The Family in Islam

Marital Relationships in the Major Religions

Allah says in the Qur’an in prohibition of adultery: ‘Verily it is a vulgarity and a vileness and an evil path to follow’.20 The use of the expression vulgarity, together with the particular past tense verb in Arabic (Kaana) gives the command an eternal and static quality with reference to God’s abstraction from time and the singularity of his law in creation, a notion which is not confined solely to Islam but is present in the remainder of the religions, because religion is one in the realm of God, just as the inherent nature of creation is one.

So when we examine the sayings of many religions, we do so with the premise that they support that, which preceded and succeeded them in the field of rational knowledge and traditions and inherent nature and not with the premise that they are a proof and an original source.21

1. The Jewish Religion

Jewish texts affirm the impropriety of bachelorhood considering it a sin and making marriage necessary after the age of twenty. Abortion and infanticide and methods of contraception are also considered a crime and acts of unbelief.

Any woman or wife perpetrating adultery would warrant stoning and the rapist of any married woman would be killed. The rapist of a virgin girl would have to pay a monetary fine and take her as a wife for life for his ill act towards her and those caught in the act of adultery would be killed together.

Anyone slandering a married person without proof would be subject to a fine and punishment.

2. The Christian Religion

In this matter, the Christian religion does not differ from the Jewish religion because Christ came confirming what was in the Torah.22 Hence Christianity prohibited abortion and placed it on a level with premeditated murder. In the same way, homosexuality was prohibited in the strongest possible terms.

The revolution of morals, which Jesus instigated, was in reality a war against the distortion (of religious texts), dissolution, and degeneracy among the people of Israel.

In the Gospels it says: 'You have heard it said: do not commit adultery. But I say whosoever looks to a woman he desires has committed adultery in his heart, and when your right eye calls you to sin, then pluck it out and throw it from you. For it is better for you to destroy one of your organs than for all of your body to go to Hell'23. 'It is said that whosoever divorces a woman; let him give her a document of divorce. But I say that whosoever divorces a woman other than in the case of fornication has exposed her to the possibility of adultery'.24

3. In the Religion of Zoroaster

This religion encouraged marriage and building a family and bearing children. In one of its texts it says that 'the married man is greatly preferable to the bachelor and he who supports a family is much more favoured than he who has no family, and he who has children is even more favourable than that.'25

Elsewhere it says that 'every time the number of children of a man increases, his closeness to his Lord increases.'26 Parents used to organise the marital affairs of those of their children who had reached the age of adolescence, it not being acceptable for a man to remain unmarried. Also any occupation or work which would distance the individual from the family was unacceptable. Among them, divorce was not approved of except in the case of barrenness, or adultery, or infidelity to the state of married life. Amongst their laws was the prohibition of masturbation, which could be punished by flogging. The consequences for one who committed adultery, or homosexuality, or lesbianism, was death. Likewise, the punishment for abortion among them was execution.

4. Buddhism

In Buddhism, the punishment for an adulteress was to be publicly thrown as prey to the dogs. As for her partner in the crime, he would be roasted alive on a red-hot bed of steel. Looking at a woman with desire decreased ones vows and the lustful glance stripped one of one's intellect.

5. Confucianism

The ancient Chinese considered the holding back of a man from marriage to be a character deficit and a crime against the ancestors and the state which could not be excused, even for religious men. They used to delegate a special official whose work was to make sure that every man of age thirty was married and that every woman was married before the age of twenty.

One of the sayings of Confucius says 'if a house stands on a firm foundation then the world is safe and sound'.

Conclusion

After that brief summary of the family system among various civilisations and religions, it is clear that all of humanity agrees upon the call for marriage and procreation as an extension of the human species, and upon the impropriety of the unmarried state and the unlawfulness of fornication and infidelity etc. This concord from the peoples of humanity shows its truthfulness and intrinsic naturalness. Islam, obviously, does not accept a great number of the rules and punishments of these ways of life and civilisations, but our concern is the whole picture and the points of concord only.

Marriage in Materialistic Societies

Despite the obvious harmony of human nature regarding the establishment of the family and married life, and that there is no structure to the human species without this establishment and the fortification of its elements, one can observe certain voices calling for that which goes against the current of intrinsic human nature, and denies this law of existence, and so just as disrespect towards and neglect of the law of the atom has occurred, so mockery is made of the existence of the family. Whilst the system of the universe has its own direct and natural reaction through radioactivity, the family and society despite its not having a direct and instantaneous natural reaction27, has a greater and more severe effect after the passage and elapse of time.

Among the most important of the slogans, which have gone outside the law of nature, are those said by Marx, Freud, and Durkheim.

Freud made the sexual impulse the basic factor in the development of mankind, while Marx considered it to be Economics, and Durkheim went for the social factor. The proof of the invalidity of these philosophies is first and foremost that they are mutually contradicting in addition to the fact that the pressures which surrounded society helped to create them. The severe pressure which society faced from those who called themselves religion, and the grave contradiction that appeared between the words and deeds of the religious authorities is but one example. Another example is the imposition of legal codes which go against human nature like the church's prohibition of divorce, and the inquisition and extreme quelling of any opposition together with the social gulf between the elite and nobility and the poor and miserable. All these matters have fuelled these philosophies.28