Muslim girls Growing Up in the West - Marriage

[libertarian]

During the past three decades thousands of Muslim families have relocated from their homelands to the West, mostly to the UK, Canada, the USA and Australia.


While all these countries now have vibrant Muslim communities, the marriages of Muslim girls growing up in the West are something of a conundrum for their parents, as well as the girls themselves.


There are many issues involved.


Many among the older generation, especially the men, still want to marry their daughters and sisters to boys from among the immediate family. Very often this means the family taking the young girl with them to the mother country, and marrying her there to some available young man.


Many such marriages go sour. I know of a case of a woman in Denmark whose family was from Jhelum Pakistan.

She was taken to Pakistan, wed there to a cousin of her father, and the couple came back with the woman's parents to Denmark. The woman's father put down a lot of many to set up his son in law in business with a neighbourhood provisions store.


The groom however wanted to acquire a status as wealthy and affluent as his wife's brothers. He somehow got into drug smuggling, and into gambling as well.


The marriage did not lat. After six years there was a divorce. Meanwhile two daughters had arrived.


This is just one of many such cases littered all over the West.



Please discuss and share your views.

[shahjahan]

Oh this just tells us one thing. Do NOT go back to Pakistan to get your girls married. Although not everyone is an idiot as the person in the case here but apparently those are the ones who some how end up in a setting that they're alien to. That causes problems as well. Personal greed is a totally different story.

[libertarian]

There is the issue of family traditions. There are families who just DO NOT want to marry outside of the family circle. There is also the caste system. Syeds do not want to marry their offspring, especially girls, to non-syeds. There are also property issues. Families who have made it out of hard times do not want to part with or share their wealth with unknown people.


And then there are social and cultural issues. A Muslim girl raised in the West is something quite different from a Muslim girl raised in Lucknow or Lahore, no matter how religious and practising the family itself may be. There are issues of sensibilities and politics.

[rabeea]

Having done much of my growing up out of Pakistan, I can say a few things.



Apart from a few, most people view us girls who have grown up in West as debauched and depraved.


Despite that, for the chance of moving to the West with their wives, Pakistani men fall over each in their desire to marry girls living in the West.


Most such marriages where the girls has grown up in the West and boy has never been out of Pakistan (often never out of his home locality) end in separation, divorce, sometimes even murder.