Q: Today many Asian parents in the west are only willing to get their children married after university education and finding a job by which time they are 25 or 26 years of age or older. The argument is that they need to be settled financially before marriage. In the interim however, it is difficult to envisage that in the environment we live in that these children manage to control their gaze, curb their desires and stay away from some of relationship with the opposite sex? A few teenage children have summoned the courage in our community to tell their parents that they need to get married but the parents argue that they need to finish their studies, get a good job and only then they will financially be able to support a wife. It is difficult to understand how a father who was once young and felt the urge to satisfy his desires now no longer understands or refuses to accede to the requests of his teenage son to get married.
1. What is the Shar'i ruling in such a situation?
2. Is it correct for parents to refuse marriage of their child until studies are finished, particularly in western countries where there is a distinctive threat of involvement in some form of zina?
3. Can the a teenage boy, who fears falling in to sin, yet his parents flatly refuse/delay him get him married, find his own wife and have his nikah conducted with witnesses?
A: When there is a need to make nikaah then nikaah becomes fardh, and when it becomes fardh then the fardh has to be done. It is not subject to the approval of the parents. Go forth and do it on your own if they are not concerned. If not, you will be sinful.
And Allah Ta'ala (الله تعالى) knows best.
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