Thursday 30 January 2014

Beware of the Marriage Bandits by Shaikh (Dr) Haitham Al-Haddad



I am sick of hearing about those brothers who prey upon the susceptibility of our sisters, using deception as a tool for marriage, and marriage as a guise for the fulfillment of their evil desires. I fear that if something is not done to tackle these abuses, we will only see the number of such incidents increase. Therefore, I feel compelled to share some of the cases I have encountered in order to highlight the nature of the issues at hand, and that we as a community must take drastic action to stop or minimize this evil.
One of the incidents which I came across just recently involved a sister who was divorced and the custodian of her children. She was living alone, away from her parents, when she was approached for marriage by a brother who seemed to be a practising Muslim. She had described that her parents were unhappy with her re-marrying due to her situation. The brother managed to convince her she had a legitimate Islamic right to search for a walī other than her own father due to the fact he was forbidding marriage for her on the basis of what he deemed to be a non-Islamic pretext. She was apprehensive in having a walī appointed from the same cultural background as she feared she may have been exposed within the community. However the brother managed to comfort her, exhorting her to appoint him, himself to find her a suitable walī. Due to her naivety and his callous experience in manipulating women, she accepted. So to summarise; she accepted to marry the brother without consent from her parents via phone and skype, with no witnesses or wedding, her walī was anonymous to her, and the brother she was to marry had the ability to appoint an anonymous walī for her. A few days after the questionable ‘nikāh’ had taken place, her ‘husband’ came to her with no other reason but to fulfil his sexual desire. It was only after this that she discovered he had various other sexual partners whom he had claimed to have married previously. A few days later he left her, however he would continue to return in order to blackmail her for sexual relations as he had convinced her their ‘nikāh’ was still valid. As a result, the sister unfortunately contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

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