There’s a man who live with his wife in a quiet college town in Kentucky. This man graduated from Obafemi Awolowo University, and It was there also that he met his wife. He was brilliant, hence the scholarship to study abroad. He was also really active and known in MSSN circles. He was versed in jarh wá tadleel. He had a beautiful voice when reciting Qur’an.

One day his wife and her friends were chatting, laughing in the kitchen, and from the living room where he was sitting, he felt a tinge of jealousy. Unlike her wife who had met a few Nigerian women who were also studying in the university, he was a bit of a loner.

Later that night…

… He called his wife to sit, and began.

“Umm Abdullah, I don’t want you to hang with those friends of yours again.”

The wife shocked, asked in a soft, calming voice.

“You mean Aisha, Títí and Caroline?”

“Yes.”

That was how the tussle began. Wife asked for reasons, and the husband gave her a generic one: they might have negative influence on her. Considering two were Christians, and Aisha although uses pashmina hijab, was not on the same level as the wife, according to him.

The wife pleaded that those girls were her lifeline in the quiet town and that she would die of boredorm without them. Make Qur’an your companion, the husband replied.

The first week the wife tried her best to evade the friends, but she just couldn’t. She missed them and they themselves won’t let her off. One day the man came in and saw the friends having quality time. He kept quiet and deferred until later in the evening.

He was furious. ‘”You disobey my explicit command.”

She felt guilty and cried. She stopped talking to the friends and in matter of weeks depression began creeping in.

One day…

The wife’s brother with a background in psychology visited them, and after getting the details from his sister, confronted the husband.

“Bro, what you are doing to my sister is wrong.”

The man huffed and puffed and said, “No, there’s nothing wrong with what I have done. I have evidences from the Sunnah.”

Then he began quoting hadith, athar of the Salafs, and tafseer. He challenged the brother to bring his own evidences for claiming that he was wrong for forbidding his wife from certain people he deemed were negative influence.

The brother was perplexed. He knew what the man did to her sister was wrong, but according to whom? Here’s a man quoting hadith to back himself while he had nothing.

“I thought so.” The man declared, gloatingly. “I am following sunnah and protecting my wife.”

The wife was listening from the bedroom as her pain deepened. On her lap a copy of the Qur’an was opened to a page of Surah An-Nisa. There’s a line on that page that reads:… وَعَاشِرُوهُنَّ بِٱلۡمَعۡرُوفِۚ

And if that woman or her brother reflected on that line, that’s all they needed.

Bàbá òní Story says Salaam alaykum!