Question
The way you put it is very understandable and will make one think more than once to go ahead with such a marriage. But we are born human beings with a heart, a heart that sometimes prevails over all logical understanding. I therefore ask you kindly to help me answer this question (within the laws of Islam, is the marriage of a muslim woman to a baha’i man allowed or not?)
Answer
I will refer you to some relevant answers published in our associated websites for the ruling you enquired about, however before that I would like to encourage you to read my first answer more carefully and to think about it more seriously. You wrote that you were human being with heart and that not all times logic might prevail over heart. I fully understand this. It is because of the same concept that I wrote that first response. I was trying to encourage you to think, beyond regulations, whether practically you will be doing something that could easily end up in breaking your heart.
In the Qur’an we only have permission for ‘Muslim men’ to marry ‘the People of the Book’ (5:5).
The most popular view is that since the permission is given only to Muslim men therefore women do not have that permission and this is because of the fact that normally and traditionally men are leaders of their family and therefore are more influential in influencing the religion of their family members.
A different though less popular view is that the Qur’an has not prohibited marriage of Muslim women with people of the book but is simply silent about it. This silence, at most, can be considered as implicit dislike but (according to this view) cannot be considered as explicitly forbidden.
Answered by: Farhad Shafti
Date: 2015-01-19
