Misyar (Traveler's Temporary/Easy Marriage): Difference between revisions

The Misyar marriage involves the woman relinquishing some or all of these rights (except for the mahr, which is necessary for the marriage to take place). Although the term "misyar" is a neo-logism in modern neo-Arabic, Sahih al Bukhari does say:

Since the misyar marriage does not require the bruidegroom to provide the bride with any nafaqah/sustenance or sukn/housing it is much cheaper for the man than the full Islamic marriage with all of the rights claimed by the woman. The mahr itself can be anything (in the Sahih hadith the prophet accepts inter alia an iron ring as the mahr of a woman), so the misyar is ideal for men who cannot afford to house and provide for a wife. Since the husband also has no obligation to sleep at the house of the wife, it is also ideal for men looking for short term sexual encounters or sexual encounters outside the bounds of their main marriage.  

The misyar marriage has arisen in the Gulf due to a number of factors:

The misyar has thus allowed for more men and women to enter into more or less normal marriages, just without the burden of support falling on the man, but have also been a method for men to engage in promiscuous sexual behavior with many women or even prostitution, as well as engaging in predatory relationships with poor or other option-less women who feel that they cannot do better. It has thus contributed to a rise in sexual promiscuity in the places where it has been practiced. Many men enter into misyar marriages and divorce shortly after the sexual act is concluded, raising comparisons to the muta'ah marriage (misyar, unlike muta'ah, does not have a set time limit of expiration for the marriage, but like regular Islamic marriage it is easy for the man to get a divorce). Feminists have decried the position of women in misyar marriages who feel used for sex and unsupported by their husband.   

The misyar marriage has been the cause of many controversies on the societal scale and for individual famous Muslims.  

The misyar marriage has been accused by social conservatives of spreading sexual promiscuity and loose morality in Mulim societies. Feminists and social conservatives have accused misyar of cause the mistreatment of women and the abandonment of the children resulting from such couplings. For this reason, although they acknowledge that the misyar is, as far a jurisprudence goes, an allowable form of Islamic marriage, many Islamic scholars and sheikhs such as ibn Baz and Qardawi have ruled it invalid due to the social harms it causes.  

In 2025, the promminent Islamic [[dawah|da'i]] Mohammad Hijab was accused by an anonymous woman of engaging in a misyar "sex marriage" where she was mistreated, used for sex, abused, and cut off from her family and friends. She accused Mohammad Hijab of telling her to act "like his girlfriend", giving her a McDonald's meal for a mahr, hiding the marriage from her father (she had no wali/guardian when she was married, which is considered illegitimate in most schools of Islamic law but is allowed by the Hanafis for all forms of marriage), and of gas lighting her and threatening her with social ostracization should she tell anyone of their arrangement. She and her father went on the record that Hijab used his knowledge of the shari'ah and his reputation to bully the woman, who is a single mother, into the marriage and to keep her in it despite her protestations and pleas for support. Hijab has responded that the misyar marriage was Islamically sound and denied all wrongdoing.