Temporary marriage

Abolition of temporary marriages has accelerated process subordinating Muslim clergy to the civil authority

"...the abolition of the síghih (concubinage) which, when contracted for short periods, is hardly distinguishable from quasi-prostitution, and which made of the turbulent and fanatical Mashhad, the national center of pilgrimage, one of the most immoral cities in Asia...all these have successively lent their share to the acceleration of that impelling process which has subordinated to the civil authority the position and interests of Muslim clericals to a degree undreamt of by any mullá."

(Shoghi Effendi, Promised Day Is Come, par. 232, pp. 93-94)

Example of decadence was the endorsement of temporary marriages in Mashhad

"...Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of Mashhad life, before I leave the subject of the shrine and the pilgrims, is the provision that is made for the material solace of the letter during their stay in the city. In recognition of the long journeys which they have made, of the hardships which they have sustained, and of the distances by which they are severed from family and home, they are permitted, with the connivance of the ecclesiastical law and its officers, to contract temporary marriages during their sojourn in the city. There is a large permanent population of wives suitable for the purpose. A mulla is found, under whose sanction a contract is drawn up and formally sealed by both parties, a fee is paid, and the union is legally accomplished. After the lapse of a fortnight or a month, or whatever be the specified period, the contract terminates; the temporary husband returns to his own lares et penates in some distant clime, and the lady, after an enforced celibacy of fourteen days' duration, resumes her career of persevering matrimony. In other words, a gigantic system of prostitution, under the sanction of the Church, prevails in Mashhad. There is probably not a more immoral city in Asia; and I should be sorry to say how many of the unmurmuring pilgrims who traverse seas and lands to kiss the grating of the Imam's tomb are not also encouraged and consoled upon their march by the prospect of an agreeable holiday and what might be described in the English vernacular as `a good spree.'"

(Extracts from Lord Curzon's "Persia and the Persian Question.", cited in the Dawn-Breakers, pp. xlvi-xlvii, in a section titled "PERSIA'S STATE OF DECADENCE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY")

Hujjat-i-Zanjani had ordered the temporary marriage institution be closed

"There was a caravansary of the days of Shah-'Abbas which had gradually become a sighih-khanih: in order to prevent a breach of the Shiite law a certain Mulla Dust-Muhammad who made his residence there, would bless the transitory union between the male visitors to the place and the inmates. Hujjatu'l-Islam, such was the title which our hero had assumed, ordered the institution to be closed, gave in marriage the greater number of these women and secured employment for the others in respectable families."

(A. L. M. Nicolas' "Siyyid Ali-Muhammad dit le Bab," pp. 332-333, cited in the Dawn-Breakers, p. 530, footnote 3)

Fath-`Alí Sháh was notorious for the enormous number of his wives and concubines

"The successor of Áqá Muhammad Khán, the uxorious, philoprogenetive Fath-`Alí Sháh, the so-called "Darius of the Age," was a vain, an arrogant, and unscrupulous miser, notorious for the enormous number of his wives and concubines, numbering above a thousand, his incalculable progeny, and the disasters which his rule brought upon his country."

(Shoghi Effendi, Promised Day Is Come, par. 167, p. 66)

See also

• Trial marriage
• Concubinage
• Cohabitation

To-dos for this page

• Add reference on concubine of the Báb (along with reference to explanations on gradualism in abolishing polygamy and the Báb's prohibition/violation by Mírzá Yahyá)