Re: Would you obey your hubby?
Wa Alaykum Assalaam,
In the first article I referred you to, by Dr. Ahmad Shafaat, it explains the meaning of the word Qanitat:
Qanit means one who is devoted to someone and out of love and devotion obeys him or her. Outside of the present verse the word in its various forms, occurs seven times and is used of both men and women. In six out of these seven places, the object of devotion and obedience is understood to be God, in one place it is God and His Messenger. For this reason qanitat may simply mean "devoted to God". In view of the context, the idea of devotion and obedience to the husband may also be read into the word.
Since men are qawwamun over their wives, they must have some authority to make decisions, for a person cannot be an effective guardian or maintainer of someone without having some decision making authority. And whenever there is legitimate decision-making authority on one side, there is some necessity of obedience from the other. In Hadith there are many traditions which encourage women to be obedient to their husbands. Some of these traditions are no doubt forged, being attempts by later Muslims to subjugate their women(1), but others look authentic(2). Thus the Qur'an and Hadith do teach that women should obey their husbands. But this "should" is not a "should" of moral or religious obligation. The Qur'an and authentic ahadith do not command women to be obedient to their husbands, so that it is not a sin on their part if they sometime do not listen to their husbands. The Qur'an and Hadith consider obedience to the husband as simply a desirable quality of the wife. Read more
And the tafseer of Ibn Katheer told us that some of the companions of the Prophet :arabic5: , including Ibn 'Abbaas; who had far better understanding of the Qur'an than any of us, understood the word in question to be referring to husbands.
This, however, as pointed out above, does not mean you worship them and obey them in wrongdoing. It is similar to the example of being dutiful to parents. Allaah says in the Qur'an:
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29.8]
And We have enjoined on man goodness to his parents, and if they contend with you that you should associate (others) with Me, of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them, to Me is your return, so I will inform you of what you did.
So even with parents, to whom obedience has been highly emphasised and commended in Islam; if they order us to disobey Allaah, then we are not to obey them in this regard, while still being respectful and kind to them. From this, we can understand that obeying someone is not the same as worshipping them, may Allaah protect us from that.
So while the word Qanit in the Qur'an has been used to refer to Allaah, this does not mean that it always refers to Allaah and therefore I don't quite see how it is "clear" evidence for what you say. However, I certainly don't think it is impossible for it to refer to Allaah, since that may be the opinion of others - Allaahu A'lam.
The Hadith play a major role in the division of Islam into sects and corruption of Islam using patriarchal fabrication.
In actual fact, the hadeeth play a major role in teaching us our religion and explaining the Qur'an to us. However, we need to be careful to follow the authentic hadeeth and not weak or fabricated reports, as this will undoubtedly lead to error. I hope you had a look at the links in my other post where I pointed out some relevant articles on this forum about the importance and status of the hadeeth.
