions about gender relations. As such it has lead to a number of discussions and revisions in the modern Islamic community. On the one end progressive Muslims such as Leila Bakhtiar, who went so far as to mistranslate the word "daraba" in order to hide the plain meaning of the text, instructing men to beat their wives in certain situations. The Yaqeen Institute on the other hand calls the idea that men can beat their wives a "myth" while admitting in the same article that the plain meaning of the text of the Qur'an allows it. On the other hand are traditionalists such as Daniel Haqiqatjou, who defends the Qur'an by claiming that wife-beating allows authority to be "distributed across kinship groups" as opposed to being concentrated in the cold, unfeeling hands of the modern nation-state. He compares wife beating to the discipline that employers enforce on their employee by forcing them to leave the premises of the building in which they are situated with the implied threat of force from the police or company security forces. For such Occidentalist critics, the cold and calculating nature of the west means that even practices which violate human rights are preferable to the modern, western, liberal state. As Michael Cook observed over a decade ago in The Koran: A Very Short Introduction commentators who take the verse come up with a number of strategies to deal with it, but whether by embracing or "swimming against" the Western tide all of them are in one way or another engaging with western, liberal modernity. | |||
==See Also== | ==See Also== | ||