Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu waRahmatullahi 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:
Maintaining a good relation with blood relatives is obligatory in Islam. It is prohibited to sever you relations with your relatives.
Answering your question, Dr. Mohammad S. Alrahawan, Associate Professor at the department of Islamic Studies in English, Al-Azhar University, Egypt, states:
Maintaining a good relation with blood relatives is obligatory in Islam. It is prohibited to dissever relations with your relatives. We read in the Qur’an what means:
{So would you perhaps, if you turned away, cause corruption on earth and sever your [ties of] relationship? Those [who do so] are the ones that Allah has cursed, so He deafened them and blinded their vision.} (Muhammad 47:22-23)
It is not necessary that your relatives maintain their relations with you and your families in order to do good for them.
Abdullah ibn Amr ibn Al-As (may Allah be pleased with them) reported that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “The person who perfectly maintains the ties of kinship is not the one who does it because he gets recompensed by his relatives (for being kind and good to them), but the one who truly maintains the bonds of kinship is the one who persists in doing so even though the latter has severed the ties of kinship with him”. (Al-Bukhari)
Abu Hurairah reported that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “Ties of kinship (rahim) are derived from the All-Merciful (ar-Rahman). They say: ‘My Lord! I have been wronged! My Lord! I have been cut off! My Lord! I have! I have!’ Allah answers them, ‘Are you not content that I cut off the one who cuts you off and I maintain connections with the one who maintains connections with you?'” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim)
Therefore, you do not have to make istikharah for things which are clearly prohibited. You have to maintain your good relations with them even if without exchanging visits.
Allah Almighty knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.