By Shaykh Dr Sajid Umar
5 June 2026

﷽ 

My dear brothers and sisters in Islam,

This ummah has been described in the Qur'an as the best of all nations. But you and I both know that a nation is nothing more than a collection of families. So if this ummah is the best of nations, the families of this ummah have to be the best of families.

That is why the Qur'an and the Sunnah, sent into a world drowning in ignorance, a world shackled by polytheism and oppression and injustice, still made the time to teach us about families. About parenting. About marriage. And at the very highest level, the Qur'an teaches us something about marriage that is lost on many of us today.

Whenever there is a nikah we get excited, and rightly so. It is not only two people coming together but two families. And let us be honest about the world we live in: if a young man and a young woman marry, that alone is cause for joy. But the Qur'an points us to a higher reason for the excitement. It tells us a marriage is a sign from the signs of Allah. A sign of His oneness, in His lordship, in His worship, in His names and attributes. Your nikah, your union, becomes a vehicle of evidence for the existence of Allah.

If you are not convinced, consider that Allah tells us in His Book that everything in existence was created in pairs. Male and female. Tall and short. Hot and cold. Light and dark. Everything in twos, so that we might reflect and understand and come to realise the oneness of Allah. Because every two can only come from a One who is Himself without partner. The pair points back to the One.

Allah goes further. He says:

Your spouse is a sign from His signs. What an honour that is.

Have you ever wondered why getting married is so easy? In terms of the contract, it is over in moments. The guardian of the woman sits with the one proposing, there are two witnesses, and he says, I give you my daughter in marriage for this mahr, do you accept. He says yes. And it is done. Subhan Allah, it is done.

When I officiate a nikah I sometimes see disbelief in the eyes of the groom. He cannot quite believe it has happened. It happened so quickly. Some of the brothers will be smiling now, because they remember the day they married. Others, depending on who they married, are choosing not to remember.

I once attended a nikah where the speaker was having a light moment with the audience. He said that if you marry the right person, then 'wife' stands for worthy investment forever. But marry the wrong one and it stands for worry invited forever. May Allah grant us all the former. Ameen.

There is a lesson under the lightness, though. Marriage happens fast because the Sharia makes it easy. Why? Because your marriage is a sign from the signs of Allah.

And yet look at the other side of it. Allah describes the marriage contract in a way He describes no other contract. Nowhere in the Qur'an or the Sunnah will you find a contract called as weighty as this one. Allah calls it mithaqan ghaliza, a solemn covenant. Getting married is made easy; divorce is made difficult. And even when, sometimes, a marriage has to end, there is protocol. There is procedure. There is a process, a waiting period, a standard that has to be kept.

This teaches us that marriage is not simply a private arrangement between two people. It is part of tawheed lived out as a system. The Prophet ﷺ came calling people to the worship of one Allah, but that call did not arrive as an abstract idea. It arrived as a way of life. And part of that way of life is your marriage, for which the Prophet ﷺ spent time teaching the ummah how to be excellent husbands, how to be devoted wives, what character a home needs, and how to raise the children entrusted to us.

Why all of this? Because you are the best of nations, and nations are nothing but families. So make sure your family is excellent too.

The two wedding gifts

The Qur'an does not only give us the essence of marriage. It gives us its ethics.

Go back to that verse from Surah al-Rum. Allah says He created your spouse for you, and He does not stop there. No comma, no full stop. He continues: so that you may find tranquillity in her. Serenity. Peace. And because marriage is two people, she finds that same tranquillity in you.

Then Allah mentions two gifts He places between the couple.

The first is mawaddah. We usually translate that as love, but it is a poor translation. Mawaddah is not love locked away in the chest. It is love that reaches. Love that is felt. In English we would call it affection.

Here is what moves me about this. When Allah gives you mawaddah, He is handing you the chance to build Jannah. Before marriage, if a young man made a young woman feel his love, or she made him feel hers, that was not building Jannah. It was building the opposite. But you pass through the nikah and everything turns over. Your smile to her becomes a sadaqah. The same smile, before the contract, was a sin. The conversations you have now earn you reward. The food you feed each other becomes worship. The same act, two completely different ledgers.

The young ones are smiling. Some are thinking they need to get married this afternoon. I understand. But marriage needs marriage maturity, and that is where I see a serious gap in our community. We marry without the maturity, and the worthy investment turns into the worry invited.

So much of the trouble comes down to that one word, mawaddah, love that is felt. In the work I do mediating between husbands and wives, I will ask the brother what the problem is. He says she does not love me. I ask the sister. She says he does not love me. Then I ask the brother to respond, and wallahi, he says, I love her. And the sister says she loves him. So I say to them, you live together, and somehow only I now know that you love each other. How is that possible? He has love for her and she cannot feel it. She has love for him and he cannot feel it. The gift Allah placed between you is sitting there unused.

And it is usually because we have convinced ourselves that affection is expensive. I need to book the holiday, I need to book the trip. This is from the plots of Shaytan, to inflate a simple thing until it feels impossible. Mawaddah is easy. For her it can be as small as a hand on her cheek, and the whispers of Shaytan disappear. For him it can be a message at lunchtime: did you eat, I hope your day has not been too hard. It changes everything. Why so simple? Because the Sharia is simple. Baraka is simple. Mercy is simple. And mawaddah is a gift from Allah, placed in the hands of you both.

The second gift is rahmah, mercy. The scholars of tafsir say that here rahmah points to the children. Because if Allah grants you children, and you can only have them in a way that builds Jannah, through the nikah, and then you raise them well, those children become a mercy for you.

The scholars draw on another verse for this. Allah says of those who believe, and die upon belief, and whose children followed them in faith:

Think about what that means. If in Jannah the parents are at level three and the children reached level seven, Allah does not split the difference and settle everyone at level five. That would be a kind of pro-rata. Allah lifts the lower to the level of the higher. And it works both ways. If the children are the lower, they are raised to the parents at their highest station. A family on earth, reunited as a family in Jannah. That is a gift from Allah to the married couple.

Fix your marriage character

Part of living out our tawheed is that we attend to our character within marriage. The Prophet ﷺ said the best of you is the one who is best to his wife, and I am the best of you to my family.

This meant something to him ﷺ. Why else would he say it? We are forever chasing the best of everything. The better-performing portfolio, the better job, the better school for the child, the better house for the family. So what about the better character inside that house?

At school they taught us that light travels faster than sound. There is a lesson buried in that. Your children will learn how to be husbands and wives from how you are with each other long before they learn it from anything you say about marriage. They see before they hear. If they watch you as a couple, the way you sit with one another, the adab between you, the way you do not talk over each other, the way you give each other the benefit of the doubt, they will have learned it before a word is spoken. That is emotional intelligence. That is how we raise children who become families that are a credit to society rather than a burden on it.

And when we stand before Allah on the Day of Judgement and He asks what we did for Islam, at the very least we will be able to say: we raised children who became good families. You taught us, ya Allah, that this ummah is the best of nations, so we gave a good family to that nation. That is the least we can offer. The rest is laid out for us in the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

Rights and responsibilities

Let me leave you with one thing from that prophetic handbook on marriage, the matter of rights versus responsibilities.

I see it again and again. When couples fall into dispute, when Shaytan has his moment, they fixate on rights and forget responsibilities.

Take the marriage of the Prophet ﷺ to Khadijah رضي الله عنها. When he married her she already had a child, Hind. Ibn Kathir mentions it, and Ibn Ishaq notes it in his historical accounts. And the Prophet ﷺ lived in her house.

Sit with that for a moment. Whose right was it to provide the home? His. He was the man. And yet he stayed in Khadijah's house, and she never once held it over him. She welcomed him in with love and care. What do you think that did to his heart for her? Did his love grow or shrink? It grew. And the books of history tell us the Prophet ﷺ looked after Hind as though Hind were his own child. What, in turn, do you think that did to Khadijah's heart for Muhammad ﷺ, seeing him go so far beyond what was asked of him? Her love for him grew too.

Years later, the Prophet ﷺ saw that Abu Talib was struggling to manage the affairs of his family. So he said to Khadijah, I want to bring Ali into our home, because Abu Talib looked after me when I was a boy. Did Khadijah say it is my home, it is my right? She opened her arms. You want to do that? By Allah, bring him. And this was before he ﷺ had even become a Messenger. The historians say she cared for Ali as if he were her own.

This is a marriage of responsibility, my brothers and sisters, not a marriage of rights. Rights are in the Qur'an and the Sunnah for when there is oppression that has to be put right. But the Qur'an and the Sunnah do not raise us to live by my way and your way, as though marriage were a scorecard. The wife keeps her tally and the husband keeps his. I have more points, so you owe me. No. We are taught to rise above the scorecard and build a marriage on responsibility.

This is a marriage for a lifetime, not merely for life.

May Allah grant us the best of families.

Ameen.

---

Help us complete our Phase 3 expansion for the new prayer halls!