“As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.”
The husband routinely beat his 26-year-old German-born wife, mother of their two young children, and threatened to kill her when the court ordered him to move out of their apartment in Hamburg. The police were called repeatedly to intervene. The wife wanted a quick divorce—without waiting a year after separation, as mandated by German law—arguing that that the abuse and death threats she suffered easily fulfilled the “hardship” criteria required for an accelerated decree absolute. The judge—a woman by the name of Christa Datz-Winter—refused, however, arguing that the Kuran allows the husband to beat his wife and that the couple’s Moroccan origin must be taken into account in the case.
They both come from a cultural milieu, Her Honor wrote, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives—and the Kuran sanctions such treatment. “The [husband’s exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565” of German federal law, the judge’s letter said. [emphasis added The judge further suggested that the wife’s Western lifestyle would give her husband grounds to claim his honor had been compromised.The reports in German and English do not state this, but Turkish papers have reported that the judge made specific reference to Sura 4, which contains the infamous Verse 34:
“Men have the authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.”
The wife’s lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk, could not believe her eyes: a German judge was invoking Kuran in a German legal case to assert the husband’s “right to castigate” his wife. The meaning was clear: “the husband can beat his wife,” Becker-Rojczyk commented. She decided to go public with the case last Tuesday because the judge was still on the bench, two months after the controversial verdict was handed down. The judge was subsequently removed from the case, but not from the bench.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/Islam/Europe_Shariatized_.html?seemore=y