An Explanation of the Sexual Rights of the Husband and Wife in the Context of Jurisprudential and Legal Texts

Sexual rights are among the legitimate rights of the husband and wife, and Islamic jurisprudence has devised considerable measures to fulfill their observance, their maximum and desirable enjoyment and the maintenance of the boundaries of the husband and wife. In order to strengthen the foundation of the family, the holy Shariah does not allow the husband or wife to violate any of these duties and guarantees the fulfilment of their rights by legislating criminal and non-criminal rulings and giving moral advice. Among these cases, we can refer to the attention that Shiite jurisprudence has paid to the husband’s violation of marital duties, which, of course, is not reflected in the law of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thus, not only in the Civil Code, but also in the Family Protection Law of 2011, there is no executive guarantee of the husband’s violation of marital duties, and basically no mention has been made of the husband’s violation of marital duties in the relevant laws. Thus, the lack of attention of the law to women's sexual rights, on the one hand, has led to the maximization of men's sexual rights, and on the other hand, has led to the negligence or minimization of women's sexual rights in common culture. Failure to grant sexual rights to women, as well as considering all women equal in this regard, will be problematic in other cases, such as the right to sleeping with the husband and the right to copulation. Analyzing the content of jurisprudential and legal texts through classification, coding and thematization processes, this study explains that although, in jurisprudential texts, nushuz (violation of marital duties) has been defined for both sexes and its characteristics have been introduced, it briefly refers only to women in legal texts; and although woman's sexual needs can be easily proved based on legal material or jurisprudential evidence, there is no executive guarantee of meeting these needs which can only be satisfied by the husband.