Forced Marriages Condemned

by

Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood.

‘Truly Allah has totally forbidden disobedience (and the subsequent hurt) to mothers, burying alive daughters, with-holding the rights of others, and demanding that which is not your right.’ (Hadith Muslim 4257. Recorded by Mughirah b. Shuba).

With these simple words our Beloved Prophet (pbuh) expressed so much that should convince any Muslim person seeking to force a marriage upon a daughter (or son) that what they are intending is not only terribly wrong, but also in direct opposition to the true spirit of Islam. At first glance, it looks as if it is ammunition to be used against the rebellious daughter who does not want to accept the proposed husband and is going against her mother’s wishes, but further insight reveals there is far more to it than that.

This is not a one-command hadith but contains three further totally forbidden things that the parents should ‘take on board’.

· daughters should do their utmost to obey their mothers

· daughters should not be ‘buried alive’

· the rights of others should not be withheld

· no-one should try to enforce that which is not their right

It is quite clearly not the right of the parent to withhold or ignore the right of the daughter who wishes to politely refuse an unwanted spouse.

‘Burying daughters alive’ does not merely refer to the long-outlawed nomadic desert practice of being rid of surplus infant girls by putting them face down in the sand shortly after birth (rather like drowning baby puppies before they have drawn breath). That hardly applies to our situation today. But there are many other ways of ‘burying them alive’ – notably in a forced marriage.

What could be more like being buried alive than being forced to share a bed and distasteful intimacy with a completely unwanted spouse? This horrible enforced pairing seems to be a part of Asian culture, belonging no doubt to a society where girls and boys do not meet and grow up apart, so that the responsibility of finding a suitable spouse falls on the parent and the walis (guardians) of the unmarried. It does not really belong here in the UK. It has nothing to do with Islam – the practice is also carried out by Hindus and Sikhs as well.

Any educated Muslim would know that whereas the practice of arranged marriages, relying on the knowledge and good taste of one’s parents is acceptable and even commendable in some circumstances, in Islam the basic rulings are

· that an offspring should not try to marry a person of whom the parents do not approve (ie. their consent is desired)

· the offspring should not be obliged to marry any person they do not think they could grow to love and respect, and would not have chosen – and should therefore have seen, met, and found out enough about the proposed spouse in order to form a reasonable opinion

· the marriages should not be secret (presumably to avoid family disapproval?), but should be open with walimahs (parties) to publicise the legality of the marriage.

The idea of trying to force a daughter or son to marry somebody of the parents’ choice seems to nevertheless occur frequently in Asian society, even here in the UK – whereas this would be totally alien to Muslims of most other societies. Needless to say, it is easy to distinguish between what is Islam and what is culture – for if something is a genuine part of Islam it will apply to Muslims from all the cultures of the world, and not just a particular country.

To be quite frank, I assume that the real reason for it happening at all is not the wish of parents to make their children unhappy, for surely most parents dearly love their children. I assume one of the main reasons for it probably lies in the strong sense of duty and honour and obligation that is shared by Asian Muslims – and these are not bad things, of course. However, the young girls are being used as pawns in a bit of wheeling and dealing.

It may be that the original family members who came to the UK had benefitted from a great deal of financial help from their families (and even whole village communities who perhaps ‘clubbed together’). Those immigrants may not have intended to remain in the UK, and thanks to the increasing use of the telephone, never really felt completely cut off from their roots. Even in the 90s, when I married a Pakistani man, I found he remained in daily contact with his family back home.

When the scene changes to a few years on, and a baby daughter grows up to the useful age of fifteen or so, the chance arises for another person from back home to come to the UK as her husband. Pressure might then be put on the parents in the UK to arrange this, those parents perhaps being in the very difficult position of not feeling able to refuse relatives or groups who had previously helped them. Hence the ‘holidays’ back home, and an unwanted marriage or engagement just when the young girl is in her most important year at school, and might indeed have gone on to student life at college or university to fill the enormous need we have here of educated and professionally qualified Muslim women.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all against educated girls marrying noble young men from Pakistan and Bangladesh, or Azad Kashmir, if they are genuinely suitable. Their young men are just as noble and intelligent as young men anywhere else, and might very soon take advantage of education and career opportunities here as soon as they are able. To be under-educated does not mean a person is unintelligent, but simply that they may not have had the opportunities for education. We should be far more understanding about this. I can also understand parents of girls here having a close look at some of the young Muslim men born here in the UK who have not turned out as their parents would have liked – (many have given in to corrupt practices and been thoroughly spoiled) - and been quite alarmed, and not wanted them for their girls.

They might also be considering the difficulties of cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-faith marriages, and see problems looming that their youngsters either cannot see at all (‘Love is blind’), or reckon will be overcome with enough love and effort (‘Love conquers everything’).

But these are not the problems at issue here. The real problem is that many of our Muslim parents who are very devout Muslims think that forcing their offspring into an unwanted marriage is the Islamic thing to do – of course the girl will resist and be shy about it, and make a fuss, but it will all die down once it is achieved, and she will learn that her parents were really right all along, and end up accepting it, if not being blissfully happy about it.

If only!!!!!

What we are getting instead is Muslim girls running away, getting into real dangers, families being ruined by hostile feelings, parents cutting their children off, girls getting involved with unsuitable people as a result of their parents’ foolish pressure, perhaps ending in pregnancies, depression, suicide, drunkenness, drugs etc. We are getting girls seeking refuge with the authorities, and protection from the very people who should be loving and supporting them into adulthood.

Another major problem is that the mothers of the girls are often quite opposed to what the fathers want, but dare not go against his wishes for one reason or another. Sadly, this reason is frequently because the father is abusive and a bully – both highly unIslamic attributes. It is extremely hard in practice for a wife or daughter to stand up against the father of a family; and sometimes the girls involved are going through agonies of grief and soul-searching because they really do not want to cross their parents.

Just as Muslims take seriously the command to obey mothers, so Muslim wives generally take equally seriously the command to obey husbands as the heads of their households. What they do not seem to do is to examine the many verses about the rights of all members of families, and take this with the commands to stand up to any form of unIslamic tyranny.

What advice can one give them? As I understand it, the ruling in Islam is that womenfolk should accept their menfolk as their natural leaders, and do their best to please them – except when what they request is going against Islam and the wishes of Allah. On those occasions, they have the right (whether or not they can find the courage) to point this out, and refuse to do the unIslamic thing. A forced marriage is not only totally unIslamic, in shari’ah law it is considered null and void, and could be dissolved immediately. Here in the UK we also have to go by the rules of the land, and here a long divorce procedure would be necessary to get out of the marriage, once it has been physically consummated. (If the girl never consummated the marriage and could prove to a doctor that she was still a virgin, the marriage would be null and void by British law, incidentally).

I will close by quoting the case of Qaylah, which is perfectly clear on the points I have raised. Qaylah bint Makhramah had several daughters. When her husband died, her husband’s brother Athub b. Ashar seized them, intending to arrange their marriages to the persons of his choice. None of the girls wanted these particular marriages. Qaylah managed to rescue and hide one of the girls, Hudaybah, and set off with her to find the Prophet (pbuh). Hudaybah was rolled up in a woollen blanket. They got away, but were so terrified of Athub that when their camel suddenly refused to go on they supposed he was using sorcery against them. By the time they got moving again, they could actually see Athub in pursuit in the distance.

However, they got to Madinah, where Qaylah had a sister residing, but Athub caught them before they could gain shelter in her house. A struggle ensued, in which this ‘Muslim’ man struck the mother with the flat of his sword and knocked her bleeding to the ground. Then he seized the terrified girl and carried her off over his shoulder.

Qaylah managed to get to her sister’s house, and in the morning was able to join the deputation of Bakr b. Wa’il of Banu Shayban that had come to see the Prophet (pbuh). They arrived at the mosque at the time of fajr (pre-sunrise) prayer, and in the darkness Qaylah joined the rows of men ( Ibn Sa’d 1.376) The man next to her realised she was a woman and directed her to the women’s rows behind them.

After the prayer, when the sun came up, she got her interview with the Prophet (pbuh), who passed judgement in her favour, and had his scribe write these words for her on a piece of red leather: ‘Qaylah and the daughters of Qaylah should not be oppressed or forced to marry. Every faithful Muslim should offer them help. Muslims should do good deeds and not evil ones.’ (Abu Dawud 4829, 3.1353 n.4829. The full hadith is given in Ibn Sa’d 1.374-376. Abu Dawud only mentions a land dispute).

As a result, Athub was obliged to accept that trying to force the girl’s marriage was an evil deed, and let the daughter go.

What could be a clearer case than that, of the Prophet’s (pbuh) genuine care for the plight of young girls being forced into marriages against their will? May God bless all Muslim parents with wisdom and understanding, so that they may carry out their genuine duties with nobility and tact and gentleness, and not tyranny (tughyan); and may God bless all those who are obliged to face up to tyranny - whether from state, boss, parent or anyone else, - with courage and humility and unswerving sense of fair play and respect for the ‘opponent’, but above all the desire to put Allah’s will and guidance into practice.

Wasalaam, Ruqaiyyah.