When it comes to experiences of violence, Muslim women are one of the most analysed and debated groups in the Australian public space. Their suffering is the location from which xenophobic vitriol directed against Muslims becomes respectable public comment.

This week, “Women of Hizb ut-Tahrir” released a video appearing to support the use of violence by men against women in marriage. Once again, this has drawn the usual outrage and elevated the group’s view to be representative of Muslim communities generally. And with this comes the cruel demand that Muslim community leaders rush into the public space to prove that Islam and Muslims do not condone violence against women – this dynamic is one by which Muslims must prove that they have a right to belong in Australia.

There is no assumption that Muslims might find those views abhorrent.

There are many appropriate ways to have responded to the video by Women of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Treating it as representative of the Muslim community is not one. Nor is printing a Qur’anic verse for circulation – as The Sydney Morning Herald did – to a public that cannot possibly understand the context of a sacred text, translated from an ancient form of Arabic, compiled in the society of the 7th-century Arabian Peninsula.

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It is provocative and reckless to print an incorrect translation of a Qur’anic verse in an environment where significant levels of racism are directed at Muslims.

The verse which is the subject of the video, and the reason and way in which it is misinterpreted I will come back to later, but – as a Muslim woman – I want that video, promoting violence through its misrepresentation of the reality of intimate partner abuse, removed from Facebook. That would be one appropriate response.

Another appropriate response is to contextualise and identify the views being expressed. Many Muslim community leaders have already come out, including more conservative religious leaders, rejecting any form of violence against women as religiously justified. In addition to a video, there is also a media statement by leading community organisations and actors. Hizb ut-Tahrir are not the holders of Muslim truth they consider themselves to be.

Like women in all religions, it has been a long battle for Muslim women to reclaim their religion from the control of men. The interpretive battle over the nature of women, their relationship to men and their status in society has been one of the most hard fought in the Muslim world. It should have never been this way, given the foundational rights Islam established in its formation. And yet, for many centuries, and still today, some Muslims continue to hold that while women are spiritually equal to men in the eyes of God, they are nonetheless inferior to men in the world. An untenable position that men could never have sustained were it not for their grip on every facet and lever of social, religious and political power. In fact, no patriarchal society could have endured without significant levels of violence targeting women in all aspects of their lives.

The way in which Muslim women – and indeed Muslim men – have worked for women’s equality is too long and too complex a history for the limited space here. It is still a very live and real battle today, complicated by colonisation, the economic decline and stagnation of Muslim nations, wars, Muslim dispossession and migration. The diversity of Muslim nations and communities means Muslim experience and politics has no single, representative trajectory.

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Despite the gains made by women, there remains an intractable minority who hold early Muslim society and its more literal interpretation of the religion as the only authentic and therefore acceptable view of Islamic practice and doctrine. But their intractability comes not only from their stiflingly narrow view of what constitutes Islamic doctrine and how it is to be understood, but also from an absolute refusal to acknowledge anything – even within Islamic doctrine itself – that does not accord with their worldview. They treat Muslims who have come to a more complex view of Islam as “white noise”; elites who have sold out.

The verse that is being misinterpreted in this instance is one of the very few verses left to those in pursuit of an Islam where men are superior and have authority over women.

The verse itself, is often referred to as the “abused verse” because it is so often exploited, misread and misinterpreted to serve men and undermine women. There are currently five commonly cited interpretations of this verse, and of those five the interpretation put forward in this video is the least consistent with other Islamic principles and doctrine. As has been noted already by many Muslim leaders, it contradicts, quite profoundly, the behaviour and beliefs of the the prophet Muhammad.

The manner in which the women in the video are at pains to differentiate permitted violence, being the use of a folded handkerchief, from prohibited forms of violence, demonstrates the impossibility, futility and disquiet inherent in a decontextualised and dehistoricised literal reading of the verse.

To interpret a sacred text as sanctioning power and control, one has to see the world as legitimately and appropriately structured along gender lines for the exclusive benefit of men, a world in which the application of violence is acceptable, as long as it is directed at women. It speaks not only of the regressive and narrow confines from which Islam is interpreted, but also from which the world is understood.

Theirs is a world in which not only Islam is diminished, but also women, men and relationships. It is an impoverished view of love and intimacy.

As damning as all of this is, it is the video’s endorsement of violence that is most alarming. Intimate partner violence is by its nature never “symbolic”. Violence in the home cannot be controlled, it cannot serve a higher purpose. It devastates lives and wreaks havoc, especially on children. Acts of violence harm women, sometimes irrevocably. The threat of harm or fear of a partner can be no less damaging than physical violence experienced.

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Violence once present, tends to recognise no limits. It is, by its very nature, destructive, self-sustaining and corrosive.

So much of what has been said to date in response to the circulation of the video speaks as if the truth and reality of violence is something that only Muslims need to learn; something that young Muslim women must be rescued from. The views expressed by the Women of Hizb ut-Tahrir, that sometimes violence by men against women is justified, is not unique to them. Excusing, normalising and colluding with men’s violence against women is something all cultures do.

But the truth is we are all still burdened by the unrelenting attack by men on women, no matter what society we live in. In a country like Australia, where millions have been spent on law enforcement, shelters and education programs to protect women from violence and shift community attitudes, on average, one woman dies a week because of such attacks. Eleven women have already died this year, and too many more will before the year ends. The battle to protect women is one in which we all must fight, not just Muslims.