Mick Hartley

…according to an Australian cleric (via):

A Melbourne Islamic cleric has told his male followers they can force their wives to have sex and hit them if they are disobedient.

Coburg's self-styled cleric Samir Abu Hamza said despite Australian rape laws it was impossible for a man to rape his wife even if she refused to have sex with him, the Herald Sun reports.

In a recorded lecture entitled "The Keys to a Successful Marriage", delivered to his male worshippers but now broadcast on the internet and viewed by several thousand people, Mr Hamza said Islamic law allowed men to hit their wives as a last resort, but they were not to make them bleed or become bruised.

He said under Islamic law, as described in a koranic verse, it was a man's right to demand sex from his wife whenever he felt like it.

"If the husband was to ask her for a sexual relationship and she is preparing the bread on the stove she must leave it and come and respond to her husband, she must respond," Mr Hamza told his male followers on the video sermon.

He then mocked Australia's criminal laws, which required consent for sex to be lawful.

"In this country if the husband wants to sleep with his wife and she does not want to and she hasn't got a sickness or whatever, there is nothing wrong with her she just does not feel like it, and he ends up sleeping with her by force … it is known to be as rape," Mr Hamza said.

"Amazing, how can a person rape his wife?"  […]

Mr Hamza runs the Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia on Sydney Rd, Coburg, which offers spiritual advice, prayer facilities and boxing, karate and gym classes for Muslims.

Since the original article hit the news and drew criticism from PM Kevin Rudd (Mr Hamza's comments had "no place in modern Australia") the story - same url - has been amended, so you'll no longer find the words quoted above. Anyway, it turns out that, just like the recent case of the Australian imam who compared scantily-clad women to uncovered meat, the remarks were "taken out of context".

The President of the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) Ramzi Elsayed said he had spoken with Mr Hamza about the lecture, titled The Keys to a Successful Marriage.

"He told me he was speaking in a metaphorical sense,'' Mr Elsayed said.

More in the same vein here, And here. And here.