The Sweep with Hassan Alhaji Hassan: The Curse in Marriage

I said it before. I say it again. If there would be another prophet, a key part of his message would be a critical review of the position of man to woman in marriage or even disbanding the institution. This is a point of extreme assertion you would say, perhaps, but we have come to the point where we have to think about how much we dared Allah in every way in the name of marriage.
But then, this is not calling marriage a curse. It is not cursing marriage either. It simply tells how much of curse we have put into an institution that should have salvaged us from any anomaly. And we have to begin, swiftly, to talk about it in a way that we have not talked about it before.
That way, we must expand our chest and open our hearts to tolerate me and any other who have something to say about it. Marriage has become a drama of life in northern Nigeria. Every bit of it drops a story that outplays its own drama, until we reached the point of love turning to kill.
And that is good reason I will not dwell to talk about the novelty and the good in marriage and its advantage to human society. I will dwell, instead, on the opposite. The opposite of the good of marriage, yes, but not because of deficiency of inherent inadequacies in the concept and the institution of marriage. No. Opposite because of what we have made out of it in contemptible jeopardy, neglect of the cardinal and overriding interest in the negotiable.
What Maryam Sanda did to her roommate – please permit the word for the objective of this discussion – was an offshoot of the kind of society we have built over the last thirty years, by the paraded pride of every kind of corruption. Under that arrangement, the husband becomes everything below and the woman becomes everything above, directly opposing the will of the Almighty and His wish. That was why it is easy to kill a husband more often than a wife dies.
It was also a result of the handiwork of the elite who spearheaded the corrupt life out of public funds and turned in on an open contempt to the people. The arrow that is shot in the sky will always come down to, perhaps, land on the head of the shooter. But the discussions that follows every incidence is worst than the murder itself. They demonstrate how shallow our minds are about the sanctity and the ordinance of marriage.
The corruption and the stray, wayward life of corruption of the elite which was blindly copied are not accidents of national history or some form of economic miscalculations or even a systemic failure. No. It is a deliberate, calculated value that we bought in to and orchestrated all over, in open lack of shame and mockery of God in the most daring way.
God has seen not just the pervasion of a social ailment. He has seen the thoughts and the hearts in the corrupt and our perception of corruption that belittle His divine orders and the deliberate ignorance, neglect and systemic avoidance of the key Qur’anic messages that disrupt the stolen new life.
The corrupt have deliberately influenced, dominated and changed public discussion and public agenda to tilt away anything factual in a story that leads to the truth of the Holy books and the divine will. And we followed along in blindness, in negligence and in ignorance to a point thus far.
God has seen that here was a literate society by its elite or leadership. It would have been a kind excuse if the leadership of this country has been illiterate all along. In fact God has seen that some aspects of the leadership have been the most benevolent in both western and eastern ways. But they chose to drop the lessons in both education styles for secularity that they meant the people would take as a reason for the corrupt life, not the leadership neglect of their education.
Instead of literating us out of ignorance and to the truth, the elite had elited everyone and we all carried the mental idea and built on a fake name and statui that did/do not tie down to any reality of our life. We acted and behaved elited even when it has been severally clear to us that we lacked the practical things to maintain the statui we were given or the one we took.
So we delinked from the divine theory of life and the garnishes that the holy books provide as guide to that life. They elited every aspect of marriage by raising the bars to a level that is beyond the reach of the least among us and fastforwarded the journey to such a way that for anyone to catch up, they have to rush in madness and insanity. At every level, we are desperate to look ahead to catch up and cannot afford the cost of the fast catchup or any turn back to see who is left behind.
We must spend much or too much or to the last breath to qualify a blessed marriage even when life severally signalled that most of the marriages that accrued much virtually broke or took a sudden turn into mates living together without any strings or separated by distance or ended in lifetime hatred and fight and but because we do not look back, we cannot see.
Yes, most of what is bought is used in the new family home. Yes. It is good. But is it use, misuse or abuse. These are not synonyms by any English dictionary. We often go beyond the needs and have taken more that what we need. Even the catchers up struggle all their life trying to get what they do not need, losing both lives, here and there.
We have characterised the marriages, the families and the lives with materialism and dropped every bit of any idea that will remind us to look back even when we realised we have forgotten much where we started; we have lost much where we stopped over on the journey and dropped much on the way since our last stop. We have come home empty of basic values and we raised the kids on the empty planes of a callous, wicked, dangerous life.
Some of us have tried to keep their minds, their lessons of life and to respect some basics of the Almighty’s fundamental principles about their lives. They tried, trying. But the majority outweighs them. They ask for the well behaved, a wife material, and geniuses that we often do not have. By the order of the raised bar, they are told ‘you cannot have everything’ in a wife because no parents wants to be reminded of his failures.
They have complained against this bastard order and sought refuge in the order of God. But they are despised, hated and accused with much, just to belittle what statui of the minds they are given. They are irked to see elderly, educated, learned persons downplay the truth and giving in to the waywards. They are disappointed by the heartbreak persons they look up to have returned so low to this flat level of emptiness. Sad.
Society is doomed when the stakes are high in marriage. When you go against God’s ways, the Almighty has assured, you are sure to get a huge pay for it. We have paid so much for it, Dear Lord. And we still pay. We still do. Count the social menaces, problems. And they are all, or mostly here, in the north thta feels so much pride of religion and stronger values.
All of the malaise, in kinds and types, are too annoying to mention, too horrible to remember, to see and too much to count. We are engulfed on every side, by a variety of the consequences of our actions and inaction about our lives and the examples we set for our families and society. We are paid back for them in both cash and kind – in ways that we never can understand: different kinds of terminal diseases, ailments and calamities. Even at that it is a form of mercy from the Lord. He chooses to punish us here. He doesn’t want us to be in Hell. But are we grateful?
For most of marriages, partners are forced to stay in the custody only with hard wishes, prayer and hope for the calamity to put the marriage off. The worse is what the poor girl has done that week. The worst was to kill herself too. It happens in every way. We have all killed – silently or in other ways. Or we have done it in different way in the knife, mouth, or neglect. We have it all the ways, in every place, at every level. But how much of it have we learnt. Nothing.
More corruption. More marriages. More misery. More social ills. More sickness. More hatred. More deaths. More killing. And they multiply because we must marry and marry in pride and ego, only for public show, not for the happiness or blessing of the home. We have to marry. We should.
But when we do, we take the responsibility: we have all cursed marriage and destroyed its tenets in the north and we do so in dance and pleasure such that when the results of our actions or inactions come, we do not see, recognise or learn from them to change our styles.
Talk less about coming together to salvage society from the curses we created. Bahaushe mai ban haushi. Allah Shikyauta.
 
Hassan is the Head of Mass Communication Department and Dean, School of General Studies, Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi and can be reached at: 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address). E-Mail: abuna2406@gmail.com