What Age is the Right Age to Get Married?

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You’ve probably heard of a woman’s biological clock: After a certain age, it becomes hard for women to have kids. But you may not have heard of a man’s biological clock. Except, after a certain age, while it’s apparently not that much harder for men to father, the likelihood of a dad passing on genetic mutations increases markedly.

Waiting too long to have kids can be a problem for women and for men. If you’re wondering what that has to do with a halaqa, read on.

For those who’ve been following, you know I’ve pegged my home halaqas to our kids—as the girls move through high school, a halaqa developed for them (and their friends.) But since they’ve been in high school for a while now, we get to enjoy diving deep into and returning to rich topics over months and even years.

On the other hand, the youngest is in middle school now. He’s on the verge of adolescence, which means big changes cognitively, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Like you’d expect. Except that makes teaching harder—how does the material grow with the students?

And does the student grow with the material?

I made a decision with the high school halaqas early on: We were going to explore deep questions that assumed prior knowledge. We were going to spend very little time with the foundations of religion. That’s not only because someone else might teach that better, but because by high school they should know the foundations.

It’s hard at that age to teach do’s and don’t’s. If you don’t (sic) already know how to pray, or what’s expected of you after your fard, or how to read Qur’an, or what the five pillars on—well, you still have to learn, but the right place would be a different kind of halaqa. My ambition was to go deeper into the question of living religion.

To prepare them for the responsibilities of religious maturity.

Of course, you can only go deeper if you’ve got the basics down. It’s like with sports, or with writing, or with anything, really. If you don’t grasp the essentials, you can’t engage them, explore them, or even debate what they mean. (Some great writers play with grammar, but I’ve never heard of a great writer who didn’t actually know grammar.)

So if you’re teaching younger kids now, and hope to get them to more sophisticated content (which, by the way, they’re more than capable of handling—these high schoolers love to debate, have rich opinions, and can handle tough topics), make sure you’re laying the groundwork first.

For the middle schoolers, as such, this year and the next are transitional in a substantive way. Much of our material includes conceptual foundations. But within that are the seeds of the bigger questions I’m going to challenge them to explore come high school. They’re still young enough that they need to know the basics and impressionable enough that these things can be taught without them feeling self-conscious or, worse, condescended to.

That’s why my middle school halaqa has two components.

In the first half of each class, I continue the conversation we had last spring: What does it mean to be a Muslim man? This fall, we’re painstakingly dissecting Oludumini Ogunnaike’s article on haya’, “The Dignity of Shame” (Renovatio), something young men don’t spend enough substantive time with.

We begin with Ogunnaike’s point that “modesty” is an incomplete and inadequate translation of haya’. On that note, beginning last week (our first fall class), we talked about how the haya’ characteristic of Muslims is better translated as “shame,” “dignity,” “self-awareness,” “modesty,” and “conscientiousness” all at once, the idea that men—and Muslims—who take themselves seriously are taken seriously.

I’m very impacted by one of Aaron Renn’s key insights on this subject: We must be wary of instrumentalizing masculinity, making young men feel that what they want and aspire to is not intrinsically valuable. But in order for them to thrive, and flourish, they have to appreciate the world and their responsibilities to the world. And its responsibilities to them!

If we don’t move through the world like we matter, like we respect ourselves, and like God is always watching, then we become people who don’t reach our potential. Since we’re only meeting every other week to accommodate busier schedules, a paragraph is more than enough to cover in half an hour.

In that time too, I always reserve space for questions, debates, brief pillow fights (I kid you not—but if you’re a guy, certainly you remember what it was like to be 12 or 13), and then there’s a breather. I was worried that they might not be able to handle a second subject almost right after the first. No play time this time.

But we tried it last week, and—alhamd! For the first half hour, they covered adab, the etiquette and comportment of Muslim men. Then we jumped right into Arabic. We’re studying the Qur’anic language—and, much to my joy and satisfaction, they loved it. I made it loud, active, involved, and whimsical at times.

Even just doing a few words at a time and they were engaged throughout. They can say things like “you are Haroon,” or “I am a Muslim,” and even understand when I announce in response to their shenanigans “antum bakwas”—a particularly South Asian fusha. (Where antum becomes “chat”). If you know, you know.

There’s something about unlocking a world that might hitherto have seemed entirely mysterious. When learning is about creating abilities, and insights, it’s exciting. This seems appropriate to where and when they are too. In their youngest years, after all, they began memorizing. Qur’an. Hadith. Prayers. Now they’re elaborating on what they’ve learned, intuiting meaning, thinking through applications, appreciating grammar and structure and style.

What a joy it is to see them make sense of the language God chose to speak to humankind in. I also appreciate that I’m being forced to brush up on my own Arabic.

But what, you might ask, does this have to do with biological clocks? Don’t worry, I’m not teaching them about biological clocks. But I am trying to teach them so that they will be ready when they first intuit the ticking of that clock. Nor is that a bad thing: Aging, I believe, is beautiful in its own ways.

(Here’s a Hidden Brain episode on the apparently counterintuitive relationship between mental health and maturity. It’s a great listen.)

But back to biological clocks—

There’s a tendency among some Muslim educators these days, even with the best of intentions, to want to explain everything before they’ve even established anything. Maybe because a lot of our teachers made us do things but then never explained why we were doing those things. To be clear, the latter is a problem. But that doesn’t mean the former was in error.

I’ve begun to fear that such an approach is a peculiar form of causation alien to our tradition (and, as such, human nature). We hear, we obey. With enough doing, we realize understanding. For those of us who are teachers—first, help kids understand how to execute their obligations. Like teaching them how to pray. Then encourage them to develop the discipline to continue on their own initiative.

And as this unfolds, then and only then can we begin to help them think through the meaning of these rituals in rich ways. We do so in this specific order because that’s how the Prophet, peace be upon him, framed living and building faith, and behind it is a simple realization that might be hard for some of us to accept: We ourselves can’t possibly know all the reasons for the things God commands us to do.

Assuming I know all the reasons God ordered us to pray, or so strongly called on men to have beards, or—well, in short, I’ll never know everything about everything, or even a lot about a little. But I’ll certainly know more if I can do the thing in the first place.

After all, some knowledge only reveals itself over the course of life. (When I was twenty, I might have feared the aches and pains of life over forty. Now that I’m past forty, though, I enjoy a level of deeper ease and beautiful purpose—even with this ongoing knee pain!—I couldn’t have even imagined possible just a decade ago.)

On the other hand, some knowledge only reveals itself socially, as we see the consequences of individual choices for collective outcomes.

Or collective choices for individual outcomes.

But some knowledge might never be known to many of us—ever. If we genuinely believe religion is from God, then would it be so hard to imagine our Creator knows things we don’t and won’t? Growing up, for example, I’d heard time and again that our beloved Prophet (s) taught us to marry as soon as we were ready to.

That we shouldn’t delay marriage unless we absolutely had to.

For men, this was usually explained thusly: If we delay marriage too long, we invite promiscuity. Irresponsibility. And the like. Few of us imagined that men might further need relationships the way we said women did, that we were not as special as we might assume ourselves to be, thanks to bias, prejudice, and gendered self-regard.

In recent years though, it seems increasingly evident that while men need a certain amount of maturity to pursue marriage, marriage itself accelerates a certain kind of maturity in turn (that this doesn’t apply to every single person hardly means the broader trend isn’t inarguable.)

Unmoored from marriage, many men become entirely unmoored. Turns out there’s still more to the story—there’s still more reason we didn’t comprehend and might never have expected. Of course, it’s problematic to generalize, but it’s generally difficult to parent young kids as our bodies get older and our energy levels flag.

Indeed, that tiredness seems to augur more: As Anthony Bradley shares in this piece, delaying fatherhood might have genetic implications for kids. If you’re taking this to mean rushing young adults into decisions they’re not ready for, you’re missing my points, which are two-fold.

The first is that we should hardly ever assume we entirely understand the reason for anything. When folks point out supposed scientific miracles in the Qur’an, I flinch. The greatest generation in history didn’t need isolated confirmations of their empirical beliefs to change the destiny of themselves and the world.

Not to mention that our scientific knowledge is contingent; every so often, an Einstein comes along who lets us know our greatest theories may contain great gaps. Don’t hitch your wagon to a theory, or a philosophy, or a community, or a nationality, or an ethnicity, or a political party, or a salary. Or a self. But to God.

And the second?

If we can’t ever understand all the reasons, we can understand the most fundamental one: There is a God. We are obligated to this God for all we are given. This God has shown us and taught us how to discharge our debts. In the process of so honoring and serving God, we live up to our potential, and better understand ourselves, but we should keep our priorities in the proper order.

Personally and pedagogically. Teach the basics. Build the habits. Embrace the practices. Do these together, where possible together, as a family or in some kind of community as well. Invest in those relationships. And then, in that context, build a thoughtful conscientiousness. Religious literacy starts with the grammar and moves on to communication, contribution, even a sense of ownership (the most important of all, in this day and age). If you’ve got a halaqa, map that process out.

What kinds of knowledge should a ten year-old Muslim have?

And what kinds of conversations about religion should a fifteen year-old Muslim be able to understand?

And what kinds of contributions should a twenty year-old Muslim be able to make?

We can’t expect a ten year-old to understand what a twenty year-old would. So go in order. But also so that, when it’s their turn to lead, to build, and to found, you don’t wake up realizing: Wait a minute, my kid has no idea what to look for in a spouse, or how to be part of a community, or how to teach their faith. And that speaks to the question of continuity still more deeply and profoundly.

Speaking of biological clocks, we’re on such clocks ourselves.

In recent years, I’ve met far too many Muslim parents who all but demand I find their child a spouse, or dissuade their child from a certain spouse, but with the benefit of some calm conversation, it seems that these parents spent all their energies pushing their kids into careers and colleges, with hardly a thought for their socialization, emotional maturity, or any active sense of autonomy and responsibility.

Let alone any meaningful attempts to talk about futures.

I’m not saying this in a crude, prescriptive, or self-satisfied way. I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. In fact, one of my greatest regrets is that I wasn’t raised with any sense of what made a meaningful life meaningfully possible—I am blessed to have found myself in a beautiful place, but that didn’t come easily. And yet, that is all the more concerning for what I’ve learned along the way.

I’m more than two decades from graduating NYU. Almost a decade and a half from my Columbia degree. It’s not that I’m not grateful for that education and the opportunities these opened for me. Except that when I sit down with other men my age, more often than not we all concur: The choices that reflect the biggest priorities in our lives, such as who to marry, where to live, and how to raise kids?

We spent hardly any time on those growing up.

If I could come back to the foundations, and build myself anew, though, that’s a credit to parents who made sure I knew the basics. I had the grammar down. I could move in religious spaces. I could challenge opinions that were harmful. I could find space for myself. And because they pushed me into situations I wasn’t ready for, at a reasonable pace, so that I might be ready for the greater challenges life would present.

Hence the middle school halaqas. Adab and Arabic.

As for the high school halaqas? We’re starting by reading an essay that asks a question: “Does Islam explain the conditions of the Middle East and the broader, so-called Muslim world?” Because I want them to be able to appreciate big conversations and internalize an even bigger question: What difference does Islam make in my life? Is Islam something that challenges me to be better?

Or is Islam something I use to excuse me?