Relief for the Wife of a Missing Person

Question

The question of the missing person causes great perplexity. According to the Hanafis a woman must wait up to ninety or a hundred years; someone says that she may marry when her husband’s contemporaries have generally died; and on top of that there is the condition that a Shari‘a ruler issue a ruling of his death and that the woman be still young by that time. The hardship women have to endure day after day because of this issue needs no description.

Answer

(1, 2) In such a situation the woman is not obliged to wait up to a hundred and twenty or ninety years. Rather, for the ease of women, the rulings on the missing person, khul‘ and the like have been set out in detail, in Urdu and in a readily understandable way, in the treatise al-Hila al-Najiza, which bears the unanimous signatures of the scholars of Thana Bhawan, the…

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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