Muhammadu Sanusi II, the Emir of Kano, has called for an end to domestic violence and encouraged women to stand against abuse, even within their marriages.
Speaking at a National Dialogue Conference on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in Kano, the monarch revealed that he advised his daughters to retaliate if their husbands ever slapped them.
The conference, themed “Islamic Teachings and Community Collaboration for Ending Gender-Based Violence,” was organized by the Centre for Islamic Civilisation and Interfaith Dialogue (CICID) in collaboration with Bayero University Kano, the Development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC), and Ford Foundation.
Sanusi shared alarming statistics from his research, noting that 45% of cases recorded in nine Sharia courts in Kano over five years involved wife beating and domestic violence.
He explained that these incidents often involved severe physical harm, such as broken limbs, knocked-out teeth, and even repeated assaults by multiple perpetrators in some cases.
According to him, “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 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.
“We had women whose limbs were broken. We had women whose teeth were knocked out. We had women who were victims of constant beating 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.
“Beating your wife or beating your daughter or beating a woman is prohibited. It is a crime. Let’s not even talk about handkerchief or chewing stick. It is just haram. It is prohibited. Allah says, all haram must be removed. And beating, gender-based violence is harm. And it must be removed.
“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.
“And we must teach our daughters not to take it. And also teach our sons that it is not allowed. It is not acceptable. It cannot happen. We have to bring up our children to understand that violence against the body of another human being, whether it’s your brother, or your sister, or your son, or your daughter, or your wife, that violence against persons violates the basic dignity of a human being,” Sanusi II stated.
