Page 406
wa-min ʾāyātihī ʾan khalaqa lakum min ʾanfusikum ʾazwājan li-taskunū ʾilayhā wa-jaʿala baynakum mawaddatan wa-raḥmatan ʾinna fī dhālika la-ʾāyātin li-qawmin yatafakkarūna
And of His signs is that He created for you mates from your own selves that you may take comfort in them, and He ordained affection and mercy between you. There are indeed signs in that for a people who reflect.
— Ali Quli Qarai
Surah Ar-Room – Verse 21
21. “And of His signs is that He crated spouses for you from yourselves, that you may repose in them, and He has set between you love and mercy; verily there are signs in this, for a people who reflect.”
A spouse must be the cause of peace, not the cause of agitation and anxiety. The aim of marriage is not often only satisfying the sexual instinct, but the aim is mostly reaching to a spiritual and bodily tranquillity. This holy verse refers to another part of the extroversive verses which are in a stage after the creation of man. It says:
And since the continuation of this relation between spouses, in particular, and between all human beings, in general, needs a heartily and spiritual attraction, next to the above statement, the Qur’an adds:
For more emphasis, at the end of the holy verse, the Qur’an continues saying:
It is interesting that the Holy Qur’an introduces the aim of marriage as peace and tranquillity, and here by applying the Arabic expressive phrase: /litaskunu/ (that you may repose) it has implicitly stated many subjects. Similar to this meaning is also mentioned in Surah Al-’A‘raf, No. 7, verse 189. Verily the existence of spouses with this special quality, which is the cause of tranquillity of their lives, is counted one of the great bounties of Allah, because these two genders are complementary of each other and each generally causes the mirth, fruitfulness, and development of the other, so that every one of them is imperfect without the other.
And it is natural that there should be such an honourable attraction between a being and its complement. From this statement we can conclude that those who turn away from this Allah’s way of treatment have an incomplete life, because one of their developing stages has stopped, (except that some particular conditions and a necessity truly requires that one remains single). However, this tranquillity is from the point of both body and spirit, and from the point of both individual and social.
The sicknesses, which happen to the man’s body because of the abandonment of marriage, are not deniable. Also, the lack of spiritual equilibrium and the psychological uneasiness, which the single persons are faced with, are, more or less, clear to everybody. From the social viewpoint, the unmarried persons feel responsibility less than others and, for this reason, suicide is more common among them than among others, and they commit horrible crimes more than others, too.
When a person turns from the stage of celibacy into the stage of family and married life, he finds a new personality in him and feels a further responsibility; and this is the meaning of feeling tranquillity under the light of marriage. The issues of ‘love’ and ‘mercy’, in fact, are the ‘clay’ and the ‘adhesive substance’, of constructional materials of the human society, because a society is formed by each one of the individuals of human beings, like a huge and glorious building which is made of brakes and pieces of stone.
If these separate individuals, and those different parts do not relate to each other and combine with each other, there will not appear a ‘society’ or ‘a building’. He, Who has created man for social life, has provided this necessary relation in his soul, too. There may be some differences between the meaning of the Arabic words /mawaddat/ (love) and /rahmat/ (mercy, as follows: 1- ‘Love’ is the motive of relation and communication at the beginning, but at the end, when one of the two spouses may become so weak that can not give any service, ‘mercy’ substitutes it.
2- ‘Love’ is used concerning the adults who are able to serve each other, but little children and babies are fostered under the shadow of ‘Mercy’. 3- ‘Love’ is often mutual, but ‘mercy’ is unilateral and is done as an act of donation and altruism, because for the existence of a society the mutual services, the source of which is love, are sometimes necessary, and sometimes free services are needed, which require ‘donation’ and ‘mercy’.
This verse, of course, states ‘love’ and ‘mercy’ between two spouses, but this probability also exists that the application of the Qur’anic word /baynakum/ (between you) refers to all human beings, and ‘two spouses’ is counted of its clear extensions, since not only the family life but also the life in the whole human society is not possible without these two principles: ‘love’ and ‘mercy’. So, the destruction of these two relations, and even with their weakness and scantiness, brings thousands of calamities, unhappiness, and social uneasiness.