It’s not just about cooking

I saw this post on Facebook this morning from someone who calls himself “Shaikh JJ”, a Canadian living in Istanbul. I should add at this point that although we know what he looks like, he uses no other name which I think isn’t appropriate for a teacher of Islam unless there’s a good reason, maybe relating to his visa status somewhere. He does seem to have some real knowledge and isn’t some random ‘Abu’ type spouting off with unqualified advice anonymously on Twitter on the back of having completed a Deen Intensive type course. But please, tell us who you are.

The post ran:

A woman who doesn’t want to cook for her husband because ”it’s not obligatory” is like a man who doesn’t want to provide his wife with no more than one peice of clothing and one or two meals of plain porridge each day because anything beyond that “is not obligatory”.

Playing that “I’m not doing it because it’s not obligatory” is no healthy means for companionship.

I think this misses the point a little bit. I don’t think there are many women who just don’t want to cook at all. A lot of women enjoy cooking, much as do many men (the world’s big-name chefs are nearly all men, after all). Rather, women often talk of “cooking and cleaning”, referring to myriad house chores including a lot of dirty, tedious or unenjoyable jobs that come with running a house and bringing up children. These are the kinds of things a woman might not want to spend her entire married life doing, especially if the husband is doing a 9-5 job which isn’t especially physically taxing, or perhaps is tiring but also exciting and varied, which doing house chores all day is not. She might, in short, want some enjoyment out of life, rather than to be an unpaid domestic labourer who does not get to retire, even if her husband does.

So, refusing domestic labour altogether isn’t a good basis for companionship, I agree, but neither is expecting one’s wife to do round-the-clock housework, which is what some Muslim men (and even some women) on social media nowadays think is an Islamic norm or ideal.

Image source: Pexels.