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Why the Church Banned Marrying Cousins—And What It Broke | Focal Point | Imam Tom Facchine
Focal Point
Why the Church Banned Marrying Cousins—And What It Broke | Focal Point | Imam Tom Facchine
A law from the year 600 banned marrying your cousin. A colonial court called protecting your own family "selfish." A 1947 statute called families who leaned on each other "idle." Separately, these look like footnotes. Together, they're a pattern. In this Focal Point, Imam Tom Facchine follows the thread: three institutions, fourteen centuries, one outcome. And what it would take to reverse it.
This episode covers:
— How it started: why the Church banned marrying your cousin
— How a sacred Islamic endowment became a colonial target
— The legal shift that made marriage wait for a career
— The Islamic case for a family built on duty, not rights
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00For years, I've noticed the concerning trend of Muslims having trouble getting married. There are scores and scores of good men and women who want to get married, but for whatever
00:14reason just can't seem to find a spouse. Now, I'm noticing a different, even more disturbing trend. Young people are starting to say, I don't even want to get married. I hear it at practically every Muslim community that I visit.
00:26This episode is about the Muslim family, but it's not what you might expect. We're not going to talk about the gender wars or online culture. Okay, maybe just a little bit, but all of those things are symptoms of much deeper issues that need to be explored. Instead,
00:38we're going to start with a different question. Who benefits from the breakdown of the family? In the history of Europe, before there were modern states or even global empires, there was the Catholic Church. The Church was a primary catalyst for the transition in Western
00:52societies from large, interconnected kinship networks to the modern nuclear family structure, through a series of marriage regulations that dismantled the traditional clan system.
01:01Starting way back in 600 AD, the Church began strictly regulating who could marry whom, fundamentally altering the tapestry of extended families. By outlawing the marriages that formerly sustained powerful clans, the Catholic Church, whether intentionally or not, contributed
01:16to replacing a collectivist, kinship-based society with an individualistic, nuclear-family-based one. The Church initially prohibited first cousins from marrying, but by the seventh century, the ban was extended to all kinsmen, regardless of how distantly related you were. Regulations
01:30eventually included prohibitions against marrying in-laws and god-relatives. For example, a widow was no longer permitted to marry her deceased husband's brother, a previously common practice that kept support systems intact. By the eleventh century, these laws became
01:44so strict that they prohibited marriage between even sixth cousins, people who share only about 0.01% of their DNA and are not biologically related in any meaningful sense. Prior to
01:57these reforms, marriages were often used to keep land and property within one clan, which provided families with money and prestige, as well as a large pool of communal help. The Church's marriage laws prevented these alliances. These laws functioned to weaken
02:10the institution of kinship, which, at the time, was probably the major rival to the Church's authority. Social anthropologist Jack Goody argued that marriage restrictions functioned to enrich the Church, because they were able to confiscate the property
02:23of anybody who violated the marriage laws. And, by getting rid of extended kinship relations, they radically increased the likelihood that wealth would be bequeathed to them, rather than kept within the extended family.
02:34The dismantling of intensive kinship systems led to a fundamental shift in human psychology and social organization. The longer a community was exposed to these marriage restrictions,
02:45the more its members came to value individualism and non-conformity over clan loyalty and collective responsibility. Even as early as 1500 AD, the nuclear family had become the dominant
02:56form in regions like England and Germany. And, as families moved from porous, multi-generational structures to more isolated units, the village of helpers—grandparents, aunts, and neighbors—
03:07slowly disappeared. This left the entire burden of parenting on the two biological parents, a state that leads to increased exhaustion, isolation, and stress. During the Victorian era, rather than seeing the family as an economic unit or a unit for
03:21production, the idea of hearth and home became a cultural ideal, propagated by John Ruskin and other prominent voices. This represented yet another radical shift in the perception of family, moving it from being primarily a unit of production to a sacred sanctuary
03:36for emotional and moral formation. By confining morality to the private home, the era began to devalue the public realm, eventually leading to a society where public life was seen as
03:46morally inferior and political engagement declined. Victorian ideals effectively gendered the concept of care, making it a private feminine duty rather than a shared social responsibility,
03:58and turned the family into a digestive organ meant to absorb the stresses of a burgeoning capitalist system. Problems in Europe don't tend to stay in Europe. As Europe colonized the globe, the shifting
04:08ideals and the tension between public and private informed how colonial lawmakers sought to form Muslim societies. Since colonialism was exploitative, these decisions were also fueled by profit motive. You can see this dynamic play out clearly with something called
04:21the Family Waqf, the Waqf al-Ahli. The Family Waqf is an Islamic charitable endowment dedicated to the family of the founder and was used by Muslims to maintain family economic stability within the Islamic inheritance system, which distributes assets proportionally. In the
04:35context of classical Islamic law, this practice served as a solution to prevent family wealth from fragmenting after the death of the testator. On the one hand, it fulfilled this spiritual aspect through ongoing charity, sadaqah jariyyah, and on the other hand, it protected family
04:49property from economic ruin. When European colonizers came to Muslim lands, they found as much as half of the real estate off the market entirely dedicated to waqfs, both public waqfs or these private family
05:01waqfs. This necessitated, according to their logic, the liberation of these lands from traditional religious endowments. Throughout the nineteenth century, individual and absolute ownership replaced the much more layered understanding of property where each parcel's right of
05:14use and revenues and alienation—meaning the right to cultivate, the right to portion or to have a portion of the harvest, the right to taxes, the right to sell—all of these were spread among different people and many times the state. Recall also that the Victorian
05:29ideal kept a strict separation between the private sanctuary and the public realm. The family waqf represented a threat to this categorization because it mixed all those things together —family, economy, and religion.
05:40Colonial laws, particularly under the French mandate, defined family waqfs as self-serving by structurally separating them from the sphere of religion and reclassifying them as private economic transactions that hindered the national economy. Colonial legal logic created a dichotomy
05:55between public benefit and private interest. Waqfs dedicated to mosques, schools, or soup kitchens were classified as religious and truly charitable. They remained under the jurisdiction of religious law. However, waqfs dedicated to a founder's family were defined
06:09as non-religious and self-interested, and were relegated to the sphere of civil and economic law. This shifted the perception of family waqfs from being acts of piety to being mere economic transactions that were intended for private gain. This was an example
06:22of colonial definitions trumping Islamic traditions, where spending on one's own family was considered the highest form of sadaqah. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us that, dhawi al-qurba—the near of kin—are the first in line for those deserving of pious
06:35spending, followed by the orphans and the needy. That's in Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 177. The creation of a family waqf was the legal and material embodiment of this ethic, allowing a founder to provide for descendants in perpetuity as a religious duty.
06:48Over time, states began to conceptualize the population as their primary object of intervention and management, fundamentally altering the role of the family. Through the development of statistics and political economy, populations came to be understood as entities
07:01with measurable patterns and regularities, such as mortality rates and the spread of disease. In earlier European thought, the concept of economy referred to the prudent management of the household for the welfare of its members. With the emergence of modern
07:14forms of government, this notion of economic management was extended to the administration of the state itself. Initially, the family served as a model for political governance. However, once the population
07:25became the central object of state administration, the family was redefined as a component within that population and, more importantly, as a key mechanism through which the population could be regulated. Rather than functioning autonomously, the family became integrated
07:39into broader regulatory systems that sought to shape behavior through norms and hygiene and education, and even moral oversight. These processes gradually weakened traditional
07:49patriarchal authority and placed the family under forms of economic and moral supervision that were imposed from above and outside. Within this context, the waqf, which had historically sustained relationships among family members
08:01and linked them to broader religious and social obligations, often, according to the founder's intentions, underwent a transformation. To facilitate the management of the family, waqfs had to be detached from the founder's sovereign control and incorporated into these
08:14new structures of regulation and administration. The legal distinction between altruistic public charity and selfish family support—selfish in scare quotes—successfully sectarianized and secularized the institution. One example
08:26of this secularization was the 1947 Family Waqf Law in Lebanon, which limited family endowments to just two generations. In addition to ending the perpetuity, it allowed for the liquidation and reversion, something generally not allowed in Islamic law.
08:40The laws also limited how much wealth a family could set aside for a waqf. While the law was intended to liberate land for the national economy, it forced a shift in how families maintained their internal cohesion and navigated state authority. The law viewed family beneficiaries
08:55as being pushed into idleness and indolence because they relied on these fixed inherited revenues, rather than being forced to participate as active, productive, and useful organs in the market. This perception relied on the argument that labor is what creates value.
09:08That was the same argument that John Locke advanced to justify the dispossession of the indigenous people of the Americas, since they did not till the land and make it valuable. Colonial officials and waqf abolitionists argued that family waqfs were a national catastrophe
09:21that served the self-interest of kin groups at the expense of the state. Of course, waqf abolitionists had to justify themselves through Islamic terminology. They used the spurious argument—which is taken up later by other various agendas—that the word waqf has to
09:35appear in the Qur'an for it to be considered Islamic, and the waqf is not found in the Qur'an. In a section entitled "Are the Proofs for Waqf Based in Religion?"—"Asr al-Waqf: Hal Huwa Min al-Din?"—a waqf abolitionist from Syria quotes former Egyptian waqf minister
09:50Mohamed Ali Al-Luba, also a waqf abolitionist, as saying that the current waqf regime is a national catastrophe and far from religion. One of the arguments in supporting the breaking
10:00up of family waqfs specifically, as well as the corporate family in general, is the concern about preferential treatment. Families might not treat all of its members equally, leading to potential abuse. While that is certainly a valid concern and a possibility, the implication
10:14that modern bureaucracies are more merit-based and less corrupt has very little evidence. In fact, it could be argued that it merely replaced one system that was open to favoritism with yet another, the modern system structurally favoring people along lines of class and race
10:28and education. The law refigured the family from a collective pious unit into a group of individualized property owners, which often pitted descendants against the original intent of their ancestors. By reclassifying family waqfs as economic rather than religious,
10:42the state encouraged heirs to view these endowments as simply financial assets. In many cases, descendants fought in court to dismantle their ancestor's waqf and to revert it to private
10:53property, treating the original religious purpose as irrelevant. This reflected a shift in subjectivity, where the original pious purpose of the ancestor was treated as irrelevant compared to the land's value as a financial asset. It also solidified the idea that giving
11:06to one's family in the public sphere was a form of nepotism or corruption rather than a pious act of mercy and charity. This forced families into a defensive stance, where they had to assert their charitable intent against state suspicion.
11:20Despite these restrictions, families and sympathetic officials engaged in furtive resistance to maintain traditional kinship structures. Some Shari'ah judges subverted the law's spirit while following its letter. For example, Judge Mohamed Assaf drafted a family waqf deed that
11:32complied with the two-generation limit, but stipulated that the property would then revert to a perpetual charitable waqf rather than private property, thereby preserving the element of inalienability. Other families leveraged the blurriness of the law to find judges that
11:47supported cash waqfs or non-traditional endowments. Families continued to use the waqf to create legal personalities that could shield their activities from more restrictive state organs like the Ministry of the Interior. Founders continued to establish waqfs based on the
12:00ethic of care of the family in the face of a legal regime designed to favor individual autonomy. Although the 1947 Family Waqf Law in Lebanon largely succeeded in ending the use of waqf as a long-term dynastic shield against the state and market, it did trigger
12:15a new era of judicial and personal resistance where families fought to preserve the sacred character of their kin-based support networks. Racism has also contributed to the profound reshaping of family structures, driving a
12:26transition from large interconnected extended kinship networks to smaller, more fragile nuclear and single-parent households. This transformation has been fueled by shifts in labor needs, the privatization of property, and the commodification of care. Prior to
12:39the industrial era, what historian Stephen Ruggles deems the corporate family, a social unit organized around a family farm or a business, was the dominant structure. According to Ruggles,
12:48in 1800, 90% of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-fourths of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed,
12:59but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families. These extended families provided high levels of resilience and shared the burdens of childcare and economic shocks. As capitalism evolved, factories in major cities pulled young people away from these farms to chase
13:12the American dream, leading them to form detached nuclear families focused on autonomy rather than embeddedness. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the cultural norm. Families struggled to thrive due to a radical
13:25disconnect between median incomes and the cost of basic necessities. By providing for the material needs of their families, men were perceived to earn a production pass out of doing the care work that has been located in the household or had been located in the
13:38household and to some extent shared. You might be familiar with the term enclosure to describe the process by which societies converted land held and used in common into private land holdings. We can think of the 19th and 20th centuries as a time in which a different
13:51type of enclosure took place, the enclosure of the household. To be clear, women have always worked, especially in working class families. What changed was the type of work and what that work meant. Married women's participation in wage labor rose steadily
14:03from the 1940s and accelerated through the 1950s and 60s due to demand. Valerie Oppenheimer's work documents the postwar expansion of clerical, retail, teaching, nursing and service jobs. They outran the supply of young single women. So employers started hiring married and older
14:18women at greater rates. Labor-saving household technologies and smaller completed family sizes also contributed to the trend. But there's a difference between having a job and having a career. Claudia Goldin argues that the first is intermittent, secondary and chosen after
14:32marriage decisions have already been made. Those coming into adulthood in the 1970s, however, they planned their careers. They invested in education accordingly. They delayed their marriages and they formed their identities around their work. This was facilitated by
14:44changes in the availability of birth control, the pill, as well as the advent of no-fault divorce, which made the decision to be dedicated exclusively to the role of homemaker much
14:54riskier. Basically, before 1970, neither spouse could unilaterally divorce the other. This protected the homemaker arrangement because a woman who leaves the labor market to run a household is investing in skills and relationships that are valuable inside a non-commodified
15:08sphere, but not always transferable back to the labor market, while her husband, on the other hand, accumulates skills and experience in the labor market that he can leverage for income wherever he goes. Fault-based divorce, whatever its drawbacks, gave the non-earning
15:22spouse her own leverage. The party who wanted out of the marriage had to prove grounds or by consent, and the price of consent was the settlement. No-fault divorce changes this arrangement. After 1970, in effect, either spouse could exit a marriage on their own
15:37terms, and the court's shift towards equitable division and short-term rehabilitative alimony rather than lifetime support meant that the homemaker's investment was no longer protected
15:48on the way out. Lenore Weitzman's book, The Divorce Revolution, published in 1985, documented a subsequent fall in divorced women's standards of living as a simultaneous rise in men's.
15:59The divorce rate itself roughly doubled between 1965 and 1980. If your husband can leave and take the earning capacity with him, keeping a foothold in the labor market is a type of insurance. Economists have found that the timing
16:11of no-fault divorce adoption across states correlates with rises in married women's employment and declines in women's exclusive homemaking. This shift changed the meaning of the homemaker role, even for the marriages that lasted. The role went from a secure position within a binding contract to a more exposed one within a revocable arrangement, which is part of why it lost prestige so fast. But beyond that, no-fault divorce is the legal expression of marriage being reconceived as a contract between two market individuals rather than a covenant
16:41constituting a household. Once the law treats the couple as two separable earners, the household as a productive unit with internal specialization has no legal shelter, and everyone inside
16:51it is pushed towards holding market-portable assets. From that angle, the fiqh's insistence on the husband's non-negotiable obligation of nafaqah and the wife's ownership of her
17:03own dower and property resembles the protective structure that no-fault divorce removed. Remember, we're talking nafaqah is the husband's obligation to provide for his wife, also the mahr, which
17:14is the dower, and her right to own her own property. It helps, along with an intact extended family network, to secure the homemaker's position against a potential unilateral exit
17:24without requiring her to hedge by becoming a wage earner or having a side hustle. Once two incomes were common though, housing, schooling, and positional goods were repriced around
17:35two incomes in what some scholars have called the two-income trap. With male wages stagnant after 1973, the second income went from discretionary to necessary for many, many people. Second-wave
17:46feminism is often blamed as a causative agent for these events, and while it can certainly be critiqued for many things, including sharing the same definition of autonomy that undid the family in the first place, it can't be simply blamed as the sole cause. Economic,
17:59legal, and ideological factors work in a dialectic, meaning that they take turns and they affect one another. Feminists were pushing for no-fault divorce, but the coalition that agitated for
18:09it was very broad and largely motivated by economics. Ideological factors then play an additional after-the-fact role in giving it meaning and valorization. Nancy Fraser and Mary Harrington, from two very different perspectives, make the argument that the second-wave feminist
18:24critique of the family wage got absorbed as the ideological legitimization of a labor regime that needed two earners. But it's also true that changing the structure changes behavior even before the ideas themselves have changed.
18:38Of course, careerism among women wasn't enough to change the domestic expectations of caregiving. This gave rise to something that scholars have called the second shift, in which women functionally did both their previously assigned care work and the paid
18:50work outside of the household. The goods provided by care work—therapy, cleaning, child-rearing, and eldercare—were increasingly commodified, available on the market, and bought back by those who could afford to do so. Those who couldn't afford to simply found themselves
19:04doing more and more with less support. This changing arrangement can be understood as the enclosure of the household itself. Industrialization first stripped production out of the household in the 19th century—think
19:15cottage industries—leaving a residual housewife role for middle-class families. The 20th century saw the absorption of that residual labor, too, in the way of household appliances and paid services. But at the end of the day, despite the market pressures pushing people to work more and
19:29more, or the valorization of autonomy provided by feminism and other ideologies, the nurturing and care provided by the mother to her children in early childhood is irreplaceable. And that care happens at home.
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20:32This is very inconvenient for capitalism, which engenders a concept of the ideal worker, who is unencumbered by household responsibilities. The ideal worker is never sick or late, works overtime without compensation, doesn't go on extended holidays, doesn't miss work in
20:45order to care for members of the household. This has been drilled into us so much that many of us actually feel guilty for taking off a day of work, even when we're bedridden. The underlying value that we have ingested and internalized is that the most important
20:58contribution that a citizen can make is to work. This also helps explain why women who tend to the home and children full-time often feel judged or deemed less by society. Now, I know what some people are going to say. Sometimes women with careers also feel judged
21:12by homemakers as well. But that's not my point. My point is that the messages we receive from the government and society at large applaud women's success as workers, not their sacrifice or success as wives and mothers. When the second question after what's your name is
21:27what do you do, the expected response is a career, not your parenting or your homemaking. It's no surprise that many individuals now view marriage and childbearing as synonymous with economic stress, leading to a rise in cohabitation, singleness, and declining birth
21:42rates. And it's worse than you think. By the year 2100, individuals are projected to have 35% fewer living relatives, further increasing dependency on state and market institutions
21:52rather than those family networks. In 1950, a 65-year-old woman had an average of 41 living relatives. By 2095, a woman of the same age will have an average of only 25 living relatives.
22:05Let's talk about fertility now. Declining fertility can occur in two ways. One is through a reduction in the number of children that families choose to have, for example, moving from 4 children to 3 or from 3 to 2 to 1, etc. The other is through a decline in family
22:20formation itself, as more individuals remain single and never have children. In the United States, most of the decline in fertility over the past two decades has been driven by the latter trend, families not forming in the first place. Before the 1950s, not
22:35a single country in the world reported a fertility rate below replacement level. In 2023, more than 90 countries had fertility rates below replacement level, with highly industrialized
22:46and wealthy countries such as Malta, Singapore, and South Korea among the lowest. Experts expect that trend to continue. They predict that by 2100, 23 countries including major
22:57economies such as Italy and Japan will see their populations halve. Rates of singleness have risen well beyond historical norms. Nearly one-third of women remain unmarried by age
23:0635, and approximately 15% have never married by age 50. These figures are expected to increase even further, making it plausible that as many as 1 in 5 women born in the late 1980s
23:18may never enter into a legally recognized long-term partnership. As fertility decline is increasingly linked to rising rates of singleness and childlessness, the proportion of women reaching retirement age without a nuclear family of their own
23:30is likely to grow significantly in the coming decades. From this perspective, the central concern surrounding childlessness is not merely its demographic implications, but what it suggests about the family trajectories of many individuals. For a growing number of
23:43men and women, childlessness reflects an inability to establish the family life that they want, resulting in longer periods of life spent without the familial relationships that they had hoped to build. This is especially important considering the findings from a 2021 General
23:55Social Survey that revealed that even though mothers are generally happier with their lives than non-mothers, their happiness also depends on marital status and life stages. The link between marriage and happiness is much stronger than it is between motherhood and happiness.
24:08In other words, marriage is a stronger indicator of happiness than motherhood is. The isolated nuclear family is a failed experiment that benefits capitalism by encouraging individual consumption but leaves humans lonely and unsupported. This relatively new social arrangement allows
24:23for the extraction of more value from more and more people in the form of labor and taxes than ever before. But it doesn't benefit children, or families, or parents, or even people who aren't parents, or communities, or even the planet. The nuclear
24:37family lacks the shock absorbers of extended kin, leading to high rates of divorce. The elderly are also affected. According to the AARP, 35% of Americans over 45 say that they are chronically lonely. Many older people have no close relatives or friends to take
24:51care of them. In 2015, the New York Times ran an article called "The Lonely Death of George Bell" about a family-less 72-year-old man who died alone and rotted in his Queens apartment for so long that by the time the police found him, they couldn't even recognize
25:04his body. In Japan, specialized firms have emerged that clean out the apartments of seniors who die alone and rot for weeks because no family was there to check on them. Contemporary Western culture treats independence as the human ideal, and it also views periods
25:18of need such as infancy, illness, or old age as merely a prelude to get through, or a problem to get over. In a culture that prioritizes autonomy, dependence is tucked away, hidden,
25:29in hospitals or nursing homes, leading to a kind of social insensitivity to the pain and needs of real life. Women are forced to confront this reality in a specific and acute way because women's bodies are physically marked by relationships of care in ways that
25:41men's bodies aren't. The umbilical cord and the nursing that takes place after birth are all stark biological reminders for women that the boundaries of her personhood go beyond her own body. As Leah Labresco Sargent states in her book "The Dignity of Dependence,"
25:54quote, "A world that is unwilling to acknowledge dependence as foundational to human life is unable to treat women as equal in dignity to men. It can make space for women only insofar as they find ways to hide or ameliorate the problem of being women, which is to say,
26:09the problem of being tied to those who depend on us," end quote. Islam offers a comprehensive alternative to the breakdown of the family unit by recentering the household as a divinely sanctioned cornerstone of civilization, rather than a mere consumer unit. By replacing the
26:22neoliberal focus on individual autonomy with a framework of spiritual interdependence, Islamic tradition provides several structural and philosophical counters to the isolation of modern life. Islamic tradition counters the fragmentation of the family by shifting
26:36the goal of the household from temporary worldly success to eternal unity. In the Ottoman waqf, the horizon of property relations were not simply one's lifetime or that of one's offspring. The
26:46hereafter, an unknown future of accountability guided in the here and now, were part of the calculation. Calculations for one's well-being in this far-off future and the desire to please God suffused property relations and social reform. Social reform that began at the micro level of
27:01the soul and the macro level of society through a domestic unit. Additionally, Islam prizes the generational expansion of lineage, nasab, over the detached nuclear model. While the nuclear
27:11family is often brittle and lacks shock absorbers, the Islamic ideal encourages a dense interconnected network of kin, where alloparenting, any form of parental care provided by an individual towards
27:21young that are not its own direct offspring, and elderly care are seen as religious duties rather than burdens. Consider the upbringing of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, who was orphaned and then taken care of by his grandfather and then by his uncle. This is an
27:33example. The family also serves as the primary vehicle for social reform, where the values of justice, mercy, and collective responsibility are developed to then be enacted in the wider world. This model positions the family as a moral institution that supports community and
27:47civilizational resilience. It suggests that social piety, which is divine awareness leading to common welfare, grows within the family when Qur'anic literacy or Islamic literacy is used as a tool for moral reasoning rather than just ritual. By internalizing these values at home, the family
28:02becomes an agent of social change, reconstructing a just family culture that is difficult for the state or the market to exploit or dehumanize. This isn't the Islamic version of Victorian norms either. Rather than confining individuals to the private sphere, the family was understood as a
28:16foundation that supported participation in the larger religious and political community, even if the larger community spaces are gendered. The essence of this model is rooted in three central concepts that define human relationships through a divine lens. The first is tawhid. This is the
28:30doctrine that secures humanity against its own excesses and its own deviations. It establishes that because Allah is the only ultimate authority, all human beings are inherently equal in status
28:41and dignity before Him. The second is istikhlaaf, vicegerency, being responsible. Human beings, both men and women, are created to be khulafaa'. This is in the hadith of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam:
28:52"He didn't say that just the men are shepherds of their flocks. Women are also shepherds too. All of us are considered to have a portion of this khilafah, of this responsibility, representing Allah's will on earth." The family is the training ground where individuals learn to fulfill this mission by
29:07managing their internal and external systems according to divine guidance. And the last one is taqwa. Piety is the only valid criterion for distinction between individuals. Within the family,
29:17taqwa serves as a protective shield that alerts members to thoughts or behaviors that might lead to oppression. However, this model necessitates Islamic literacy as the epistemological foundation for developing ethical perspectives on spousal relationships and child rearing. Families with
29:32a high level of Islamic literacy tend to maintain more balanced roles, strengthen spiritual communication, and foster compassion-based dynamics within the household. The Islamic model replaces the secular focus on demanding rights with a reciprocal system of obligations, where the
29:45responsibility of one member is an inherent right of another. It becomes part of a social contract or a covenant between humans and their creator and among themselves. It emphasizes that every right
29:56thus has a reciprocal obligation. It also features complementary roles. So, rights are aligned with responsibilities inspired by the shari'ah. For example, the husband's duty to provide maintenance,
30:08again, nafqah, is the right of the wife. And the parents' duties are the children's rights. Justice in the family does not mean that everybody has the same roles, but it means that their rights are
30:19fulfilled as much as possible. Rights themselves are also reciprocal. The woman's right to be provided for is reciprocated by her husband's right to be obeyed in what is religiously permissible.
30:29Also, another tenet is ma'ruf, good behavior. Relationships are not governed by cold technical contracts or accounting, but by a social moral conscience called ma'ruf. This involves goodness, sincerity, and following social norms that do not violate divine principles. There's a distinction
30:44here between the process and the consequences. We don't just do the right thing to get something we want in return. We do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and we trust that Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, will aid us in whatever happens. It also has a distinction between love
30:57and justice because, and this is a quote from Raghib al-Isfahani, he says that love makes justice irrelevant, or that justice is only applied when love is absent. That if you're counting your,
31:10oh, I did this many chores, and I did the dishes these days and those days, that's a symptom of a larger problem. It's a symptom that love has gone from the relationship. If you're keeping score, everybody loses. The legal safeguards that we mentioned, nafaqah, mahr, divorce, are very
31:24important, and fiqh councils in the West in particular have an enormous obligation to fulfill the spirit as well as the letter of the law, especially in shifting to the always-changing
31:35legal terrain. The fiqh scholars must develop sometimes new mechanisms that are necessary to fulfill the shari'ah goals and navigate the existing legal systems. And that last point is important
31:47because the situation is so dire and tragic that we must move beyond slogans and apply our best minds to solving these issues while still remaining faithful to divine guidance. If we're able to do
31:58that, the hope is that people will not only want to get married again, but they'll find within marriage the sakinah and mercy that Allah intended.
