The Research About Islamic Marriage Legal System

Marriage is not only a private act, but also a social act, a legal act. If the family isthe cell of society, which plays the role of the most basic and frequency to socialstability and development, then the marriage institution is the foundation with such afundamental role. It is both the starting point and the formation of the family symbol,but also the core of the family axis.In the age of barbarism (especially the 100 years before the rise of Islam), thewhole Arab society was in the period of transition from a matriarchal society to apatriarchal society, marital relationship was still in the hazy state and there was nouniform system to regulate and adjust it, but mainly relying on local and tribalcustoms and practices. The combination between men and women was not premisedwith exclusive cohabitation, there was commonly existed the pairing marriage. Of amarriage and dissolution of marriage they were very simple, the marital relationschanged frequently.When Mohammed was creating a religious community in Medina, he realized theimportance of marriage to the stability of a society, so there were many verses relatingto regulation and adjustment of marriage behavior in the Koran. Some legislativeideology in the Koran had positive meaning of the times, such as"encouragingmarriage and prudent divorcement","marriage taboos","restriction on polygamy","idda","mahr".Jurists after Mohammed constantly improved the marriage system of Islamthrough the development of Hadith, public discussion, analogy and other forms on thebasis of the Koran. In the process, four well-known teaching schools were formulated:Hanafi school, Malik school, Shafi'i school, as well as Hanbali school. They improvedthe marriage system in detail, concerning marriage contract, validity of marriage, the rights and obligations between husband and wife, divorce, custody, judging paternityand so on.In the first half of the 19th Century, the main areas of Islamic World had becomecolonial or semi-colonial states of the Western powers, this process had also led to theterrible blow for the Islamic law because of the widespread dissemination of Westernlegal concepts. The Islamic countries reformed the traditional theory of the marriagesystem to keep abreast of the changing times. The core of these reforms was to redressthe imbalance state of rights and obligations between husband and wife. Childrenmarriage, polygamy and the right to divorce were the issues of concern in theseIslamic countries.