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From Issue: 576 [Read full issue]
Half The Religion
A Prophetic tradition states that someone who marries has achieved "half the religion": this points out the importance of religion in confirming the individual's personality and faith. The hadith clearly focuses on the goals of marriage, which must both fulfill a being's needs and answer the ethical requirements of religious and spiritual teachings. This cannot be reduced to the defensive, formalist discourse that is heard today about the meaning of marriage in Islam: confronted with the excesses of current permissiveness, marriage is presented as a duty, with its rules and rights which, by uniting believers, should be sufficient to guarantee a union's success. These are purely normative teachings and advice, which fail to answer the needs of the women and men who wish to start a family or avoid a break-up. Speaking of marriage certainly implies speaking of a common aspiration beyond oneself, but it also means, for oneself and self-accomplishment, tackling the issues of love, dialogue, listening, physical attraction, and sexuality as related to cultures, habits, and wider family circles. A lasting, loving marriage cannot be achieved through prescriptive religious reminders, fatawa, or lists of duties and rights.
Couples must be advised and supported by insisting on the freedom to choose one's spouse based on love which, once felt, should be nurtured, maintained, and deepened through thoughtfulness, dialogue, and the personal fulfillment of each of the partners. We must tackle the sensitive yet essential issues of how difficult it is to be a husband or a wife today, of the efforts that must be made: to establishing dialogue, to weathering crises, to recalling the doubts and pains that must be lived through at the heart of an experience that brings as much happiness as it requires self-questioning and sacrifice.
Islam does not make marriage compulsory, and anyone can choose celibacy if this is where he or she finds proper balance and welfare, but what comes out as the most natural choice for most people remains a life of shared love and fulfillment. Nevertheless, one should remain oneself, a woman or a man, beyond being another person's partner: giving the other everything while fulfilling oneself. This is, ultimately what the hadith and its higher objective express: it is through shared life and love that individuals, both women and men, attain their personal faith, their intimacy with God, with themselves, and with their spouse. Within a couple, human beings find complete spiritual, physical, and human fulfillment and this cannot be reduced to a mere code of conduct repeating the rights and duties of the spouses and in particular of women.
Compiled From:
"Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation" - Tariq Ramadan, pp. 225, 226