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Quran verses about family

What a household is asked to carry

Family is deliberate in the Qur'an. Kinship of blood and kinship of marriage are named together as two things God made from a single beginning, which places the people you were born among and the people you chose inside one design. The household gets treated as a real place, with obligations that belong to it and nowhere else.

Much of what the book asks of a family is practical. Prayer is something a person keeps calling their household back to, and the care of one another is set down as something owed. The Qur'an also records what believers ask for, and among the recurring requests is "grant us joy of our eyes in our spouses and our offspring". Wanting your family to turn out well is treated as a legitimate thing to pray about.

The Qur'an is honest about how much a family can cost. One verse tells believers plainly that among their own spouses and children there can be those who work against them, and the instruction that follows is to pardon, overlook and forgive. That is guidance written for a household with a real grievance inside it, and it is closer to how families actually go than any picture of uncomplicated warmth. If the grievance in yours has never been acknowledged, the verses on forgiving someone who never apologized sit closer to it.

Nuh finds the limit of it. He appeals for his son on the grounds of family and hears back that the boy's own conduct has placed him outside it: "he is not of your family". The answer is gentle in its wording and firm in its content, and it leaves Nuh his grief. A tie of blood carries a great deal in this book, and it does not carry that.

What holds a family together in the end is a shared direction. The gardens are described as somewhere you enter alongside the righteous among your forebears, your spouses and your descendants, so the reunion turns on what each person was doing with their life. The work of getting there is the ordinary work already in front of you: teaching the children, keeping the ties, forgiving the ones who stayed. For what is owed specifically to the people who raised you, the verses about parents go further.

  • 25:54 — And it is he who created a human being from water, then made for him kinship of blood and kinship of marriage. Your Lord is ever capable.
  • 4:1 — O humankind, be mindful of your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the two of them spread out many men and women. Be mindful of God, in whose name you make claims upon one another, and of the wombs that bore you. Indeed, God is ever watchful over you.
  • 16:72 — And God has made for you spouses from among yourselves, and through your spouses he has given you children and grandchildren, and he has provided you with good things. Will they then believe in what is false and reject the favor of God?
  • 25:74 — And those who say, "Our Lord, grant us joy of our eyes in our spouses and our offspring, and make us a model for the God-conscious."
  • 20:132 — And command your family to pray, and be steadfast in it. We ask no provision of you; we provide for you. And the best outcome belongs to mindfulness of God.
  • 66:6 — You who believe, guard yourselves and your families against a fire whose fuel is people and stones, over which stand angels, stern and severe, who do not disobey God in what he commands them and who do what they are commanded.
  • 64:14 — You who believe, among your spouses and your children are enemies to you, so be wary of them. But if you pardon, overlook, and forgive — then God is forgiving and merciful.
  • 11:45 — And Nuh called out to his Lord, saying, "My Lord, my son is of my family, and your promise is true, and you are the most just of judges."
  • 11:46 — God said, "Nuh, he is not of your family; his conduct was not righteous. So do not ask me about what you have no knowledge of. I warn you, lest you be among the ignorant."
  • 13:23 — gardens of perpetual residence, which they will enter along with the righteous among their forebears, their spouses, and their descendants. And the angels will come in upon them from every gate,

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