Thus Spoke a Couple: a Corpus-Based Content Analysis of Spousal Duties Fatwas

What is it about?

This paper collects a corpus of fatwa questions (150,000 fatwas from IslamWeb.com) specifically dedicated to questions on spousal duties and how people, rather than Fatwa dispensers, understand spousal roles. Rather than claiming the exclusivity of individual factors in producing social problems, the above method helps parse out the various factors that collectively culminate in the shaping of marital relations. The data showed that dereliction of duty is a mutual habit in marital relationships, and the reluctance to fulfill the rights is driven by different reasons, the most salient of which is the failure of either party to know the borderline between rights and duties. Another interesting finding is that problems sometimes arise from an overlap between two moral precepts and the inability of one party to give primacy to one of them at the expense of the other.

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