Marriage Betrayal: Does Islam Require You to Stay or Allow You to Leave?

That is your decision. Nobody else's. That is not an Islamic decision in the sense that Islam mandates one answer. It is a personal choice decision.

You chose to get married — not because Islam forced you, but because you wanted to get married. And the question of whether to stay in or exit a marriage is not one Islam has given a fixed religious answer to. It is a contract. If you want to stay in that contract and work on fulfilling its clauses — its rights and responsibilities — you can. If you want to exit the contract — there are exit clauses. Fulfill them.

There is no criminality in ending a marriage in the halal way. There is no criminality in getting married and there is no criminality in getting divorced in the halal way. What the religion applies to is how you should treat each other while you are in the marriage, and how you should exit it with dignity and justice if you do. Beyond that, you are an adult. You make your own choice.

We have Christianized our view of marriage in many ways — treating it as some kind of permanent sacrament that can never be ended without sin. That is not the Quran's view. The Quran gives the longest discourse in its pages on how to exit a marriage gracefully and with justice. That itself tells you something about its perspective.