Emir Sanusi advises daughters to retaliate if their husbands slap them

On Monday, December 9, the Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, shared his strong stance on domestic violence, revealing that he encourages his daughters to retaliate if their husbands slap them.

Speaking at the National Dialogue Conference on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) prevention, Sanusi addressed the issue of domestic violence, highlighting that it makes up 45 percent of cases in nine Shari’a courts in Kano over the past five years. The event, titled “Islamic Teachings and Community Collaboration for Ending Gender-Based Violence,” focused on tackling GBV from an Islamic perspective.

Sanusi explained his position by discussing the interpretation of certain Islamic teachings. He said, “You can take that verse and say that as a husband, I’ve been given this permission to beat my wife lightly. 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 went on to share alarming statistics from his research, saying, “41% of the cases over a five-year period had to do with maintenance. 26 percent had to do with harm. And out of those, 45 percent 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.”

Sanusi also explained that he has shared this message with his daughters when they were about to marry: “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.”