Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh
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:
All premarital activities you referred to in your question are not allowed for engaged couples. You have to refrain from such activities and seek Allah’s forgiveness for it. You have to either get married if you are able to or stop all illegal relations until you get married.
Responding to your question, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, states:
You have been involved in an illicit relationship. Islam does not allow any extra martial relationship even if the persons involved have the best of intentions to get married, or they claim to love one another deeply.
If your love for each other is genuine, then you should get married. If you are not able to do so, you should refrain from all unlawful activities, including kissing, holding hands, isolating or practicing the so-called ‘phone sex’, etc., until such time that you are able to marry. All of these activities are clearly forbidden in Islam.
I would, therefore, advise both of you to repent to Allah and ask forgiveness of Him. We must never rationalize or justify our sinful activities. This is what he is doing when he is saying that we are allowed to do so since we have sincere intention to marry. This is not different from someone saying that we are allowed to rob a bank as long as our intention is to give charity.
In conclusion, I would urge you to resist from such activities; to seek forgiveness of Allah and make sincere repentance and stay away from each other. Once you are in a position to marry, you may do so after sincere repentance.
I pray to Allah to inspire us to forgive our sins, major and minor, outward and inward, secret and public, and inspire us to seek the way of repentance so that we can be worthy of His mercy.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.
Source: www.askthescholar.com