Tom Facchine – What Are My Rights As A Married Muslimah
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the rights of marriage and divorce, emphasizing the importance of not giving them all to anyone. They also mention the importance of cohabitation and sexual intimacy, which are not allowed for a married couple to abandon their spouse in the bedroom. The speaker also mentions the rights of protection, financial, and privacy for their spouse, and how they can be enforceable.
AI: Summary ©
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.