Cairo - Dr. 'Shawky Allam' – the Egyptian Mufti- asserted that The Egyptian Dar Al-Ifta (The House of Islamic Advisory Opinions) is the mirror of society as it reads the daily movement of society through the statistics that reaches it from the multiple committees of "Fatwas" (advisory opinions). He pointed out that through those statistics, Dar Al-Ifta was able to monitor not only the concerns of the Egyptian communities but of the whole world as well. Dar Al-Ifta receives questions from foreign countries and responds to them in ten foreign languages. Through the press conference held by Dar Al-Ifta for launching the fourth program for qualifying the would-be married couples, The Egyptian Mufti added: "about two years ago, we have been reading those statistics, we found out that there has been an increase in the rate of the incidents of divorce especially during the first five years of marriage, according to the calculations of the Central Agency of Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). We have monitored this phenomenon and read that problem and discovered that the reasons behind divorces are the couples' lack of knowledge of the fundamentals of marital life and of the rights and obligations resulting from the marriage contract. The Mufti denoted that Dar Al-Ifta has noticed that there should be methods to tackle these problems through preventive actions aiming at sensitizing the couples on the basics of marital life and on how to manage it and inform them of the responsibility shouldered by the couples both as it is a mutual responsibility between them because this responsibility affect society either negatively or positively. The Mufti also added Dar Al-Ifta held three successful courses before and it is keen on evaluating each finished course to avoid the negativities in the coming courses and to take the suggestions of the trainees into consideration. On the basis of that, we found that success of those courses and continuation in them is more useful for society. Therefore, we suggest the initiative of generalizing the courses of the would-be married couples besides making use of the experiences of other countries where divorce rates are noticeably very low.
