Nearly half Saudi women are beaten at home

Islam elevates women!!!

"A woman may be likened to a sheep (even) a cow or a camel for all are ridden."
Tafsir al-Qurtubi (arabic), 172/15

Have you beaten your quran lately? Daily beatings are good for the soul.

Gee, it looks like Emirates 24/7 is acting a little islamophobic.

Guess that's what happens when ya tell the truth.

Nearly half Saudi women are beaten at home.

The other half are beaten at work?

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Dr. Lateefa sites many motives based on "poor religious motives." I wonder on what basis she considers them "poor" and what religious motives she considers "good."

The hitting of women by men should always be in violation of cultural and religious norms and not because of them. If because of cultural and religious norms, then that particular culture and religion suck. Therefore, and this one is easy, Saudi culture sucks and Islam sucks.

Nearly half Saudi women are beaten at home
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Probably a low estimate.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lived in Saudi Arabia for a time as a child, describes the horrific chorus of moans, sobs, and screams that would start up every night as the sun went down and the men came home.

That's one of the images that stuck with me most from the book.

More:

"Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God's guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them." (Qur'an 4:34)
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What could be more Islamic than beating your wife? And who would be surprised to find that good Muslims in the "Land of the Two Holy Places" are especially apt to follow the dictates of their creed?

More:

Muhammad’s example is normative for Muslims, since he is an “excellent example of conduct” (Qur'an 33:21) – and according to a canonical hadith, Muhammad’s favorite wife, his child bride Aisha, reports that Muhammad struck her. Once he went out at night after he thought she was asleep, and she followed him surreptitiously. Muhammad saw her, and, as Aisha recounts: “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?”
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Beating your child bride—that's "justice" in Islam. *Ugh*.

More:

The Koran commentary Ruhul Ma’ani reflects mainstream Muslim understandings of this verse when it gives four reasons that a man may beat his wife: “if she refuses to beautify herself for him,” if she refuses sex when he asks for it, if she refuses to pray or perform ritual ablutions, and “if she goes out of the house without a valid excuse.”
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Not only is this utterly grotesque from start to finish, but note how subjective most of this is. What constitutes sufficient efforts to "beautify herself for her husband"? In some cases, the wife will be up for a beating if she is unable to render herself as attractive as the new wife, who is twenty years or more her junior.

Are we to believe that *half* of all Saudi wives are "disobedient"? Or is it more likely that under such a "religion" that it is often *impossible* for a woman to appease the petty dictator in the house?

This is what abusers are like, all over the world. Now add in a creed that enables and condones wife beating as *model behavior*, and this is what you end up with.

More:

“Husbands were found to be beating their wives more than others….they are followed by fathers, then brothers then sons…hands and sticks were found to be used mostly in beating women, following by men’s head cover and to a lesser extent, sharp objects.”
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It's often mentioned that women in "traditional" Muslim societies go from being essentially owned by their fathers, then their husbands, and then their sons—but they are often beaten by each of their owners, as well.

Here's Rania El Baz, a Saudi television presenter who was brave enough to step forward publicly when her husband beat her to a pulp:

"Beaten Saudi Woman Speaks Out"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3667349.stm

Many naïve souls were certain that this would change things in Saudi Arabia. This was almost ten years ago, and things are just the same. But why not? Islam hasn't changed during this time...

Mohammad's description of himself, in his own book, says he is an “excellent example of conduct” (Qur'an 33:21).

He is saying in his OWN BOOK that he is an excellent example for mankind.

And people actually believe this? That's a joke right? How could anyone be so gullible as to believe it?

Domestic violence occurs across the world, in various cultures, and affects people of all economic statuses.

According to one study, the percentage of women who have reported being physically abused by an intimate partner vary from 69% to 10% depending on the country.

One study found that half of Palestinian women have been the victims of domestic violence.

80% of women surveyed in rural Egypt said that beatings were common and often justified, particularly if the woman refused to have sex with her husband.

In Turkey 42% of women over 15 have suffered physical or sexual violence.

One recent study, in Syria, found that 25% of the married women surveyed said that they had been beaten by their husbands.[55] Another study found that 21.8% of women have experienced some form of domestic violence; 48% of the women who experienced some form of violence had been beaten

Bangladesh. Statistics from four United Nations studies show that 16-19% of the women (age less than 50) were victims of domestic abuse within the previous 12 month period. 40-47% of the women had been subject to domestic violence during some period of their life.

The Human Rights Watch found that up to 90% of women in Pakistan were subject to some form of maltreatment, within their own homes.

Unofficial statistics estimate that 97% of Indian women experience violence at some point in their lives.

Up to two-thirds of women in certain communities in Nigeria's Lagos State say they are victims to domestic violence.

In Canada, the Assembly of First Nations evaluation of the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program conducted by CIET offers an inclusive and relatively unbiased national estimate. It documented domestic violence in a random sample of 85 First Nations across Canada: 22% of mothers reported suffering abuse in the year prior to being interviewed; of these, 59% reported physical abuse.

In the United States, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 1995 women reported a six times greater rate of intimate partner violence than men.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicates that in 1998 about 876,340 violent crimes were committed in the U.S. against women by their current or former spouses, or boyfriends.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the United States 4.8 million women suffer intimate partner related physical assaults and rapes and 2.9 million men are victims of physical assault from their partners.

According to some studies, less than 1% of domestic violence cases are reported to the police.

In the United States 10–35% of the population will be physically aggressive towards a partner at some point in their lives.

Now compare USA and UK to Indonesia

From a United Nations study

Indonesia Central Java, 2% of the women (age 15-49) were victims of domestic abuse within the previous 12 month period. 11% of the women had been subject to domestic violence during some period of their life

USA, 1% of the women (age +18) were victims of domestic abuse within the previous 12 month period. 22% of the women had been subject to domestic violence during some period of their life

UK, 3% of the women (age +16-59) were victims of domestic abuse within the previous 12 month period. 19% of the women had been subject to domestic violence during some period of their life

Page 54

http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/61/122/Add.1

So Islam makes muslims violent towards women, can some one kindly explain what makes non muslims violent towards women.

Just targeting islamic violence is not going to help the women who are abused by non muslims

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Map3.1NEW_Womens_Physical_Security_2011_compressed.jpg

The unholy quran is a manual for misogyny, murder and mayhem; just to name a few.

I know all about Koran, 4:34, and the various uses of miswak, so we would expect that Indonesia would have a higher rate of abuse;

Papua New Guinea Christian 67%

Bangladesh Islam 42%

Australia Christian 31%

New Zealand Christian 30%

Thailand Buddhist 28%

Vietnam Buddhist 25%

Japan Shinto 13%

Indonesia Islam 11%

Muslim men are violent towards women for exactly the same reasons as non muslim men.

Most muslim men are ignorant of 4:34. to them it is just arabic goobliegook, and islam is the furthest thing on there minds when beating his spouse.

And if islam is the cause of the violence, why has indonesias less crimes than most other non muslims countries in Asia

The above figures are from

http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/61/122/Add.1

High praise, EYESOPENED. Thank you so much.

I had a chance to hear Nonie Darwish speak a few years ago at UC Berkeley. Marvelous and clear-eyed stuff.

Also I am aware that non muslim women have laws that suppose to protect them, but they still get the shiite kicked out of them. So these laws have not acted as a deterent, as can be seen by the fact that USA, UK Ausralia, and etc have higher rates of abuse than Indonesia.

Domestic violence "can happen to anyone regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, religion, or gender", and can take many forms, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional, economic, and psychological abuse.

Psychopathology, substance abuse, poverty, cultural factors, anger, stress, and depression often are thought to cause domestic violence. While there is little empirical evidence that these factors are direct causes of domestic violence, research suggests that they can affect its severity, frequency, and the nature of the perpetrator's abusive behaviour

Domestic violence is reinforced by cultural values and beliefs that are repeatedly communicated through the media and other societal institutions that tolerate it. The perpetrator's violence is further supported when peers, family members, or others in the community (e.g., coworkers, social service providers, police, or clergy) minimize or ignore the abuse and fail to provide consequences. As a result, the abuser learns that not only is the behavior justified, but also it is acceptable.

Islam is not the cause of domestic violence, it reinforces the problem, if domestic violence was an islamic thing then it would not be so prevalent and be such a major problem in the west.

While in most developed countries domestic violence is considered unacceptable by most people, in many regions of the world the views are different: according to a UNICEF survey, the percentage of women aged 15–49 who think that a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances is, for example:

90% in Jordan, Islam.

86% inTimor-Leste, Catholic (31% in Indonesia, Islam).

85.6% in Guinea, Islam.

85.4% in Zambia, Christian.

85% in Sierra Leone, Christian/Islam.

81.2% in Laos, Buddhist.

81% in Ethiopia, Christian.

79% in South Sudan, Animist/Christian (47% in Sudan, Islam)

76% in Kiribati, Christian.

69% in Solomon Islands, Christian.

68% in Bhutan, Buddhist.

Good grief, gunung semeru's posting above - with a large swathe of unsourced cut-and-paste, lacking quotation marks - sounds almost like he's channelling 45ch/ 'peter'/ loveverybody...

He is ignoring one teeny tiny fact about Muslim countries: the honor-shame paradigm.

I would hazard the guess that stats on anything that would make the Ummah look bad - wife-beating, 'honor' murders, rapes, and for that matter, incidence of HIV infection - emanating from any Muslim land, are not going to be terribly reliable; indeed, how many 'honor' murders anywhere get noticed at all? How many beaten wives just put up with it and say...nothing?

My guess is that the stats on dv from non-Muslim countries are much more likely to be somewhere *near* accuracy (and within that sector, the non-Muslim world, the stats from from western countries are more likely to be accurate, than those from third-world countries) than the stats from Muslim lands.

Rosemary Sookhdeo, in her book 'Secrets Behind the Burqa' , which despite its somewhat 'popular' title is based on serious, rigorous sociological research, makes it clear that the general attitude she encountered, from Muslim families, is that if a woman is beaten by her husband, she should suffer in silence. Unlike in a western family, she cannot count on getting help or even sympathy from her family of origin. They would rather that she be beaten to death, than that they should be publicly shamed by their daughter or sister leaving her husband.

Mrs Sookhdeo's adult daughter runs a women's refuge. She got a lot more Muslim clients than non-Muslim clients.

And in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 'Infidel', she notes that in her work as an interpreter, she visited a/ abortion clinics and b/ women's shelters, in the Netherlands, rather a lot. And she noticed something: that, overwhelmingly, the clientele of those places was *not* native Dutch; and that there were a *lot* of Muslim women among them.

If Muslims are no more violent domestically than non-Muslims, or perhaps even *less* violent, then Ayaan should have found, in those women's shelters, a majority of Dutch women and very, very few Muslim women. But it was the other way around. Very, very few Dutch women and lots of Muslim women.

DDA said
I would hazard the guess that stats on anything that would make the Ummah look bad - wife-beating, 'honor' murders, rapes

The figures I use in my last comment come from

http://www.childinfo.org/attitudes_data.php

And

According to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in 2002, over 90% of married Pakistani women surveyed reported being kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, when the women failed to bear a child, had given birth to a girl instead of a boy, or had an illicit affair

To put the figure at 90% does not support what you are alluding to about covering up for the Ummah.

Re Islam, and wife-beating (and wife-beating should not be seen as separate from other kinds of violence against women).

A very interesting little article (I hope the link still works, if it doesn't, I do have the complete article and can provide extensive excerpts).

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LE25Ak01.html

Wife-beating, sharia, and Western law
By Spengler

"More than the Koran's sanction of wife-beating, **the legal grounds on which the Koran sanctions it reveals an impassable gulf between Islamic and Western law** {my emphasis - dda}".

"The sovereign grants inalienable rights to every individual in Western society, of which protection from violence is foremost.

"Every individual stands in direct relation to the state, which wields a monopoly of violence.

"Islam's legal system is radically different: the father is a "governor" or "administrator" of the family, that is, a little sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife and children.

"That is the self-understanding of modern Islam spelled out by Muslim-American scholars - and it is incompatible with the Western concept of human rights.

"The practice of wife-beating, which is found in Muslim communities in Western countries, is embedded too profoundly in sharia law to be extracted.

"Nowhere to my knowledge has a Muslim religious authority of standing repudiated wife-beating as specified in Surah 4:32 of the Koran, for to do so would undermine the foundations of Muslim society....

"I can find no record of a recognized Muslim authority repudiating wife-beating.

"Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim scholar who purports to offer a Westernized version of Islam, notoriously defended wife-beating in a 2003 televised debate with then-French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

"On the contrary, Westernized Muslim scholars strive to justify the practice on Islamic legal grounds.

"Muslim traditional society is a nested hierarchy in which the clan is an extended family, the tribe an extended clan, and the state an extended tribe.

"The family patriarch thus enjoys powers in his realm comparable to those of the state in the broader realm.

"That is the deeper juridical content of the Koranic provision for wife-beating in Surah 4:34..".

And then there is something from Australian journalist Geraldine Brooks' useful book 'Nine Parts of Desire' (1994) on women in Islam, based on some fairly extensive personal experience in various Islamised countries both Sunni and Shiite, and observations of the behaviour of Muslim colonies within the West as well.

Toward the end of the book, in the section entitled 'Conclusion: Beware of the Dogma', she discusses 'honor' murders, and the case of a Sudanese Muslim man in the UK who murdered his wife, Afaf, in the early 1990s (1992/93); Brooks argues that this was a fundamentally different kind of murder, from the sort of 'crime passionelle' that some western societies have recognised in the past.

She attended the trial. And she observes, by the by, that "This was not an isolated case. It simply happened to be the one I heard about. In a British study of family violence completed not long after Afaf's death [that is, sometime between 1992 and 1994, the date of publication of Brooks' book - dda), the researchers found that women married to men of Muslim background were eight times more likely to be killed by their spouses than any other women in Britain".

**Eight times more likely**.

It would have been even more useful had Brooks named the title, authors and date of this study, but still: if women with Muslim husbands are eight times more likely to be killed by their husbands than any other women in Britain (that is, women with husbands from other belief systems), then that hardly suggests that Muslims are no different from other groups, as regards domestic violence.

And then there is Phyllis Chesler's work on 'honor' murders, which form part of the violent system by which Muslim men, in sharia-suffused societies, control and terrorise their female chattels.

It is not such a long step from beating a woman - whether she be wife, sister, daughter or cousin - to ...*killing* her.

http://www.meforum.org/2067/are-honor-killings-simply-domestic-violence

Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?

by Phyllis Chesler
 Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2009, pp. 61-69