A life of being a sex slave and a punching bag is leading an increasing number of women in Yemen to lash out.
“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. If they then obey you, look not for any way against them; God is All-high, All-great.” (Qur’an 4:34)
The Qur’an commentary Ruhul Ma”ani 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.” Also, Muhammad’s example is normative for Muslims, since he is an “excellent example of conduct” (Qur’an 33:21) — and 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?” (Sahih Muslim 2127)
Wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction. Amnesty International reports that “according to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, over 90% of married women report being kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, or when the women had “˜failed” to bear a child or had given birth to a girl instead of a boy.”
Aisha herself said it: “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women.” (Sahih Bukhari 7.72.715)
–˜Husband killings” become crime phenomenon in Yemen,” by Abdul Aziz al-Hyajem for al-Arabiya, January 8 (thanks to Pedro):
About 50 Yemeni women were arrested in 2012 for murder, most were accused of deliberately killing their husbands, Yemen’s interior ministry announced this week.
According to a report released by the ministry”s Information Security Centre, the Yemeni women were between the ages of 25-50 and most had committed the crimes with the help of male relatives.
Inequality, domestic violence and “emotional motives” were just some reasons behind such crimes, said the report, adding that the killings took place in Mahweet, Taiz, Hajjah, Sana’a, Amran and Marib.
However, the ministry said that the number of women who were victims of attempted murder was nearly double the number of women involved in killings.
Dr. Mujib Abdul Bari, a specialist in psychiatric and neurological disorders, told AlArabiya.net that constant physical and psychological abuse drastically changes a person.
Daily abuse makes a woman feel despair at her seeminlgy [sic] hopeless situation, said Bari, adding that women in such situations “forget their femininity and resort to killing their spouse.”
He said that the most notable crime in Yemen took place on August 7, 2012 in a village in the province of Marib, in which a 40-year-old woman killed her husband and two sons following a family dispute….