Professor Rafatu Abdulhamid of the Department of Islamic Studies, University of Abuja, has enjoined men to accord priority attention to the welfare and well-being of widows and orphans.
She made the call on Saturday in Abuja at a Ramadan lecture she delivered on ‘Divorce and Widowhood’ organised by the Al-Habibiyyah Islamic Society.
She cited several verses of the Quran, where Prophet Muhammad encouraged men to be sympathetic and be kind and supportive of widows.
“My advice to men is that they should emulate Prophet Muhammad’s gesture towards widows. In Islamic history, many of the prophet’s wives were widows; but today we see a different thing.
“Today, wealthy men are not ready to take widows as wives and sometimes when the widows have children, the men run away from them because they don’t want added responsibilities.
“Those men forget that such responsibility is what will earn them Paradise.
“For them to earn paradise, they have to take care of widows and orphans as Prophet Muhammad and verses of Quran have encouraged us,’’ she said.
Abdulhamid also expressed concern at the alarming rate of divorce in society due to insincerity and misconception about marriage, saying, “nowadays marriage is not taken as an act of worship.’’
The lecturer noted that in Islam, every couple was expected to make good intentions to marry so as to serve God.
“Once we have that sincerity of intention, everything will go smoothly, but insincerity is one of the major causes of divorce.
“Intending couples must ask themselves at the beginning why they want to come together.
“Is it about serving God so that we can earn His pleasure or looking at materialism? And this is why we make a lot of selections and some of these selections are very bad.
“At the end of the day, we pay the price of insincerity because we are not looking at the real concept of marriage from the Islamic perspective,’’ Abdulhamid noted.
Earlier, the Chairperson of the Ramadan lecture, Dr Bilkisu Magoro, explained that the programme centred on the rights of women as widows and divorcees, with a view to educating women more on what Islam was all about.
Magoro, who stated that Islam had a guide and rights for divorcees, urged Muslims to always abide by the teachings of Islam in whatever they did.
Similarly, the National Chief Imam of Al-Habibiyyah Islamic Society, Imam Fuad Adeyemi, enjoined all Muslim women to continue to maximise the spiritual benefits of the month of Ramadan.
“In a nation where women are conscious of God, we shall have a nation that is conscious of God because women control all aspects of human endeavour, including their children and husbands,’’ he said.
