As Islam is the complete way of life, it guides man in each and every aspect of life. And its guidance encompasses our individual, family, social, national and international affairs. In fact, nothing under the sky, and beneath the land, escapes the Divine Vision. This is why the Qur’ān repeatedly asks human beings to brood over the various elements of Nature spread all around us as well as over on our own physical structure. It is only with this process of thinking that we would be able to realise the Divine Wisdom behind the creation of man as well as other beings and elements in the universe.
The Qur’ān (30:21) looks at the shared life between the two sexes: “And among His signs is that He creates for you spouses out of your own kind, so that you might incline towards them, and He engenders love and tenderness between you. In this there are clear signs indeed for people who think.”
People are well aware of their physical urge and feelings towards the other sex. Islam guides us even in this closet-closed aspect of life. It enjoins that a man and a woman can live together and satisfy their physical urge but only after Nikah (solemnisation and declaration of marriage). Without Nikah, there is no room for two persons living together like husband and wife. Islam thus wants us to see to it that people live on the high, universally acknowledged pedestal of civilization, where no one is allowed to lead a lonely life and no two persons are allowed to indulge in intimate relationship without Nikah.
It is with this solemnisation of Nikah that a family comes into existence. Here the Qur’ān says that it is God who created their spouses out of their own kind and gave them emotions and feelings. And it is the requirement of these God-given emotions and feelings that a man and a woman, who have established their matrimonial life by solemnising Nikah should live together with mutual love (muwaddah) and tenderness (rahmah), the feelings again created in their hearts by God. If they live consciously with these feelings and emotions, their relationship would prove a source of physical and emotional comfort, stability, spiritual friendship, and reassurance for both.
The Qur’ān defines this relationship between a man and a woman, who might have come together by way of marriage from two different families and environments, as one of the Signs of God. “In this there are clear signs indeed for people who think.” (The Qur’ān – 30-21). Here the Qur’ān underlines the fact that only the ‘people who think’ and reflect would be able to realise this Sign of God. This thinking and reflection leads us to appreciate the Divine wisdom in creating each of the two sexes in such a way that is complementary to the other, providing fulfilment of natural, Divinely inclined needs, psychological, mental or physical.