Seeking to highlight domestic abuse in Saudi Arabia, a popular TV news personality released photographs of her badly beaten face, claiming she had been assaulted by her husband.

Rania al-Baz said her husband broke her nose and fractured her face in 13 places earlier this week, BBC News reported.

Saudi TV personality Rania al-Baz says husband beat her (Photos: Arab News)

Mohammed al-Fallatta, an unemployed singer, is now sought by police to face charges of attempted murder, Reuters reported.

Al-Baz, who is recovering in a hospital, said, "I want to use what happened to me to draw attention to the plight of women in Saudi Arabia."

Saudi media reported the TV host's mother said her daughter was beaten regularly by Fallata and became infuriated on the most recent occasion when al-Baz answered the telephone. The mother said Fallata took his daughter to the hospital after beating her then fled.

Al-Baz has become a popular figure in Saudi Arabia, hosting a daily family program on television each morning for the past six years.

Her charge of domestic violence possibly is the first to be given media coverage in Saudi Arabia, where the presence of such societal ills largely is kept quiet, the BBC said.

"It is considered a husband's rights that his wife should obey him," Abeer Mishkhas, of the Saudi English-language newspaper Arab News, told BBC News Online.

"This can involve coercion or violence, and we know that the majority of cases of this kind go unreported and unnoticed."

Saudi women increasingly are going to court to request divorces, claiming domestic violence, but the strict Islamic nation does not allow them to vote, drive, own a business or travel without permission from a male guardian.

A recent report by the Washington-based regional news monitor, Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, said a book's claim that wife-beating is condoned by Islamic law has the support of Muslim clerics around the world.

Egyptian-born Sheik Muhammad Kamal Mustafa, the imam of the mosque in Fuengirola, Spain, was convicted in January for publishing his book "The Woman in Islam," which among other things said a rebellious wife should be physically punished.

MEMRI researchers Steven Stalinsky and Y. Yehoshua contend this belief is common, citing Muslim clerics and Islamic religious institutions that discuss it as a legitimate way of "disciplining" a wife, based on the Quran.

In his book, which sold about 3,000 copies, Mustafa states, however, "The beating must never be in exaggerated, blind anger, in order to avoid serious harm [to the woman]."

He adds, "It is forbidden to beat her on the sensitive parts of her body, such as the face, breast, abdomen, and head. Instead, she should be beaten on the arms and legs," using a "rod that must not be stiff, but slim and lightweight so that no wounds, scars, or bruises are caused."

The sheik said the aim of the beating is to cause the woman to feel some emotional pain, without humiliating her or harming her physically. Wife-beating, he said, must be the last resort to which the husband turns in punishing his wife, and is, according to the Quran, chapter 4, verse 34, the husband's third step when the wife is rebellious.

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