From the earliest periods of human history, religion and the family have been intimately related. Each has an influence upon the other. Neither can be fully understood apart from the other. This interconnection may explain the apparent gap in conventional studies of the Muslim family structure between two unbalanced approaches: the clearly “normative-moralistic” approach, and the non-normative, sometimes called the sociological or anthropological approach.
Since the Muslim family system is based on religious principles and norms, most writers have dealt with the subject from a religious, normative point of view almost exclusively. But this approach has almost always been polaristic. There are those Muslim writers who seem disposed only to applaud the Islamic family system, viewing it from an idealistic standpoint and mistaking what should be for what actually has been. Others seem disposed to condemn the system, as if they saw in it an aberration from some abstract universal standard of morality.
Neither normative standpoint makes useful distinctions between what have been called the “ideological” and the “behavioral” components of the sociocultural world, or the “existential” and the “normative” imperative ideas. In other words, the ideal, the ought-to-be realm is confused with the actual, the is realm.
Each of these two approaches, the normative and the non normative, seems to be inadequate by itself and at times even polemical, if not openly biased.
Here is another book you need to add to your library, enlightening the conditions that seperate a valid marriage from a robbery one, the consequences and ignorance in marital trust, the necessities before stepping into a polygamous family, intergenerational roles, dissolution of the marriage(divorce), its consequences and lots more.
Book Title: TOWARDS THE AVERSION OF OBSCURITIES IN NIKAAH
Launch Date: 1st October, 2020 in Shaa Allah.
Author: Ibn Taofeeq Abdul Azeez