SEC. 2 — LEGAL DISABILITIES

Mut‘ah or temporary marriage disallowed

A marriage for a fixed period was recognized before Islām. It went under the name of mut‘ah, meaning profiting by or enjoying a thing. Besides the temporary marriage, four kinds of union of man and woman were recognized by the pre-Islāmic Arabs (Bu. 67:37). The first of these was the permanent marriage tie which, in a modified form, was recognized by Islām. The second was known as the istibdzā’.11 The following explanation of this word is given in Bukhārī and other authorities: “A man would say to his wife, Send for such a one and have cohabitation with him; and the husband would remain aloof from her and would not touch her until her pregnancy was clear” (Bu. 67:37; N.). This is exactly the form which goes under the name of niyoga in the reformed Hindu sect, Ārya Samāj. The third form was that in which any number of men, less than ten, would gather together and have cohabitation with a woman, and when she became pregnant and gave birth to a child, she would call for all those men and would say that the child belonged to such a one from among them, and he was bound by her word to accept the responsibility. Fourthly, there were prostitutes who were entered upon promiscuously and when one of them bore a child, a man known as qā’if (lit., one who recognized) was invited and his decision, based on similarity of features, was final as to who was the father of the child. The last three forms only legalized adultery in one form or another and Islām did not recognize any of them, nor was any such practice resorted to by any Muslim at any time.

Temporary marriage stood on a different basis, and reform in this matter was brought about gradually. Recently the idea has appealed to the Western mind which is seeking in temporary marriage, by way of experiment, a remedy for the rigidity of the Christian marriage laws. Islām, however, discarded the idea of temporariness in marriage, because it opens the way to loose relations of the sexes, and entails no responsibility of any kind on the father for the care and bringing up of the children, who, with the mother, might thus be left quite destitute. Occasions may arise for the dissolution of a