Our society mistakenly perceives the state of being married with the idea of being ‘happily’ married. For us, the definition of happiness for a woman is all about being married, having children (particularly sons), and that is it. No one really cares about the lashes, slaps, beatings, abuses, and other forms of tortures that are covered under the cloth of ‘happiness’. But yes! It would be an obligation for everyone to opine about a woman’s character, and her inability to stay ‘happily’ married. According to John Milton, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” We blindly follow this principle to define the boundaries of our hells and heavens.
The biggest flaw in the upbringing of an average Pakistani girl is the teaching to tolerate, to allow the practice of domestic abuse, to condone and overlook her husband for whatever he does, to give him authority as the planner of her routine and likings, and to swallow all forms of ill-treatment for the sake of her children. The strategy used by the parents to make her accept the aforementioned as her fate and bear with this for her entire life is by telling her that she has nowhere to return, and that divorce would prove to be a stigma for her as is for every divorced lady in our society.
We are told that Islam permits husbands to beat their wives. We assume that this must have been mentioned in the Qur’an. We make an educated guess about the specific verse being in Surah An-Nisa (Chapter 4), as its name implies about it containing solutions to all major problems regarding women. But hardly has any one ever bothered to open this Noble Doctrine and look for this specific verse to understand its true meaning and context.
Let me tell all those who think that beating women is permitted in Islam, and who unfortunately constitute more than 99% of our population, that no such ‘license to scourge’ has been given to the ‘honourable’ men by the religion of peace. The verse quoted in this regard is 4:34 in which Allah Almighty has used three words – fa’izu, wahjaru, and wadribu – to describe the step-by-step strategy a man of belief should use to warn his wife, in case they have a disagreement. Fa’izu refers to the straight talk to make the situation clear to the wife and its implications in accordance with the teachings of Islam. The next step is to do hajara, i.e. to separate body from body by refraining from touching or sleeping with them. The last and final step, as prescribed in the Qur’an, is to do daraba, which is mistakenly translated as ‘to strike’ or ‘to beat’. It actually means to tap lightly on the arm and this view vindicated by several sayings of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) in which he has commanded the men of faith to provide their wives with food and clothes, and has prohibited from beating them (Sunan Abu-Dawud, 8:3468, 11:2138, 11:2139). Thus the main problem lies in the interpretation of the teachings of the Qur’an and not its words.
Using the above-mentioned verse, fabricating the context of interest, and using it to justify and promote domestic violence are nothing less than arrogance and ignorance. The first ever divorce in Islam was contemplated due to lack of alignment between the two, not because of Hazrat Zaid beating his wife. Above all, the dissonance in the wedlock still remains to be absolutely insignificant when it comes to determining the dynamics of a ‘happy’ marriage. But the problematic aspect of this society is the aim to ‘gharbasana’. What is basana? Why is it only the woman’s headache to stop the man from divorcing her? Why is this word ‘divorce’ a stigma only for the woman? Which act could be fallacious enough to allow a man to slap and molest his wife at his own discretion?
You want to lie? You want to beat your wife? You want to molest the mother of your children? That’s your call but don’t try to search for any verse in the Holy Qur’an which would justify these brutish and sadistic acts of yours because it is very much un-Islamic. And those who are declaring the Women’s Protection Bill as un-Islamic, despite having just skimming over the draft, should first look at the swollen eyes, purple cheeks, bleeding lips and burned bodies of our women and declare these reported incidents as un-Islamic, for a woman, too, is as equally a human as man is.