Discipline as a Means to Marital Reconciliation

To justify discipline by the husband, the wife's disobedience must not be trivial. More precisely, the disobedience worthy of discipline means the type of behavior on the part of the wife which is so disturbing for the husband that their living together becomes difficult. The disobedience cannot be ex nihilo. Jurists thus typically limit the wife's disobedience acknowledged in this passage to the following four categories:

1. She does not beautify herself for her husband when he desires that from her.

2. She disobeys her husband with respect to coming to his bed and she refuses torespond to his sexual needs.

3. She leaves the house without his permission or without any legal right to do so.

4. She does not perform her obligatory religious duties, such as failure to performher daily prayers, failing to fast Ramadan, or any other obligatory act of Islam.

b. Disobedience Limited to Sexual Matters

The jurists who limit the wife's disobedience to sexual matters only proclaim that any other form of disobedience does not justify her husband's discipline. Jurists use this narrow interpretation of disobedience to further avoid trivial complaints by the husband as a justification for discipline, making the wife's disobedience required more objective than the majority opinion.

Such jurists commonly categorize sexual disobedience as in regards to either sexual access or certain types of sexual misconduct outside of marriage.Sexual access refers to the Islamic right that a husband has to engage in conjugal relations with his wife. One hadith that establishes this right states, "If the man asks his wife to come to his bed and she declines, the angels will keep cursing her until the morning."

To deny the husband this right to sexual access constitutes sexual disobedience.
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I've been meaning to post this for a while, link was from a comment.
Perspective and cpontext.

Gerald


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