Q. When we get married, are we assigned a particular wife or husband by God, or the choice we make is our own?
M. Iqbal, Al-Khobar
A. What we have to understand with regard to many questions related to man’s free choice and predetermination by God is that when God created man, He gave him a free choice within a large area of his life. Needless to say, when we speak of “man” here, we mean the human race, including both man and woman. This means that the free choice, and man’s will, are realities of life. Indeed, we see and feel the working of these realities in our every day life. You may decide to go and do the Umrah next weekend, and you make arrangements to do so. It is your decision based on your free will. However, before the weekend something creeps up and you have some urgent business to attend to. You amend your plans and decide to postpone the Umrah for a week or a month. This is again your decision based on the new situation and your general circumstances. It is not imposed on you by God, because you may still decide to overlook the new situation and go.
Before you make any of these decisions, and indeed even before your birth, God knows what decision you will make, and what new circumstances will affect it, and how you will react to these circumstances. It does not mean that He has made a decision for you and that you will do what He decided, whether you want it or not. There is no compulsion here. It is merely God’s knowledge, which is absolute, free of restrictions.
The same applies to choosing one’s wife, or one’s husband. You decide to get married and you look for a wife. You may see or get to know of a woman who may be suitable to you. It is you who judge on the basis of the relevant situation whether to propose to her or not. You make your proposal, and she and her family consider it. They have to look at what is involved before they make a decision on whether to accept your proposal. They look at hard facts, such as whether you will continue to live in Saudi Arabia, and whether you will be taking your wife with you to live there. They then make their decision. This is all a human process, not a decision made by God, in which we are no more than actors in a play of robots. All decisions are made by us, and we go through them knowing what we are hoping to achieve.
People always say that a man’s wife is his even before he casts an eye on her. This is a wrong reference to a correct fact. It is wrong when we assume that God has chosen our spouses and we have no escape. What is correct is that God knows whom we will marry even before the start of our life. His knowledge does not dictate our actions. In order to understand it, we must remove the element of time from God’s knowledge. Time does not apply to God or His attributes. We measure time by the passage of hours and days, and by the succession of day and night, but all this is incidental to the position of the earth in relation to the sun and the fact that the earth moves in an orbit around the sun. Hence time cannot apply to God. So when we say that he knows something before it is created, we are referring to this fact that His knowledge is affected neither by time nor event. But this does not imply compulsion in our own actions, because compulsion is contrary to the free will God has given us.