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Quran verses about weddings

What actually gets read when two people marry

A nikah is short. An offer, an acceptance, two witnesses, a gift named out loud, and the marriage exists. Everything else on a wedding day is hospitality, and the Qur'an does its work in those few minutes.

The sermon that opens most nikahs, the khutbat al-hajah, is built from three short passages, and none of them is about marriage. They ask the room for mindfulness of God, for words that are true and to the point, and they trace everyone present back to a single soul. A marriage is set inside something wider than the couple's feeling for each other before the couple has said a word.

Then come the binding parts, which are also the tender ones. The bridal gift belongs to the wife and is given freely, and the Qur'an treats any move to claw it back as beneath the man attempting it. The contract itself is called a solemn covenant, the same weight of phrase used for the covenants God takes from his prophets. That is heavy language for something two witnesses sign, and it is meant to be.

One passage speaks straight to what delays weddings most often, which is money. It tells a community to marry off its unmarried and then answers the obvious objection: poverty is a condition God can lift, and a household's provision was never the wedding budget's to guarantee.

The verse that ends up on the invitation is the one about rest, where God places love and mercy between two people. Love is what brings a couple to the ceremony; mercy is what carries them through the years when love is tired, and guests who read that card are being asked to pray for the second half of it. For the ordinary weather of a shared life after the day itself, the verses under marriage go further, and family picks up the household that follows.

  • 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.
  • 3:102 — You who believe, be mindful of God as he truly deserves to be held in awe, and do not die except in a state of surrender to him.
  • 33:70 — You who believe, be mindful of God and speak words that are true and to the point,
  • 33:71 — God will set right your deeds for you and forgive you your sins. Whoever obeys God and his Messenger has won a great triumph.
  • 4:4 — Give women their bridal gifts as a free offering. But if they willingly give up some of it to you, then enjoy it with ease and good cheer.
  • 4:21 — And how could you take it back, when you have lain with one another and they have taken from you a solemn covenant?
  • 24:32 — Marry off the unmarried among you, and the righteous among the men and women your right hands rightfully hold. If they are poor, God will enrich them from his bounty. God is boundless, all-knowing.
  • 30:21 — And among his signs is that he created for you mates from among yourselves, that you might find rest with them, and he placed between you love and mercy. In that are signs for people who reflect.

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