Divorce: Inducing a woman to get
divorced to marry someone else

Q161 :I knew a young woman whom I dearly loved to
marry. I talked to her mother and brother, but they did not take my
proposal seriously. They arranged her marriage. I still feel the same
toward her. Is it all right if I try to persuade her to get divorced so
that I can marry her?

A161 : What you feel is not unusual in the sense
that you have had great hopes that you will share your life and future
with this lady, and that the two of you will do every thing possible to
ensure your mutual happiness. The fact that you were not able to
realize your dreams still lingers with you causing you much pain.
However, a Muslim must train himself to accept all life’s eventualities
and trust God to give him what is better than what he may choose for
himself. In the life of everyone of us certain wishes and hopes are
frustrated and we find ourselves unable to take control of what seems
to us to be of utmost importance. We, however, try to accept the new
situation and make the best of it. As time passes we discover that we
are much happier with the way things have turned out. If we are given
the choice again we would certainly choose to continue with what we got
rather than go back to our original preference. In your case this is
the attitude you should adopt. You should resign yourself to the fact
that you have missed out on marrying that lady and you should include
in your supplication a prayer that God may give you a better woman for
a wife. When you have done that you should try to forget the matter
netpletely, trusting that God will choose for you what is best. This is
the proper attitude of a Muslim. I realize that it is not easy to
discard something that one has cherished as one’s dearest hope,
thinking that it is the be all and end all of one’s own happiness, but
then it is an essential aspect of being a true believer that one
accepts what God has chosen. The Prophet expresses this in his
inimitable style as he advises everyone of us: “Accept what God has
apportioned for you and you will be richest of people.” It will
certainly be very wrong of you to try to encourage this lady to seek
divorce so that you could marry her. Try to think of the matter in a
reverse order. What if you had married someone on the basis of a
goodwill and then discovered that someone is trying to get her
divorced? Is it not true that your discovery will cause a great deal of
trouble within your home and family life? The least that you expect
from your wife in such a situation is to turn a deaf ear to whatever
that man says and to boycott him altogether. The Prophet says: “No one
of you is a true believer unless he loves for his brother what he loves
for himself.” If you do not like that any person encourage your wife to
seek divorce from you, then you must not encourage another woman to
seek divorce. You may protest that she is not happy with him, but that

is irrelevant. It may be that all that they need to bring happiness
into their home is to give themselves a little longer to understand
each other better. Besides, how do you know that she will be happier
with you, or that you will be happy with her? These matters can only be
discovered by practice. Let me tell you that it is forbidden for you
to take any action to persuade that lady to divorce her husband. Islam
does not allow that a man should put a proposal of marriage to someone
who is only engaged to another man. It certainly does not approve of
trying to get a married woman divorced in order to marry someone else.

Our Dialogue ( Source : Arab News – Jeddah )