Marriages

haroon_adel · Joined: 18 Mar 2008 Posts: 125 Location: USA

The End!

From_Alamut · Joined: 22 Jan 2008 Posts: 666

mandi · Joined: 28 Mar 2009 Posts: 1

very sad ending, it was very much same with me but i and my girl survived.

i converted to aga khani then i was told that i could only marry my girl if my whole family is aga khani, which was like impossible.

then me and my girl both decided to marry any how, jamat khana people did not allow us to marry in jamat khana, so we married outside of it. but then a moment of great shame was that no single person from her side attended the marriage not even her siblings.

well now it has past 3 years none of her relative have ever tried of contacting her, she is just cut of from community.

maybe thats why the girl of the guy (sadly who is no more alive), may not want her family to face such shame due to her.

this really is a critical matter, it has destoryed many lives.
one of cousins of my wife also suicided, these are some cases that are infront of us, but there are many that we dont know about.

afte reading about this guy, i feel like ...
and all the evidences he gave, it proves that marriage is allowed than why do we ismaili people dont let our children marry.
i think we ourselves should do something to make ismaili people aware that it is not a sin, well i ask every one reading this please email or tell atleast every one you know that it is allowed, also give them the evidence provided by the person (really makes me cry when i say he is dead).

may allah bless all rest couples in this situation.

maks_pam · Joined: 08 Apr 2009 Posts: 1

YAM, Hey, Could anyone give some link on the internet to Farmans of HH regarding the Marrage, please. I would be very grateful to you. I have question as previously state by someone; Example. If I am in love with Cristian girl, and we agreed that she will convert into Ismaili befor marrage, is it allowed in Ismaili???????  If you have some information regarding this issue from Imams words, please send me. Because as I read from some statements within the Forum, I have got an understanding that many of us have some missunderstanding of who we are - Ismailis!!!! but it is hard to explain in two words ......... Thanks a lot in advance,

TheMaw · Joined: 14 Feb 2009 Posts: 106

I cannot give you a Farman, but you can marry a non-Ismaili. We aren't the Druze... the People of the Book are licit to Muslims, which *explicitly* includes Christians and Jews and generally also includes groups like Parsis-Zoroastrians and often explicitly monotheist Hindus.

They don't even have to convert to Islam.

Also, Princess Zahra married an Anglican man in 1997, so I think you are fine.

From_Alamut · Joined: 22 Jan 2008 Posts: 666

Ya Ali Madad and Salam

I just want to share a little though which I was thinking a couple days ago about our Ismaili brothers or sisters before marrying a non Ismaili. The first important thing is before getting "marry" is to think about your "religion". I mean not like first you get marry and then think about religion. Because I think religion is something very important. For example, let say you are married with some Wahhabi Saudi Arabia male or female. So, you keep your faith and Wahhabi person his or her. After a few years, you guys going to have a new first child born. Once, the child grew up, then the Wahhabi person male or female want his or her "Child" to be a "Wahhabi" and the "Ismaili" person want his or her child to be An Ismaili. So, what my point is that in this cast it creates such a big conflict amount the couples. God know, what will happen next. But such a things have already happened. All I want you guys to be aware of everything before getting marry.

"To get marry is to create a new life".

Kindest Regard

aslamsal · Joined: 15 Aug 2003 Posts: 1

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

The power of symbolism

By Richard Wagamese, For the Calgary Herald

May 3, 2009

Spring has arrived in the mountains. It came just this week in a blaze of sunshine and the twitter of red-winged blackbirds down by the water. For a while there, my neighbours and I fretted over the length of the winter and wondered if there was ever going to be a break in what seemed to be the first stages of a new Ice Age. But spring, as they say, has sprung.

At our house, we're planning this year's house and home projects. There's exterior painting to be done, a pergola or a roofed porch, perhaps, added to the deck, a wood shed to be built, a garden to put in and our bedroom is the last room in the house to get spruced up and modernized. It sounds like a lot of work, but spring and summer beckon and we actually look forward to it.

See, we're both kids from the street in a way.We're nomads. Both of us spent years wandering, city to city, job to job, looking for the one place we could really call home. Both of us were married twice. Both of us started our lives as displaced kids, taken away from our natural families and plunked down in someone else's living room and life. So the idea of working together on the place we call "ours" is exciting.

We want to get married soon. That's the big news. Despite having had little success in that department before, we've been together going on seven years now and things just feel right. There have already been trials and tough times. We've seen each other through things. We've learned forgiveness. Our life has become stauncher with love smack dab at its middle.

Last week, we went to town and shopped for a ring. Now, we're both in our early 50s and tarnished some, jaded maybe, cautious, but that experience was revelatory for me and things haven't seemed the same since. See, it's the idea of that ring that altered how I look at things.

I've never been what you might call a conventional man. My life has been marked by dubious choices at times, at others, downright unimaginable and crazy. But I always carried a craving for the sort of set-down life like I saw on The Waltons, say, or loyal and staunch like the Cartwrights. I just never thought I'd get it.

But when we picked out that ring, I felt like a different being. Music hasn't been the same since. I hear things in songs that touch a soft place in me I didn't know existed. Scenes in movies and TV shows get me all emotional. I look at the sky with a sense of wild expectation. Quiet times in front of the fire make me think of us instead of problems and issues. And I smile more.

The gold of that ring glitters. It shines a particular kind of light and even without the diamonds it would be a marvellous thing. Gold exudes the promise of riches beyond measure. It always has. For me, that ring offers hope that a downtrodden life like mine might be sanctified some by the hope that resides in it. Given a newer, hardier light to chase away the shadow of all those gypsy years.

When I saw it on her hand, I felt raised up. Elevated. I felt, right then, as though everything I had ever done in my life had led me to that one shining moment and that is actually the truth of it. Life is a crucible. It is the alchemy that transforms us. What we bring to a marriage, what we carry from our individual histories, becomes the inherent value of the gold in a ring.

That's what I saw. I saw the awesome potential in two spirits joined by the strength of a symbol. I saw the fact that our lives and the choices we make along the way are the rough ore of our becoming. I saw the undeniable truth that we find the truest expression of ourselves in the ones we come to love; parts of us spread out suddenly like the shining vistas of new and undiscovered countries.

When we stand and be-come joined by ceremony, it is the bare fact of our living that brings us together. It is the lesson in the journey that makes it sacred. It is the travelling and not the destination that offers us wisdom, and in the end, it is experience that creates the person we become, the gold we extract from the hardscrabble mines of life and living.

That's what we bring to each other. We marry the whole person. Good and bad, weak and strong, strength and weakness. We stand with all of that. Gold on gold.

One Native Life

Richard Wagamese, a former Calgary herald columnist, is the 2007 recipient of the Canadian authors association award for fiction and a former national newspaper award-winning Columnist.

� Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

ChrisMacPherson · Joined: 30 Apr 2010 Posts: 1

Hi everyone. I have been married to an Ismaili lady for almost 8 years. Her family has always been very nice and accepting of me. We have children who are being raised as Ismaili's because I am not religious and it didn't matter to me what religion they are. I was born a Christian but I don't practice. We were married in a religious ceremony but not in Khane. So interfaith marriages can work!

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

India to loosen traditional divorce laws

Agence France-PresseJune 11, 2010

Marriage is the central focus of most Indian lives, but the government on Thursday took steps to make divorce easier as nuptial breakdowns become more common.

Traditional Indian marriages are still arranged by parents along lines of caste, religion and wealth -- and the couple are expected to stay together and produce children even if they find themselves unsuited.

However, divorce rates have risen in recent years as the country has undergone rapid economic development, massive migration to cities and an upheaval of established social norms.

Ambika Soni, the minister of information and broadcasting, told reporters the proposed change in the law would help an estranged partner get a divorce "if any party does not come to court or wilfully avoids the court."

Currently divorce in India can be granted for matrimonial fault, mutual consent or if one partner has not been heard of for several years.

The Supreme Court last year said the legal system should try to keep marriages together, but agreed that divorces should not be withheld from couples who had completely split.

The proposed amendment, which was passed by a cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, will include "irretrievable breakdown of marriage" as a legal justification for divorce for the first time.

"In today's day and age it may be a welcome step, but it will only really help urban women," Kamini Jaiswal, a Supreme Court advocate, told AFP. "Rural women will still get a raw deal as they are more oppressed by their husbands."

� Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_print.html?id=3139757&sponsor=

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

June 14, 2010, 12:27 pm
Do Kids Still Matter to Marriage?
By TARA PARKER-POPE

One of the more surprising trends in marriage during the past 20 years is the fact that most couples no longer view children as essential to a happy relationship.

A few years ago, the Pew Research Center released a survey called �What Makes Marriage Work?� Not surprisingly, fidelity ranked at the top of the nine-item list � 93 percent of respondents said faithfulness was essential to a good marriage.

But what about children? As an ingredient to a happy marriage, kids were far from essential, ranking eighth behind good sex, sharing chores, adequate income and a nice house, among other things. Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. The only thing less important to a happy marriage than children, the survey found, was whether a couple agreed on politics.

So why do kids rank so low on the list? The fact is, marriages today are increasingly adult-centered, rather than child-centered, an issue identified in a sweeping 2008 report from Rutgers marriage researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. In the report, called �Life Without Children: The Social Retreat From Children and How It�s Changing America,� Dr. Whitehead notes that the percentage of our lives that we devote to parenting is shrinking. Because married couples are delaying children and having fewer kids, they start parenting later and finish parenting sooner than couples of earlier generations. She writes:

For most of the nation�s history, Americans expected to devote much of their adult lives to the nurture and rearing of children. Life with children has been central to norms of adulthood, marriage and the experience of family life. Today however, this historic pattern is changing. Life without children is becoming the more common social experience for a growing percentage of the adult population.

The decline of the child-centered marriage is particularly relevant this week, as lawyers in California offer closing arguments on Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in the state. In January, a supporter of Proposition 8 argued that children would be hurt by same-sex marriage, an issue reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Extending marital rights to couples who cannot conceive children would change marriage from �a child-based public institution to an adult-centered private institution� and �weaken the role of marriage generally in society,� David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, testified at a trial in San Francisco federal court on the constitutionality of the state�s ban on same-sex marriage.

The ruling on same-sex marriage in California will likely not be the last word on the issue. And as Dr. Whitehead goes on to explain, the changing patterns and timing of marriage and parenting don�t mean that we don�t love or remain committed to our children. It just means that children are less central to our lives than they were in the past.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/do-kids-still-matter-to-marriage/?ex=1292212800&en=daa578aeeaaaafa0&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0616-L14

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

The findings come from a new CDC report on U.S. marriage and cohabitation. The data were collected in 2002 in one-on-one interviews with a nationally representative sample of some 7,600 women and 5,000 men.

Which Marriages Last 10 Years?

Get married young, break up young. The odds of a marriage lasting at least 10 years are:
� 54% for women and 47% for men who get married between ages 15 and 19
� 64% for women and 65% for men who get married between ages 20 and 25
� 76% for women and 73% for men who get married at 26 or older

Do children affect marriages? Apparently so. The odds of a marriage lasting at least 10 years are:
� 34% for women and 37% for men who have no children during the marriage
� 55% for women and 65% for men who have a first child by their eventual husband or wife before marriage
� 79% for women and 79% for men whose first child is born at least eight months after marriage
� Having children doesn't mean the marriage lasts a lifetime. 1997 data show that only 57% of marriages last 15 years, and only half last 20 years.

Will your marriage last longer if you first explore living together? Maybe not -- even if you cohabit with your eventual spouse. The odds of a marriage lasting at least 10 years are:
� 60% for women and 62% for men who ever cohabited
� 61% for women and 63% for men who cohabited with their first spouse
� 66% for women and 69% for men who never cohabited

Education makes a difference. But there's at least one surprise here: Just getting a high school diploma doesn't help, but a college degree makes a big difference. The odds of a marriage lasting at least 10 years are:
� 54% for women and 56% for men with a high school diploma or GED
� 63% for women and 61% for men with no high school diploma or GED
� 62% for women and 64% for men with some college but no degree
� 78% for women and 81% for men with a bachelor's degree or higher

Your family structure makes a difference, too, most markedly for women. The odds of a marriage lasting at least 10 years are:
� 67% for women and 66% for men who lived in a two-parent household at age 14
� 48% for women and 63% for men who did not live in a two-parent household at age 14

Marriage success rates differ by race and ethnicity. The odds of a marriage lasting at least 10 years are:
� 51% for black, non-Hispanic men and women
� 64% for white, non-Hispanic men and women
� 68% for Hispanic women and 75% for Hispanic men

Cohabitation Facts

The CDC data offer fascinating glimpses of U.S. cohabitation:

� From 1987 to 2002, the percentage of women who ever cohabited more than doubled, from 30% to 61%.
� For women ages 19 to 44, more than half of marriages from 1990 to 1994 began as cohabitations.
� More than half of births outside marriage occur in cohabitations.
� Over 40% of U.S. children will spend some time in a cohabiting household.
� For women ages 18 to 19, cohabitation is over twice as common as marriage (11% vs. 5%).
� For women ages 25 to 44, marriage is nearly eight times more common than cohabitation (62% vs. 8%).
� More than half of couples in their first cohabitation marry within three years.

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

Grand Mufti wants Emiratis to marry local
Herald News Services
August 25, 2010

The Grand Mufti of Dubai has called for a curb on marriages between locals and foreigners as the price of marrying native brides has risen to more than $490,000.

The number of Emiratis marrying foreigners has risen by 10 per cent in the past four years, according to recent figures.

Officials and religious leaders blame the rising costs of dowries and wedding ceremonies for persuading "ordinary" local men to seek foreign wives, who cost less to marry.

Ahmad al-Haddad, the Grand Mufti, the emirate's most senior Islamic scholar, wants to restrict foreign marriages to allow only Muslim Arab spouses.

For a man, it would have to be his first and only wife.

"In Islam, choosing your life partner is a personal freedom," the Grand Mufti said at a gathering in honour of the holy month of Ramadan, "but personal freedoms can be restricted for the benefit of the public interest."

His proposals are unlikely to be welcomed, and he may have difficulty persuading Dubai's ruler to approve his suggestion.

Sheikh -bin Rashid al-Maktoum took -Jordanian princess as his second wife and would have fallen foul of the rules.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_print.html?id=3439874&sponsor=

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

July 3, 2011
More Perfect Unions
By ROSS DOUTHAT

In 44 states, the future of gay marriage still depends on legislatures, governors and voters � and eventually, perhaps, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. But in New York, as in five states before it, gay marriage�s future is in the hands of gay couples themselves.

Over the decades ahead, their choices will gradually transform gay marriage from an idea into a culture: they�ll determine the social expectations associated with gay wedlock, the gay marriage and divorce rates, the differences and similarities between gay and lesbian unions, the way marriage interacts with gay parenting, and much more besides.

They�ll also help determine gay marriage�s impact on the broader culture of matrimony in America.

One possibility is that gay marriage will end up being a force for marital conservatism, among gays and straights alike. In this vision, the norms of heterosexual marriage will be the template for homosexual wedlock. Once equipped with marriage�s �entitlements and entanglements,� Jonathan Rauch predicted in his book �Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America,� �same-sex relationships will continue to move toward both durability and exclusivity.� At the same time, the example of gay couples taking vows will strengthen �marriage�s status as the gold standard for committed relationships.�

At the other end of the spectrum from Rauch�s gay conservatism are the liberationists, who hope that gay marriage will help knock marriage off its cultural pedestal altogether. To liberationists, a gay rights movement that ends up reaffirming a �gold standard� for relationships will have failed in its deeper mission � which Columbia law professor Katherine M. Franke recently summarized in a Times Op-Ed article as the quest for �greater freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage.�

That�s the kind of argument that makes social conservatives worry about polygamy (and worse). But liberationism has been gradually marginalized in the gay community over the last two decades, and gay conservatism seems to have largely carried the day. The desire to be included in an existing institution has proved stronger than the desire to eliminate every institutional constraint.

Still, there�s a third vision that�s worth pondering � neither conservative nor liberationist, but a little bit of both. This vision embraces the institution of marriage, rather than seeking to overthrow it. But it also hints that the example of same-sex unions might partially transform marriage from within, creating greater institutional flexibility � particularly sexual flexibility � for straight and gay spouses alike.

This idea is most prominently associated with Dan Savage, the prolific author, activist and sex columnist who was profiled in Sunday�s Times Magazine. Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about monogamy. Better, he suggests, to define marriage simply as a pact of mutual love and care, and leave all the other rules to be negotiated depending on the couple.

In �The Commitment,� his memoir about wedding his longtime boyfriend, Savage described the way his own union has successfully made room for occasional infidelity. �Far from undermining the stable home we�ve built for our child,� he writes, �the controlled way in which we manage our desire for outside sexual contact has made our home more stable.�

The trouble is that straight culture already experimented with exactly this kind of model, with disastrous results.

Forty years ago, Savage�s perspective temporarily took upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51 percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism, their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers.

This trend eventually reversed itself. Heterosexual marriage has had a tough few decades, but its one success story is the declining divorce rate among the upper middle class. This decline, tellingly, has gone hand in hand with steadily rising disapproval of adultery.

There�s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

Critics of gay marriage see this as one of the great dangers in severing the link between marriage and the two realities � gender difference and procreation � that it originally evolved to address. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.

In courts and now legislatures, this has been a losing argument. But as gay New Yorkers ponder what they want their marriages to mean, they should consider one of its implications: The hardest promises to keep are often the ones that keep people together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/opinion/04douthat.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

kmaherali · Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 9905

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
JULY 9, 2011

The Divorce Generation
Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn't always work.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303544604576430341393583056.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Excerpt:

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of
16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children
were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the
same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest
level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all
marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s�in other words, our
parents' marriages.

Not ours. According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples
who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We're
also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950
was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for
women....

Adultery is far more devastating for us than it was for our parents or
grandparents. A 2003 study by the late psychologist Shirley Glass found
that the mores of sexual infidelity are undergoing a profound change. The
traditional standard for men�love is love and sex is sex�is dying out.
Increasingly, men and women develop serious emotional attachments with
their would-be lovers long before they commit adultery. As a result, she
found, infidelity today is much more likely to lead to divorce.

Call us helicopter parents, call us neurotically attached, but those of us
who survived the wreckage of split families were determined never to
inflict such wounds on our children. We knew better. We were doing
everything differently, and the fundamental premise was simple: "Kids come
first" meant that we would not divorce.

Welcome to The Heritage Web Site