Wife Beating in Islamic Law: Difference between revisions

Critics have also noted what they describe as the sheer absurdity of the qualification found in the report and suggest that it could hardly be that God would leave out such an important qualification from the verse which, read in isolation, simply instructs men to beat their wives. To do so, critics suggest, would be a serious lack of judgement on God's part. Critics have also ridiculed the absurdity of the practice itself - what is the purpose, they ask, of tapping one's wife with a twig? And why would ''this'' prove effective if admonition of one's wife and abandoning her in bed had proven ineffective - surely tapping someone with a twig cannot be more compelling than either of these measures? Such a practice, critics conclude, is, at worst, a humiliating and patronizing symbolic gesture (having no place in polite society), or, at best, a fiction generated in the minds of later Muslims (that is, 7th, 8th, or 9th century Muslims attributing this idea, retroactively, back to Ibn Abbas) who were having a hard time reconciling the conflicting imperatives of an early Islamic tradition which at once taught Muslims to be kind to one another - and to beat their wives.

Classical Muslim scholars have written abundant [[Tafsir|commentary]] and jurisprudential material regarding {{Quran|4|34}} and instruction to beat wives. A few of these classical sources are quoted below, alongside some modern authorities. It is important to note that a number of Islamic modernists (a small sub-group of modern Islamic scholars in general) [[Wife Beating in Islamic Law#The objections of Islamic modernists|have advocated]] an interpretation of {{Quran|4|34}} that militates against traditional understanding and takes the beating instructed to be purely 'symbolic' in nature. The influence of these few, albeit vocal, modernists has resulted in some recent English translations of the Quran opting to replace the word ''daraba'', which is found in the Arabic text and which means 'beat', with alternative words that more readily evoke the modernist interpretation.  

===Quran commentaries===

{{Quote|1=[http://www.qtafsir.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=672 Tafsir of Ibn Kathir for Qur'an 4:34]|2=(beat them) means, if advice and ignoring her in the bed do not produce the desired results, you are allowed to discipline the wife, without severe beating. Muslim recorded that Jabir said that during the Farewell Hajj, the Prophet said;

(Fear Allah regarding women, for they are your assistants. You have the right on them that they do not allow any person whom you dislike to step on your mat. However, if they do that, you are allowed to discipline them lightly. They have a right on you that you provide them with their provision and clothes, in a reasonable manner.) Ibn `Abbas and several others said that the Ayah refers to a beating that is not violent. Al-Hasan Al-Basri said that it means, a beating that is not severe.}}