GBV: I told My Daughters to Retaliate Whenever Their Husbands Slap Them — Emir Sanusi II
By Juliet Vincent
The Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, has disclosed that he told his daughters to retaliate whenever their husbands slaps them.
He made the remarks at the National Dialogue Conference on Gender-Based Violence, (GBV), from an Islamic perspective.
The conference themed: ‘Islamic teachings and community collaboration for ending Gender-Based Violence’ was organised by the Centre for Islamic Civilisation and Interfaith Dialogue, (CICID), Bayero University, Kano, (BUK), in collaboration with the Development Research and Projects Centre, (dRPC), with support from Ford Foundation.
He said 45 per cent of cases across Shari’a Courts of Kano in five years were related to wife-beating and domestic violence.
“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,” he said.
According to him: “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 did research on nine courts, nine Shari’a courts in Kano. About 51 percent of the cases over a five-year period had to do with maintenance. While 26 percent had to do with harm. And out of those, 45 percent were cases of wife beating, domestic violence, and when we go to the content analysis, not one case of wife beating was light beating.”
He lamented that there are women whose limbs were broken, whose teeth were knocked out and those constantly beaten with sticks.
“We had women where the husband and his other wives beat one of the wives. We’ve had cases of Khadis having to send her sons to trial for criminal assault because of the nature of the beating against their wives. This is the common beating that happens,” he explained.
“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,” Emir Sanusi II noted.
