THE FAMILY WITHIN ISLAMIC SOCIETY
The basic unit of Islamic society is the family, which as a result of the Quranic revelation came to replace the Arab tribe as the immediate social reality for the individual. One of the most important social reforms carried out by Islam was the strengthening of the family and the bonds of marriage.
In Islamic society, as in many other traditional societies, the family is not limited to the nuclear family of parents and children, but is made up of the extended family including grandparents, uncles, aunts, in-laws, and cousins.
The extended family plays a major role in the upbringing of children, in protecting the younger generation from external social and economic pressure, and in transmitting religion, customs, traditions, and secrets of the family trade.
One can hardly overemphasize the role of the extended family in Islamic society even today.
The impact of modernism has destroyed many Islamic institutions, but not, as yet, the family. In the West the extended family became reduced to the nuclear family and more recently, through a kind of splitting of the social atom, the nuclear family has been further distilled into the single-parent family, and the institution of the family as such has been placed under severe strain. Most Muslims look upon these developments in Western society, along with new sexual mores and new female and male roles, as incomplete social experiments the results of which are still uncertain, and not as definitely established and time-honored models to be emulated. This issue has therefore become a point of contention between certain ultramodernist circles in the West and the Islamic world, but then many modern practices are opposed with equal severity by conservative Jews and Christians within the West itself. The attitude of the ordinary Muslim to all these recent social experimentations with marriage and the family is not much different from those of traditional Jews and Christians in the West. I know of many Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic families in America who, in their understanding of the meaning and significance of the family, feel closer to their Muslim neighbors than to some of their own childhood friends.
As for the question of marriage itself, one cannot understand its status in Islam without first comprehending the significance of sexuality for Muslims. In classical Western Christian theology, sexuality itself is associated with original sin and accepted only as a means of procreation. To practice it in the context of the religion therefore requires that it be sanctified through the sacrament of marriage. In Islam, as in Judaism, sexuality itself is sacred and a blessing. Therefore, there is no need of a sacrament, in the Christian sense, to sanctify it. Rather, marriage in Islam is a contract drawn according to theShari‘ah to legitimize the sexual act within marriage and to protect the rights of both partners. In both Christianity and Islam, however, as in Judaism, sexual activity outside of marriage is not allowed and is considered a sin in the eyes of God.
Islam does legally allow divorce, but makes it morally and socially difficult. According to ahadith , of all the things that God has permitted, what He hates most is divorce. That is why, although legally it seems easy
for a man to divorce his wife and a wife also has certain grounds for divorcing her husband, including being neglected and not supported, in practice divorce is relatively rare, especially in the more traditional segments of Islamic society, certainly much rarer than in present-day Europe or America.
The current perception in the West about women’s rights in Islamic society in matters of family and divorce is not accurate, because it fails to take into consideration the many social and ethical factors involved in most family situations, although there are, alas, also many tragic injustices.
As far as actual practices in questions of family law and divorce are concerned, there is much debate going on in the Islamic world today about protecting the rights of women whose husbands abuse them but refuse to divorce them, and family courts have been established in many countries to try to administer justice according to the spirit and law of the Quran rather than current customs. There are, needless to say, abuses in Islamic society in this matter as there are elsewhere, but Islam emphasizes the importance of family and marriage and the responsibility that God has placed on the shoulders of both husband and wife, even if some of those who call themselves Muslims do not fulfill those responsibilities.
As for marriage itself, it must be recalled that the Christian and Islamic marriages are based upon two different spiritual prototypes. That is why Christians and even post-Christians in the West identify marriage solely with monogamy, while Islam includes the possibility of polygamy in certain cases and situations. No one has expressed this difference of prototypes better than Titus Burckhardt, one of the most profound Western scholars of the Islamic tradition. He writes:
Europeans tend to look on Muslim polygamy as sexual licence. In so doing, they forget that the “licence” is largely compensated for by the monastic seclusion of family life. The essential point, however, is that Islamic marriage presupposes a completely different spiritual prototype from that of Christian marriage:
Christian monogamy reflects the marriage of the church-or the soul-to Christ, and this union is founded on a personal and non-transferable love.
Islamic polygamy on the other hand finds its justification in the relationship of the one Truth (al-H. aqq), to its several animic “vessels”: Man, as spiritual officiant(imam) of his family, represents the Truth; his role corresponds to the “active” vessel, namely the Spirit; whereas his wife corresponds to the “passive” vessel, namely the soul. This is also why a Muslim man may marry a Christian or Jewish woman, whereas a Muslim woman may only take a husband of the same faith as herself. These spiritual prototypes- both cases-are not something imposed on marriage from the outside, but inhere in the nature of things.
The symbolism in question is not necessarily in everyone’s consciousness, far from it, but it is inherent in the respective tradition, and therefore part of the collective mentality.1
The spiritual principles and prototypes mentioned here do not in any way mean to reduce the relation of man and woman to simply that of the active and passive principles.
As in the Far Eastern tradition, where males and females possess both yin and yang, but in different proportions, so in the Islamic perspective the male is not simply equated with the active principle and the female with the passive, for both the male and female contain both elements within their nature. What is elucidated by Burckhardt are the spiritual prototypes and principles involved.
If for Christians the multiple marriages of the Prophet diminish his spiritual status, for Muslims they ennoble sexual union and sanctify it. Moreover, if one relates marriage to the sexual act and accepts that there should be no sexual activity outside of marriage, then there has probably been a lot less promiscuity in the Islamic world, with polygamy, than there has been in the West, even before the 1960s sexual revolution, with its claim to monogamy. The Islamic world has for so long been accused in the West of being sexually licentious, while Christianity is pictured as favoring chastity and being severely opposed to extramarital sexual activity. The social reality is quite something else. There is no doubt that there is some polygamy in the Islamic world, and also temporary marriage in Shi‘ism, but most men are monogamous and there is little extramarital sexual activity in traditional Islamic society. Moreover, there is also a great deal of extramarital sexual activity in the West, although polygamy is not officially practiced. In Islamic society, illicit sexual practice is rare, although it is not totally absent, and there are practically no illegitimate children because in all types of marriages, including the temporary, children are officially recognized by law and the father has the duty to support them.
The Prophet said, “Marriage is half of religion,” and to marry is considered by Muslims a blessed way to follow the prophetic Sunnah, although it is not technically required by theShari‘ah . Because of the religious significance of marriage, nearly everyone within the Islamic world, even in big cities, is married, and great pressure is put on the young to marry, especially to avoid sinful actions. There are hardly any unmarried men and women in Islamic society; only a few are to be found here and there. In the countryside even more than in cities, a woman whose husband has died often marries another man even if she is not young and has many children. Likewise, a widower is usually pressured to remarry.
Even those who are not married, male and female, usually live with relatives and are part of the larger extended family.