Top American Islamic Cleric Threatens U.S. on Egyptian TV
The multilingual site, IslamQA.com is quite blunt about the four conditions under which a husband may beat his wife:
Discipline. The husband has the right to discipline his wife if she disobeys him in something good, not if she disobeys him in something sinful, because Allaah has enjoined disciplining women by forsaking them in bed and by hitting them, when they do not obey.
The Hanafis mentioned four situations in which a husband is permitted to discipline his wife by hitting her. These are: not adorning herself when he wants her to; not responding when he calls her to bed and she is taahirah (pure, i.e., not menstruating); not praying; and going out of the house without his permission.
Finally, when Muslim apologists sometimes say that Muhammad commanded that women not be harmed, they are actually basing this on what he said before or during battle, such as in Bukhari (59:447), when Muhammad orders that all the men of Quraiza be killed and the women and children be taken as slaves. (Having your husband murdered and being forced into sexual slavery apparently doesn’t qualify as “harm” under the Islamic model).
But, in fact, there are a number of cases in which Muhammad did have women killed in the most brutal fashion. One was Asma bint Marwan, a mother or five, who wrote a poem criticizing the Medinans for accepting Muhammad after he had ordered the murder of an elderly man. In this case, the prophet’s assassins literally pulled a sleeping infant from her breast and stabbed her to death.
After taking Mecca in 630, Muhammad also ordered the murder of a slave girl who had merely made up songs mocking him. The Hadith are rife as well with accounts of women planted in the ground on Muhammad’s command and pelted to death with stones for sexual immorality.
In summary, according to both the Qur’an and Hadith, a woman may indeed have physical harm done to her if the circumstances warrant, with one such allowance being in the case of disobedience. This certainly does not mean that all Muslim men beat their wives, only that Islam allows them.
Source: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Quran/003-wife-beating.htm
