The author of the book is Ayatullah Murtadha Mutahhari. It is published in W.O.F.I.S. World Organization for Islamic Services. The author outlines general rights of women with special emphasis to marriage. Some of the areas covered are marriage proposal, engagement, temporary marriage, modernity, dowry, inheritance, divorce and polygyny.
The problem of family relations in our age is not so simple and trivial as may be resolved by filling up questionnaires by boys and girls by holding seminars — like the seminars I saw and heard of, and the level and standard of intellect that was displayed in them, which is not peculiar to our country. Other nations have also not been able to find a solution to the problem, nor do they claim to have found one.
The philosopher Will Durant, the well-known writer of The Story of Civilization, writes: “If in imagination we place ourselves at the year 2,000, and ask what was the outstanding feature of human events in the first quarter of the twentieth century, we shall perceive that it was not the Great War, nor the Russian Revolution, but the change in the status of woman. History has seldom seen so startling a transformation in so short a time.
The ‘sacred home’ that was the basis of our social order, the marriage system that was our barrier against human passion and instability, the complex moral code that lifted us from brutality to civilization and courtesy, are visibly caught in that turbulent transition which has come upon all our institutions, all our nodes of life and thought.” (The Pleasures of Philosophy New York, 1953, p.l29)
Today, similarly, when we are living in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the lamentations of western thinkers are all the more articulate when they witness around them the break up of family ties, the weakening of the foundations of marriage the evasion of young people in accepting the responsibilities of marriage, the dislike of being a mother, the dwindling of paternal and maternal affections, indulgence in the satisfaction of temporary passions instead of love, the ever-increasing incidence of divorce, the galloping increase in the number of illegitimate child with unity and sincerity being very rare thing in married couples.
