When you get married with your new husband, your understanding of marriage must be altered. You must not behave yourself as you did before. Your conduct has not been good at all. To leave a husband to marry another man is very dangerous. Therefore, when you are mar- ried to your new husband, you must be cautious and faithful.
Thus through the whole counseling session the main criterion to evaluate individual’s conduct has been ‘happiness’: happiness of the husband and of the wife, happiness in the present marriage as well as in future marriage, and happiness in this world as well as in the world hereafter.
The counselors search for the appropriate conduct for the clients through consultation with them. Key values such as happiness in married life, happiness in family life, and sincerity in pursuing one's happiness, are all rooted in the Qur’an and Hadith, but the counselors do not make any explicit refer- ence to these sources. Elderly women of experience and knowledge provide them as words of wisdom to their junior fellow Muslims.
Let me conclude my talk now with a quotation from a book written by Professor Frank Vogel on the breath of the notion of Islamic law as follows;
...... [W]e would have to treat not only court decisions but also phenomena which are vital to law’s application but which we do not call “law,” or even “lawlike” — such as ones that are either informal, particular, subjective, private, unique, occasionalistic, voluntary, or individ- ual in various ways. For example, it is not to us “law,” “law-finding,” or even “law-enforce- ment,” when an individual evaluates the legality of his own action and amends his behavior or not accordingly, gives advice to another on how to comply with the law, ...... (Vogel 2000:30)
In the beginning of my research, I was not sure whether my concern with marriage counseling at BP4 was academically worthwhile as an exercise of anthropology of Islamic law. But, I have found myself assured that I am tracking a ‘straight path’ when I have come across the above quoted state- ment. Here I would like to end my talk by expressing my sincere gratitude to Professor Vogel and Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School for giving me an opportunity to deepen my understanding of Islamic law.