I told my daughters to retaliate if their husbands slap them – Emir Sanusi

The Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, has disclosed he encourages his daughters to retaliate whenever their husbands hit them.

Disclosing that domestic violence and wife battery form 45 percent of cases in nine Shari’a courts of Kano in the past five years, Sanusi said he usually tells his daughters this when they are getting married.

He made this known at the National Dialogue Conference on Gender-Based Violence, GBV, prevention from an Islamic perspective themed: ‘Islamic Teachings and Community Collaboration for Ending Gender-Based Violence.’

According to Sanusi: “You can take that verse and say that as a husband, I’ve been given this permission to beat my wife light. And nobody will deny that, nobody will say it is haram if you comply with all the rules. But if you live in a society in which those rules are never applied, nobody who is angry remembers to look for a chewing stick or a handkerchief.

“They just slap these women and punch them and kick them and beat them. I just wrote a doctorate thesis on family law, and I researched nine Shari’a courts in Kano. 41% of the cases over a five-year period had to do with maintenance. 26 per cent had to do with harm. And out of those, 45 per cent were cases of wife beating, or domestic violence. And when we go to the content analysis, not one case of wife beating was light beating.

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“It just does not make sense. Now I said it before, and I know I’ve been attacked for it, and I’ll continue saying it. When my daughters are getting married, I say to them, if your husband slaps you, and you come home and tell me my husband slapped me, without slapping him back first, I will slap you myself because I did not send my daughter to marry somebody so he can slap her. If you do not like her, send her back to me. But don’t beat her.”