Namo Buddhaya. May you all be happy, peaceful, and well.
I come from an Islamic background and live in a conservative Muslim country governed by Islamic laws, commonly referred to as Sharia. There is no real religious diversity where I live, and leaving Islam is not legally or socially accepted.
My personal journey has been long. For many years I was an atheist, then I became agnostic with a strong interest in Buddhism. Eventually, I embraced Theravāda Buddhism and found genuine peace.
Now I have decided to marry a Buddhist man whom I believe is a good match for me. I simply want to live a peaceful life with the person I love.
I am facing a serious dilemma. According to my family’s expectations, as well as the religious and cultural norms where I live, I cannot marry without my family’s approval. They will insist that my future husband be considered Muslim and that our marriage be performed according to the Islamic tradition.
My concern is whether going through such a marriage would violate the Buddhist precept of truthful speech. This is what troubles me the most.
The reality is that I have no practical way to marry the man I love except through this process. If I were to marry him in a different way or simply live with him without marriage, my family would almost certainly disown me.
I would sincerely appreciate your thoughts. From a Buddhist ethical perspective, how should I approach this situation? Is there a way to navigate this dilemma without violating the precept of truthful speech?
Thank you.
First of all may I say, congratulations on finding someone to love and who loves you!
I understand your issue, as I have lived in an Islamic country.
You have a hard decision, and there’s no simple answer. But since you asked a specific question, let me answer it.
As you have shown, you care greatly about precepts, and honesty is the foundation of a good relationship.
I’m not sure about the details of the wedding vows, whether there has to be an explicit affirmation of religion. Or if it’s more generally maintaining a double life, pretending to be what you are not. Or both!
If you perform a wedding ceremony, this is a serious statement, and anything said at that time has weight. Obviously there are a lot of legal implications, as well as the personal and social.
If it’s a matter of general life, then living a double life is going to have a corrosive effect on your relationships. But of course this depends on your exact situation and relationship with your parents.
Either way, strictly in terms of the precepts, yes, this would be violating a precept on right speech. Nonetheless, the precepts are there for training, not as absolutes. If you decide to break the precept for what you see as a greater good, that’s your decision to live with. Be clear about what it is that you are doing and why, and determine, together with your husband, to be as truthful as you can in all other circumstances.
Finally, let me just say, I know parents can be complicated, but your life is your own. If you choose what seems the more convenient way, to lie and disguise your intentions, maybe that’ll make it easier for a while. But truth has a way of getting out. I fear that the ultimate outcome will be that you compromise your ethical integrity, then this is found out and the crisis unfolds anyway. The reality is, such situations are highly unpredictable and we cannot control the outcome.
One thing in common between Buddhism and Islam, we both value truth. If you stick to the truth, maybe people will surprise you! But all you can control is your own integrity. At the end of the day, we will become separated from all those who love us, and our own kamma is all we have left.
You are far from the first to encounter this dilemma. It’s happening all over the world, so long as religious intolerance exists. Islam is supposedly against coercion in religion, yet here you are.
And you should be able to do so. The laws and customs of man that divide people from one another are a source of endless, unnecessary travail. I wish you all the best. Please let me know if I can help in any other way.
Sharia is a form of law. Getting married is a contract. Buddhism has no religious rites of marriage - the Buddha considered marriage to be a matter of personal and social responsibility (DN31). In Buddhist countries, buddhists need to register their marriage under Civil law. In an Islamic country one needs to register under Sharia law. That’s just the law of the land. It has no bearing on truthful speech.
If your worry is reciting the Shahada and violating truthful speech - well IMO, nothing in the text of the Shahada is untruthful.
Thus have I heard it spoken…
“There is no God but Allah- Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”.
You could only break the fourth precept if you personally knew for certain believed that this statement was
(a) unequivocally false - impossible to know that for yourself unless you have a high meditative attainment! Please also consider that the Buddha does not deny the existence of God. Nor does the Buddha deny that there are contemplatives who have personally encountered God/s. All that he does is describe and explain these phenomena. And he recommends keeping an open mind (MN 60) when it comes to such things rather than being caught up in views.
(b) spoken by you to sow conflict in those present at the wedding - I would hope not!
(c) spoken in anger with a wish to hurt - on the contrary, you would likely speak out of love for family
(d) without any spiritual or practical purpose - once again, not applicable.
The Buddha is a Teacher. He is not a prophet. He is not a God. He does not ask for our devotion. He does not ask us to stop supporting the religious practices of our parents - rather he urges us to continue the practices our family has passed down (AN 8.12, AN 5.39). Actually he is on record saying that he wants nothing at all from us! (MN103) Out of a sense of compassion, wanting what is best for us, he draws our attention to our own suffering. The precepts and training he recommends one to take on are personal practices aimed at reducing the suffering of oneself and others - they are not matters of faith or ritual. And what is it that we freely undertake for our own welfare? Generosity, virtue, mindfulness, meditation, wisdom… none of these are against the tenets of any religion.
I am a Muslim, and I am a Buddhist. How does it work?
Well, because I come from a Muslim country, and I have grown up with Muslim values (for good and bad). I’ve studied Qu’ran, I’m part of this culture. My intellectual and spiritual leanings have been largely shaped by Sufism as I grew up. I periodically fast during the Ramadan because it’s easy to do when everyone is also fasting, and it’s a wholesome, communal practice. I’m not at war with Islam, nor am I at war with this society. I consider myself a part of an Islamic society, so I’m a Muslim by default, notwithstanding my (lack of) beliefs (so perhaps I’m a terrible Muslim, lol). These are just social concepts of identification and accommodations for me.
Likewise, Buddha considered himself a brahmin, for example (despite his objections to the Vedas).
Having been married (and now divorced!), I’ve come to realise that most of the rhetoric and rituals about marriage is about assessing the compatibility of families and cultures. It’s really less about the two people who’re incidentally getting married, but more about the extended families, because in the end, due to the actions of two lovers, those extended families will have to spend time together.
So, all of the rituals preceding this social contract, generally amount to something like “Are we, as two different families and societies, going to get along?”
It might be wise to consider that this is what is meant when your family wants to consider your husband a Muslim — is he, or is his family going to be a problem for your family’s practice? Are they the kind of people to look down on other cultures? Is your husband at ease with being “Muslim” culturally, understanding and respecting the cultural norms, like the call to prayer, the Ramadan, ashura? Kinda like “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
A nice middle ground would be that he could accommodate to being a Muslim, but he has to also stay true to his upbringing, his culture, his family, and still be a Buddhist. Perhaps, when put this way, your family’s concerns and views will be revealed.
Of course, it depends from place to place and muslim country to muslim country. Some places are more literal, some places are less so. Usually though, you might find that their concerns might not strictly be “Does he actually believe in Allah?!” but rather, is he going to cringe when your parents practice their prayers, can he say “Mashallah! Inshallah!” wholeheartedly, is he going to be a part of the “family”.
(And to add to @faujidoc1’s creativity: I can think of several ways to voice Shahadath without breaking any precepts, for example; considering Allah to be the Amitabha Buddha, and Mohammed as a Bodhisattva… Hey! Skillful means. All of these depend on how imaginative and creative you can get with concepts and ideas. )
If not, and if they’re strictly literalists, and all they care about is what he truly believes - well, I don’t know what one would do about that.
Thanks to both of you for your comments, it’s so helpful to have someone with your background.
I just wanted to clarify this one. The standard of “false speech” does not require this level of certainty. Generally, it requires that you believe something to be true and say the opposite.
Ngl, I think this is just making it worse. Amitabha isn’t Allah, and in any case, OP says she’s Theravadin.
If you’re going to break a precept, be honest about it. It happens. No-one’s going to condemn you for making a tough choice. Just see how you can preserve it next time.
Share to your family about your partner not focusing too much on he is Buddhist and you don’t want to marry Muslim. You are marrying because of his qualities not just because he is a Buddhist.
Your family’s expectations, religion, cultural norms and traditions not gonna help you a lot once you start life after marriage (no matter whom you marry). If you marry someone whom you don’t like, that’s gonna be very difficult, a reality.
PS: Being born and living in a suitable place (conducive to practice dhamma) is a blessing. Unsolicited advice: if possible move to a good country.
I have nothing good to say, except that actually this is not your problem, it’s your future husband’s problem.
In islamic law, marriage is a contract between the groom and the bride’s father. The bride actually has no say, and as far as I know, say nothing during the marriage ritual. The bride just need to coast along.
Uhm, having attended countless Islamic marriages (in Turkey, it’s customary to have both the state-marriage and Islamic marriage), I have to call false on that.
In most classical Sunni schools (Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Hanbalī), the bride’s walī (guardian, representative) normally concludes the contract on her behalf, so the spoken ījāb/qabūl (acceptance) may indeed be between the walī and groom. But the walī is acting on the bride’s side of a marriage between the bride and groom; it isn’t conceptually a marriage contract between two men. And the walī isn’t necessarily her father.
And also, Hanafi law allows for a competent woman to get married without a walī being involved at all.
In just about every Islamic weddings I’ve attended, Imam asked the bride how much gold she wanted in the case of a divorce. This is a standard procedure, kind of like a pre-nup of modern times. So, that’s not “coasting along”.
A woman’s consent is definitely sought, and she consents in silence. Silent consent seems to be a thing of some dignity in ancient times — compare it to the Buddha consenting in silence to meals prepared for him.
And of course, seeking consent in silence can be understood as conveniently enabling patriarchal conditions, I would argue. Yet, women have different grounds on which they can seek divorce, and some do not depend anyway at all on the groom’s PoV. These things wouldn’t be the case if women’s consent was wholesale disregarded.
There are numerous cases in Hadiths where a bride that was given away without her expressed consent had her marriage nullified.
Anyway, just because traditional Sharia Law respects the woman’s consent, doesn’t mean that it’s respected everywhere. It would be likewise foolish to conclude that Islamic society is some kind of a perfect egalitarian feminist society.
And likewise, just because there are archaic, patriarchal framings to certain practices doesn’t mean that it’s as black-and-white as you say.
Reality is of course weirder and messier, and it depends greatly from place to place. Turkey, Iraq, Emirates, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan will all have different interpretations and practices of Sharia Law.
)
Sure — just an oddball example, your mileage may wary!