Tom Facchine – What Are My Rights As A Married Muslimah

Very popular question. What are the rights of

a woman when she's married? And I'll answer

that question

with something that is not a direct response.

1st is that marriage will not survive if

you're only focused on rights. Marriage needs to

elevate itself beyond the level of rights. If

you're concerned about getting all of your rights

from your husband and your husband is concerned

about getting all of his rights from you,

then you're gonna hate each other. You're gonna

resent each other. That's not love. That's not

marriage. That's business.

Right? It sounds like you're ready to take

each other to court. You didn't give me

my rights. In reality, the rights of a

of a wife and the rights of a

husband are so many in the nikah

that there's no possible way that you're going

to give all of them to the other

party, And so it's constantly a process of

negotiation

and overlooking

and trying to improve. So

for advice to married people, and I need

that advice first and foremost before anybody else,

to try to

relate to your marriage,

not as a business partnership in which you're

trying to extract your rights, but something that

Allah has given you as an opportunity to

worship him. You worship Allah through your spouse,

you worship Allah through your marriage. If each

party

can get to the point where they're worshiping

Allah through their marriage, neither will complain ever.

They will have a happy marriage.

If one person is able to do it,

but the other person isn't, it's very difficult,

but it can still kind of limp along.

If neither party is worshiping Allah through the

marriage, either of them is just concerned with

themselves and getting out of it what they

want, then it's only a matter of time

until the marriage isn't satisfying that, and you're

going to want to end it. That being

said,

the rights that women have, and we mentioned

this in previous question, it's very important to

to to stress here. The dowry is one

of the first ones. Okay? You have a

right to a dowry.

We have 2 extremes in the Muslim community.

We have some, ethnic groups where the dowries

are

so expensive that you wonder how anyone ever

pays them, 100 of 1,000 of dollars. And

then we have other communities

that

the dowry is so cheap that the women

are in a very, very weak position if

they ever want to get a khulah. We

just talked about how women can get, initiate

a divorce in exchange for part of a

dowry. Okay. If your dowry was a copy

of the Quran

or if your dowry was being recited Surat

Al Ikhas, What are you gonna do when

you want a khulah? What do you wanna

do when you want a divorce? Maybe your

husband starts drinking. He starts smoking. He starts

beating you, and you want a divorce. He

doesn't wanna give it to you, and you

don't have anything to go to negotiate with.

In in today's currency, I believe.

So that's something where, you know, you can

you can negotiate with. Other rights have to

do with cohabitation,

sexual intimacy.

It's not allowed for a husband to abandon

his wife in the bedroom at all. And

this is something that's extremely important.

There's research that shows that the hormones that

get released

between people

when they cohabit in such a way, it

decreases tension,

and it actually makes everything else easier. All

the arguments that you have, all the resentment

that you build up, all these sorts of

things, if you're not engaging each other in

the bedroom,

then everything gets worse. So that is something

that is that it cannot be used as

a weapon. And this is a really big

problem that some couples do. They use it

as a weapon. If you're not making me

happy, well,

none for you. And it goes from each

party to the other. Huge mistake. It should

be something that both couples do no matter

what situation they're in, if they've had an

argument or whatever, because it's actually going to

help the argument and it's going to help

everything else that's going on.

You have the right to financial maintenance,

and this has to do that's it goes

back to our

okay? It goes back to what is considered

reasonable

according to

the people of your area. You have the

right to what is typical.

Okay? That might be a 3 bedroom apartment.

That might be a 2 bedroom apartment, depending

on where you live, depending on how many

kids you have, depending on your education level,

these sorts of things. And there's other rights.

I mean, it would, but but those are

usually the big ones. She has the right

to protection,

physical, financial, from her husband. And

there are there can be other rights that

also go back to culture because in many

things, and if the Sharia is silent about

a certain thing, oftentimes,

it goes back to the right? It goes

back to the the culture. If something is

an expectation within the culture, then it can

be it can be, not every single time,

but it can be something that is recognized

by the Sharia as something that's a cultural

expectation,

that is enforceable.