Intishār al-Ḥurmah in the Ḥanafī Madhhab

QUESTION

As a Ḥanafī, if you follow the Shāfiʿī ruling on Ḥurmah, are you required to follow the Shāfiʿī madhhab in all its rulings?

ANSWER

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

The issue at hand is known as intishār al-ḥurmah ( اِنْتِشَارُ الحُرْمَة ), a phenomenon whereby matrimony is disallowed between any of the two involved parties and parent/child of the other, e.g., the mother of a man’s wife, and inversely the husband of a woman’s daughter, or the daughter of a man’s wife after consummation, and inversely the husband of a woman’s mother.

The Ḥanafī madhhab, to the exclusion of the other three, holds that intishār will occur when a person touches another of the opposite gender with lustful intent, on the basis that lustful touching is prone to provoking further adulterous relations. They stretch this ruling as far as to annul a marriage as consequence to lustful touching of the wife by the husband’s father/son, or inversely the wife touching the husband’s son/father. They do lay one requisite in that the parent/child in question should believe their child/parent regarding their claim to having touched the other party with lustful intent.

Now, to address the issue at hand, are you required (having adopted the opposing view of say, the Shāfiʿī madhhab, that intishār will not occur in the above situation) to follow said madhhab in all its rulings? The answer is simply no. You are still allowed to continue following the Ḥanafī madhhab in everything else pertaining to marriage, and will only be considered to have departed your madhhab for one isolated case, something seen as wholly permissible by all fair-minded, impartial jurists.

وﷲ تعالى أعلم

And Allah knows best

Y Karaan
DUAI Fatwa Department