Abstract
In this chapter we will be examining attitudes to marriage among young British Bangladeshi women. We see the move to new forms of Muslim piety among these women as related in part to the problems posed by marriage in the contemporary British environment. New Islamic groups provide both social and intellectual resources that may help to resolve difficulties and issues in relation to marriage and the family, including tension between Western models of romantic love and marriage and the desire to behave in a proper Islamic way. At the same time, the specific forms of Islamic practice adopted may also be constitutive of a new sense of self and a new identity which carries along with it a new and different sense of what the marital relationship, the woman’s relationship to her own body and self and her relationship to her present or future children might be.
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Notes
- 1.
‘The Challenge of Islam: Young Bangladeshis, Marriage and the Family in Bangladesh and the UK,’ 2008–11. We gratefully acknowledge the ESRC’s support of this research.
- 2.
Our informants tended not to use terms such as Salafi, Deobandi and Barelvi, and were often quite unfamiliar with them, so we have avoided them in this paper.
- 3.
As Bautista points out, Mahmood’s approach has perhaps more in common with Marcel Mauss (as in Mauss’ “Techniques of the Body”) than with Pierre Bourdieu, and perhaps is the better for it (Bautista 2008, p. 81).
- 4.
One woman we interviewed, who has adopted burqa and niqab, insists that she cannot show her face to any possible spouse. She has refused to allow her parents even to show a photograph of her to potential partners, and has threatened never to speak to them again should they do so.
- 5.
All names of interviewees have been changed.
- 6.
The term ‘traditional’ here is problematic shorthand, given that family patterns in Dhaka in particular are themselves transforming quite rapidly in the direction of the nuclear family, with consequent conflicts and transformations in views of marriage among Bangladeshis in Bangladesh itself.
- 7.
See http://www.ninjabi.net/. Accessed 4 July 2008.
- 8.
Islamic Circles e-mail circular, 4/7/08.
- 9.
Pamphlet distributed at Islamic Circles Marriage Event, London May 2008.
- 10.
There are explicitly Islamic and Bangladeshi equivalents to MySpace and Facebook, such as http://mymuslimpage.com/, http://shhadi.com/ and http://www.circlebd.com/, as well as sites specifically devoted to locating Muslim partners such as http://www.singlemuslim.com/, http://www.muslims4marriage.com/, http://www.muslimmatch.com/ or http://www.muslima.com/
- 11.
For further details see Rozario and Samuel 2008.
- 12.
http://www.hijazcom.co.uk/. Accessed 28 June 2008.
- 13.
‘Whoever has married has completed half of his religion; therefore let him fear Allah in the other half!’ (Hadith of Bayhaqi, cited in Maqsood 2005, p. 7).
- 14.
This goes back at least to the writings of Muhiyuddin ibn al-Arabi, which were themselves a major influence on the Western European poetic tradition through the troubadours of Provence and through Italian poets such as Cavalcanti and Dante (Samuel 2005, pp. 356–7).
- 15.
‘Adab is prescribed etiquette, a way of living outlined in Islam. Islam has rules of etiquette and an ethical code involving every aspect of life. Muslims refer to Adab as good manners, courtesy, respect, and appropriateness, covering the slightest acts, such as entering or exiting a washroom, posture when sitting, and cleansing oneself’ (Wikipedia).
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Rozario, S., Samuel, G. (2012). Young Muslim Women and the Islamic Family: Reflections on Conflicting Ideals in British Bangladeshi Life. In: Lovat, T. (eds) Women in Islam. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4219-2_3
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