The Idea of “Violence Against the Husband” Has a Western Basis and Is a Product of Sexual Fluidity Theory

Note: Violence against the wife has for many years been a subject of discussion within jurisprudential and legal literature on women, and concepts such as marital rape and the classification of various forms of violence against women have emerged from this discourse. In contrast, however, another form of violence—termed violence against the husband—can also be conceived of, though it has received far less attention within jurisprudential and legal literature. We raised this subject with Dr. Nahid Salimi, a faculty member of the Women and Family Research Institute. This author and women’s studies scholar holds the view that violence against the husband has indeed been examined within our jurisprudential literature, but that the coinage of this particular term has been undertaken by societies that sanction homosexuality and sexual relations between two men. The detailed exclusive interview conducted by Contemporary Fiqh with this faculty member of the Women and Family Research Institute follows below:

Contemporary Jurisprudence: Can violence within marital relationships occur solely against the wife, or can violence by the wife against the husband also be conceived of?

Salimi: Violence, in its lexical and functional meaning, denotes a form of harsh and coarse action and conduct as opposed to gentle behavior and conciliation—a concept whose instances and meanings vary across different environments and cultures, depending on the surrounding cultural context. Within Islamic jurisprudence as well, two types of violence are considered: positive and negative. In its positive sense, violence signifies intensity of action and a refusal to compromise with the enemy or with lawbreakers; in its negative sense, it signifies the transgression by a Muslim against the rights of others and against the law. Among the notable aspects of Islamic jurisprudence in regulating spousal relations is the discussion of nushuz (marital disobedience/discord) and the wife’s nushuz, which is addressed as an instance of transgression against the husband’s rights and can likewise be framed within the meaning of violence against the husband. Correspondingly, given that the treatment of the wife’s nushuz has been considerably more precise and extensive within fiqh, it might even be said that the treatment of violence against the husband, and the prohibition thereof, has occupied a particularly prominent place within Islamic culture and jurisprudence. This prohibition has also been explicitly conveyed in the hadith tradition, wherein transgression against the husband’s rights by the wife has been prohibited. The Holy Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) states in this regard: “Any woman who causes her husband distress—God will not accept her prayers or her good deeds, even if she fasts throughout her entire life, performs the prayer, frees numerous slaves, and spends abundant wealth in the way of God—unless she obtains her husband’s satisfaction. And if she departs from this world without her husband’s satisfaction, she will be the first to enter Hellfire.”

Contemporary Jurisprudence: Can instances such as coldness in sexual relations, the wife’s use of vulgar language during intercourse, and compelling the husband to engage in certain acts during intercourse be regarded as instances of sexual violence against the husband? What is the jurisprudential ruling on this matter?

Salimi: If we consider the instances of violence discussed thus far within the broad and general framework outlined at the beginning of our discussion, we will find that many forms of unconventional and excessive or deficient conduct by the wife toward the husband—conduct that has been extended from fiqh into law—correspond, within the marital relationship, to that very meaning of negative violence, that is, violence that exceeds the bounds of law. Coldness in sexual relations itself, absent any legitimate impediment, has been the subject of considerable jurisprudential prohibition and constitutes an instance of precisely that deficiency (tafrit) which results in the forfeiture of the husband’s right.

Therefore, within the Islamic approach, although specific rights and obligations between spouses toward one another arise automatically upon marriage—with both spouses obligated to fulfill their duties and to maintain good companionship with one another—what has received greater treatment in the behavioral and non-economic dimension has been the husband’s rights over the wife, and the wife’s obligations, through the expansion of the conceptual and referential scope of tamkin (marital compliance) and nushuz (marital discord). Accordingly, if the wife falls short in fulfilling her obligations and is indifferent toward her husband, she is deemed, in fiqh and law, to have committed nushuz and to have caused distress to her husband. This distress, within the specific dimension of tamkin, encompasses anything that affects the husband’s sexual enjoyment of his wife. Thus, each of the matters mentioned—such as insulting the husband or insisting on a particular form of sexual gratification that results in the husband’s dissatisfaction and lack of pleasure in the sexual act—is, in a certain sense, considered an instance of the wife’s nushuz and the husband’s distress.

Contemporary Jurisprudence: Can humiliating the husband, comparing him to other men, threatening him with divorce, and being aggressive, harsh, or abusive toward him be regarded as instances of verbal violence against the husband? What is the jurisprudential ruling on this matter?

Salimi: Shahid al-Awwal considers ill-temperedness toward the husband to be a precursor to nushuz, and Shahid al-Thani likewise regards harsh speech as a form of verbal violence and one of the precursors to nushuz—that is, a shift in manner of speech from gentleness and calm to harshness and violence, which applies to both women and men alike. However, what has developed within customary legal and moral norms has, in practice, been directed toward women and toward women’s behavioral characteristics; in fact, the husband’s nushuz and mistreatment have been confined solely to failure to pay maintenance (nafaqah) to the wife and failure to observe obligatory cohabitation over a specified and extended period—matters treated with considerably less detail than those concerning women.

Contemporary Jurisprudence: Given that instances of violence against men (both physical and verbal) perpetrated by women are not insignificant, why is violence within marital relationships interpreted solely as violence by men against women?

Salimi: What has been discussed in the preceding remarks, together with Islam’s general approach to the family, confines the position and concept of violence against men within the family discussion to two axes:

First, within Islamic rationality, the regulation of relationships in society—particularly within the family—beyond the rights and obligations addressed in fiqh and law, is treated predominantly as a moral matter, governed principally by conscience. Islam has, in essence, had no inclination toward the inflation of legislation and the judicialization of the family, and it accords priority to the collective interests of the family—grounded in self-sacrifice and forbearance—over an excessive emphasis on individual rights and pure legal individualism.

Second, what pertains to the husband’s rights, and the wife’s obligation to observe them, has been addressed in considerable detail and at great length within fiqh and Islamic law, such that there is perhaps scarcely any negative behavioral instance on the part of women within the marital relationship that cannot be accommodated within the semantic and operative framework of the wife’s nushuz and the husband’s mistreatment. Therefore, the treatment of the concept of violence against men within the marital relationship, in the Islamic approach and in fiqh, is not a new innovation or a recently emerged and hitherto neglected matter, in the way it has been with respect to women. At the same time, while violence and transgression against women’s rights are observable as a pervasive phenomenon within the field of social transformation, instances of violence against men, for the very same reasons rooted in natural, legal, sexual, and gender-based characteristics, have not been a pervasive phenomenon and have not acquired this pervasive character throughout history.

It may well be that the expansion of this concept, like many other social and legal concepts pertaining to the family, given the unavoidable dimensions of globalization, is a function of developments in international literature and policy on this subject. It should be noted that Western literature in the domain of the family, and the newly emerging deviations it has introduced into the structure and nature of the family and family forms, has caused the family to become emptied of its foundational concept as a fundamental, interconnected community with intertwined interests, and the predominance of individualism over family-centered collectivism has increasingly foregrounded individual domains and individual rights. Within this context, the primary addressees of the legal and legislative system are, first and foremost, individuals whose interests, relative to one another, must be continuously safeguarded in line with contemporary developments—rather than the family itself, for the preservation of which individuals would be engaged, in a secondary capacity, in resolving the matter at hand.

A review of international literature suggests that the creation of the idea of violence against men has a Western basis, arising as an unavoidable corollary of new family forms, the pervasiveness of gender theory, and propositions stemming from the sexual revolution—such as sexual and gender fluidity. On this basis, close examination of reports and research also shows that violence against men, or domestic violence against men perpetrated by a spouse, is more prevalent in families with a same-sex partner or spouse than in heterosexual families, and that men remain more frequently subjected to violence at the hands of other men than at the hands of women. Within these documents, the man’s sexual orientation, and the humiliation and attacks directed at this orientation by his sexual partner or spouse, constitute one of the most recurrent concepts within the conceptual network of violence against men. For this reason, even within the Western model of engaging with family structure and content—where violence and the expansion of the judicialization of family relationships are occurring with considerable intensity—the proportion of women’s involvement in domestic violence is not comparable to its prevalence with respect to men. To the extent that statistics show approximately one in every four women, from the age of fifteen onward, experiences violence at the hands of an intimate partner or spouse, as compared to one in thirteen men.

Therefore, within religious and jurisprudential literature, sufficient discussion has been devoted to the bounds and meaning of tamkin and nushuz—which disrupt tranquility within the family—as one dimension of excess and deficiency possessing legal aspects, and the addition of newer dimensions to this literature, or the intensification thereof, would require particular underlying causes that we, within Iranian and Islamic culture, have in certain respects not encountered.

Contemporary Jurisprudence: What forms of protection have been provided, within Islamic jurisprudence and law, for a man who has become the victim of violence at the hands of his wife?

Salimi: It would appear that Islam has not favored maximal intervention within the family and within the individual domains of family members, so that matters may instead be resolved through the family’s own moral mechanisms. Accordingly, the Islamic state reserves for itself only the right to exercise authority in instances of violence characterized as the wife becoming nashizah (disobedient/discordant) and in cases of excessive or deficient conduct resulting in mistreatment, while it does not possess the right to intervene in matters considered mere precursors to violence. In other words, this constitutes a point of divergence between Islamic and Western thought, since the latter, for the reasons already discussed, believes—and indeed requires—legal intervention across the full range of conduct regarded as violence within the modern world.

Given these considerations, upon reviewing Islamic fiqh, law, and legislation, it becomes evident that greater weight has been accorded to the protection of the husband’s rights against the wife’s transgression, and that the mechanism of nushuz has identified numerous instances of the wife’s excessive or deficient conduct toward the husband. What is said with respect to violence against men and its instances is, for the most part, capable of being pursued within this framework.

What is generally applicable and mutual is set forth in Article 1103 of the Civil Code as follows: “Husband and wife are obligated to maintain good companionship (husn al-mu’asharat) with one another.” The good companionship addressed in this article generally encompasses: forgiving one another’s faults, mutual respect and good temperament toward one another, refraining from speaking ill of or disclosing one another’s faults to others, fulfilling the right to sexual enjoyment, and cooperating and consulting with one another in matters of life. Likewise, matters concerning insult and disrespect toward one another within social and family relationships are addressed in a gender-neutral manner and are actionable as such. Accordingly, Article 608 of the Islamic Penal Code, among the ta’zir offenses (offenses of “violation of personal dignity” for which the Shari’a has not fixed a specific punishment), classifies this as a private right (haqq al-nas) subject to punishment under law. In this article, the legislator has clearly stated that abusive language and the use of vulgar terms constitute insult, and any other conduct falling within this scope is likewise regarded as violence. This article stipulates that insulting individuals—such as through abusive language and vulgar terms—where it does not meet the threshold of the hadd punishment for qadhf (falsely accusing another of fornication or sodomy), shall be punished by up to 74 lashes or a fine ranging from fifty thousand to one million rials. At the same time, where the insult includes improper terms or accusations (of fornication or sodomy), and the perpetrator is unable to prove their truth before the court, the offender shall, pursuant to Article 250 of the Islamic Penal Code, be sentenced to 80 lashes.

However, with respect to the husband’s rights and their observance by the wife, the legislator, through the conceptual expansion of nushuz and tamkin within the law, has also established enforcement mechanisms addressing the wife’s mistreating conduct. These mechanisms are addressed within the dual framework of tamkin (general and specific) and nushuz.

The direct enforcement mechanism for the wife’s failure to fulfill tamkin, within fiqh and Islamic law, is the forfeiture of the wife’s right to maintenance (nafaqah)—a matter upon which Shia and Sunni jurists are in agreement. This ruling is explicitly set forth in legislation under Article 1108 of the Civil Code, such that the consequence of the wife’s misconduct is her forfeiture of maintenance. If the wife fails to reside in the dwelling provided by the husband, leaves the home without his permission or consent, maintains improper friendships or relationships, or fails to sexually satisfy her husband, she shall be deemed nashizah (disobedient). Indeed, under Article 1117 of the Civil Code, the husband may even prohibit his wife from pursuing an occupation that conflicts with the family’s welfare.