Introduction
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of books written on the subject of marriage. Most of these books are prescriptive books that tell men and women how to go about getting married and how to behave appropriately within marriage. These books are typically also romantic and far from the actual experiences people have in real life. Most of them also address marriage in purely monogamous terms, aside from a few books that are not for the English audience or the books that are evangelical about polygyny. Very few books talk about marriage as a social phenomenon that forms the backdrop of all functional societies. Even fewer books address the problems that exist around marriage in the Islamic world.
In this book, I am going to discuss marriage from the perspective of its natural functions, taking into consideration that marriage essentially existed before institutionalised religion. After looking at marriage broadly as it existed for thousands of years, we will come to the very modern concepts of marriage that exist in Islam as the newest religion among the religions of the Book. We will also look at how the practices around marriage are culturally informed and at the current challenges that exist for Muslim people with their respective cultures.
In addition to the discussion we will be having in this book, I want to point out that I have a very specific methodological approach to the Qur’an and the Sunnah. Firstly, the Qur’anic laws supersede all other laws outside of it and must be viewed as independent. The Sunnah, in so far as it relates to the Hadith (Prophetic narrations), can only be used as auxiliary evidence to support the claims that are already made in the Qur’an, in that it demonstrates the ways in which the earliest Muslims practised it. However, I will not be using the Sunnah as an independent source because that conflicts with the command that we must judge by the Book. Since this is not the book in which methodological concerns are to be discussed, I will not discuss the subject at length.
Lastly, I will present rulings founded within the various schools of thought that might help alleviate some of the pressures that exist on Muslims in and around marriage, so that hopefully we as a nation will find a healthy balance between sexual repression and lawful means.
What is Marriage?
There exists a wide variety of social movements in the world at large, both in the West and in the East, in Arabia and in Africa, that view marriage as essentially a death trap for men and women. It is not surprising that that is the case, given the climate in which we live. To begin with, we live in a mechanised and computerised economy where the happenings of manual labour are often far removed from the distribution points in cities. The loudest mouths in the world, who dominate public opinion, are also the most privileged people globally. Most of the world’s people are poor and do not have access to basic education, let alone things like the internet. In this climate of relative ease for the world’s loudest people, where any woman in the middle classes can do any job a man can do, and where contraception is freely available, marriage is clearly not needed as a means to have sex. Nor is marriage needed as a means to secure a male slave who will perform economic duties so a female can have children who will survive. In such a climate, where a value system is no longer connected to the survival of disjointed individuals, marriage would indeed seem obsolete. Or is it? What is marriage? Why do we have it? Where does it come from?
Human beings and animals are often found in pairs. The mating system of human beings requires a male and a female to pair in order to reproduce. Hence, there is a natural proclivity for males and females to pair. The main priority of all species is to survive as a species. What does that mean exactly? Deep within the genetic code of every person is the urge to reproduce. This doesn’t only happen on an individual level, but also on a collective level. For the mating ecosystem to work, humans have evolved various mating strategies just like other species have done.
Let us first look at the environment of our ancestors so we can understand the backdrop around which customs have evolved. For roughly twelve thousand years, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. Hunter-gatherers used to move around in small bands of a few extended families and had to survive by protecting each other against the harshness of nature while foraging for food. Given this climate, hunter-gatherers typically organised themselves based on gender. Men typically did the hunting, and women did the foraging. They also adhered to marriage customs that included arranged marriages and marriages that facilitated alliances between tribal entities. Some hunter-gatherer societies also practised polygyny, where one man married several women. These arrangements were best for the social cohesion of the group because they minimised tension between members. It was also marriage that connected men to their children because the only way a man could tell whether a child was his was if he was the only one mating with the woman who fell pregnant. This mating strategy increased the chances of greater parental investment from the father, which in turn increased the likelihood of the child surviving. During this period, there already existed the practice of giving a bride price for the bride. The purpose of the bride price was to ensure that the groom could afford to look after the bride and that she would not starve. It also ascertained that he understood that by marrying her, he was acknowledging his responsibility to hunt for her. In other words, the customs we assume today as Muslims already existed roughly 12,000 years ago and were part of the survival strategy of human beings as a species. We might ask why they had to go about it that way.
Let us impose some of our wayward modern perceptions on the hunter-gatherer society as a thought experiment. Let’s assume they didn’t get married, and it was a free-for-all, as some fictionalised versions of hunter-gatherer societies have it. Since no man and no woman was with any particular man or woman, the children could only definitively be attributed to the mother. Hence, the mother would have to assume the responsibility of looking after them, and she would also have to hunt for them in the event that no man would do it (lack of male parental investment). In fact, this arrangement did occur in some of the matriarchal traditional societies of the East as a mating strategy, but ultimately it proved to be unsuccessful in the long-term. As part of human mating strategies, there were and are women who have children with many men so as to extract resources from all of them. However, it happened quite often that when such men weren’t held to account, they simply would not give the women resources and would go on to have children with several other women, potentially hundreds of women, without having to ever accumulate resources for any of the women or children. Hence, in the long term, matriarchal societies were often poor and militarily weak because their women were burdened with most tasks and their men were lazy, weak and mischievous. It is not surprising that all the greatest empires in the world were patriarchal. Where one man in a matriarchy could have a hundred walk-in marriages and never have a dime, a man under patriarchy had to have a hundred dimes before he could have one woman. What was the result?
Marriage, far from merely being a union between a male and female, was and still is the basic foundation of any social order. The absence of marriage is the foundation of social chaos. Cleverly, by gatekeeping sexual relationships through marriage constructs under patriarchy, men were kept productive- because they had to earn their right to a bride, and women were kept chaste- because they had to be worth it. Marriage was used as a means to create social cohesion in society, to ensure the survival of offspring and to alleviate tension between jealous men and women who could go into a murderous rage due to a natural instinct called mate guarding. Men typically guard their mates to ensure that no man seduces them and thereby compromises the investment they have made in their mates as mothers or potential mothers of their children (exclusivity). Whereas women guard their mates so as not to divert resources away from themselves and their children. Since the basic interests men and women had in each other differed, it was tolerable that men could potentially have several mates under patriarchy if they were capable of looking after all of their women. Hence, even though men of prestige, wealth and power often had several women, the average man typically only had one. Societies maintained an ecosystem in the mating market that accommodated everyone.
In the past, sex could not be appropriately separated from procreation due to the lack of fully effective methods of contraception. In fact, in the present time, sex still cannot appropriately be separated from procreation since countless people on contraception have still fallen pregnant. However, the two have been separated in the minds of the loudest people, and hence, it is not seen as being part of the same equation. In societies that prioritise marriage, the act of having sex is simultaneously met with the responsibilities that come with it, and hence marriage is not seen as robbing anyone of their freedom. Rather, it is seen as quite the opposite: a place in which people can finally be free. Marriage is therefore all the things I mentioned: It is the foundation of social cohesion and civilisation, the thing that connects a father to his children, the place where stability can be found within families and tribes, where chaos and jealousy can be averted, and where sexual pleasure can be engaged in responsibly. However, despite marriage being all those things, we tend to look at it merely from an individualistic perspective and as a means to fulfil sexual desire. Let us indulge that idea for a moment, since marriage is sex to begin with.
TO BE CONTINUED….
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