touch – as I will demonstrate – we cannot bequeath As-Sakkinah (peace and
security) to our descendents because in its absence there are no descendents.
This is because sexual stimulation and response can be achieved without
sight, sound, smell, taste and even pleasure — but not without touch.viii
And those who pray, “Our Lord! Grant unto us wives and offspring who will be the
comfort [pleasure] of our eyes,^ and give us (the grace) to lead the righteous.”
(Q. 25:74)If this is how we started, then what has happened to the estate of marriage
that it is such a cause of despair for so many these days? Muslims have failed
to keep pace with science and hence have also failed to intelligently
acknowledge, define, utilize and justly defend the gender specific differences
Allah created and established between men and women. Instead of unity
there is a diversity of division despite the marital facades that promenade as
pedestrian masjids. Marriage has become a kind of 'trench warfare' with
spouses dug-in on either side of the gender-line with pre-nuptial nukes and
fantasy snipers locked and loaded. In-between is a war-scarred no-man’s land
of ignorance of the “other” where insults are traded and frequent devastating
sorties are entertained. It is also a place where ‒ when no one is looking ‒
passionate ‘touch’ takes its natural course only to be denied its dais of pristine
glory as the continuum of a pious afterglow called as-Sakkinah as described
above. This is not the example of the Prophet who said:
“Nikah is my sunnah. He who shuns my sunnah is not of me.” (Muslim)Now, we’d like to think this Hadith refers to marriage in its generic
transcendent sense. However, the use of the word Nikah has completely
different connotations and I can’t vouchsafe that the Prophet actually used
this word; Can You? Though many of the Shafii School use it to mean
marriage, the word Nikah doesn't exactly mean "Marriage" in its gestalt
romantic sense. From the Dictionary of the Quranic phrases and its meaning,
Sheik Mousa Ben Mohammed Al Kaleeby, Cairo, Maktabat Al Adab, 2002,
writes:
The definition of "Nikah" is the penetration of one thing by another.
Examples would be as in saying the seed in the soil. It also can mean the