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'Wife not housemaid': Muslim clerics challenge conservative views on spousal roles
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A 2017 report found that the main drivers of low female labor force participation in Indonesia were "marriage and children below two years of age in the household". (Shutterstock/-)
W
hile conservative Muslims in Indonesia believe that the main responsibility of a wife is to stay at home and be an adept homemaker, two clerics maintain that Islam has never positioned women as maids.
It is instead the obligation of the husband to provide food, clothes and decent housing for his wife, meaning he is the one who should cook, do the laundry and keep the house neat, according to the clerics who spoke about the teachings of Sunni Islam’s four largest mazhab (Islamic schools of thought): Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali.
"When I looked closer at Islamic jurisprudence books, I was surprised that none of the major mazhab actually obligated wives to take care of household duties," cleric Ahmad Sarwat said on Friday during a public discussion on his book titled Wife not Housemaid, which was first published last year.
The event came amid a plan by a group of conservative lawmakers to introduce a controversial family resilience bill that would prescribe rigid roles for husbands and wives and would require housekeeping to be a wife's duty.
Ahmad said that husbands should instead hire domestic helpers if they were unable to perform the duties themselves. "They can definitely ask their wives for help, but keep in mind that taking care of household chores is not the wives' responsibility."
The cleric, who regularly gave sermons to Indonesian diplomats in the Middle East, was inspired to write the book after seeing the reality in Saudi Arabia, the modern state that occupies the area where Islam is widely considered to have originated, where wives are not obliged to take care of household chores.
He said he saw that a majority of wives in Saudi Arabia spent their time treating themselves instead of doing housework. Their households hired domestic workers – a common practice in Saudi Arabia, which is a regular employer of Indonesian domestic workers.
