Advice Regarding Marrying non-Muslims

QUESTION:
I need a fatwa regarding making the marriage contract in a church or in a civil court.So the question is: If a muslim is getting married with a Christian woman, is it permissible in Islam to make the marriage contract in a church or a civil court?
ANSWER:
as-Salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu:
As for regarding, marrying a Christian woman, one must understand that Allah has permitted for us the "muhsanaat" among them. This means that the woman _must_ be chaste. As for those Christian women who have had sex outside of marriage; it is impermissible to marry them. As most American woman, these days, have sex before marriage, a "muhsanah" from the Christians is a rarity!
As far as the contract, it is impermissible to have any part of the marriage ceremony at the church; as this entails witnessing shirk (or perhaps at times participating in shirk), like when the Priest takes the ring from thr groom, and then places it on the bride's thumb, forefinger and the middle finger while saying "In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" (may Allah be exalted from such blasphemy) and finally rests the ring on the index finger. Also their marriage has many ceremonies which are from the practices of the unbelievers that one may not partake in.
As for the contract in a civil court, this is permitted if two conditions are met: (1) There is no acceptance of the laws and system of the disbelievers as supreme or valid as this would nullify our testimony of faith; (2) the registering of the marriage in the civil court results in some benefit that outweighs the harm of not registering the marriage. (This is the case with the majority of Muslim marriages in North America in particular for citizens and residents.)

QUESTION:
Secondly, is this allowed when the person is making a second contract according to the islamic teachings and laws regarding this issue?
ANSWER:
The Islamic marriage must proceed the civil registration; as it is only the Islamic marriage that makes the marriage valid. (An Islamic marriage entails in brief: (1) the acceptance of both partners and their suitability for marriage; (2) the acceptance of the bride's guardian; (3) the dower; (4) and two wintesses.)
A court marriage is not a marriage according to the sharia. And hence both partners, if not married Islamically, cannot be alone with one another, let alone, live as husband and wife.
I have one final word of advice regarding the dangers and appropriateness of marrying a Christian woman. (1) If the marriage ends in divorce; the court will almost always and without exception give custody of the children to the woman; (2) if the husband tries to leave the US with the children and a court order issues a warrant for his arrest for kidnapping; the Dept. of Justice will send FBI officers to arrest the husband and bring back the children, even if he is overseas. In fact, there are special mercenaries for hire that for a fee will kidnap the children and bring them back to the US. This has happened in Jordan and Iraq. I even know first hand of an incident where a British Muslim (a white Englishman with a big red beard) who was arrested in Medina by Saudi authorities due to the pressure of the British government to return his Muslim daughter back to her Christian drug abusing wife and her boyfriend and to place him in jail for kidnapping his Muslim daughter to Saudi Arabia; (3) many Muslims today are weak in faith and suffer from feelings of inadequacy (due to this lack of faith) in front of Westerners (and in particular white Americans); as a result, it is often that the Christian wife who will control their lives. I know of many cases of Muslims who have married these Christian women and due to the enviornment have ended up in a case of "virtual" apostasy; (4) how appropriate is it to marry a Christian woman given that there are many Muslim woman who lack husbands? These are not only American sisters, converts and immigrant children who have grown up in this country and who need strong Muslim men to learn Islam from them and take care of them; but what about the tens of million of Muslim women from Muslim countries who due to war and displacement live very poor lives and are looking for a Muslim man to teach them and rescue them from their misery. If the youth of Islam remain with only one wife or marry Christians, who will shelter our sisters from Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Kashmir, Philipines, etc.! That is some advice from the heart that I felt must be brought forward. My apologies if these words are out of place.

The Difference Between Sunnis and Shiites

Basics

The majority of the world’s billion-odd Muslims are Sunnis. Approximately 10 to 15 percent of all Muslims follow the Shiite branch (pronounced Shi‘ite, Shi‘a or Shia). Beyond that, it gets slightly complicated: Who lives where, and why the differences and conflicts between them? The answer is less daunting than it seems.
Sunnis form the overwhelming majority in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Shiites form the majority only in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan, but they constitute sizable minorities in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen.
At heart, Sunnis and Shiites are like Catholics and Protestants in the commonality of some fundamental beliefs. But their differences, especially in nations where the Sunni-Shiite split is exacerbated by each other's proximity (as in Iraq and Lebanon), run so deep that intolerance and violence shadow the two groups, making coexistence difficult.

Islam's Origins

In 610 A.D., Muhammad ibn Abdallah was a successful 40-year-old Arab businessman and tradesman. Every year he retired to a cave near Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia, to pray and fast. Beginning that year on his cave retreats, he had overpowering revelation of the word of God, what would later come to be known as the Quran (which means recitation). By 610, Muhammad was preaching the Quran and directing his earliest followers to build a community, or ummah, where the practical and the compassionate (rather than the theological) was to predominate.
The year 622 marks the founding of Islam as a religion: It was the year of the hijrah, or migration, by Muhammad and his followers. They founded the first truly Islamic ummah in Medina.
By the time of Muhammad's death in 632, Islam had conquered the Arabian peninsula roughly up to what today would be Saudi Arabia's borders with Jordan and Iraq. Within a century, Islam would spread to western India, the Caucasus, Turkey, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Its furthest advance was to the heart of present-day France, where the armies of Charles Martel stopped the conquerors in 732 in the Battles of Tours and Poitiers.

The Prophet Muhammad's Succession

At Muhammad's death in 632, Abu Bakr, a close companion of the Prophet, became his successor, or caliph. Most Muslims agreed that the most able and pious of the Prophet's followers should be his caliphs. Their followers would come to be known as the orthodox branch of Islam, or Sunnis.
A few Muslims disagreed, arguing for a line of succession based on bloodlines. To those dissenters, the succession should have immediately gone to Ali, the fourth caliph -- who took the helm after some of his followers assassinated Caliph Uthman, his predecessor. Followers of Ali would eventually form Shiite Islam.

What Sunnis and Shiites Believe

The Quran, the Prophet's hadith, or sayings, and the sunna, or customs, are central to the belief system of both Sunnis and Shiites. So are the five pillars of Islam: The recitation of the creed ("There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet"); the salat, or the recitation of prayers five times a day; zakat, or the obligatory giving of alms to the poor according to one's means; fasting from sunup to sunset during the month of Ramadan; and the hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca at least once in a Muslim's lifetime, means permitting.
Sunnis and Shiites also believe in Islamic law. But its application varies.

Where Sunnis and Shiites Differ

Sunnis accept that the first four Caliphs, including Ali, were the rightful followers of Muhammad. However--rather like Protestantism in Christianity--they don't grant the kind of divinely inspired status to their clerics that Shiites do with their imams. Shiites believe imams are descendants of the Prophet.
Islam has no codified laws per se. It has various schools of law. While Sunni doctrine is more rigidly aligned in accordance with those various schools, its hierarchical structure is looser and often falls under state, rather than clerical, control. The opposite is true in Shiitism: The doctrine is somewhat more open to interpretation but the clerical hierarchy is more defined and, as in Iran, the ultimate authority is the imam, not the state.
Both Sunnis and Shiites break down into various sects that range from puritanical (as with Sunni Wahhabism, prevalent in Saudi Arabia) to somewhat mysterious (as with the Druze of Lebanon, Syria and Israel, who form an offshoot of Shiitism).

Why Can't They Get Along?

That's a loaded, condescending question best answered by raising a mirror to the more familiar: Why couldn't Catholics and Protestants get along for hundreds of years (and in straggling cases still aren't getting along?). The answer must take account of doctrinal and historical differences, however irrational those differences might seem to the objective, uninvolved eye.

Islamic Ethics of Organ Transplantation and Brain Death

The ethical problems raised by recent advances in medicine are the domain of the ethicist, medical philosopher, lawyers, members of Parliament, religious leaders as well as physicians involved in the dilemmas of day to day problems. Islam is not only a religion; it is a code of life and hence encompasses the secular with the spiritual, the mundane with the celestial, through its holistic approach. The Islamic scholar is both the jurist and the ethicist. It is true that new methods and techniques in medicine have no precedent and hence make it difficult for Islamic jurists to give their verdict. However, the Islamic jurists were very active in the last decade and held many conferences to which many doctors were called to discuss issues such as brain death, organ transplantation, and new methods of procreation, abortion and euthanasia. They passed resolutions that help formulating the rules regarding medical ethics in the arena of rapidly advancing the medicine of high technology.

It is important to have an idea how the jurists reach their rulings and judgment on these thorny hair-raising contentious issues. Islamic jurisprudence is based on two pillars: 1) O' Sool (fundamental, basis) 2) Foroo branches) which include the actual rulings of different Islamic jurisprudence schools in various aspects of life and worship. The jurist reaches his verdict through Careful study of the Holy Quran the Sunna (the trodden path) which include the sayings and speeches of the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him (PBUH) (Sunna Qaw-liya), his deeds (Sunna Filiyya and his approvals (Sunna Taqiiriya). The paradigmatic behavior of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) is the example and model that each Muslim aspires to reach. If the jurist is unable to reach a verdict through studying the Holy Quran and scrutinizing the Sunna, he uses analogy and reasoning (Ijtihad or Qiyas). He can also use other sources e.g. Al Masaleh Almursalah, which simply means taking care of public interest provided it does not clash with a clear text of the Quran or Sunna.The Hanafi School of jurisprudence has in addition a similar source which they call Isthsan, i.e. seeking the best solution for general interest. Ijma is a unanimous opinion of the whole community of Islamic jurists all over the world on a certain issue. It was, and still is, very difficult to achieve; however the consensus of the majority of jurists is more pragmatic. In fact, almost all the rulings that were passed by Islamic jurists conferences were passed by majority of votes.