Parental Alienation: Severing Sacred Ties

Part One: Severing What Allah Commanded to Be Joined

Brothers,

Islam has a name for the bond that ties a family together: silat ar-rahim, maintaining the ties of kinship. Allah does not treat this bond as a suggestion. He commands it directly, and He warns severely against breaking it.

And those who join that which Allah has ordered to be joined, and fear their Lord, and are afraid of the evil of the reckoning. (Ar-Ra'd, 13:21)

But those who break the covenant of Allah after contracting it, and sever that which Allah has ordered to be joined, and cause corruption on earth, upon them is the curse, and they will have the worst home. (Ar-Ra'd, 13:25)

Read those two verses side by side. Joining what Allah ordered to be joined sits next to fearing Allah and dreading the reckoning. Severing what Allah ordered to be joined sits next to corruption on the earth and the curse. Allah does not place family bonds in a neutral category. He places them next to some of the heaviest language in the Quran. The Prophet ﷺ made the stakes even clearer.

The one who severs the ties of kinship will not enter Paradise. (Muslim 2556)

Sit with that hadith. Not “will be diminished.” Not “will be questioned.” Will not enter Paradise. That is how seriously Allah and His Messenger ﷺ treat the deliberate severing of family bonds. And there is one form of severing that is worse than most, because it does not simply break a relationship between two adults who can speak for themselves. It reaches into a relationship no one has the right to touch: the bond between a parent and a child too young to defend it.

Whoever separates a mother from her child, Allah will separate him from his beloved ones on the Day of Judgment. (Tirmidhi 1283)

This hadith is stated about a mother and her child, but the principle inside it is not limited to one direction. A child has a right to both of his parents. Deliberately turning a child against his mother is qat’ ar-rahim. Deliberately turning a child against his father is qat’ ar-rahim. The parent doing the severing may tell himself or herself a story about protecting the child, but the child did not ask to be separated from someone who loves him, and the child is never the one who benefits.

What Alienation Actually Looks Like

Let us be concrete, because vague warnings change nothing. Parental alienation is not a single dramatic act. It is usually a slow campaign, carried out in small moves that each look defensible on their own. It looks like badmouthing the other parent in front of the child, week after week, until the child absorbs the bitterness as fact. It looks like blocking phone calls, canceling visits, and quietly making contact so difficult that the other parent eventually gives up trying. It looks like rewriting a child’s memory of his own mother or father, replacing a real, flawed, human parent with a caricature built entirely out of one side’s anger. None of this protects the child. All of it uses the child as the instrument through which one parent punishes the other.

The Child Is the Victim, Never the Tool

Here is the part that must be said plainly: the child carrying out the coldness, the child repeating the accusations, the child refusing the phone call, is not the guilty party. He is a young heart that has been shaped by an adult he trusts completely, an adult who used that trust to accomplish something the child never chose and does not fully understand. This is qat’ ar-rahim executed through a child’s own heart, and the sin sits with the parent who engineered it, not with the child carrying it out.

This is why alienation deserves its own name and its own warning, distinct from ordinary bitterness between two people who were once married. Two adults arguing over money or the past cause each other harm they at least entered into with open eyes. A child recruited into that argument entered into nothing. He was handed a version of a parent that was manufactured for him, and he will carry the emotional cost of that manufactured story for years, often long after the original marital dispute has been forgotten by everyone else involved. That cost, more than any court filing or any argument won, is the actual damage this khutbah is naming.

Part Two: The Believer’s Response, and the Community’s Duty

Brothers,

If you recognize any of Part One in your own family, in your own case file, in your own phone calls home, this half is for you, on both sides of it.

Accountability of the Alienating Parent

If you are the parent doing the alienating, whether out of hurt, revenge, or a genuine but misguided belief that you are shielding your child, understand that you are standing where the hadith of Tirmidhi 1283 stands. Allah does not judge intentions dressed up as protection when the actual effect is severing a child from someone who loves him without a real impediment behind it. Repentance here has a concrete shape. It means restoring contact, not merely feeling regret in private. It means stopping the campaign of words in front of the child, even if your anger toward the other parent is entirely justified in other matters. Your anger at your ex-spouse is not license to conscript your child into it.

Repentance also means being honest with yourself about the difference between a genuine impediment and a manufactured one. If the other parent has truly harmed the child, that is a matter for an Imam or mediator to weigh, and protecting a child from real danger is not alienation. But if you are honest with yourself and find no real impediment, only your own wound, then the wound is yours to carry to Allah in tawbah, not something to hand your child to carry in your place.

The Alienated Parent’s Playbook

If you are on the other side of this, the parent being erased, here is the path the Sharia and simple wisdom both point to.

Never retaliate through the child. Do not badmouth the other parent back to him, even when every word would be true. Two parents fighting a war through a child’s heart produces one loser, and it is never either parent.

Stay constant. Send the letter even when it goes unanswered. Make the call on your allotted day even when it is refused. Show up, in whatever form you are permitted, again and again, without drama and without demand. Consistency is itself a form of proof that outlasts any story told about you.

Let time and truth do the slow work that argument cannot. A child eventually grows old enough to notice inconsistencies, to ask his own questions, to recognize the difference between the parent who kept showing up and the parent who kept explaining why the other one was unworthy. You do not need to win that case today. You need to still be standing, patient and unshaken, when the child is finally old enough to look for himself.

Yusuf, peace be upon him, is the model Allah gave us for exactly this kind of long patience. His own brothers plotted against him, separated him from his father, and built years of false narrative around what had happened to him. When the truth finally surfaced and his brothers stood before him in shame, Yusuf did not spend that moment settling scores.

He said: No blame will there be upon you today. Allah will forgive you, and He is the most merciful of the merciful. (Yusuf, 12:92)

Notice what came before that forgiveness: years of separation, years of a father grieving, years in which Yusuf could have grown bitter and did not. He kept his integrity intact through the entire ordeal, and when vindication came, he met it with mercy rather than triumph. That is the standard for a parent whose bond with a child has been severed by someone else’s plotting. Stay righteous through the wait. Let Allah handle the timing and the outcome.

The Community’s Duty

This is not only a two-person problem. An aunt who reinforces the bitterness, an uncle who repeats the accusations to the child as fact, a friend who takes sides and fuels the fire, all become participants in the severing. Silat ar-rahim is a communal obligation, not only a parental one. If you are the friend or relative standing near a family going through this, your job is to be a voice for reconciliation, not a megaphone for one side’s grievance. And if you are the parent who has already done real damage and now wants to repair it, the steps are the same ones asked of anyone seeking tawbah: acknowledge the harm plainly to the child when he is old enough to hear it honestly, stop actively working against contact, and let consistent good conduct rebuild what words tore down.

Behind These Walls

Brothers, few things are harder than facing parental alienation from inside these walls. Limited phone time, limited visits, and a system that already makes contact difficult give an alienating parent an easy path to finish the job the walls started. If this describes your situation, do not go silent. Keep writing, on your schedule, without bitterness in the letter even when you feel it. Involve your community’s Imam or a trusted family member to advocate for your access where you cannot advocate for yourself. Document the effort you are making, because consistency recorded over years speaks louder than any single argument. And when contact does open again, whether next month or years from now, be the parent who never once used the child as a weapon, so that when your child finally looks for the truth, your record is the one thing that was never in question.

O Allah, mend every tie of kinship that has been severed in our families, especially between a parent and a child too young to defend the bond himself.

O Allah, forgive us for any word we have spoken against the other parent of our children, in anger or in weakness.

O Allah, grant patience to every parent who is being kept from their child unjustly, and let time reveal the truth in their favor.

O Allah, soften the heart of every parent engaged in alienation, and bring them to repentance before the harm becomes permanent.

O Allah, protect the hearts of children caught in the middle of their parents’ conflict, and do not let bitterness take root where love should be.

O Allah, make us people who repair the ties others sever, following the example of those You praised for maintaining kinship even when it was not returned.

O Allah, grant us the patience of Yusuf, peace be upon him, and let our vindication, if it comes, be met with mercy rather than triumph.

O Allah, reunite every parent and child You will reunite, in this life if You will it, and without any separation in the next.