Following the brutal murder of Aasiya Zubair, renewed attention has been paid to the position of Islam on domestic violence. In response, here is a sermon by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, recorded on February 20, 2009 in San Jose, California.
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is founder of the California-based Zaytuna Institute.
With all due respect to Shaykh Hamza, a large section of classical Islamic jurisprudence sanctions domestic violence. Unless somebody has the courage to come out with this fact and deal with it, I don’t expect the problems of domestic violence in the Islamic world to disappear.
Here is an example:
http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?id=612
Many people claim that Prophet Muhammad never hit any of his wives. This also appears to not be true, at least on one occasion:
http://salafiburnout.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/on-striking-a-wife/
Again, it’s great that Shaykh Hamza has adopted the revisionist translation here but one has to deal with the weight of history if one wants a culture to change.