Consent: no one is married by force
A young woman describes her situation: her father wants to marry her to someone she detests, and she does not believe she could live with him.
Sheikh Salih al-Fawzan's answer leaves no room for interpretation: this is a wrong on the part of that father, and compelling her to marry someone she does not want is a grave wrong.
And he addresses her directly: you are not obliged to accept this person you do not want.
It is not only a moral wrong
The decisive point is legal, and it is often missed on both sides. The sheikh continues: among the conditions of validity of the marriage contract is consent. The consent of both spouses toward one another. It is a condition of validity of the contract.
An imposed marriage is therefore not a valid marriage badly lived. It is a contract missing one of its conditions.
What marriage is founded on
The sheikh names the foundation: agreement, consent and shared life.
Those three words describe a relationship that must hold over time. Coercion at the start does not produce harmony at the end: it produces a shared life neither party chose, and often a separation.
The confusion to clear up between guardianship and coercion
Many people conflate two distinct things.
The wali is a condition of validity: he concludes the contract, and we explain this in detail here.
Coercion is a prohibition. The same Sheikh al-Fawzan who firmly affirms the necessity of the wali affirms with equal firmness that no one is married by force, and recalls that Allah has forbidden the wali from preventing the woman in his charge from marrying a suitable man she has accepted.
Guardianship protects a choice. It does not replace it.
What to do under pressure
Three practical markers.
Refusal is legitimate, and it does not amount to disobeying one's parents in what they have the right to ask.
Having the message carried by a respected third party, a person of knowledge or a trusted elder, usually defuses things faster than a head-on confrontation.
And when pressure becomes real coercion, the matter leaves the family circle: it belongs to the people of knowledge, and if necessary to the protection provided by the law of the country.
How the framework helps
On Nikah no introduction happens without a voluntary step from both sides. The wali is involved as a condition of the contract, never as a substitute for consent. A profile can be paused or hidden at any moment, and an exchange can be declined without having to justify it.