Rabat – After heavily criticizing sexual assault in Muslim societies, including Morocco, blaming sexual frustration and lack of sex education, the scholar Mohamed Abdelwahab Rafiki has set his sights on “marital rape.”
The former Salafi public figure said the ongoing debate in Morocco about rape – following the shocking sexual assault of a girl by a group of teenagers in bus in Casablanca–should draw the Moroccan public’s attention to another kind of rape, which takes place in the marital bed.
The Moroccan scholar said in a Facebook post that society provides a “cover” for this kind of rape, with many giving it a religious “legitimization.”
“Our societies, with all their male authoritarianism and despotism, allow the man to do whatever he wants with the woman’s body whether she likes it or not, as if it is an animalistic operation,” he wrote.
He went on to say that this “culture” does not exist solely in “primitive male dominated societies,” but also in Muslim ones.
Worse still, Rafikicontinued, is when this culture is legitimized by religion and becomes a religious order that the woman must comply with, or be seen as disobeying both Godand his prophet.
He pointed to the Muslim scholars’ general opinions, based on some hadiths, that a woman who denies her husband sexual intercourse is cursed by the angels.
Rafiki suggested that when a woman pleasing one’s husband, whether she wants to or not, becomes a religious order, then it enforces the false idea that it is the man alone who has lust and that the woman is a mere recipient.
“On the other hand, if the woman has a desire, her husband has no responsibility to answer her want and does not sin if he refuses,” he said.
