Abu Abdullah

For it is love which makes a marriage-not a soppy, sentimental kind of romantic dream, but the sort of love which will roll up its sleeves and get stuck into the mess; the sort of love which will hang on to you when everyone else has turned against you and is speaking wrongly of you, while you have confidence that your partner (who knows you better than any person) will justify that confid

Some seeds develop into beautiful flowers, while others are troublesome weeds-like bindweed, which climbs over everything else and chokes it, until the garden is buried and destroyed.

You have to be on the alert for invasions of malicious pests which, although they are themselves claiming a right

to live, are nevertheless gaining their living at the expense of yours, and are ruining the things you have planted.

You have to keep an eye on the weather, and when there is not enough rainfall, you must do the long chore of going round the garden yourself carrying water, making sure everything is all right. In a long, dry spell, is might mean a great deal of drudgery-but you know at without it your garden will fail and die.

But the most fundamental team of all, and the one which is the most important, is that of a man and woman deciding to live together in one space as husband and wife.

Allah has prohibited marriage to polytheists,

It is no good, of course, the husband simply feeling 'hard done-by' if he wishes to accept the wife's earnings as part of the total income of the house

It is no good, of course, the husband simply feeling 'hard done-by' if he wishes to accept the wife's earnings as part of the total income of the house

It is no good, of course, the husband simply feeling 'hard done-by' if he wishes to accept the wife's earnings as part of the total income of the household, but then makes a fuss if it is he who returns to the house first, and who might, perhaps, be expected in that case to light the oven or make the tea! Obviously, if the wife returns before the husband, it is she who gets the 'dark emptiness,' and she is naturally expected to accept this as part of the way things are.

Everything should be considered fairly and openly.

It is patently not all right to expect a highly intelligent woman to sit around at home wasting her life's talents by limiting herself to housework alone. It is true that there is serious unemployment in many Muslim societies, and a major influx of women

into the jobs market would make this much worse and leave many families without one breadwinner, let alone two. But it is also true that the Muslim world is crying out for female doctors, nurses, lecturers and so forth, and these women have to undergo considerable sacrifice in order to get themselves trained, and expect to be able to offer their services to the community in much the same way as a trained man.