I want to marry a girl but I was in a relationship with her mother. Am I allowed to marry the daughter?

This is one of the debatable issues among scholars. Hanafi jurists for example believe that committing adultery with the mother automatically prohibits marriage to the daughter and vice versa. Shafi’i and Maliki scholars believe that prohibited acts do not prohibit lawful ones. This means that it is permissible for a man who commits adultery with a woman and then repents and ends the relationship, to marry the woman’s daughter or mother.

We believe that the whole matter is based on deterring the act of adultery and this issue differs according to societies and the nature of relationships among people. Therefore, if marrying the daughter will lead to even the slightest possibility of resuming the adulterous relationship between the man and the mother, then the Hanafi opinion of prohibiting this marriage prevails to deter the possibility of adultery. But if the prohibited relationship between the man and the mother has ended and both parties are determined not to resume it, then there is no legal impediment to adopting the opinion of the Maliki and Shafi’i scholars permitting marrying the daughter of a mother with whom adultery was committed.