Tom Facchine – Riyadh al-Saliheen and Women’s Q&A #12
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The transcript discusses issues of marriage and the importance of eldership in marriage, including the need for parents to be in a position of authority and avoid conflict of interest. The lack of lineage being recognized as valid reasons for marriage proposals is a general problem, and the legal school's position on lineage matters is that lineage matters matter. The segment concludes with a recap of the discussion, including the importance of having a valid marriage contract and the need for lineage to be in a position of authority. The Guardian discusses the issue of lineage being recognized as valid reasons for marriage proposals, and suggests that the lack of lineage being recognized as valid reasons for marriage proposals is a general problem. The segment concludes with a brief recap of the discussion.
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This one I have my rocky
handling Alameen wa salatu salam ala Viet you almost I mean maybe in our code once in our Mohammed Ali he of course Salah is good to sleep on Bahama Island that we may and powder on family that island in a lawsuit an arraignment Yellowbird I mean,
somebody can work a lot everybody who is in attendance.
Welcome, it's Thursday night.
It's raining outside.
A good night to stay indoors and learn our deen in sha Allah.
This class we have a new Hadith. We're moving on to the ninth Hadith or the first chapter on sincerity.
The ninth hadith
is on the authority or is narrated by a companion by the name of Abu Bakr ah, different from Abu Bakr, who is very famous in Abu Bakr Al Baqarah, which was not very famous, I will backlog as apathy. His real name is no failure.
Although it wasn't for you, he was a slave of the thief tribe, a tribe that was a resident of five right outside of Mecca.
He was then set free around the time of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa salam, and the Muslims
fight against it. After the conquest of Mecca. He accepted a SNAM. Around that time, he became one of the jurists of the companions, he was very learned and legal matters. And he eventually moved to bussola in Iraq, and settled there, after the death of the prophets of Allah.
When the Civil War came between the side of Adi and malaria and the chaos that ensued during that time, he was of the position of withdrawal. So he withdrew from all of that he did not take sides and refused to take part of the fighting.
What Abu Bakr, ah, is most famous for is a story that happened later in Buffalo.
That proves a couple of things about Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law.
That I think is worth telling and reflecting upon, because Islamic criminal law is much maligned, and popular culture Sharia law, right, we have entire political action committees that help introduce legislation into the State and Federal Congress that are against the implementation of Sharia law, and all this sort of thing trying to stop Muslims from following Sharia laws become kind of a boogeyman, this sort of
evil force, this backward force that is just ready to take us back into the stone age, where kind of life is cruel, and harsh.
Justice is not served. So there's a story that involves criminal law that happened in the title of Abu Bakr, when he was in Barcelona, which I think is illustrative of a couple of things. So at the time, there was a very famous companion by the name of automobile, you've been sure about, he was the governor of vessel.
Now, one day,
I will bet Keira, our narrator, and some of his friends and relatives were sitting around, and they see the governor come out of his house.
And they ask him where he's going.
And he just gives them a nondescript answer. He knows like, Oh, I'm just going to do some stuff, take care of some things. And they say, Okay,
no problem.
But they watch him as he goes.
And they see that he enters into a house that was known to belong to a certain woman that Emiliana was not married to.
Okay, so now there's this kind of shady thing going on.
Right, where you have someone who's supposed to be held to a very high moral standard, the governor, and he is entering into kind of a situation that could leave his reputation open to doubt.
So
our narrator of the Hadith, Abu Bakr, Al and some of the gentlemen who are sitting around him, they decided to go and look
and see what's going on.
and they don't, they're not breaking and entering. They're not
doing anything illegal, they're not trespassing.
But they noticed they look and they see that indeed, he is in a room alone secluded with this woman.
Now what happens is they raise this court case, they writes to Armagh, who is the the leader of the time. And they say this is what we saw
your governor doing, and busted by me asked that he'd be removed.
And he said, I have four witnesses. And we saw them basically doing it is what he's saying.
So a lot he removes, and will the IRA from his position. And he proceeds with the with the court case,
he takes them one by one, these four gentlemen, because for such an accusation, you have to have four reliable, trustworthy witnesses in order for the court case, in order for an indictment to happen
in order for charges to be filed. So he takes the witnesses one by one, and he asks them what they saw.
You need four witnesses in such a case.
Three of the four witnesses, including the narrator of this hadith, Abu Bakr, ah, they say that they specifically saw the actual act of fornication happening.
The fourth witness,
kind of recants and kind of goes back on what he was kind of claiming initially. He says, Well, you know, really, all I saw was him disappear into a room
with this woman. And then I heard some voices. And that's, that's all i That's all I saw. And that's all I heard.
When the fourth witness said, this drama, started making technique, he started saying, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
He was making tech via, because all of a sudden, the case did not have enough proof to produce a charge or to produce a guilty verdict.
And so instead of subjecting a lira to the punishment of fornication, he actually
subjected the three witnesses
to the punishment of slander,
which and Islamic criminal law is at lashes.
The other part of the penalty for someone who's slander somebody else
with a claim of promiscuity
is that they're a witness if they were a trustworthy witness before they are no longer a trustworthy witness, except for if they repent.
So of the three who were punished in this way to have them repented, and so their witness was accepted after this case happened. As for our narrator of the Hadith, Abu Bakr Ah, he refused to repent, because he swore that he saw what he saw.
And so even though he was a righteous companion, and even though he was a jurist, and he had knowledge, because of this, legally, his witness was not accepted in court, after this incident, and for the rest of his life.
So what do we what do we learn from the story?
One of the things that we learned from the story is that Islamic law
has or offers a it disincentivizes it discourages bringing forth proof against anybody
unless there is incontrovertible certain evidence,
right? Because what happens is they were one witness short, if that fourth witness says, No, I saw exactly that act happening, then all of their testimony is considered reliable. And then the punishment of fornication is applied to a person who is guilty of are charged with
but if only one of them, turns back and says, You know what? I'm not sure what I saw.
It could have been this. It could have been that I don't know.
Then, not only does the punishment not go forth, but it turns back and returns on the people who brought such a thing to the table in the first place.
Because this is slander, to damage someone's reputation like this. It has enormous
have enormous consequences.
Also, notice how specific the witness has to be. We don't rely on probabilistic reasoning. We don't say, well, he disappeared behind the closed door with somebody. And so therefore, he did this and that no third No. If you didn't see the actual
I'm gonna say it penetration.
I witness, then that is not, that does not meet the threshold of proof
that is required in Islamic criminal law, to charge someone for this specific act
to the point where many classical scholars said that the threshold of proof for these sorts of things is so high,
that nobody has actually been punished for this act, except by their own confession.
And that brings us to
our next point, which is that one thing that
Christian society
or a society that is culturally Christian does not understand about Islamic law is that the punishments that we do have,
they are not some sort of
dispatching somebody to the fires of *.
We're not making a judgment on a person in the Hereafter, just because they deserve a punishment in this world.
Rather, the punishments that exist in Islamic law, they exist as repentance, as atonement as expiation,
which is why you have such a high threshold of proof
for kind of charging someone without their confession.
Yet their confession is taken as binding proof if they want, and they have the piety to wants to repent and experience their punishment in this life, instead of experiencing it in the afterlife.
Notice also the preference of the Islamic law to let someone who's guilty go free.
Instead of punishing somebody who's innocent. We see this from Omar who's hoping that one of the witnesses returns on his
his claim. And when he does, he makes that via he's relieved that he doesn't have to implement this punishment. And this was the attitude of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam himself. And his speech, he said, specifically repel, implementing these punishments via any doubt, that might come to you. If there's the slightest bit of doubt
that this didn't happen, then you err on the side of letting the guilty go free when it comes to these sorts of punishments. So I thought that was an interesting story that happened to come up just because of the narrator.
And they illustrate some Islamic law in action, and how the setup how the first community of Muslims implemented Islamic law and what they were going for. It wasn't like Aladdin, right? And Aladdin, and I hope your kids haven't seen Aladdin. But if they have, right, you know, in the beginning, he takes the apple from the car and then the big scary dude with a beard in the turban like grabs his hand and is about to cut off his hand right there on the street. Right? This is all kind of the indoctrination or the propaganda warfare that goes on against Muslims, because it makes it seemed like Islamic law is this cruel, arbitrary thing. Compare that to the process that we see here in
this story, how everyone is kind of shying away trying to avoid it at all costs. And then everybody's relieved when the thing doesn't go forth.
So the text of the Hadith, Abu Bakr, a Salafi, he said that the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam said, when two Muslims are engaged in combat against each other with their swords, they both have their swords out, trying to kill each other. Both of them are Muslims. And one of them is killed.
Both of them deserve the hellfire.
And it's not over
Abu Bakr Al Assad
question. He says, Oh Rasul Allah, O Prophet O Messenger.
I understand the one who did the killing, that's obvious. But what's so bad about the person who got killed?
And the Prophet SAW, they said, um, he said he was eager to kill his opponent too.
What's the relationship between this hadith?
And the entire chapter? Is that again, Allah is looking at your intention.
Right? So you have two people in this scenario, it's almost like a thought experiments.
They each intend to the same thing.
One of them is able to accomplish it.
And one of them is prevented from accomplishing it. Not because they've changed their mind, just because they were overcome.
Allah is still going to hold these people accountable for their intention.
In this hadith, we have an answer to an age old question. I'll see if any of you can spell it out for us.
Some people have reached out to me before and asked me how is it possible
that Allah
will punish some people
eternally,
forever?
When our lives are not eternal, our lives are finite. They are for a very short amount of time.
And so even the worst denier and sinner,
the most stubborn and obstinate, rejecter denier have faith.
They're only engaged in this activity
for a certain amount of years.
How then is it fair that Allah punishes them forever? I would like to hear your answers.
Okay, I think I've heard the answer that comes first is I think I've heard you say, that's a nice, that's a nice move there. So if it's wrong, then
plausible deniability
that if their lives were infinite, their sin would also be that is 100%. Correct.
They intend to sin forever.
And we're talking here about denial because a law isn't going to hold someone accountable, punish them forever, for a mistake.
Or a sin. Just any sin, right? We're talking about somebody
who sees the truth, knows that this is the truth and rejects it.
Such a person intends to come to keep on doing that forever. They're only prevented from denying forever.
Because a law causes them to die. When he wills have they been given the opportunity
to live until the Day of Judgment?
Allah knows that they would have continued denying Allah until the day of judgment.
So for such a person, for such a person, the punishment is spinning. It's suitable. It's not extreme. It's not unjust.
It matches their intentions,
not necessarily the outward result.
Very good. We've reached halfway through the class. So this is where we transition to marriage law. And last class, we got into
talking about
the more juicy parts of marriage. Well, we said before that, that
and this came up just the other night so Pamela was one of the sisters that we were talking with.
That it is not an obligation to become to get married.
It is not something to be rushed.
That marriage is something that is a very serious,
coming commitment.
And that I advise against converts getting married
within the first couple of years.
were few years of their of their conversion, because who you are is changing.
So we talked about these things, then we got into
then we got into the,
the points of agreement and consensus.
When it comes to the essential parts of marriage contracts, we boiled it down to three things that a marriage contract has to have
a Wali,
meaning a guardian, for the female, unless, unless she has been married before, or has sexual experience, we talked before about the difference of opinion about what type of sexual experience counts,
that she needs a movie
in order to conduct a marriage contract, and how the institution of Allah is in the best interest of women, because it protects them from deceitful men,
men that will lie and fib and
butter somebody just to get what they want, which is regretfully, often just a moment of pleasure.
So it's not meant to be something that is controlling, it's not meant to be something that is abusive. And if it becomes abusive, or it becomes controlling outside of the bounds of Islamic law, then that guardianship that would I can be taken away and given to the Imam given to the soul Thawne given to somebody who is going to act within the best interests of the woman, because that's what the whole institution is about in the first place. So marriage has to have a guardian. It has to have witnesses, and it has to have a dowry. Okay, these are the big three, everything else we're going to talk about
coming up.
So we talked about issues of consensus. Now we're going to talk about issues where there's some difference of opinion. And why is it beneficial to learn? Because if somebody comes to you and tries to say, Oh, you have to do this, you have to do that, or Oh, this isn't required. Let's say there's a guy in your in your
slides into your DMS, and it's trying to make moves on you. And he says, oh, you know, you don't have to do that. No, we don't have to have this or that or the other,
then you can kind of see where this thing is coming from, and you won't be tricked, because maybe, maybe they're trying to exploit
a difference of opinion. So the first issue is okay, is indeed guardianship a condition to
a valid marriage contract.
The vast majority said, Yes, it is a condition,
essential part of a valid marriage contract. Without a guardian, the marriage contract, it's as if it doesn't exist. It doesn't matter who signed their names, it doesn't matter what happened. It's as if it never happened.
Okay.
The dissenting view, and here is the view of Abu Hanifa.
But it is often misunderstood.
So I will Hanifa said, it's not technically a condition, meaning that if a woman goes ahead and gets married without a guardian, then the contract is still it's valid. But but the Guardian has the right to know
that contract if he disagrees with it.
So you see here that it's not a loophole, per se, it's really the same
results. These two seemingly different opinions.
I had somebody messaged me a couple of weeks ago.
And the reason why these issues are important. They sent me a message. The message said that
there was this young man and this young woman and they wanted to get married.
The young man was telling me that the father of the girl was not practicing and did not want
her daughter to marry a religious person.
He wanted her daughter to marry somebody who was successful somebody who had means somebody who had a good job who was wealthy.
Okay, okay, nothing
but nothing too, out of the norm here, check out what the young man do. The young man determined by himself
that the Father had forgotten his right to guardianship.
And he asked one of his friends
to be her guardian
in lieu of her father,
and then they basically eloped.
As for other male relatives of the bride, he said that they were back home and X country. And they were hard to reach. So he just had one of his, his friends, become her guardian, and they got married. But to give credit to this young man, he had the hearts and he had the conscience to come to me and asked me
if this was a valid marriage contract.
And in my mind, I'm thinking if I were her father, you would be in serious trouble.
But I simply told him that, no, in my opinion, this is not a valid marriage contract.
You are not the one to determine
whose guardianship is valid and whose isn't, you have a conflict of interest, because you want to marry the girl, nor can you just hand out her guardianship to your bud.
It has to go to somebody who is in the state of authority, such as an Imam, such as somebody who has religious knowledge.
And even if you're technically right, that the father was being oppressive, and
preventing his daughter from a valid marriage, then there's other procedures involved, other male relatives will be contacted.
And having them be in a far off land is not an excuse to not even try and just say, I'm going to give it to my friend, and we'll just go ahead and get married. Well, Hamdulillah, you know, somebody in his position, it would have been very, very hard to listen to my advice. And to give credit where credit is due, he did take my advice. And he said, Okay, I'll try to go back and, and change the way I did things. But this sort of thing is not uncommon. Right, which is why we talk about these issues, so that you can be prepared.
Now, what if
somebody's wedding, there's a woman she has Woody. And by the way, we talked before last class that Dylan Lee has to be a Muslim,
they have to be male, they have to have reached puberty, and they have to be Muslim. So for our Connor sisters, your fathers are not your guardians when it comes to marriage unless they have converted themselves. This is no disrespect to your fathers.
This is no disrespect to your fathers. And
when it comes to marriage, your father should be involved. And even if
necessary, asking his permission
is sent.
Right to bring them along in the process. Nobody's going, nobody should be telling you well, your opinion doesn't count because you're not a Muslim, that would be very, very, very dumb to do.
But within Islamic law, if you're a convert, and nobody else from your family has converted, then the guardianship transfers to this Athan or whoever is in his position, which is in America, the best that we have is the local email.
So he becomes your guardian. He's the person that will help you get married.
And it's always good to involve the the parents in marriage.
You will not regret it.
Except in rare situations, because marriage is not so much. It's not so much the wedding of two individuals, as it is the wedding of two families.
And this is one thing that I explained to this young man, I said, let's assume that
what you did was valid. Your marriage is correct in some sort of abstract theoretical way. How is that going to make the parents of the bride feel?
What's going to happen when there are children and those parents of the bride or the grandparents
and your wife is going to want to visit them and you're going to have to have a relationship with them. You've almost ruined any chance of having a good relationship with them by trying to go behind their back
by trying to cut corners.
And while it's true that there can be an opposite extreme, where the parents are oppressive, and overly restrictive, and we will get to that
there's
another extreme as well, which is people imagining that they can just bypass the family completely and go about their business as individuals. So let's say for example,
you have a Muslim male relative, your father is a Muslim, you want to get married? What if he is an open center? A major center.
What we mean by this, in legal terms is a facet. A facet is somebody who sins in an open way. They don't pray, everybody knows it. He drinks alcohol in public, right?
These sorts of things in decencies, public indecency.
Is such a person, a valid guardian,
in the case of marriage or not, this is a difference of opinion. It splits the legal schools right down the middle, I will have Anita ematic. They said that it's not a requirement that the Guardian be
pious because and their argument was, how many look at how difficult it would make it to get married, how many people are not pious or are openly kind of rebellious or openly single, it would cause too much hardship
on women to require this, whereas a Shafi an admin, they said that no, this is requirement is required that the male guardian be a just righteous person.
Because the whole point of having a guardian in the first place is to act in the best interest of the woman.
And if somebody isn't as openly disobeying Allah,
if they don't fear a lot to the point where they're going to
be righteous or pious, that how are they going to have their daughter's best interests at heart?
Or next set of issues has to do with a concept we touched on last week, which was kind of
to FDA means like suitability in marriage. So
is it possible?
Well, okay, backup, we said that as a matter of consensus, suitability
in religiosity is valid. It's valid reasons to accept or reject a marriage proposal, either from the guardian
if the woman has no experience with men, or from the woman herself, if the father is trying to marry her to this person, and she says no, a valid relief reason universally valid is asymmetry. unsuitability when it comes to religiosity. Somebody who is praying five times a day, should not be marrying somebody who doesn't pray at all.
Right?
There might be exceptions, but this is a general general thing.
What they disagreed about
is, what about other types of suitability? What about
suitability of lineage? What about suitability of economic status? Can a rich person marry a poor person? We should say, of course, if everybody agrees, but can a rich person refuse a marriage of a poor person just because of their socio economic status?
or kind of a, the The Guardian, right? This is really where the rubber meets the road, because we're talking about if a guardian has the ability to deny certain marriage proposals, upon what grounds is he able to do that? He can't just do it because the guy has a crooked nose, right? He has to have a reason they have the scholars agree that if the reason is religious incompatibility, then that's a good reason. But what if it's economic? What if it's racial, or ethnic? Oh, yeah, we're gonna go there. What if it is lineage, or class? What did the scholars say about that? So we'll take it bit by bit.
When it comes to lineage
is someone able, like a guardian able to refuse a marriage proposal due to concerns of lineage?
The majority opinion on this issue
is that
these are
valid reasons to reject a marriage proposal, the dissenting opinion was Matic.
Now, my job is to spell out for you what's actually on the books, I'm not going to lie to you just to make it to make anybody look better, right? Because this is kind of scandalous to us. But if you review the evidence, and you know that that difference of opinion exists, just like we had with a previous issue, when it comes to the ability to force a doctor to get married, there are some issues where one opinion stands out to somebody as stronger or weaker, even if it's not the majority opinion. So, in my
amateur,
humble perspective, this is one of these such issues, the majority of scholars, they have said, that lineage does matter. When it comes to suitability, Malik dissented, and he has very, very strong evidence of his first evidence is that Allah said in a chroma Komenda law he talked with Allah says in surah is an original rot, that certainly the most pie, the best of you in the sight of Allah are the most pious. And he says this right after he says that the reason why He created us,
different ethnicities and different lineages is so that we can get to know each other.
Not so that we can look down upon each other not so that we can exclude each other, from marriage or from living next to each other, or for other reasons like that. He also has a very, very clear Hadith of the Prophet Mohammed slay Salam, where he commanded
faulty mung beans guys,
that she married Osama bin Zayed and Osama Zayed was a former slave. Fatima had been phased out of interface with someone who was from an elite lineage.
And the Prophet saw the southern commanded her to marry Osama bin Zayed, who was the son of
Zaid who was a slave. So he was also a slave even though he was freed. So this was, you know, a big class difference and a big racial difference, even a big difference of lineage and the prophesy southern commanded. So we have explicit evidence here, from these two things that disprove
that disprove kind of the logic of
anybody having some sort of ability to reject
a marriage proposal simply because of
lineage.
What about money?
What about economic status?
This is a similar issue, in that we have the majority of scholars saying that this is a legitimate reason. And they're they have their reasons, but their reasons are general. They're not necessarily. They're not necessarily textual.
Or if they are textual, they're not explicitly proven from the text. So one could say, for example, you can imagine, what if there's a woman who's from a rich family,
and she is going to be married to someone from a man who is of lesser means. And the father wants to reject a marriage proposal?
Because his concern is that she's going to be accustomed to living a certain way. And this individual is not going to be able to match those expectations.
Is there logic there? Yes, there is. But is that logic?
Backed up by
the city? Yeah. And what we have from the actions of the province is set up as companions. Not necessarily. And so we have the dissenting opinion of Abu Hanifa, who referenced the same story of Fatima entice who this was a, also an economic difference as well, between wealth and not having wealth. The province always said, I'm ordered that marriage, not just recommended it. There's also another Hadith where somebody had a he was employed as someone who makes a gem right, so this, like the bloodletting
and this was considered kind of like very, very low work. And the province it sort of went around to the people and commanded a certain group of people to marry this person, to not exclude them from marriage just because of his employments. So we have explicit texts that show that these sorts
Some things they're not valid grounds to completely refuse a marriage contract and Allah subhanho wa Taala knows best. We're out of time. Anybody have any final question before we dismiss?
All of this means that a woman can refuse a marriage proposal for whatever reasons she wants. While we're talking here in the situation of the Guardian, does a father, for example, have the right to refuse a marriage proposal because of these sorts of criteria? And I've heard it from scholars. I've studied the humbling method more than the other ones. And Sheikh Bajaj but who lives in Saudi Arabia when explaining humbly books coming to this issue, he is a very fair minded person. He admits he said, This is the position of the legal school that this sort of criteria matters but honestly, he's like, I don't find any. I don't find it compelling. I don't find that the evidence supports that
position. And a lot of those best
so if that's all again, everybody can always send me questions private or through the WhatsApp group or through my wife Ruth who sister Saira.
And we will see you next time in sha Allah, Allah to Allah Allah, Allah Allah legal