The Role of Jurisprudence in Developing Awareness of Rights and Duties: The Wife’s Medical Expenses as a Model

The Role of Jurisprudence in Developing Awareness of Rights and Duties: The Wife’s Medical Expenses as a Model
 A Comparative Jurisprudential Study
 
Nihal Mohamed Abdel Jalil Ghaleb.
Department of Comparative Jurisprudence, Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies for Female Students, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt
Email: nehal.ghalep@azhar.edu.eg
 
Abstract:
The research on the wife’s medical treatment expenses aims to raise awareness of the wife’s rights and duties and explain how Islam guarantees the preservation of women’s rights. Islam mandates the provision of medical expenses for the wife in addition to the expenses that the jurists obligate the husband to pay, including food, clothing, and housing. The research applies the inductive and deductive approach, by tracking and extrapolating the opinions of past and contemporary jurists, citing their evidence and discussions on jurisprudential issues, and interpreting those opinions and evidence to derive the preponderant opinion supported by evidence. The most important findings of the research include the following: the consensus among jurists on the husband's obligation to provide for his wife, including food, clothing, and housing. This obligation also extends to covering the medical expenses of a sick wife, the costs of treatment for infertility, childbirth expenses, and necessary cosmetic surgeries. However, if these surgeries are not necessary, the husband is not obligated to pay for them. The wife also has the right to request divorce after exhausting all possible means to compel the husband to provide for her, including her medical expenses. The separation between the spouses due to the affluent husband's refusal to provide for his wife is considered a dissolution of the marriage according to the preponderant opinion.