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Gaza opens first domestic violence shelter

Jul 26, 2011 12:06 am By Marisol Seibold

This article includes the disclaimer: “like every society [Gaza] is not immune to wife-beating.”

But there’s something it has that others don’t: chapter and verse in the Qur’an instructing men to beat women from whom they “fear disobedience”:

“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).

And yes, it really does say to strike them. Attempts at moral equivalence with the West are disingenuous; no comparable text exists in Christianity. Imagine how dismally different the West would be if, say, St. Paul had added, “and slap her if she gets out of line” in Colossians 3:19. He didn’t.

But the Qur’an did permit a man to strike his wife in Qur’an 4:34, and the fruits of that permission appeared quite early. Muhammad’s wife Aisha noted: “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women. Look! Her skin is greener than her clothes!” (Sahih Bukhari 7.72.715).

Similarly, Islamic tradition does not leave much room for the wife to refuse sex:

“If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relation] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning” (Sahih Bukhari 4.54.460).”

Just this past year, a woman hospitalized in Pakistan with severe injuries from marital rape said her family told her that was why she could not refuse her husband. And there is more, from Muhammad himself:

“By him in Whose Hand lies my life, a woman can not carry out the right of her Lord, till she carries out the right of her husband. And if he asks her to surrender herself [to him for sexual intercourse] she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle” (Ibn Majah 1854).

A shelter in Gaza — let alone one guarded by Hamas — is undoubtedly but the tip of the iceberg, as activists below suggest as well. But not to worry: this report also assures us that Hamas “enforces a conservative though not radical Muslim religious code.”

“Wife battering in Gaza spotlight,” from Reuters, July 25 (thanks to Twostellas):

Most safe-houses in the Gaza Strip are meant to provide protection for armed militants on Israel’s target list. Now Gaza is offering protected shelter to battered Palestinian women.

Its lone women’s safe-house, opened two months ago, has had eight clients, all guarded by police from the Islamist Hamas movement that runs the enclave and enforces a conservative though not radical Muslim religious code.

So-called ‘honour killings’ are rare but not unknown among religious Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, and like every society it is not immune to wife-beating.

“In 2010 there was no record of killing under the motive of family honor and this is a positive development,” said Huda Naeem, a Hamas lawmaker who backed the safe house as a way station for women at risk within their own families.

But feminism in Gaza is a very fragile plant.

Women in many Arab communities can be killed by zealous relatives on the slightest suspicion of having relations with a strange man. And jurists in Gaza say there is no clear clause in the Palestinian law setting out the penalty for such murders.

Islam also prohibits adultery and some Islamic teachings call for the stoning to death of offenders.

Sobheya Joma, a woman lawyer at the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), said there was no way to know for sure if honor killings were really eradicated.

“The ICHR is worried because it has recently noticed that some deaths were listed as unexplained or accidental,” Joma told Reuters in her Gaza city office.

“As long as there is no investigation into these cases and the real causes were not uncovered, you are still going to have doubts,” she said.

For Palestinian women, talking openly about sexual abuse in the family is still taboo. But if it’s accompanied by violence, some women can finally opt for the shelter of the safe house.

Of the eight cases of abused women now under the roof of the compound, some were minors. Other women have visited briefly and discreetly, seeking professional advice and support.

“The first case who came to us was a woman who had been subject to physical violence and was raped and then escaped from her home,” said resident psychiatrist Suhad Qanita.

“We supported her psychologically … and, thank God, eventually we were able to find her a husband.”

But there’s nothing you can’t try to pin on Israel:

Local human rights groups say it is the first such refuge in this Mediterranean coastal enclave. At one stage, women under risk were transferred to the other Palestinian Territory – the West Bank – where they could be kept safe from angry relatives.

But it is now virtually impossible for Gazans to get to the West Bank because of an Israeli blockade, which is vigorously imposed following repeated Hamas attacks on the Jewish state. […]

Qanita said she had been shocked at her new job when she came face to face with problems that were always hidden before.

“I hope this is not a widespread phenomenon, but to some extent it is worrying,” she said. “There are girls who are being assaulted with impunity.”

“We also try to educate families, and if a problem cannot be solved within the nuclear family we try to find an uncle or a relative ready to shelter the victim, but not in cases where a woman might be killed if returned to the family,” Qanita said….

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