محرمیت در فرزندخواندگی

The matter of a ‘prohibition of marriage’ (mahramiiat) between an adopteeand their adoptive family, before becoming and further to being a legalquestion, is an object of both moral and religious investigation. As aconsequence, any society has own orientation concerning its religious andmoral bases in this context. In Islam, it has been stated that the causes for theprohibition of marriage are limited to lineage (nasab), cause (sabab) andfostering (rezae). The principle, then, is one of authorization and marriage ispermitted insofar as there is no contradictory reason and, as a result,adoption has no effect in this matter. Nevertheless, consideration of thesocial aspect of legal institutions requires a perennial interaction betweentheir functions (and effects) and time-and-place circumstances. So, in orderto gather a dynamic and updated law we must, on the one hand, understandthe function and coordinates of an institution while, on the other, it isnecessary to refer to the roots and bases of religious regulations. This articleattempts to pursue the aforementioned prescription with regard to aprohibition of marriage in adoption: it regards adoption in the current Iraniansociety as based on the ‘family’, and in order to analyze the adoptee’ssituation, it proposes a solution based on the situation of present individualswithin ‘quasi family’ institutions, namely that of ‘husband’s son of’, ‘wife’sdaughter’ (rabibeh) and ‘foster child’.Keywords:Adoption, Prohibition of marriage, Step-mother, Wife’s daughter, Fosterchild