Father and Mother: two topos of family ethics in Cristianity and Shia Islam

Christianity and Shiite Islam share the religious nature of marriage as compliance with a divine precept and of the family as a sharing and continuation of the divine will preordained for the creation and multiplication of human beings on the face of the earth. I will not dwell on the institution of marriage itself and I will omit to expound its principles, canons and ethics proper to it. I therefore proceed to immediately lay out the essential outlines that characterize the existential philosophy and the role to which parents are called within the family cell. Of this cell they are not the only protagonists, and it must also be said that the cell itself is not an end in itself: the parents are one with the children and the family is one with the society, civil and religious, in which and with which it evolves, lives its religiosity and ethics, and realizes divine wills. The subject of people who make up the family nucleus in the strict sense and the people who gravitate with different duties and in different capacities around it, such as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, relatives and servants, is vast and complex in its articulations. This is true both as regards their interpersonal relations and their relations with the community environment in the midst of which they stand as elements of edification and support. Indeed, an exhaustive treatment of the personal roles of individuals constituting the family would in itself require extremely detailed and laborious research. Perhaps in no other field has legalism indulged so much as in the treatment and determination of the rights and duties inherent to the members of the family unit. Not only because of their natural belonging to a tribe, clan and family, but also because of their religious identity as subjects of a revealed law, over whom the dominion of faith prevails, or ends up prevailing, over every other instance of ethical, associative and community order. We therefore propose to outline, below, just a few of the complex religious and human implications of the interpersonal relations that regulate and govern the family institution as it articulates itself and becomes the core of the so-called Islamic community.