The Impact of Epilepsy on the Termination of Marriage: A Comparison of Viewpoints Offered by Jurisconsults in the Five Schools of Islamic Thought (Madhāhib-i Khamsih) and the Civil Law in Light of Recent Scientific Findings

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Farzad Parsa ¹
• Om-i Kolsum Bahrami Jaf ²

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Fiqh and Shāfiʿī Law, Faculty of Humanities and Sociology, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

² MA Graduate of Fiqh and Shāfiʿī Law, Faculty of Humanities and Sociology, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

10.22067/jfiqh.2022.78539.1438

Abstract

Epilepsy was mainly considered a mental illness in traditional medicine and the understanding of jurisconsults, attributed to the influence of bodily humors or supernatural events and Jinns. Based on this analogy, the majority of jurisconsults considered epilepsy to be one of the defects that could nullify the marriage contract, comparing it with insanity and believing that epilepsy is a mental illness. However, at the moment neuroscience holds that epilepsy is a neurological and nervous disorder. The present research uses the descriptive-analytical method and recent scientific findings to invalidate the analogy between epilepsy and insanity and contends that epilepsy does not nullify the marriage, unless it becomes a factor in hardship and inconvenience, in which case it can nullify the marriage.

Keywords

• Marriage defects
• epilepsy
• The Five Islamic schools of thought (Madhāhib)
• Civil Law

Main Subjects

• Civil jurisprudence

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©2024 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

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