Sheikh Muhammad Said Raslan treats marital mistakes in two distinct series, those of husbands and those of wives, sparing neither. Here are five of them, gathered because they proceed from one mechanism: what wears down a household is almost never an event, it is a habit.
Much dissatisfaction, little gratitude
The sheikh describes the woman who is always discontent, rarely thankful, and unsatisfied with the good she has been given.
The detail he picks out is the most telling: she compares her situation with that of other wives. If her husband gives her money, she judges it small compared with what her peers receive. If he brings her a gift, she greets it with a dark face.
His conclusion needs no commentary: had she her share of contentment, the suns of happiness would rise upon her.
Comparison is the mechanism, and it has no floor. No gift survives comparison with the best gift someone else received.
Throwing your favours back
Another named mistake: the woman who serves her husband, cares for him and for his parents, but reminds him of it endlessly.
The sheikh is clear on the gravity: recalling one's favours is a base trait, ugly in anyone, and uglier still from a wife toward her husband. And he names the exact effect: such reproaches destroy the favour and crack dignity.
A service that is thrown back ceases to be a service. It becomes a debt.
Disturbing the other's quiet
This passage is subtler, and rarely treated. The sheikh describes the pleasure found by the one who withdraws to worship, who studies, who reflects in calm.
He observes that a wife may not feel that pleasure, may see no sense in it, and may even read it as rejection or distance. And he warns: if she persists in disturbing that serenity, she will end by making him hate the atmosphere of the home, and aversion to the house can extend to aversion to the wife.
But he immediately shuts the door on any abuse of that argument: this does not mean the husband may neglect his wife's rights. He must discharge them, and apologise to her if he falls short.
Ignoring her nature
The sheikh ranks among the mistakes of husbands the ignoring of a woman's natural states: pregnancy, menstruation, the period after childbirth.
He describes the concrete consequences, especially during pregnancy, where she may come to dislike certain things to the point of not bearing the sight of them, even to dislike her house, and her husband.
And he describes the mistake that follows: the husband who is ignorant of that state reads it as hatred and weariness toward him, pride seizes him, and he rushes to divorce, without knowing that all of this is outside his wife's will.
His remedy is disarmingly simple: if he is ignorant of such states, let him ask. The cure for ignorance is to ask.
Loyalty that stops at misfortune
Finally, the same demand addressed to both.
To husbands: the sheikh describes the man who cares for his wife only while she is young, healthy and advantaged, and who turns away as soon as she ages, falls ill or becomes poor. He also mentions the man who divorces when illness raises fear of death, to deprive his wife of the inheritance.
To wives: the exact symmetry, the woman who turns away when her husband becomes ill after health, poor after wealth, old after youth. We cover it in the righteous wife in Islam.
His conclusion holds for both: people of loyalty keep affection and do not forget the good they received, however far back it goes.