Chapter 19 Being Married to a Non-Muslim Husband: Religious Identity in Muslim Women’s Interfaith Marriage (original) (raw)

Abstract

Despite the widespread idea in Islamic culture that Muslim women should under no circumstances marry a non-Muslim, many Muslim women get married to non-Muslims. The potential influence of a non-Muslim husband on a woman’s religiosity is one of the main arguments used by scholars who are against Muslim women’s interfaith marriages. This research aims to highlight the untold stories of interreligiously married Muslim women and to examine how being part of an interreligious marriage affects their religiosity and religious experience.

Based on qualitative interviews with intermarried Muslim women who are currently in interfaith union, this study shows that for many interreligiously married Muslim women, marriage to a man from a different religion influences their religious observance in two ways – first, by having no effect (either negative or positive), and second, by having a positive impact on the practise of their religion and the expansion of their religious knowledge. It reveals that the main reason for the positive change was Muslim women’s feelings of being an ambassador of Islam and Muslims in their inter-religious family.