Love #05 – Does Obedience to Husband Mean Tyranny?

salat wa salam ala Rasulillah Dear brothers and sisters are Salam aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato. So the first question that somebody that I think a sister submitted is, what's the meaning of obey your husband? She said, like, if your husband says, I can't eat apples anymore, is that what it means? Like, how literal are we talking here? Because I know people who treat their wives like slaves, she says, like they own them, and they have to do and listen to all these crazy things. Okay.

So the sister is asking about the meaning of obeying your husband, right?

So look, let's let's frame the answer, first of all, and say that, you know,

as the Quran points out, you know, marriage is built upon more what that and Rama, right, it's built upon

upon love and mercy, right. And that's the default kind of relationship that we should be having within a marriage. Okay. It's not really about,

you know, some kind of competition regarding rights and duties, you know, the rights and the duties, they're there. But the main modus operandi of a marriage cannot be

to people competing with each other with regards to rights and duties, right, that would not make for a harmonious marriage. And that just turns marriage into the opposite of Muhammad and Rama, right. So if we start with that, first of all, that marriage is built upon Mohammed and Rama. So obviously, when you're going into a marriage, husband and wife, you're going in, wanting to make it work, wanting to build a family

and wanting to care about the other person, right? It's not, it's not about like, bossing somebody around. Right? So if, as the sister is saying that, there are some brothers that, you know, seem to take

the this concept of obedience to

a kind of extreme, you know, then you'll see that those types of marriages don't don't really work. You know, there's always somebody extremely miserable in those sorts of marriages.

An in a normal marriage in a normal, well functioning Marriage Marriage, you don't you won't ever need to use or you will very rarely need to use words like obedience, you know, even though obedience. First of all, what does obedience mean? Right? Because in the English language, obedience, has like a bad negative connotation, right? It's like, especially in our current context, we,

we, we don't want to be

we don't like the idea of submission of BDS, even the word Islam submission, it's like, when people hear the meaning of it, they think, Well, you know, I want to be free, right? They think it's the opposite of freedom. But but that's not the case. You know, when it comes to obedience, it's basically about there being somebody who is the head of house, right? So just like in a company, or if you're going for travel, we're encouraged to have an Amir, aren't we right? We're encouraged to have somebody who's like the the person in charge. In a company, there's a CEO. And the CEO has the final say, the CEO, a good CEO is not a tyrant. A good CEO is somebody who consults

the people who work with him, right? Or her, like the good CEO would literally be consulting their team and take everybody's needs everybody's perspectives on board. But then, at the end of the day, the CEO needs to make the final decision because the CEO is the leader. Right? The buck stops with the CEO. So in that in that way, the husband is

the head of the house, he's responsible. So head of the house doesn't just mean somebody who

wields power, it also means somebody who has the highest responsibility. So, if the family is going astray, the buck stops with the husband actually, right? If the family is

their needs are not being met,

the husband is ultimately responsible. So, because Allah subhanaw taala, places a greater burden of responsibility upon the husband, right? The the responsibility to financially provide the responsibility to educate, to make sure that all of the the normal meet needs of his wife, as well as his children are met.

Therefore, Allah subhanaw taala also gave the husband

that level of

kind of authority right over the family. And so, you know, just as you would obey the Amir, or the CEO,

of an organization, you obey your husband in that sense, right? Now, obviously, the purpose of that wasn't the husband tells the wife, you know, that she can't eat apples and things like that. Okay. That's, that's like taking it to another level, right?

To be honest.

For example, a CEO who micromanagers his team usually ends up being hated by the by his team. And similarly, husband is going to be like that, right? He's, who wants to control and manage every single aspect of his wife's life is also going to not be very liked, right? Like, deep down, there'll be a lot of resentment. There'll be negativity. So obviously, it's, it shouldn't be like that. Right?

But the point is,

that if the husband, so when we're talking about this idea of power of obedience, if the husband asks the wife to do something, okay, and it's something permissible,

and it's not going to cause her any harm,

then she should do her best to do it. Okay. So, in Islam, there is the moral responsibility that the wife has to to obey the husband in as much as she can, as long as it doesn't harm her. And as long as it's something permissible, right, so not that he's asking her to do something harmful to her self or something that is haram.

Of course, then she does not have to obey Him, right. But when it comes to other than that, then she will get great reward if she complies. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said in the Hadith,

graded sahih if a woman praise her five prayers, false her month of Ramadan, God's her chastity and obeys her husband, she will enter Paradise from any gate she wishes. Okay. Famous Hadith. Either Salatin Mara to Hamza was Ahmed Shah, ha, were Hassan. Faraja, well thought but Allaha de Halutz min a Abwehr Bill Jannetty Shabbat.

Now,

that's very clear. So this is one of the means for, for a wife to actually

gain the pleasure of Allah.

That isn't it's not intended to encourage tyranny?

No, I think it's, the purpose of it is for there to be order. Right. And for just as I'm using the analogy of a company, just as any successful company needs a CEO, a successful family needs a CEO. Right. I hope that answers the question.

What did you

people who treat their wives like slaves, okay. Obviously, Islam doesn't encourage that. It discourages that, you know, the Prophet SAW, Selim said, the best of you are those who are the best to their wives, right for, for many sisters, it's about negotiation. Okay. It's not about, you know, black or white answers. It's a negotiation. So in any healthy marriage, you should negotiate with your husband. If your husband has a personality that's quite strict or rigid or, you know, human beings come with different personalities.

If you can negotiate with that type of personality, you know,

if it comes to a very extreme stage, have mediation, that kind of thing.

You know, have somebody come and mediate between you, or arbitrary between you, in other words, make a decision to help you fix things or make things better, or go forward with new, renewed intentions, etc.

All of those means are there at our disposal. So it's a really big question, actually. So I hope I've begun to answer it, right? The norm in a marriage should not be

obviously people being treated like slaves, right. But also, I would say to the sister, be careful, you know, be careful not to judge people's marriages, because, you know, sometimes you might be only seeing one side of it, or you might have only heard one side of it. Right, or sometimes a sister might be having a bad day, and she's complaining about her marriage, etc. That doesn't necessarily represent the whole of her marriage doesn't necessarily represent.

You know, the reality of her marriage even could just be a bad day. So be careful not to, because I'm assuming the person who asked the question is not married, and maybe seeing other sisters, and maybe assuming sometimes that they're being treated badly or something might be putting the sister off the idea of marriage. You know, the point is, marriage isn't like a transaction. You can't make it transactional. I mean, you know, if you if you reduce it to being transactional, then

you know, it's not gonna work. It's gonna be very difficult to make it work.