I.   The Family: First Level of Social Organization

        Human association has had a long history which three institutions had struggled to dominate. The first is the family, which has blood and heredity for bases. The characteristics it engenders in humans are innate and immutable. Indeed, they are constitutive of the relationship. Certainly family-living engenders in humans other characteristics which are acquired through association. These, however, are not necessary. Members born to one family may successfully be brought up as members of another; but the innate characteristics remain unchanged. The family was declared by God an intrinsic order of creation:

“O Humankind, revere your Lord Who created you of a single soul and created of it its spouse…”  [Q 4:1]

“It is of God’s providing that He created of yourselves spouses in whom to find quiescence, and established between you love and compassion…”  [Q 16:72]

“…..that He generated from you and your spouses your children and grandchildren.”   [Q 30:21]

        Parents, their children and grandchildren, and the love and compassion relation between them, constitute an immutable pattern of God in creation. This is the family in its nuclear and extended forms spanning three generations. Islam not only acknowledges it but has girded it with law. Unlike any other social system, the law of Islam articulated the relations of all members of the extended family in order to insure proper functioning of all of them. Marriage and divorce, legitimacy and dependency, earnings and support, inheritance, and the members’ mutual rights and duties have been detailed by the shari’ah. Matters which are not dealt with by any law, hardly ever considered by custom, or spoken of in public (e.g., the sex relations between the spouses) – let alone the more common affairs of everyday living – have also been defined by Islamic law in terms of rights obligations. Justice and equity are as much involved here as in any other human transaction. Delinquency may be established with precision, and dealt with effectively. On top of all the laws, stands the divine commandment that mutual love and compassion, kindness and gentleness, and what is usually normative (al ma’ruf – Qur’an 2:180, 228, etc.) should govern all intra-family relations.

         The extent of the extended family is three generations inclusive of all members. Although Islamic law left open the possibility to include members of other generations as need and the particulars of the case dictate, it assumed that those are included who can effectively eat from one kitchen and live in one estate. It assumed that through their shared living, which is possible for three generations but extremely difficult for more, the feelings of love, compassion and ma’ruf proper to the relation could be effectively maintained. The extended family is therefore the area where immutable factors constitute the sufficient reason for human association and where promoting these factors and using them as criteria of desirability or ethicality is legitimate and indeed commendable. It is not ethically improper to love one’s spouse, one’s children, one’s brothers and sisters, one’s grandparents and grandchildren, one’s uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces because they are the relatives. To love them for their wisdom or piety or achievement is worthy but additional. Indeed, it is not ethically improper to define the effective association to promote their welfare, to the exclusion of all other humans is ethically desirable.