Kafaah in Islamic Perspective

One of the problems that related to issue of marriage is a matter of kafa’ah, namely equality or equivalence between the husband and the wife in certain factors. One of the purpose of kafa'ah is to realize the goal of marriage, namely to realize a happy family. In Islam, a woman married for four things such as; belongings, heredity, beauty and religion. Among these factors, Islam emphasizes the choice of religion. Prioritization of Islam against the religion factor in regulating this issue, of course can’t be separated from efforts to achieve the benefit, which is to realize happy family, then surely kafa'ah determination in order to support that goal.
Here, we take one of problem that happen in our society about interfaith marriage. There is moslem woman want to marriage with christian man. Actually from woman’s family is disagree with woman’s choice because they think that the man is not proper for woman. The differences not only from religion but also from social aspect. The woman come from rich family but the man just come from ordinary family. This differences didn’t make woman cut her marriage, she still marriage although there are many differences with the man. During marriage appear some contradiction between both of them because the woman still in her religion so their thinking always different, their marriage is not harmonize, moreover when their child become moslem. They always have different perspective to educate their child, so that their child confuse who will become good model. From this case we can know that kafa’ah or equality is important in marriage, because when parent educate their children use different perspective and they aren’t harmonize, it will give bad effect for psychological development of children. So that before marriage, couple should consider equality in coequal, level of social, intellectual, descendants, and the important one is religion.