Berlin Imam: 'Women should not refuse husband sex'

The sermon was originally held on January 23 at the al-Nur mosque in the Neukölln district of Germany's capital, Berlin.

A video of al-Eila's radical speech in Arabic, calling for the submission of women to their husbands, has since emerged on YouTube, with subtitles provided by the US-based Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri). The content has been widely reported in German domestic media.

To begin the sermon, al-Eila addressed "marital problems," which he claims begin when a man lets his eyes wander "from what Allah has given him," adding, however, that a woman must also "beautify herself."

Wandering eyes

Claiming that when he first married his wife, she was "pretty and slim" and that she "used to say nice things to him," al-Eila bemoans that he has been left with a "fat" wife with a "gloomy face."

If a man is tempted by another woman who "arouses" him in the street, al-Eila claims that the Prophet Muhammad had the remedy when he apparently said that the man "…should go home quickly and have sex with his wife and Allah will immediately remove the urge from his heart."

Confined to her husband's home

According to al-Eila, it is also the responsibility of a woman to "turn the home into a flourishing garden for her husband, so that he does not flee from her like one flees a leper or a lion."

A woman, al-Eila adds, should be "confined to her husband's home." She should neither leave the house, let anyone into the house, nor sleep outside the house without her husband's permission. A woman must also not get a job without her husband's consent - something which al-Eila denotes as "a big problem in the [German] society in which we live."

'No excuses or pretext'

It is towards the end of his sermon, however, that al-Eila took pushes his radical preaching to the extreme, claiming that "a woman is not allowed to refuse to sleep with her husband."

"She is not allowed to make excuses or use pretexts," al-Eila says - even when a woman is menstruating. "There is nothing to prevent her husband from using her body for pleasure," the Imam added.

The al-Nur mosque, where the radical al-Eila preached last week, has come under investigation on several occasions in recent years.

Many of Berlin's 570 Salafists are known to have attended the mosque. Among them was Berlin rapper Denis Cuspert, who perfmormed under the stage name Deso Dogg. Cuspert was a regular worshipper at al-Nur mosque before joining the "Islamic State" (IS) militant group in Syria.

In July 2009, the mosque invited the Islamic homophobic hate preacher Bilal Philips to the lectern, before Danish hate preacher Abdul Bilal made an appearance last summer, when he called for an armed struggle against Israel and the killing of Jews.

Al-Eila, who has already appeared at the Al-Nur mosque three times since the beginning of the year, is expected to hold sermons there until the end of the month.