Maintenance of a wife who refuses to accompany her husband on a journey

Question

Question: Zayd’s senior wife is 55 years old; she is wealthy and of standing, liable for zakat, and pays all kinds of taxes. Her 22-year-old married son is well-to-do, a property owner, a merchant and a taxpayer. Zayd’s second, junior wife is 24 years old, poor, pitiable and helpless, with a little daughter in her lap. The girl’s mother has been living seven hundred miles away since the time of the quietly held wedding; on account of poverty Zayd, by way of upholding the ties of kinship (silat al-rahim)

Answer

(a) In these circumstances Zayd does not have the right to compel the senior wife to move to another city, especially when the other city is forty-eight miles from the wife’s house. So it is in Radd al-Muhtar, vol. 2, p. 360. (b) Maintenance does not lapse because of this disobedience (Shami, vol. 2, p. 647).

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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