Middle East: Cleric says women can beat husbands

CAIRO: Sunni Islam's highest authority has approved a woman's right to fight back if her husband uses violence against her, Egypt's Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper reported yesterday. The declaration by Sheikh Abdel Hamid Al-Atrash, who heads Al-Azhar University's committee for fatwas or religious rulings, comes after similar rulings by religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. "A wife has the legitimate right to hit her husband in order to defend herself," Atrash was quoted as saying. "Everyone has the right to defend themselves, whether they are a man or a woman... because all human beings are equal before God," he said.

Over the last few days, Saudi Sheikh Abdel Mohsen Al-Abyakan stressed the fact that a wife should resort to "the same kind of violence" as her husband used against her, whether it be with a leather strap or a wire cable, the paper said. Prominent Turkish Muslim preacher and writer Fethullah Gulen went one step further and ruled that a woman should return the violence with interest. "She should give back two blows for each one received," the paper quoted him as saying. Rights groups quoted by Amnesty International say that 35 percent of Egyptian women killed each year die as a result of domestic violence.

Separately, a human rights group in Egypt yesterday slammed police for snooping on couples accused of wife-swapping in the conservative nation and arresting them on prostitution charges. The main accused in the case, a 48-year-old civil servant and his teacher wife, 37, were detained last week for allegedly organizing wife-swapping parties and orgies via a website run by an Iraqi Kurd, local media reported.

The Cairo couple, who have children and used the pseudonyms Magdy and Samira on the website and in emails, could face up to three years in prison if convicted of facilitating prostitution. "The case raises serious concerns about due process and the privacy rights of those arrested, especially in light of press reports about police interception of defendants' electronic correspondence," Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights told AFP. "We're also of course worried that police seem to be still going after many people based on the intercepted emails of the two main defendants.

The couple confessed to having sexual relations with three other couples, although at least 44 couples signed up for Cairo swinging sessions via the website, and several other suspects -including a lawyer - were arrested. Magdy reportedly insisted that couples present a marriage contract before indulging in any activities, fearing that they might be using a temporary, or orfi, Islamic marriage certificate in the pursuit of pleasure.

I refused couples who had an orfi marriage because they're completely different. One of them could tear up the marriage contract and file a complaint with the authorities," Al-Masry Al-Youm quoted Magdy as saying during questioning. Magdy told prosecutors that he had convinced his wife of the idea of "a swinger lifestyle as a form of physical recreation between consenting married couples," the English-language Egyptian Gazette said.

Through the website, the couple chatted with married Egyptian contacts who were all up for wife swapping, but the man rejected most of them because they were either "not sexy enough" or "not funny", Al-Masry Al-Youm said. Bahgat criticized the 1961 law that could be used to prosecute the suspects as it defines certain sexual acts as prostitution even if no money changes hands. "The way (the law) has been interpreted for decades is based on the idea that for prostitution to take place... someone has to have sex with different people, without distinction, within three years," Bahgat said.

Magdy, who has been charged with inciting debauchery, prostitution and immoral advertising, reportedly said he was particularly excited when he saw a stranger with his wife, Al-Masry Al-Youm said. "The case raises privacy concerns, whether with regard to the interception of private correspondence and (telephone) conversations or prosecuting people for consensual sexual acts between adults," said Bahgat.

- AFP