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Issues & Doctrines / Violence against women

Issues & Doctrines

Violence against women

Quran 4:34 has been translated as authorizing a husband to strike a disobedient wife; classical inheritance and testimony rules assign women a lesser share and, in financial contracts, a lesser voice. Honor-based killings and FGM require careful sourcing: they are not unique to Islam, and official agencies do not always publish the totals often repeated about them.

A note on people and ideas. The critique on this site is directed at doctrines, legal rules, and published findings — not at Muslims as people, neighbors, or fellow citizens.

This page examines specific texts, legal rules, and empirical findings. It does not treat Muslim women as a class, and it does not claim that every Muslim man accepts or acts on the rules reviewed here. Where a figure is a survey or a public-health estimate, it is attributed to the agency that published it.

Quran 4:34 and competing translations

Surah al-Nisa 4:34 is the central proof-text in discussions of a husband’s authority over a wife, including physical discipline. The Arabic of the disputed clause is wa-dribuhunna (from the verb daraba). English translations do not agree.

The Quranic Arabic Corpus at the University of Leeds places several standard translations side by side. Sahih International reads, in the relevant steps: “But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance — [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them.” Pickthall has “admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.” Yusuf Ali has “admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly).” Mohsin Khan similarly adds “beat them (lightly, if it is useful).”

The Clear Quran, translated by Dr. Mustafa Khattab, which Quran.com uses as a default, renders the third step as “then discipline them gently.” The words “lightly” and “gently” are translator interpolations. They are not a separate phrase in the Arabic of the verse.

The tafsir excerpt carried on Quran.com for this verse, from Ibn Kathir, states that the man “is her maintainer, caretaker and leader who disciplines her if she deviates.” That is a classical reading of male authority, not a modern polemic.

A civic review can say this plainly: the most direct standard translations authorize a graduated process that ends in striking a wife. Softening glosses and reformist re-readings exist and are discussed in the box below. They are later interpretive moves, not a second sentence in the scripture.

Honor-based violence — what official sources do and do not count

“Honor-based” violence and killings are real crimes, often committed by relatives, in which the stated motive is to punish a woman (and sometimes a man) for conduct said to have shamed the family. They are not commanded by a Quranic verse in the way 4:34 is invoked for discipline, and they are not confined to Muslim communities. Treating them as a uniquely Islamic sacrament would be inaccurate. Treating them as a rare curiosity would also be inaccurate.

What we could not find, in the official sources we retrieved, is a current UNODC or UN Women standalone global total for “honor killings.” The figure of 5,000 honor killings a year is widely repeated; we did not retrieve a current UNODC or UN Women report that states that number, so we do not repeat it as a fact.

What those agencies do publish is a broader count. In Femicides in 2024: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides, UNODC and UN Women estimate that approximately 50,000 women and girls (a range of 44,400–55,500) were killed by an intimate partner or other family member in 2024 — about 60% of the roughly 83,000 women and girls killed intentionally that year, or an average of 137 a day. The brief mentions “honour killing” only in the methodology annex, as one of the national-law offence categories sometimes used when country-level intimate-partner or family-homicide data are missing. It does not break out a global honor-killing subtotal.

The honest conclusion is narrower than the rhetoric sometimes is: family-member killings of women are a large, officially estimated category; honor-based cases are part of that landscape in countries that define such offences; a precise global honor-killing total is not what these reports currently provide.

Female genital mutilation

FGM is a serious harm. It is also easy to mis-describe.

The World Health Organization fact sheet dated 31 January 2025 states that more than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia where it is practiced; that it is mostly carried out on girls between infancy and age 15; and that more than 4 million girls are estimated to be at risk each year. WHO is direct about religion: “Some people believe that the practice has religious support, although no religious scripts prescribe the practice. Religious leaders take varying positions with regard to FGM, with some contributing to its abandonment.”

UNFPA’s FAQ, updated 5 February 2026, also uses the 230 million estimate and adds that, in 2026, it estimates 4.5 million girls are at risk. On religion, UNFPA writes that FGM “is not endorsed by either Islam or Christianity,” that it is “often perceived as being connected to Islam, perhaps because it is practised among some Muslim groups,” but that “not all Islamic groups practise it, and many non-Islamic groups do, including some Christians, Ethiopian Jews and followers of certain traditional African religions.” In four of 14 countries with available data, UNFPA reports, more than half of girls and women believe it is a religious requirement.

In the United States, CDC researchers estimated in 2016 that as many as 513,000 U.S.-resident girls and women had undergone FGM/C or might be at risk — a threefold increase from a 1997 estimate, “largely due to the growing number of U.S. residents from countries where FGM/C is practiced.” CDC also reports that, among 1,132 women in the later Women’s Health Needs Study, 55% had experienced FGM/C and 91% believed the practice should be stopped. We looked for a distinct current Population Reference Bureau U.S. estimate and did not retrieve one in this pass; the 513,000 figure above is the CDC estimate.

The accurate civic statement is that FGM is a regional and cultural practice with a religious afterlife in some communities, including some Muslim communities, and that it is also practiced by some non-Muslim communities. It is not a Quranic ordinance, and it is not a habit of “Muslims” as such.

Testimony and inheritance in the texts

Two other Quranic rules have been treated, in classical law, as setting a durable inequality.

On inheritance, Quran 4:11 (as given on Quran.com in The Clear Quran) begins: “Allah commands you regarding your children: the share of the male will be twice that of the female.” That half-share rule, with its surrounding exceptions, is the basis of the classical fara’id law of inheritance.

On testimony, Quran 2:282, in the Sahih International rendering, instructs the community, in the context of a written debt contract: “And bring to witness two witnesses from among your men. And if there are not two men [available], then a man and two women from those whom you accept as witnesses — so that if one of the women errs, then the other can remind her.” Classical jurists extended, limited, or analogized that rule in different ways — including, in some schools, declining women’s testimony in certain criminal (hudud) cases — but the scriptural starting point is not equality of voice in that contract.

A liberal legal order can respect religious conscience in private life and still refuse to write these inequalities into public law.

Sources for this page