Temporary marriage...

Temporary marriage, as well as permanent marriage, has two sides, and BOTH sides are supposed to benefit from it. Consequently, depriving them for these benefits may cause both men and women to go wrong. It seems that some people have no problem with what is promoted in the West, with a culture of nudity and nakedness, with using women as adverting objects, with reducing the sexual values and ethics to the garbage and obscenity we see everyday on TV, media, etc.

There is nothing humiliating and unethical about using a young, pretty, half-naked girl (the ideal woman!) as a sex object to sell bear. A woman selling her beauty to a magazine or show is considered to have a "respectable" career and is called a "model"! What a meaningful terminology! On the contrary, playing the role of a "mother" in a family is considered to be unimportant, if not humiliating. Being boyfriend-girlfriends is accepted as a sign of freedom, culture, and growth.

However, if we talk about temporary marriage suddenly these people start to cry! Some also believe that the spread of pre-marital relationships in the West is not completely a result of moral breakdown, rather it is also due to changed socio-economic conditions. In older times, marriage was simpler and the average age of marriage was much lower. In today's complex society, it is no longer possible to be economically self-sufficient enough to get married until one is nearly thirty years old.

This means that the only option to avoid pre-marital relationships is to extend the period of pre- marital celibacy to as much as 15 years. Education is another obvious example. The man and woman usually can not find a job if they are unskilled or uneducated, and therefore financial independence is not feasible in the early stages of their life. Such prolonged celibacy is unnatural and cannot be sustained in any society for long.

This is one reason why the traditional marriage customs broke down in the west during the last 30 years. Today, most Muslim countries are also rapidly modernizing. It is inevitable that they will also face many of the pressures that most Western countries are facing. They have a choice to make. They can either try to mount a futile struggle against inevitable change and face a chaotic breakdown of their traditional customs.

Or they can courageously take the initiative and revive the Islamic values such as Mut'a to respond to changing needs of the society in the true spirit of Islam.