By Femi Abbas
Monologue
Today’s article is not new. It is only being republished here due to popular demand. When it was first published in this column six years ago (2015), many Muslim couples, in Nigeria and abroad, saw it as a true mirror of their matrimonial homes. Many others took it for a matrimonial handbook capable of serving as a guide for the conduct of their homes. Yet, many who missed it at that time but only heard of it from those who read it have severally called for its repetition in this column. Thus, because of the value it may add to Muslim homes and the role it may play in resolving conflicts in those homes, ‘The Message’ decided to re-publish it here today for the benefit of all and sundry. Here it goes:
Preamble
“A radical 20th century India-born British journalist and novelist, George Orwell, wrote a famous allegorical novel entitled ‘ANIMAL FARM’ in 1945. His focus in that novel was mainly on the Russian revolution of 1917 which he satirized venomously. While writing the novel, that social critic never thought that any possible ripples could arise from it, which might have a backlash effect on the entire human social life in the 21st century. But ironically, with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), in 1991, the application of that book became manifest on the entire social life of today’s mankind. This will be explained shortly.
Institution of Marriage
Perhaps no institution in human life is as temporally or spiritually valuable as marriage. This is an indisputable fact across nations, races, cultures and religions. Marriage is the main axis around which the continuity of human existence on earth rotates. It is either a pivotal source of decency or a clear cause of malfeasance in any given society. Without marriage, human societies would have been like Orwell’s Animal Farm. And were Orwell alive today he would have probably redirected the focus of his novel towards the matrimonial homes globally rather than to condemnation of socialism.
Rate of Marital Dissolutions
Nowadays, the rate of dissolution of marriages is by far higher than the rate at which marriages are consummated. At least, going by the local customs of the various tribes in Nigeria one can conclude that marriages are conducted weekly throughout the country as against the daily occurrences of their dissolutions.
Definition
Some people define marriage as a legalization of intercourse and procreation of children without any reference to its divine sanctity. Others call it a social contract culturally or legally consummated between two consenting mature people of opposite genders. The latter definition is also silent on the obligation and responsibilities of such a union. In Islam, marriage is much more than both definitions. It is on the one hand, a promise made by the male gender who is soon to become the husband and on the other, a trust personification by the female gender who is soon to become the wife in the custody of her husband. Thus, marriage is an agreement between two families aimed at creating an avenue for continuity of social life through a common social venture jointly managed by the two representatives of both families in their bid to set up a home of their own.
Essence of Marital Life
In the life of any serious-minded human being, three events are fundamentally essential. These are birth, marriage and death. The three events form the main social axis around which the entire human life rotates. All other events in human life are merely peripheral.
Throughout the world, today, (Nigeria inclusive), marriage has become a balloon which can be casually inflated in one minute and thoughtlessly deflated in the next minute. It has been taken for a mere chess game played for the fun of the players as well as that of the onlookers. To most Nigerians of today, marriage is not more important than dining, wining, singing and dancing. It has been reduced to mere fun and entertainment which many young couples see as a legitimate means of actualizing sexual urge that would have been perceived as a social aberration without passing through a formal matrimonial communion.
Parable of Marriage
While conducting a marriage in Lagos sometime in 2012, yours sincerely compared a marital couple to a pair of scissors which has two blades. Each of those blades faces a different direction. The one faces the right side whilst the other faces the left side. These positions are not naturally interchangeable. Yet, with the nuptial knot tying them together in the middle to seal their common destiny, the two blades jointly work assiduously in their move to certify the essence of that togetherness.
Looking at a pair of scissors very carefully, one will discover that the two blades therein sometimes stick closely together and sometimes stand out separately. Their meeting and parting randomly accentuate the essence of their togetherness. Through those meeting and parting moments, the two blades of the pair of scissors communicate effectively and mutually function dutifully. When they stay apart, the tendency is for some intruders to assume that they cannot jointly function again and therefore attempt to penetrate the gap between them. But as soon as those intruders try to come in, the two blades of the scissors quickly come together to crush them. There is a marital lesson for human beings to learn from this.
Implications
Unfortunately, today, marriage has become like the country called Nigeria where projects are hurriedly executed to satisfy the momentary secret (under the table), in terms of contract, without any consideration for the quality and maintenance of such projects. When two young people of different genders and backgrounds are coming together to form a couple, they hardly think of the implications of such a union in terms of individual differences and the possible challenges that may emanate from those differences. Young couples of today perceive love, either from beauty point of view or from endowed wealth or even from pleasure of sexual intercourse. And, that is a way of turning infatuation or possession of material wealth or sexual enjoyment into love, which is usually the cause of early marital collapse.
Love or Infatuation
In marriage, love develops only gradually with mutual understanding, especially when it becomes evident that one spouse accommodates the weaknesses of the other through tolerance and compromise. The attraction which beauty or wealth or intercourse engenders can only, at best, generate tentative LIKENESS and not LOVE in the real sense. This is where the foundation of divorce is often laid even before the consummation of marriage. There is nothing called love in a matrimonial home in the absence of sincere communication and thorough mutual understanding as well as compromise and tolerance. It is not enough to claim mutual understanding through mutual study during courtship. No matter how long it may last, the period of courtship can never be enough for any couple to fully understand each other. That period is usually to impress each other while the tendency to pretend is often disguised. That is why an Arab poet once coined a couplet thus: “A liking eye sees nothing wrong in the conduct of the liked one; but a hateful eye only searches for the faults in the hated person”.
The Seriousness of Marriage
Marriage is a serious business which must be seriously negotiated initially by the concerned couples and their parents or guardians. At the courtship stage, the concerned couple must not only discuss the modalities of coming together as husband and wife they must also negotiate the factors of sustaining their marriage through proper sustenance of the home. Any marriage without a program of sustenance is likely to become like dew used by a farmer to water his crops into fruition. Can dew function like rain?
The Prophet’s recommendation
In his recommendation to Muslim men who are searching for wives, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was reported as saying: “Wives should be married on the basis of four factors: beauty, wealth, family background and faith”. He, however, emphasized (Islamic) FAITH as the strongest factor for Muslim couples. He did not recommend such factors to women because he knew the difficulties that women might face in making choices of husbands but he strongly recommended that a woman’s consent in the process of her marriage is germane. The Prophet then concluded that any marriage without such consent is invalid. This means that forcing a girl into marriage without her consent is illegal in Islam.
Marriages are globally collapsing at an alarming rate today because couples and their families have closed their eyes to two key factors in sustaining the matrimonial home. These factors are COMMUNICATION and MUTUAL RESPECT. No marriage can ever survive or succeed without a thorough pre-marital counseling by parents, guardians or religious clerics who must not only tutor potential couples but also demonstrate practically to them how marriages are sustained using their own marriages as examples. Newly married couples often dream of building their homes in a floating castle without remembering that it is possible for a dream to end up in a nightmare.
Communication
There can be no matrimonial peace in the absence of adequate communication between husband and wife based on mutual respect. Nothing signals the collapse of a marriage more than a absence of communication. A marriage without effective communication is like a house without doors. Of course, the children from such homes are mostly the victims of any ensued divorce. If a marriage is initiated and consummated without communication, how can anybody think that such a marriage can be genuinely sustained?
The real essence of marriage is for husband and wife to disagree in order to agree and not the other way round. In the process of disagreeing or agreeing, communication is the only key instrument. Without it, the home can never be solidly intact.
Any couple that closes the matrimonial door to communication has surely opened that door to marital dissolution. Even divorce, whether through mutual agreement or through court injunction, must be a subject of communication in one way or another between both parties.
Togetherness in Worship
In Islam, one of the most potent ways of ventilating communication in the home is to worship and pray together at least twice in a day (morning and evening). A Muslim husband must at least be knowledgeable enough to lead his family in Salat and to preach and pray for such family daily. Through such worship and prayer, many knotty matrimonial issues can easily be untied. Besides, the children will learn to be good-mannered and to resolve disagreements among themselves. That is one of the reasons why Muslims are urged to acquire knowledge about their religion.
Spate of Divorce
The spate of divorce in any society today is much higher among the ignorant couples than the knowledgeable ones. It must be noted here that literacy does not necessarily amount to knowledge as erroneously believed in Nigeria by most elites.
Matrimonial Conflicts
Matrimonial conflicts are not new to any modern society. What seems to be new and worrisome about them is the geometric leap they are taking these days.
Conclusion
Today, Nigerian society is prone to danger of insecurity mostly because of matrimonial instability. And the more marriages are consummated, the more matrimonial homes crumble. Who, then, will save the society by saving our matrimonial homes? That is the biggest question of this time which is begging for a very positive answer. The security of Nigeria as a country depends very much on the stability of matrimonial homes. That is why emphasis should rather be laid on stability of homes than on distribution of contraceptives for the purpose of reducing procreation. There can be no peaceful nation without peaceful homes. This is a panacea for national insecurity. The battle for Nigeria’s future peace is rather in the matrimonial homes than in the Sambisa forests of this world, which is the enclave of the evil agents called Boko Haram. God bless Nigeria.
NOTE:
THIS article was first published in this column on August 21, 2015.