Don’t use kids to settle scores, imams advise divorced men and women

Published: 27 July 2024

NT Bureau
Doha

A number of imams and preachers have called on divorced men and women to follow religious principles after divorce in a way that makes divorce positive rather than negative, in order to prevent stubbornness between them from negatively affecting their children.

Speaking to Al Raya Arabic daily, they also said children should not be made a means of settling scores by pressuring them and their feelings, and disagreements and grudges should not be passed to children
“We do not want the children to be a scapegoat for the mistakes of the divorced man or woman, as these actions generate disobedience towards the father and mother, and make the child prey to psychological pressures,” the paper quoted them as saying.

“We, as fathers and mothers, after divorce, must put aside our differences in order to reform our children and to ensure their educational progress. Otherwise, we will destroy our children and the family, punish our children for sins they did not commit, and turn our children into victims of our mistakes,” they said.

“When stubbornness begins between a husband and wife, the family collapses. As a result, we find the wife insisting on harming the husband, using the children and the right to custody as a means to obtain her rights registered in the marriage contract. At the same time, the husband uses tricks to force his wife to submit and give up her legal rights, using the expenses that are due from him, delaying them sometimes and preventing them at other times. We find children in the middle suffering greatly because of the family conflict,” said Sheikh Dr. Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, Professor of Comparative Jurisprudence and an Islamic preacher.

The main problem lies in the two parties, as each of them strives to find a way to take revenge on the other, as if they entered into a war after the divorce, without taking into account the negative repercussions of their actions on their children, he added.

Sheikh Ahmed Al-Buainain, and Imam and preacher and legal notary, stressed that divorce has negative effects on children and parents should not add additional burdens on their children on top of them, because it destroys them psychologically.

Sheikh Dr. Ayesh Al-Qahtani, a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and an educational and family consultant, said: “It is not permissible for the father to belittle the mother or for the mother to belittle the father in front of children. They must rise above these differences that occurred between them and not repeat them in front of the children. We must raise the child to believe that this is your father and this is your mother, no matter what differences or problems arise between us,”

He pointed out that many divorced men and women unfortunately make these mistakes despite the efforts of preachers and family consultants to educate them and provide them with advice to make divorce a positive rather than a negative experience.