A Muslim spiritual leader who wrote a book telling Muslim men how to beat their wives was sentenced to 15 months in prison for encouraging violence against women, a court in Barcelona announced Wednesday.
In his 120-page book, "Women in Islam," Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, imam of the southern Spanish town of Fuengirola, urged husbands not to hit their wives on sensitive parts of the body or with force but, rather, "on hands and feet, using a light rod so that the blows don't leave scars or bruises," according to the sentencing document, dated Monday and released Wednesday.
Mr. Mustafa's lawyer argued that the book, distributed in Islamic bookstores in Barcelona, merely rehashed versions of Islamic writings from the 13th to 19th centuries and did not represent the imam's personal views. "Freedom of expression wasn't the right argument, it was freedom of religion that had to be protected," said the lawyer, José Luis Bravo García.
In the decision, however, Judge Juan Pedro Yllanes stated that the book was "infused with a tone of obsolete machismo," and that it violated the constitutional "principle of equality" and promoted "intolerable" discrimination against women, outweighing the guarantee of religious freedom. The passages on wife-beating, he said, are "incompatible with the reigning social mores, even if we must remember that the treatment of women in this country was very similar in a not too distant past."
It is the first verdict in Spain that recognizes "incitement to violence on the basis of gender" as a crime, according to a prominent feminist lawyer, María José Varela, who represented the three Spanish women's rights federations that filed the lawsuit over the book in July 2000.
"We showed that Islam had evolved, and that the imam can't shield himself behind religious texts from medieval times," she said, noting that Spanish Muslim women testified at the trial about the evolution of women's rights in contemporary Islam.
The verdict comes as Spain's European neighbors struggle to find a balance between freedom of religion and women's rights in a secular society. But while a French law to ban head scarves and other overt religious symbols in public schools set off protests, several representatives of Spain's diverse Muslim community supported the verdict issued Wednesday.
"We respect the sentence," said Mohamed Halhoul, director of the Islamic Council of Catalonia. "In Islam, there does not exist any type of call for aggression, either towards men or women."
Jadicha Candela, president of an association of Muslim women, hailed the ruling. "With all the confusion about what Islam stands for in Spain, we were afraid that it would be accused of protecting such conduct."
Mr. Mustafa's lawyer said he would appeal the decision, saying the case had been distorted by "media pressure" regarding domestic violence.