Islamic Marriage

My Warning to Young Women

The religious composition of the British parliament is not what it once was. Last week, many prominent Christian MPs like Fiona Bruce, Therese Coffey, and Miriam Cates lost their seats to Labour candidates. Muslim MPs, on the other hand, did very well. Historically, the Labour Party is the home of British Islam, so it is not a surprise that in an election where Labour dominates, many Muslims are elected. New Muslim Labour MPs, including Sadik Al-Hassan and Zubir Ahmed, unseated rivals in some surprising places, like in North Sommerset, a seat controlled by the Tories for as long as anyone can remember.

Nonetheless, many Muslims, furious with Labour’s refusal to fully embrace Hamas and its agenda, left the party to start their own. The Muslim Vote, a new organization dedicated to pushing an Islamic agenda in parliament, managed to elect a record five independent members of Parliament. One further Muslim Vote candidate, 23-year-old Leanne Mohamad, lost by just 528 votes. The Muslim Vote’s response was this adulatory statement:

“You are the community’s real winner. You put Gaza back on the ballot. You’ve created history and given us incredible hope for the future.”

It may be time for young Western women – Muslim or otherwise – to hear a bit more about “the incredible hope” for women when Muslim power grows enough.

Muslim Marriages

In 2018, the Swedish government produced a brochure entitled “Information for You Who are Married to a Child.” The brochure stated that while it is technically illegal to marry a child under 18 in Sweden or to have sex with someone under 15, social services “may suggest” that those with a child sexual partner do not live with that child. The brochure did not promise that the law would be enforced. In 2016, social services in the Swedish town Mönsterås permitted a couple to live together even though the male was a 20 year-old asylum seeker and the female was only 13. Months later, she became pregnant; social services still never acted.

As I write in my book Prey, the reason the social services failed to act is the same reason the government’s pamphlet failed to properly criticize child marriage: Native Swedes were not ones being criticized.

Child marriage, forced marriage, “Honor Based Abuse,” polygamy, and consanguinity (marriage between blood relatives): These are features which characterize marriage in the Islamic world.

Honor Based Abuse and Entrapment

In Prey, I discuss how Muslim women are prevented from dissenting from marriage arrangements and from leaving those marriages. Repressive norms shackle women to their husbands. What is often called “Honor Based Abuse” (HBA) is the means by which women are trapped: It entails death threats, acid attacks, rapes, mutilations, and honor killings.

It is very difficult to estimate how many Muslim girls and women are trapped in marriages and threatened by HBA worldwide. Some diasporic estimations have been made: In 2020 an imam estimated that between 2-3,000 Muslim women in Denmark were trapped in marriages they couldn’t leave. In the UK, incidences of HBA, which is closely tied to Muslim forced marriage, have been on the rise, with offences rising in England by 60% in the last two years and by 193% since 2016. (Note the linked Guardian article’s failure to mention the role of Islam in a predominantly Muslim practice). Besides crime statistics, comprehensive data on Muslim marriage norms has not been collected; the scale is unwieldy and I suspect investigations are scant given the reticence of governments to criticize minorities, as in the British Muslim grooming gangs scandal.

In my view, one woman coerced into a life of invisibility and abuse at the hands of Islam is one too many. When such a thing happens on Western shores, governments should respond with urgency. At the very least, activists should speak out. But while feminists are happy to protest the abuse of women by Western men, they remain silent in the face of actual rape culture.  

Muslim clans and incest

After years of rapid immigration from the Islamic world, repressive norms are well-established on European shores. For many years in Britain these norms have challenged the functioning of English law. In his exemplary book of legal scholarship, British Islam and English Law, Patrick Nash has meticulously illustrated several troublesome encounters between English law and Muslim culture. Most notably, Muslim clans are held together through endogamy (marriage between members of the same tribe or clan) and consanguinity (marriage between family relatives, commonly second or first cousins). In Pakistan, the rate of cousin marriage is about 60%; as Nash discusses, this is closely reflected in the British diaspora and may even occur at higher rates in British Pakistani communities. This practice threatens public health, the social fabric, and the rule of law.

It threatens Britain’s social fabric because clans do not alter their behavior to fit the law or customs of the wider environment – whether that be the north of England or Amsterdam. As Nash writes: “The normative codes of honor and hospitality binding clan members together, such as the Pashtunwali of the Pashtuns or the xeer of the Somalis and many others, are rigorously applied and enforced regardless of territorial jurisdiction.”

One of the principles of the traditional legal system xeer is that a widower may inherit his deceased wife’s sister and a widow may be inherited by her deceased husband’s brother. Pashtunwali, a code centered around revenge, boasts the popular adage: “A woman's use is either to cure your poverty or to settle a feud.” Paighor, or “taunting” by men of other tribes, drives Pashtun men to punish and even kill their own women. As such, women are mere symbols of the “honor” of the tribe; should they “betray” or attempt to flee the clan, they risk HBA and even death. Besides their inherent horrors, these codes clearly pose a considerable threat to social stability and the rule of law in the Western nations where Muslim clans settle.

As for public health: High rates of cousin marriage result in higher rates of inherited genetic disorders like cerebral palsy and Tay-Sachs. These disorders often require lifelong intensive treatment, as the British National Health Service (NHS) has seen. Even twenty years ago, it was reported that British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4% of all births but over 30% of recessive gene disorders. More recent research finds that nothing has improved since. The NHS is consistently a top voter issue in the UK, since its diminishing quality of service leads to premature deaths every year. Intensive care for children born with genetic diseases places pressure on the service, particularly affecting people in impoverished areas with high Muslim immigrant populations.

Finally, English law stands at complete odds with sharia, but dozens of sharia councils exist in the UK and frequently rule on marriage disputes. The Dutch researcher Machteld Zee has documented cases of women who seek divorce being forced to return to their abusive husbands by sharia courts. The government is aware of these councils, noting in a 2019 report that sharia councils “may be working in a discriminatory and unacceptable way.” Yet the only politicians who frequently criticize sharia are those who are deemed to occupy the “fringe” right – I think especially of Nigel Farage, who recently expressed alarm after a poll showed that 32% of British Muslims desire the implementation of sharia.

Polygamy

Polygamy is, of course, lopsided. It consists of a marriage contract in which the groom may have many brides but the bride can only be married to the groom. In Prey I discuss the way polygamy valuates (and thus devalues) women: “Women are invested in and valued not for themselves but for the price their virginity can attract in the marriage market. This explains why a girl’s virginity is viewed as capital, whereas a boy’s virginity is insignificant.” 

Besides making women commodities and limiting their ability to have loving relationships with their husbands, polygamy weakens the economic and social development of nations. I recommend this prize-winning scholarly work on polygamy and development by a recent Restoration contributor, Dan Seligson: “Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment.” He shows that in many Muslim-majority countries with high rates of polygamy, economies suffer and tribalistic social structures are ingrained. Not only are women subjected to repression – they are prohibited from contributing to the development of their countries.

Recently, I was struck by this interview with the imprisoned wife of the late Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She states that she was forbidden from using any form of technology to interact with the outside world since 2007 and complains that her husband took another wife. She then asked for a divorce, but couldn’t accept the condition that she give up their children. The situation she describes is woefully common, and not just in the extreme context of Islamist terrorism.

Where is the love?

Only a religion which does not consider love between partners as the building block of marriage can permit polygamy. In Muslim clans, endogamous marriage comes first: Marrying for love is secondary, if not irrelevant, to the tribalistic function of marriage. Conversely, in Christianity, marriage is a sacrament which requires love and full consent to be valid. Take the words of the late Pope Benedict XVI as an example of the Catholic regard for marriage as an expression of love: Since “human beings are made for love,” he said in 2010, “their lives are completely fulfilled only if they are lived in love. […] The relationship between the man and the woman reflects divine love in a quite special way; therefore the conjugal bond acquires an immense dignity.”

The Coronation of the Virgin, by Diego Velázquez

It’s now my belief that Christianity, not secularism, is the ultimate creed upon which most Western practices and beliefs are founded. One of the best pieces of evidence for this is the institution of marriage. Today, even non-practicing Westerners often choose to marry in a Christian church, the bride wearing a beautiful white gown (traditionally a symbol of her virginity). It may sound hypocritical to lament the patriarchal norms built into Muslim marriage while enjoying Christian marital trappings, which include the symbolic “handing over” of the bride from her father to her husband. However, it is clear that today we inherit several precious aspects of the Christian tradition while holding women’s consent to be of utmost importance.

This is consistent with the Catholic Church’s attitude to women. It’s common knowledge that women comprise the social backbone of many Catholic parishes. Their Church regards motherhood to be the very purpose of the Church herself, as stated by Pope Benedict in 2012: “Mary is the mother and model of the Church, who receives the divine Word in faith and offers herself to God as the “good soil” in which he can continue to accomplish his mystery of salvation. The Church also participates in the mystery of divine motherhood.”

I am more drawn to a sanctifying view of marriage than I used to be. I don’t celebrate the high rates of divorce in the West, since they hurt children and speak to a deep wound in the relations between men and women. However, any civilized culture must not only allow but encourage women to escape abuse and to marry whom they love. Any civilized culture must be able to criticize repressive institutions: In the Islamic world, marriage is the most consequential one.