Interfaith Marriage

Can a Muslim Woman Marry a Non-Muslim Man?

Abstract

A few decades ago, the idea of a Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man was inconceivable in Muslim communities. While Muslim men were able to marry from other faiths (Christian and Jewish), Muslim women, on the other hand, were not permitted to marry non-Muslims. This presentation examines the legal reasoning behind the law which forbids Muslim women from marrying outside their faith. The aim of this presentation is to unpack the arguments employed by Muslim jurists and exegetes throughout the ages which have allowed these laws to remain on the books until today. In this essay, I provide an analysis of these laws in order to determine whether these rulings were rooted in the Islamic tradition—specifically, the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet. Islamic legal scholars and jurists have long claimed that it is forbidden for women to marry from outside the Islamic faith, maintaining that their reasoning is based on evidence from within the Islamic primary source of law (the Qur'an). This essay, however, shows that such claims by Muslim jurists have no base in the Qur'an or traditions of the Prophet, and, instead, jurists have relied on one of the most strenuous methods of Islamic law—jurists’ consensus (ijma)— to reach these conclusions. Jurists’ rulings, which later became law in almost every Arab-Muslim state, tend to discriminate against women, especially with regard to their right to choose their own spouse. Though widely considered to be among the strongest and most reliable forms of evidence in Islamic law, Jurists’ consensus has proven itself to be fertile ground for the creation of laws which restrict the rights of women, while at the same time protecting and even favoring the rights of men.