Hajiya had one wife-beating case early in her reign.
"I told him if he ever beat his wife again, I'd dissolve the marriage and put him in prison," she remembers. "Marriage is not a joke, and women are not slaves."
Since that case, she has made a point of campaigning against domestic violence whenever she holds court in local communities. She says she's never had another beating case. People know where she stands.
"Men sometimes say the women provoke them, so that is why they beat them," she says. "I tell them that there's no justification, whatever happens."
If a girl is miserable in an arranged marriage, the queen listens to her side of the story, even though she dislikes divorce.
"In such cases I try to strike a balance. I don't just end such marriages. I try to be tactful and see if there's any way this woman can come to love this man," she says. "But if that's not possible, if there's no way she can have any compassion for him or love, it's not her fault or his fault. It's just natural.
This passage reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend. We were discussing marriage and how (in her case in Islamic societies) marriage is more about an arrangement and "obligation" rather than some romanticized love relationship. Not that those marriages were/are without love, but that "love" as is understood in "the west" was not the centerpiece of the relationship.
Anyway, a decent read.
LA Times
