By: theblessedhub.co.uk
Source: theblessedhub.co.uk
One random day, Mustafa sends a message to Adam saying:
“I am trying to help find my sister a marriage partner and it is proving ever so difficult. I am getting stressed out. I don’t have many family contacts, or a good social network. I’ve tried a local centre and partner look outs yet no luck. They do not get back to you. I need your advise, what do I do? This is really a big problem.”
Adam is lost for words and replies: “Ok this is going to take a while… Let me check Google.” And then they begin a discussion ranging from what can be done to problems that are faced like actually finding real men – who all seem to be little boys.
The question posed here is important. How would you respond? What would you say? Why is it hard to get married, or is it? How does one go about finding someone to get married to in the Muslim community here in the UK?
“Religiously speaking, there isn’t a prescribed method for finding a spouse in our tradition. We find a variety of ways in our tradition that people utilized when getting married as well as different types of couples. Younger men marrying older women, intercultural marriages, arranged marriages and love marriages, marriages in which the woman proposed to the man, and many more. What this shows us is not that these ways are the only ways to do it, but there are many ways and no set, defined way to go about it. Permissibility does not equate to normativity — meaning just because it’s allowed to be done in a certain way, doesn’t mean that’s the only way of doing it. In general, this is something that needs to be understood because too many of us give advice based off of our own subjective experiences and understandings, and don’t really think about the reality that the other person is coming from.” – Imam Khalid Latif
So then looking at the issue, perhaps the root causes should be addressed in order to facilitate such needs. It’s a complicated. Integration may well be part of the solution. Many who have the problem live closed lives. They do not have much of a social network. There are a lot of other things that come to mind on this topic.
The Blessed Hub is a dedicated independent non-organisational service working for the community of Manchester, UK, that serves as a unique point of reference and a network for those wanting to know everything this magnificent city has to offer from Halal food joints to circles of knowledge to engaging with scholars.