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Comment by catlover76 | Hacker News Reader

> Islam is especially potent on the fertility front because marriage and having children are considered a central moral obligation

I'm a Sunni Muslim who is fairly well-versed in the religion, and I can tell you it isn't an "obligation". Marriage is strongly encouraged, but usually without mention of children, though that's generally expected (probably more from a cultural angle). Islam is also generally (to my knowledge) accepting of contraception.

I have no doubt that American Muslims have more kids than the average American, but it's becoming increasingly common to see Muslim couples now with no kids (wasn't the case when I was a kid). Nobody thinks much of it.

(Above applies to Sunni Islam, can't speak for Shi'a denominations)

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It's not an obligation in the sense that it's not strictly mandatory.

But it is beyond encouraged. Any faithful Muslim believe that marriage is half of faith.

“When a person gets married he has completed half of his religion, so let him fear Allah with regard to the other half.”

https://islamqa.info/en/answers/11586/is-marriage-half-of-re...

It's strongly encouraged, yes. But not mandatory and not obligatory, which was the erroneous claim to which I was responding.

Are you Muslim? You realize people don't take "half of faith" literally, right?

Yes I'm Muslim. They do where I am. Calling marriage "completing half my faith" is a very common expression. Why wouldn't they take it literally?

I used that at my speech in my brother’s wedding, and the aunties loved it.

Many of my American friends don’t have kids now pushing 40. I know two Bangladeshis of the same age who have no kids (out of my entire extended family)—and even then they wouldn’t say out loud that was the plan. And my family is quite secular. My dad, who hasn’t stepped foot in a mosque in decades was freaking out when my brother turned 30 without kids.

By contrast, I feel like most American Christians wouldn’t react that negatively to someone in their family declaring they don’t want kids.

> By contrast, I feel like most American Christians wouldn’t react that negatively to someone in their family declaring they don’t want kids.

That depends on whom you ask, as those who are as culturally (or actually) religious as your Muslim friends and family would react the same way to someone in their family declaring they don't want kids. In other words, it is likely just you not realizing many American Christians' lived experience, as that is not your own lived experience. I see a similar phenomenon with my Indian family thinking that Americans are more cavalier and distant with their children and that Indians treat them better, when in reality they simply don't know the lives of many other Americans.

> I see a similar phenomenon with my Indian family thinking that Americans are more cavalier and distant with their children and that Indians treat them better

My Bangladeshi parents said something similar: “Americans don’t love their kids.” And while that characterization isn’t quite true, I’m married into an American family, and the stereotype does have a factual underpinning. That’s how the manifestations of individualism—particularly among WASPs—is perceived by south Asians.

> My dad, who hasn’t stepped foot in a mosque in decades was freaking out when my brother turned 30 without kids.

Exactly, it's a cultural thing, not a religious one. See, for example, how a lot of Hindu Indian parents would react similarly.

There’s no clear distinction between religion and culture. Both my parents are antagonistic to organized religion (because secularism is a class marker in Bangladesh) but they don’t eat pork. Their moral axioms are rooted in Islam, even if they don’t recognize it as such.

The same is true for secular Americans. As an outsider, it’s quite obviously an outgrowth of mainline Protestant Christianity.

> There’s no clear distinction between religion and culture.

While too many religious people let their cultural and other beliefs/values contaminate their religious practice, it is still pretty simple to draw a line, and it's silly to try to infer something about a religious group based on the attitudes of your irreligious parents.

As a couple of us have pointed out, the same attitudes are exhibited by non-Muslim South Asians, so why are you still asserting their views reflect some vestige of their ancestral religion as opposed to the culture they come from?

I’m talking about the other direction: religion influencing people’s culture. Religion and culture are deeply intertwined in a bi-directional exchange.

Asia offers a good example of how religion makes a difference. The whole area has been the subject of extensive population control efforts. But the Muslim fertility rate in India is markedly higher than the Hindu rate. And the fertility rate for Indian Buddhists is much lower than either, and closer to East Asian countries with a strong Buddhist tradition.

>But the Muslim fertility rate in India is markedly higher than the Hindu rate.

Citation needed, they've been converging for a while now.

> I'm a Sunni Muslim who is fairly well-versed in the religion, and I can tell you it isn't an "obligation". Marriage is strongly encouraged, but usually without mention of children, though that's generally expected (probably more from a cultural angle). Islam is also generally (to my knowledge) accepting of contraception.

Sunni Islam is very diverse. I am sure there are many millions of Muslims out there who would agree with everything you said. But there are other Sunnis who disagree. Here are some quotes from the Salafist website IslamQA:

"it is permissible to temporarily stop having children, with the aim of spacing pregnancies or stopping them for a specific length of time, if there is a legitimate shar‘i need for that, according to the view of both spouses with mutual consultation and agreement, on condition that this will not lead to any harm..." (my emphasis) [0]

"If the decision to delay having children is widespread, at the societal, national or ummah-wide level, then in this case it becomes a destructive and negative choice, and in that case the ruling is that it is not allowed, because it has moved from being a permissible and natural matter to one that is imposed from without and will lead to negative consequences, and is therefore blameworthy" (my emphasis) [1]

"...having children is a right of both spouses, and it is not permissible for one of them to refuse with no excuse or good reason" [1]

"If the motive for delaying having children, or ceasing to do so, is to follow the cultural norms of non-Muslims and imitate them blindly, out of admiration for their culture and infatuation with their way of life, then undoubtedly the ruling in this case is that it is not allowed" [1]

IslamQA does say "not one of the scholars said that it is obligatory for a couple to produce children" [1] - however, read in the context of the rest of what they say, that seems to mean that married couples who have no children due to infertility or difficult circumstances do not sin - not that a married couple being "childfree by choice" is acceptable in Salafi Islam.

My impression is that IslamQA's position on this is the standard Salafi position. If some segments of Islam – such as the Salafis – view having children as highly encouraged, even quasi-obligatory, then (all else being equal) those segments of Islam are going to grow faster than segments of Islam who view having children as more optional.

[0] https://islamqa.info/en/answers/144543/ruling-on-delaying-ha...

[1] https://islamqa.info/en/answers/231777/is-contraception-hara...

To be frank, when I think of Sunni Islam, I tend to think of the four canonical schools and ignore Salafi nonsense. Their influence is disproportionate to their numbers, unfortunately. It's not abnormal for them to reach strange conclusions, but I am surprised to see them do so on this particular question.

In any event, Salafis do not constitute a majority of Sunni Muslims (by far), and Sunni Islam is not a religious system that includes a clergy. Nothing on websites like IslamQA binds anyone, and people who identify as "Salafi" do not automatically or necessarily adhere to rulings in the way you seem to imagine.

And as you note, even the "scholars" and other content creators on that site, try as they might, in the end must admit it is not obligatory.

> If some segments of Islam – such as the Salafis – view having children as highly encouraged, even quasi-obligatory, then (all else being equal) those segments of Islam are going to grow faster than segments of Islam who view having children as more optional.

Leaving aside whether that's actually the case, this was not the original claim that was being disputed. The original issue was whether getting married and having kids is obligatory for Muslims, a requirement of their religion like ritual prayer, fasting during Ramadan, etc. It isn't.

> In any event, Salafis do not constitute a majority of Sunni Muslims (by far),

True, but they have a lot of influence. I'm not Muslim, but my uncle (by marriage) is. My uncle has never really been the mosque-going type, but his father was. I remember his father complaining that the Salafis had taken over his mosque, using all their Saudi money. And I don't think his experience was particularly atypical.

Also, I don't think this is unique to Salafism. [0] repeats basically the same point of view (contraception is permissible to delay having children, but not to prevent it entirely). That's not a Salafi website, that's a website aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood – the Brotherhood are not Salafi, they represent an Islamism which is more traditional in its scholarship than the Salafis are

[0] https://fiqh.islamonline.net/en/contraception-permissible/

> and Sunni Islam is not a religious system that includes a clergy.

Whether that's true depends on how you define "clergy". Sunni imams or ulama are just as much "clergy" as Jewish Rabbis or Baptist ministers are. The claim that Sunni Islam lacks "clergy" relies on defining "clergy" in a narrow sense inspired by Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and "high church" Protestantism, and ignoring the broader sense in which the term also gets applied to Judaism and "low church" Protestantism, among others.

> and people who identify as "Salafi" do not automatically or necessarily adhere to rulings in the way you seem to imagine

I'm Catholic–how many Catholics do you think follow the Catholic Church's teaching that most forms of contraception are prohibited? So I was never making the assumption you are assuming I'm making

> The original issue was whether getting married and having kids is obligatory for Muslims, a requirement of their religion like ritual prayer, fasting during Ramadan, etc

In a strict sense, you are right – all Sunni ulama agree that marriage and children are mustaḥabb (recommended/encouraged) not fard (obligatory). However, I think it is more complex than that for two reasons (a) in some Muslim subcultures, certain things which are officially just recommended/encouraged become de facto obligatory, not necessarily due to the letter of religious teachings, but due to social pressures which exist in those religious communities; (b) something which is only mustaḥabb in the general case can become fard in specific cases, and certainly you will find ulama who think that sometimes happens in the matter under discussion, and if the specific cases become broad enough, they can end up outweighing the general case in practice

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