Islam
Islamic law (sharia) clearly lays down rules for marriage, including who can marry whom, and the Qur'an prohibits a wife to be "inherited" unless she agrees.
O you who have believed, it is not lawful for you to inherit women by compulsion. And do not make difficulties for them in order to take part of what you gave them unless they commit a clear immorality. And live with them in kindness. For if you dislike them - perhaps you dislike a thing and Allah makes therein much good. —According to an analysis by Iraj Bashiri of Chingiz Aitmatov's Jamila, levirate marriage was practiced in Kyrgyzstan during the Cold War. Some do or did practice levirate marriage, more often in the name of tribal practices or customary law rather than Islamic law. "Certain tribal cultures ... enforced the levirate ... according to which a brother of a deceased husband was obliged to marry his widow."
Read more about this topic: Levirate Marriage
Famous quotes containing the word islam:
“Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
“Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven.”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist. Islam and Democracy, ch. 9, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Trans. 1992)
“The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)