“Qur'an 4:34 says a man may beat his wife if she does not do what he wants. That is horrible.”

Take the reaction seriously first. Anyone who reads a popular English rendering of this verse and feels revulsion is reading it the way it was handed to them.

The verse describes a sequence, and the sequence is aimed at reconciliation. It addresses a specific situation, a wife's nushuz (insolence, or a serious breach of the marital bond), and it prescribes stages: counsel, then withdrawal from the shared bed, and only then the third step. The verse closes by forbidding hostility if she seeks reconciliation.

Two things are usually lost. The first is that the passage is a de-escalation ladder with an explicit off-ramp at every rung. The second is that the third step was defined by the Prophet's own practice and by the jurists who followed it as something that leaves no mark and causes no pain, a symbolic act. The Prophet never struck a woman in his life. A husband who beats his wife is not executing this verse. He is violating the standard set by the man who delivered it.

English translation carries much of the blame here. A single word is rendered "beat" and the whole architecture collapses into a licence for violence.

A verse can be read to mean something monstrous when it is cut away from the practice that defines it, the jurisprudence that constrains it, and the reconciliation it exists to serve. Anyone can do that to any text. The question worth asking is whether the reading survives contact with the sources, and this one does not.

If a man in your life has used this verse to justify hurting someone, he was lying to you about his religion. Do not let him keep the verse.