Arab societies are divided along economic, religious, tribal and gender lines. These classes exist within a great pyramid-like hierarchy that governs relationships within the society. This hierarchy determines a man’s relationship with his wife and children and also his relationship with his government. Since the family is the basic cell of society, it is virtually the only social tool through which a woman can acquire her rights as a citizen — not as an individual but as the member of a family who acts as a kind of intermediary between her and the government.

The arena for participation expands and contracts with the tyranny or egalitarianism of the paternal system. Since that system fluctuates between true religion and obsolete customs cloaked in religion and between knowledge and ignorance, the representation of women through an intermediary did not always reach the level it did within certain other societies and systems. As a result, women here lost their individuality and became attached to men, whose situation in fact wasn’t that much better than their own. By weakening women’s positions, men have become powerless without their ever realizing it.

Women’s independence and respect for their rights doesn’t mean separation from the family or from society or full equality with men. Independence isn’t about liberation from the principles of religion and humanity or rejection of the heritage in full. It is merely a cry for respecting women as human beings, as mothers, as wives, as daughters. It is a cry to guarantee their rights as prescribed by Islam and Shariah and not leave them at the whim of men or their personal interests.

Can it be right for a woman to marry a man, carry his name, bear his children and live with him for years — then for whatever reason, she finds herself trampled under his feet, kicked, beaten and humiliated? What kind of logic allows a man to divorce his heart from mercy and strike one who cannot strike back, giving no thought to the well-being of his loved ones as they see their father, their role model, abusing their mother?

Whatever the wife’s crime may be, religion has the best answer. Those whom it is impossible to live with, part from them on equitable terms — that is the solution. The Qur’an specifically says that a husband should behave with honor when divorcing his wife and give up certain rights in obedience to God and to please Him. But not to keep her and abuse her day after day until she turns into a statue carved by selfishness and hate, useful for nothing, neither for bringing up children or cohabiting with a husband. A woman’s heart breaks at the destruction of her home and displacement of her children. She is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, either patience and self-sacrifice while keeping her children or returning to her family, a divorced woman, without her children.

Courts usually take their time in deciding such issues and cannot financially compensate the children for the loss of family security. In most Arab countries, the Ministry of Justice is usually in charge of such cases — it seems odd that a judge who adjudicates commercial, real estate and other such cases also adjudicates family ones! It is imperative in some Arab countries to specify a single separate court for speedy judgments concerning the family, marriage, matters relating to alimony and custody of children. This court should allow the wife and mother to speak, just as it does the husband and father.

Children who have been brought up on a diet of tyranny come to find it palatable. They have neither pride nor sense of honor. An Ummah that produces children such as these is bringing up hopeless children who will not seek its glory.

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(Suraya Al-Shehry is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)