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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A husband's prerogative
By Fayza Hassan
Samah was still married to Samir when I met her years ago. She was trying to get a divorce but every time she left the marital home to escape her husband's violence, he found ways to lure her back. He used the children as bait. He would never let her see them again if she insisted on separation. If she changed her mind about the divorce, he would stop drinking and would never beat her again -- he promised. Samah's father took the repeated beatings lightly. A husband has to chastise his wife and he was the first to admit that his daughter was too high-spirited. One day, however, Samah called him in the middle of the night. She never told anyone what happened on that occasion, but she and her father were taken away in an ambulance and remained hospitalised for a number of days.
After this incident, Samir finally consented to the divorce on the condition that Samah would leave him the children and renounce all her rights, which she promptly did. I could never understand how Samah, a loving mother, had accepted to give up her young children. "He would have killed me," she would say briefly to those who asked her; "what good would that have served?" Actually, Samir, a violent man and a hopeless drunk, was a very good father to his daughters and spared no effort providing them with the best education.
Samah eventually remarried and I lost track of her, but a couple of years ago I heard that Noura, her older child, had married the son of a prominent personality. The wedding had been straight out of A Thousand and One Nights, surpassing anything seen before. People spoke of its magnificence for weeks after the event. Nothing much was known about the groom, except that his father was very rich. Pretty Noura was certainly going to be pampered like a princess. I was therefore in absolute shock when I was told recently that the young woman had been beaten to death by her husband.
The story came out in trickles. Noura had told her father on that fatal day that she was pregnant. Overjoyed, Samir had given her a hefty check "to buy whatever she needed for the new baby." Upon hearing of the check, Noura's husband Ashraf had demanded that she endorse it to him at once. He needed money badly, he had told her.
Noura had stubbornly refused to surrender her father's present, whereupon the beating had started. It was not the first time that the young man had hit her. Actually, he did it quite frequently, whenever under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When she complained to her father, Samir had admonished her to be patient. Wife beating was not uncommon; it was a husband's recognised prerogative. After all, he had joked, didn't she remember how he used to chastise her mother? Had Samah shown more tolerance, he would have probably stopped and they would still be happily married today. Samah, however, had not been sensitive to his moods. Did Noura give her husband all the attention he expected? Did she obey his orders without discussing them? Had she not inherited from her mother the habit of nagging?
Samir had added that he had chosen the best for her. Noura's husband was an educated young man, from a respectable family. Such good men were hard to come by these days. Noura should consider herself lucky, with a father-in-law commanding such an important position; it would be better if she did not discuss her private affairs with her mother, who was capable of intervening quite inappropriately. In a few years, Noura would smile at her husband's past antics.
The beating continued that day. By evening, Noura's arm was broken and she lay in a pool of blood with severe internal injuries. She kept asking for her mother, but every time she begged Ashraf to call her, he hit her some more. When he finally sobered up, Noura had stopped moving. Panicking suddenly, he called his father, who advised him to pack immediately and leave for Alexandria. Hours later, Noura's father received a phone call advising him that his daughter was very ill. When he arrived at her apartment, he had to break the door down. He got there too late. In time, he would begin to wonder: was it a matter of hours, or of years?
