Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
Non-Muslim marriages are considered valid in Islam if they were conducted according to recognized cultural or legal norms. A formal, public marriage—not mere cohabitation—is required, and the couple must be lawfully eligible to marry. Upon conversion to Islam, such couples do not need to redo their marriage according to all four schools of Islamic law.
In response to this question, Dr. Yasir Qadhi — the Dean of The Islamic Seminary of America and the resident scholar at the East Plano Islamic Center — states:
Are you meeting some type of Brazilian tribesmen that are converting to Islam? Why has this been voted 100 times? I don’t understand, really. I’m perplexed—why is this thing so popular? Is there something going on online that I’m not aware of? Like some new fad or something? But anyway, okay, I will answer the question.
Al-Bahuti, the famous Hanbali scholar, says in his Hanbali textbook—and I quote Hanbali because it’s the one I studied the most—that Ankihat al-kuffar, the marriages of the non-Muslims, will be considered valid if it was done in accordance with their cultures and civilizations.
Okay, so every single civilization, without exception, has a ceremony that is deemed to be a public marriage. Every civilization. There is no civilization that doesn’t have it.
So what our Fiqh says is that if they have undertaken that ceremony, whatever it might be—whether it’s by their priest or priestess, whether it is in their court, whatever it might be—there is something that happens that society recognizes as being a formal marriage between a man and a woman. If that civilization does this, number one.
Number two, the two people must be halal to be married, because in some civilizations they had incestuous marriages. Most famously, believe it or not, in pre-Islamic Zoroastrian civilization, they had incestuous marriages amongst the nobility. And Umar ibn al-Khattab and others basically ruled that if they come to our courts, we cannot consider this to be a valid marriage. You cannot marry within the family like that. They would have that in the royal families.
But other than that, if they have undertaken any type of vow or public contract that is considered to be a marriage, and if they then convert, they do not need to redo their marriage.
So the question is answered very simply: cohabitation or living together is never deemed to be, in and of itself, a marriage in any civilization. You might get some perks and laws—in America, a common law wife might get some money, yes—but a common law wife is not deemed to be a legally wed wife, even in this society.
So in any civilization, if they undertake the appropriate ceremony, if they do the vows, if they do whatever needs to be done according to their culture, the Shari`ah considers that to be a valid marriage. And if they’re living in a non-Muslim state or under Muslim rule, they are deemed to be husband and wife. If they convert, they do not need to redo their marriage. This is by all the Madhabs—all four Schools of Fiqh say the same thing.
I don’t know why that was interesting, but okay, there’s your answer.
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Almighty Allah knows best.
Source: Dr. Yasir Qadhi Youtube Channel