Role of the Family in the Spread of Islam

By Professor Ismail Faruqi

The family, is indeed, the best tool for Islamic Da'wah in the West.
There is no institution, there is no mechanism that I know of, that
can convey Islam as well as the living example of an Islamic family in
the West. The Islamic family, if it is rightly Islamic, is the very
ideal to which Western people today aspire. In other words, the
reality of Western people today stands diametrically opposite; if they
can say that they can stand at the bottom of human, social and ethical
development, because of what we see happening around us in their
midst, the Islamic family with its ideals, with its norms and
standards, stands at the opposite highest, and therefore, there can be
no better way of convincing Western man, the non-Muslim man or woman,
of the value of Islam, of the greatness of Islam, than to invite them
to visit a Muslim family. But then, the Muslim family must be a good
one. In other words, it must be truly Islamic and it must live up to
the standards expected of an Islamic family. And now as to the
dialectic of this relationship.

PRINCIPLES OF MUSLIM FAMILY LIFE
The Question of Pre-marital Sex

First of all, before a family is made or before a family is born, is
it possible to engage in the kind of family relationship, in the very
same kind of relationship that the family blesses and legitimises,
before marriage? In plain English, what about pre- marital sex?
Certainly our daughters do not practise pre-marital sex. They keep
their chastity and their purity and for us sex is legitimate only
within the bounds of marriage, only in the family, and this very
restriction upon our sexual lives saves us from the evils of sexual
promiscuity, the sexual libertine that is taking place today in all
Western societies. The consequences of this sexual promiscuity are
clear for everyone to see. The spread of venereal diseases,  the
disappointment of the newly-weds in the  first week after marriage
because everything has been deja vu as, we say in French. Having been
accustomed to having more than one sexual partner, this becomes a
habit which is continued even after marriage and, therefore, there is
no fidelity in the Western home. The children are illegitimate in the
eyes of the father because he is not their father and all this brings
about emotional ruin.

The leaders of the women 's liberation movement in the West,
practically all of them are now retracting what they had been
advocating by way of sexual liberty in the 50's, the 60's and the
early 70's because they say to themselves now and to their own people:
That is not what we have been dreaming of by way of liberty for women.
It looks as if we have given birth to a monster that is eating up our
stand in society and ruining it. You have also all heard about the
teenage pregnancies and the unmarried mothers. You have heard about
infanticide, about how people throw their babies into garbage bins and
leave them at the doors of others. There is an extremely active
business of buying and selling babies which is without parallel in the
history of the West and also that despite all this, the so-called
ideal of women's liberation, namely that women may have a career, a
career which may give them dignity and self-respect, has failed.
Despite all the work that has been done in this field, women are still
looked upon as sex toys or sex objects. They are still under-paid and
their legal personalities are incomplete. In other words, there are
still many legal rights which women do not enjoy on par with men and
so, this whole movement which liberated women in order to improve her
situation has brought ruin upon itself, upon women, as well as upon
the family. However, the Islamic family, by upholding the Islamic
ideal of sexual purity, of sexual legitimacy only in and within
marriage and married life, has saved itself from all these evils. In
New York, where at the entrance to the public library stand two big
lions made out of stone, the common saying is that these two lions
roar whenever a virgin passes by them. Well, now the saying is that
the two lions roar whenever a sane woman, whenever a woman who has
preserved her mental health, passes by them. All these evils,
Alhamdulillah, we are saved from by virtue of our upholding the
Islamic ideals of sexual chastity and purity.

The Patriarchal Family

Secondly, the family in Islam is a patriarchal family and the
patriarch, that is to say, the head of the family, carries a
tremendous burden of responsibility. Along with this responsibility he
carries the burden of leadership. He acts as a fulcrum around which
the life of the family revolves and all the talk about the superiority
of men over women is nonsense unless it refers to this leadership role
and the responsibility role. It is absolutely essential. Even in the
case of the universe, of the cosmos, Allah, Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, has
said to us in His Holy Book: "But if there were more than two Lords in
the universe, one of these Lords would have contested the power of the
other and fought to ride over him." In other words, it is impossible
to have a management, to have an organisation, to have a going concern
such as the family without somebody assuming the role of leadership
and responsibility. And this is really all that Allah, Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala, has meant us to achieve and to understand when he established
for us the leadership, the family as a patriarchal institution because
our Shari'ah, without apology does regard the family as a patriarchal
institution. The ship without a captain cannot run for long, nor does
the ship without a rudder. Allah has blessed us by imposing this
leadership, by vesting the patriarch of the family with it and
demanding its fulfilment, in fact, making the question of fulfilment a
question of law. A father who is not fulfilling his role as a
responsible leader is a father that can be sued under the law, under
the Shari'ah, and he can be sued by any member of the Islamic Ummah
because the Ummah and the Shari'ah regard this role as constitutive,
it is a public role.

The Social Features

A third advantage which the Islamic family has  over the Western
family is the fact that the family is made out of a cement which is
social and therefore begins long before the marriage, but the special
relationship that we refer to as the love relationship is supposed to
begin and to grow only after marriage and not before. Before marriage,
there is social affinity between the two families of the couple. After
marriage, one enters upon this relationship with a determination to
make it grow and, therefore the chances of a love relationship between
husband and wife growing and becoming more secure and stronger are
better under the Islamic system than they are under the Western
system. Under the Western system, as you know, it is supposed to grow
as a result of courtship, but because of illicit fornication which may
take place between the couple before they become husband and wife,
marriage is looked upon as a confirmation of that which has already
been developing for a year or two or three or ten or whatever. In our
society, marriage is regarded as the beginning not the consummation;
it is not something that is practically finished on the wedding day.
It is something that begins on the wedding day, and has all the future
in which to flower and become greater. The determination with which
this is entered into by the Muslim spouses allows ample room for
adjustment because the commitment has already been made and therefore
a Muslim who enters into marriage is determined to make that marriage
work, determined to make the love relationship between the two spouses
grow, and is therefore more ready for the adjustment that family life
demands. It is the other way round in Western society. If this
relationship has grown to its apex before marriage and marriage is
looked upon as a consummation of that movement, then the consequence
is that the desire to adjust, the preparation to make the necessary
sacrifices and adjustments, would be all the more because the interest
in it would be on the wane rather than on the increase.


Arranged Marriages

A fourth advantage is the advantage that we talk about in arranged
marriages. Arranged marriages are really the coming together of two
families. Of course, the individuals are involved, and as we said
earlier it is possible for such a marriage to succeed because from the
standpoint of the marriage the love relationship begins after and not
before the wedding. But then, the relationship between the two
families is something that has been cultivated for some time, and so
we speak of the Muslim marriage not as a marriage of two individuals
but as a marriage of two families. And the two families with all their
resources, their human resources, their economic resources, their
wisdom resources are at the service of the newly-married couple and
there is no doubt that nobody in the world needs more advice, more
economic assistance and more support than the newly-married couple and
this is provided for them from both sides of the marriage if it is
truly a Muslim marriage, that is to say a marriage of the two
families. Compare and contrast this with the situation of the Western
young men and women who meet under all kinds of circumstances on their
own and having met and fallen in love, decide to enter into marriage.
They are literally alone and this is why the greatest overwhelming
majority of these marriages are contracted outside even the knowledge
of their parents and their relatives.


Marriage: A Civil Contract

A fifth point is that our marriage is by contract; it is a civil
contract between two equal parties, between two equal families, not
just between two individuals.  It is a civil contract that requires
the consent of the two parties. The two parties may include outside of
the Shari'ah requirements, anything that may lead to their happiness
and mutually agreeable to both of them. Once the marriage has taken
place and the contract has been signed and agreed upon, witnessed not
only by the individual spouses, but also by their guardians and their
elders, then it becomes a legal and binding document. Now, this
creates a constitution for the marriage. Now consider  its fate, and
the home as a state. It has internal affairs and it has external
affairs, it has public security affairs and it has police affairs and
jail affairs, sometimes. It has educational affairs and it has
propaganda affairs, and public information. All the ministries of
government, all the functions of the ministries of government are
there to be per- formed in the family, in the home unit. Can you
imagine all these activities being carried out with- out a
constitution in the state? But such is the Western marriage. The
Western marriage has no constitution. It is a state without a
constitution.

They say it is a sacrament and a sacrament is an equal act; it is a
mysterious cement which has created, a cadre or framework that has
been vested upon that couple outside of their family and it is not
spelled out, that is to say, nobody knows its terms and this is why
when there is dispute, when there is trouble, when the marriage is on
the rocks, they have to refer to custom, to common law, to what- ever
the arbitrary wisdom of the judge may happen to hit upon by way of
solution. Therefore, we can say that the Western marriage is a chaotic
marriage, it is the founding of an institution without a 
constitution, whereas our Islamic marriage, being built upon the
constitution, its terms being spelled out in the constitution which is
the contract of marriage, is an orderly, a societal institution, that
is to say it is an institution very much in society. And Allah,
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, has commanded us in the Holy Book that if we
agree on anything, to write it down, and writing down the contract of
marriage is a blessed act which saves the marriage as well as a great
deal of unhappiness and suffering.


Marriage - Settles Life and Relations

Likewise, this contract of marriage, and this is my sixth point,
settles life and relations should the marriage for any reason come to
an end, whether this is by death or separation by divorce. The
consequences are all or should all be spelled out in the contract of
marriage and in this way the life of the spouses after marriage are
also regulated. I remember a case which I read about in the American 
press not too long ago, a case in California. California is the state
which is most liberal in man- woman relations and now they recognise
that a man and a woman coming together and living together without
marriage, without the sacrament, still entitles  the woman to some
kind of settlement, some kind of compensation. I remember one very
famous American woman sued the man who was her paramour, with whom she
had been living for many years without marriage, without bond, neither
civil nor religious nor anything. She pleaded her case to the judge
that "after all, I have given this man the flower of my youth, I have
given this man all the service and all the company and so on and so
forth, now he is telling me to get out of here, and no settlement,
nothing, and he is a man of means. Am I not entitled to something,
despite the fact that I have no marriage and we have been living in
sin?" So the judge pronounced his verdict that because there had been
no contract, no marriage agreement, and at least the sacrament is a
kind of agreement that is recognised by society, you the woman are not
entitled to anything. So this famous woman went out and met the press
and she began cursing the judicial system of America for this
atrocious piece of injustice and she was saying: "all fellow women of
America, do not ever enter into marriage, do not allow your men even
to kiss you unless you agree with them on the consequences of
termination of that relationship, and put it down in writing for only
then will the judicial system operate."

And when I read that, I said that here, finally, these American women,
after running away from the Islamic value of pinning down and spelling
out the relationship and the consequences of the relationship in a
contract which has been available to everyone for fourteen centuries,
finally they are coming to realise its value. How much education and
how much safeguarding of the future for our Western neighbours, our
non-Muslim neighbours it would provide if we were to invite them to
our homes and show them our contracts of marriage and tell them that
life within marriage, or should the marriage be terminated outside the
marriage, are all here, written down and spelled out, agreed upon not
only by the two individuals concerned, but also by the two families.
What a tremendous source of relief this could give them if they were
capable of practising it and, of course, this would be an introduction
to them to enter the fold of Islam because only Islam gives them that
assurance and that guarantee.


Women's Personality

The seventh point that I want to make concerns woman's personality. I
have already mentioned women's liberation and you are aware, I am
sure, how much has been done since the days of universal suffrage; the
right to vote, to elect officers of the government, or a right to all
property or what you have, but the West still has a great deal to
learn from Islam on this question of legal status, regardless of the
relationship that marriage has brought about. In the West, only very
recently and only a few women are beginning to carry their maiden name
and then only those that have achieved a reputation and a career
before marriage. It has become something of a business value, like the
name of the business world, therefore they want to keep the name, but
very few among them believe that they are total and complete
personalities and of course, the law does not allow them to be. There
is no faith in the union, in America, that would allow a married
woman, or a married man for that matter, to sell a property without
consideration for the other spouse. And so it looks that, as far as
buying and selling property is concerned, women are half persons, not
fully legal persons, and in the continent in Europe, there are still
many states which do not recognise at all such rights of married women
or of unmarried women for that matter.


The Extended Family

Then our family, and this is my eighth point, our Muslim family is an
extended family, it is not a nuclear family though the nuclear family
is quite fashionable . We said that the nuclear family, forgive me for
using this term and playing on the term nuclear and fission, the
nuclear family consisting only of husband, wife and children does not
have the resources, the human resources, the wisdom resources, the
friendly resources that the extended family brings to the scene. This
tendency, unfortunately is gripping the whole Muslim world and I would
not be surprised to see it gripping the Muslim population of England,
Europe and America as well, that every person who gets married wants
to go and live in a flat of his own, avoiding his relatives, immediate
or distant. This is a terrible development, this is the Westernisation
and the corruption that we are subjected to, that we are undergoing in
our lives in the West, and we should resist it. We should resist it
for several reasons. The Shari'ah has prescribed for us who is our
dependent and who is not our dependant, who is our heir and who is not
our heir and therefore, to the extent that the Shari'ah has done this,
then those people who inherit from us and who are our dependants must
live together. We must eat together from the same kitchen and live as
far as possible in the same home. We, our brothers, our sisters, our
parents, our grandparents, our cousins, uncles, nephews, nieces and so
forth, because these constitute the extended family of Islam. Now the
extended family of Islam is the noblest, the greatest, the most
valuable social institution that the world has ever seen. By going
nuclear, that is to say by going individualistic, Western society has
lost all these values and they are suffering terribly.

Let me point out to you a few of those consequences. Because we live
with our parents and our elders, we love them, they have brought us
up, they have played with us when we were young, they have told us
stories, they were patient with us and they have educated us, guided
us, advised us, so we love them because we are in constant communion
with them. However, in the Western case, there is alienation and a
strangeness because as soon as the youth period is past, the children
strike out on their own and the result is that when the parents become
old, there is no respect for them; they end their days pining for
their children in old folks' homes or the nursing homes for old
people. There could not be a more cruel death for anyone than that of
being taken to the old folks' home to die slowly, away from his own
progeny, from his own dependants and there could not be a worse fate
for any man or woman than to be deprived of the relationship and
affection of their own children. But you see, respect for elders has
to be cultivated and it will not be cultivated by separation, hence
this is the great benefit of the Muslim extended family. Secondly, the
extended family permits no generation gap among Muslims. In the same
family there are babies, teenagers, adults and elders, maybe elders of
the first level and elders even of the second level and, since they
live together, they are in constant communion with one another; this
is precisely the socialisation, the acculturation that the
sociologists are talking about and are pleading for, and yet the
nuclear family makes it impossible. This is why acculturation and
socialisation have to be obtained in the drug store, through the
television screen or through one's peers in the schools, but then this
is not acculturation, this is not socialisation. This is
demagogisation, if the term can be used. Acculturation and
socialisation means the passing on from one generation to another of
norms, of social norms, of social values. It does not mean a group of
people coming together Ad hoc in order to have fun. That is not
socialisation, that is not acculturation, and where in the Western
society can this process take place anyway?

This is why Western society today is so radically different from
Western society of yesterday, and this is why the old values of
Western society do not obtain today and why there is no continuity. On
the Islamic side, because of the extended family, there is no such
generation gap. Thirdly, a great consequence of the extended family is
the fact that considering that human beings are social animals, as the
philosophers used to say, they need company, they need solace. I need
somebody with whom to love sometime and I need somebody with whom to
play sometime. I need somebody with whom to complain sometime and I
need somebody with whom to cry sometime. Now where else but in the
extended family can I find that somebody? Now if I do not have the
extended family, if I do not give vent to these pent-up emotions,
these emotions will build up in me and make me insane, make me crazy,
they will make me take to drugs, to alcohol, to running after other
women outside the home.

A nuclear family endangers that sanity and opens the door to all kinds
of maladjustments. Another consequence of the extended family is that
we learn to be loyal to a group, we learn to be altruistic, we learn
to give our emotions, our love, loyalty and fidelity to a group that
is, of course, the microcosm of the Ummah, in other words, to defeat
our individualism. All of us are individualists, this is something
inside us, it is an instinct. We are all advocates, everybody wants to
promote himself and fill his own tummy and so on and so forth. This is
natural, Allah has put that inside us, but Allah has also planted us
in an extended family in order to curb those instincts, to discipline
them. In fact, to make something good come out of them instead of the
egotistic pursuit which brings ruin. Without the extended family there
can be no Ummah because there can be no Ummatic feeling bred in the
members and the result would be dissolution, and this is exactly what
we are seeing in the Western family and in Western society. Western
society today is built upon individuals and upon egotism, everybody
wants his own thing, his own pleasure, to pursue his own interests,
and nobody is willing to adjust and sacrifice and co-operate with
another and this is why the society is falling apart. And to bring a
Western person into an extended family and to let him experience what
we experience in the extended family situation is undoubtedly, if he
or she has any measure of sensitivity, to convert them to Islam, to
make them one to that kind of relaxation, that kind of thirst that is
enjoyed by the Muslim who is living in an extended family.


The Benefits of an Extended Family

Another point, the ninth point, can be regarded as a consequence of
the extended family. We have heard about women going out to work and
having a career, but for a woman to go out to work and have a career
in the West, in the nuclear family, must always be and can only be
done at the cost of the home and the children. Either there are no
children, deliberately, in order to pursue the career or, if there are
children, they are abandoned to the television set or to the
baby-sitter or to the street corner if they cannot afford the
baby-sitter. Sometimes they even bum themselves or burn the house down
by playing with fire without a supervisor. Or the woman comes home
from work, exhausted to the point of being uninterested in the spouse
or another person, and then tempers fly, because everybody is
exhausted  and so family life is ruined. I want to tell you that only
in the Muslim family can the woman have a career outside the home.
Why? Because she can absent herself, if she has a talent; if she has
the talent to invent things or produce things that would benefit the
whole Ummah, a woman can do that without losing either home or
children. Why? Because there are so many other women in the home,
because there are so many other people in the home carrying on the
business of the family and so preventing damage to the career or the
home. Of course, the first career of a Muslim woman is her family.
There can be no doubt about that, and that comes before driving
shuttles to the moon or whatever or inventing robots. It is her duty,
it is her function, it is her prime function, the function for which
Allah has created her is, indeed, to be the pillar, the main pillar of
the family and the mother. But this may not exhaust all her years or
all her energies. And therefore, if it is possible for her to serve
the Ummah additionally, besides being a mother, this could be done
only in the case of the extended family and the Muslim family. And it
is also the condition for the preservation of her femininity because
the tensions under which women work outside of the home are dissipated
when she comes home and the same femininity, the same feminine touch
never leaves the home. This is always available.

And, in conclusion, I should remind you of all the other values that
our Muslim family enjoys by virtue of adhering to the prescriptions of
the Shari'ah. The fact that we do not drink alcohol or take drugs is a
tremendous source of strength for the family. The fact that gambling
is Haraam and that the resources of the family ought to have one kitty
in which to put their incomes and from that kitty should come all the
expenses of everyone according to a system of priorities established
by the responsible leader or father. All these are tremendous props
which the Western peoples do not enjoy at all.


The Last Word

And now a last word. We are here to stay, we are here to plant Islam
in this part of the world and we must utilise everything in our power
to make the word of Allah supreme. If we go and merely talk to our
neighbours, our talk is talk and talk my brothers and sisters, does
not have the convincing power of facts. Facts and deeds are far more
eloquent and they tell their stories far stronger than any words, even
if the words are sheer poetry. Now it is in the realm of the family
that these values of Islam are exemplified. You must make it a rule to
invite a non-Muslim to visit your family once a week. Devote every
Friday evening to your Da'wah effort. Invite your neighbour, whether
your friend is a colleague from the factory, office, the shop where
you work or your geographic neighbour next door. Let him come in with
his wife or with his girlfriend or whatever, let them come in and see
for themselves these Islamic values implemented in the real life of
the family. You do not have to be rich; you have to be clean, you have
to be disciplined, you have to be thinking in terms of Da'wah, of
putting forth these excellent values of Islam and talking about them,
and not only talking about them, but practising them, and that would
be your best argument. And remember that it is Allah that converts
them to Islam, not you, but may you all and your poor brother, Ismail
Faruqi, be instruments in the hands of Allah, Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, to
spread His faith.  

"The family Is a divinely Inspired  Institution that came Into
existence with the creation of man. me human race Is a product of this
Institution and not the other way around." Khurshid Ahmad