The Right to Maintenance
- Indianapolis, IN
mid-1970s
Selected pages from a booklet written by Dr. Jamal Badawi and published by the Muslim Students Assocation of the US and Canada.
Notes: This booklet is a republication of a work by Badawi, “Status of Women in Islam,” first published as an article in al-Ittihad in the early 1970s. After publication as an official document of the MSA, the work became a broadly circulated pamphlet.
Maintenance or financial support and care by husbands of their wives — specifically, the lack thereof — is a consistent theme in my mother's relationships with her husbands, as it is with many Black women. The term “maintenance” is a translation/interpretation from the Qur'anic verse 4:34. While most of the interest in this verse in the Euro-American academy and popular imagination is on its ending, I find the emphasis among Black women is on its beginning. Growing up, we understood this verse to open with the phrase “men are the maintainers and protectors of women.” This became one of those “promises of patriarchy” that Ula Taylor, Carolyn Rouse, Jamillah Karim, Sylvia Chan-Malik, and others have written about that are attractive to Black women who have always been “the mules of the world” (Hurston) and impossible to attain for Black families that have always been exploited by white supremacist, imperialist, partiarchal capitalism (hooks).