I told my daughters to retaliate if their husbands slap them – Emir Sanusi

The Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, revealed that he advises his daughters to retaliate if their husbands hit them.

He shared this advice during the National Dialogue Conference on Gender-Based Violence, where he highlighted that domestic violence and wife battery account for 45 percent of cases in nine Shari’a courts in Kano over the past five years.

Sanusi emphasized the importance of addressing gender-based violence from an Islamic perspective and promoting community collaboration to end such harmful practices.

According to Sanusi: “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 researched nine Shari’a courts in Kano. 41% of the cases over a five-year period had to do with maintenance. 26 per cent had to do with harm. And out of those, 45 per cent 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.

“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.”