Salaam all,
Don't know if this has been posted here before, but there's a brilliant 3-part youtube series on 4:34 by 'The Impactful Scholar', aka Javad Hashmi.
Link to first video here.
In general I really like his videos, and he has plenty of hadith-sceptic ones as well.
Regarding 4:34, he buries the lead a bit until the 3rd video. The video is based on an academic essay published by Saqib Hussein, entitled
'The bitter lot of the rebellious wife'.The long and short of it is that he relates verse 4:34 to 4:16 and 24:2. The latter verse instructs the community to lash those guilty of infidelity with 100 lashes. He then argues, quite successfully in my opinion, that the instruction to 'beat the wife' is actually a reference to the community to mete out the lashes if the wife is found guilty of infidelity. The author stresses that the punishment for infidelity are the same for both men and women, but the actions leading up to nushooz are different, and it is more important for the man to forsake the wife in the bedroom due to issues of paternity.
Overall, haven't seen this theory before and i thought it was surprisingly clear and convincing.
