You know "Ayatollah"? It means "god's sign" and in Islam HE is a person who studied Islam for many years and other people can trust him about the Islamic rules. There are also some "Grand Ayatollah"s. These are the people with the MOST possible understanding of Islam and every shi'i Muslim HAS TO choose one of this persons as her/his reference and obey HIS ideas and ask him, her/his Islamic questions.
One of these grand ayatollahs is Makarem Shirazi. Luckily he has an multilingual website: http://www.makaremshirazi.org/english. I was surfing his English weblog and reached this question:
It is correct that the Holy Quran has authorized corporeal punishment of the ladies refraining their marital obligations?
and the answer ? The answer starts with women are very valuable in Islam and then but in some occasions... but the most shocking part is the last part :
It is remarkable that as per psychologists, there is a state of masochism in some women which is sometimes intensified, and appears as a mental crisis. In such critical and exceptional cases, mild punishment is effective in their mental relief.
!!! have a look yourself !!!
p.s. It seems that his site is built with PHP Nuke but the designer has ripped off the software's GPL license ! I wrote a letter to this great religious leader and mentioned this and asked him not to use stolen software.
