Inter-Ethnic Marriages: Muslim American Experiencing Change

During the period between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of European Jews made their respective ways to the United States. At the time, 99% of these Jews were married to or became married to fellow Jews. Today, just 70% of American Jews, by most estimates, are married to a Jewish spouse. As Muslim-Americans begin to experience a similar evolution in the spousal selection, the manner in which this phenomenon will impact the Muslim-American familial and socio-cultural experience will soon be revealed.

While the Jewish immigrants described above largely hailed from Eastern European countries, the vast majority of recent Muslim immigrants, who have been arriving in increasingly large numbers since the 1970s, hail from an upper-middle-class background, bringing with them the perks entailed in such upbringings, including university-level educations in many instances (Riley). While many of these immigrants arrived with plans to return to their respective homelands, providing that socio-political unrest of the kind recently witness in Egypt was quelled, the vast majority of them have stayed, while growing their families in the United States. For the most part, like their Jewish counterparts, these Muslim immigrants have evolved large, successful and well-educated families, though they have not assimilated into their respective American cultures with nearly the ease with which their Jewish counterparts did and continue to do the same (Constant and Gataullina 277). As such, the Muslim-American community’s collective reaction to the concept of inter-ethnic marriage may emerge as one to a perceived threat to both American and Muslim cultures.

As the Muslim-American community grows, it is reasonable to expect the rate of inter-ethnic marriage to increase. However, today, it is estimated that 1 in 6 Muslim-Americans are entering into inter-ethnic unions (Riley). Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that this rate will do anything other than continue to rise, and for very specific socio-cultural reasons. To some extent, the inter-ethnic marriage tide for immigrant Jews was stemmed from the slow receptivity of various institutions to the mere presence of Jews. As such, Jews were simply not present in settings where they would be likely to meet eligible bachelors or bachelorettes of varying ethnicity; places such as country clubs or certain places of work. Today, of course, with all such restrictions having been eradicated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Muslims are readily present in all manner of settings through which they might be drawn towards inter-ethnic marriage.

To this end, it is Muslim-American men who are most likely to be drawn toward inter-ethnic marriage in that Islamic law permits such men to inter-marry and nevertheless produce Muslim children, providing that they marry a Jew or Christian, as women of both faiths are, as Muslims, considered descendant from an authentic tradition of monotheistic faith (Riley). Of course, Muslim-American men are also more likely to be directed toward higher educational settings, which research has established facilitates adaptation to and assimilation into native cultures (Furtado 85). However, if Muslim-American men are disproportionately present in settings with the potential to ease their respective transitions into Americanized cultural enclaves, they are more likely to encounter potential spouses of varying ethnicity, and not merely Jewish or Christian ones. Given that research has also established the difficulty of retaining Muslim faith in Muslim children raised by a non-Muslim mother, the impact of inter-ethnic marriage on the strength of Muslim-American faith may yet be considerable (Riley). As such, the same factor that facilitates Muslim-American integration into the local culture is one that directly threatens the long-term vitality of its faith-based belief system.

Furtado’s research identifies a likely correlation with troubling implications for the capacity of the Islamic faith to endure as Muslim-Americans continue to integrate into American culture. For Furtado, it is likely that Muslim men engaged in settings ripe for spouse-searching may forfeit the need for ethnic matching in favor of seeking a spouse with an educational background well-matched with their own (Furtado 82). According to a Muslim-American female, however, Muslim women “frequently lack intellectually and professionally equal Muslim partners…These forces drive Muslim women to either select suitable marriage partners from outside the faith or face unremitting spinsterhood” (Ahmed). Given this state of affairs, it is difficult to imagine that inter-ethnic marriages between Muslim-Americans and spouses of other ethnicities will do anything other than an increase in frequency. It is worth considering how this phenomenon might bear on whether Muslim-American are able to effectively integrate and assimilate into American cultural norms while retaining some semblance of Islamic socio-cultural mores.

In 2010, applied psychologist Selcuk Sirin conducted surveys of Muslim Youth in America in an effort to glean the extent to which Muslim-American demographic and sociological trends have changed and may continue to change as a result of 9/11. Sirin found that “[A]cross focus groups we conducted; young people spoke of great pressure from their parents not to be too visible as Muslims in the U.S.” (Sirin). If this is so, it becomes even more difficult to imagine a future in which the vitality of Islamic faith is intermingled with Muslim-American socio-cultural expressions. In other words, if the vast majority of the youngest Muslim-Americans are conditioned to limit the extent to which their faith and heritage manifest externally, then this youngest generation will also seek to limit this extent with regard to a spouse and, presumably, any offspring he or she produces. Indeed, with an adolescent and young adult cohort reporting some form of discrimination, to the tune of 84% and 88% respectively, one expects that it is not merely a parental influence that bears on this cultural limiting (Ibid.). One expects that this youngest generation of American Muslims themselves wish to limit any external manifestation of the Islamic heritage.

Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of North American Muslims are not entirely inclined to discourage expressions of Islamic identity, and this encourages, wittingly or otherwise, the continued rise in inter-ethnic marriages among Muslims. Reports of so-called “honor killings” have been consistently stemming from the United States and Great Britain, with first-generation immigrant Muslim parents taking it upon themselves to murder their own children upon discovering so much as their involvement with a non-Muslim partner (Ahmed). Indeed, Ahmed describes how far certain parents will go to effectuate or perpetuate, as they see it, Islamic faith: “In a recent tragedy…Afghan Muslim parents and the brother of three teenage girls were found guilty of drowning them in an honor killing…for ‘dishonoring’ the family by wearing clothes deemed unacceptable, socializing and, in one case, dating a Christian boy” (Ibid.). It is well worth noting that in this particular instance, the prospective partner in question was 1) a mere boy, far removed from the possibility of marriage and 2) a member of a faith that should be deemed acceptable for purposes of a Muslim male’s spousal selection, but not for purposes of a Muslim female’s choice. This suggests a difficulty for Muslim-American women going forward.

It seems relatively clear that a kind of double-standard exists as to inter-ethnic marriages engaged in by Muslim-American women and those engaged in by Muslim-American men. Unfortunately, it seems relatively clear from recent research that a Muslim mother is necessary for purposes of raising children instilled with an enduring sense of Islamic faith. Given that Muslim-American men are more likely than ever to choose spouses who themselves are not of this faith, it seems that Muslim-American women have risen to this challenge, increasingly choosing spouses of non-Muslim descent, thereby entirely precluding any possibility of offspring who might be termed authentically Muslim, at least according to most interpretations of the Q’uran. It is worth considering the detrimental effect that this kind of inter-ethnic marital progression might have on the faith-based beliefs of Muslim-Americans.

With a generation of young Muslim-Americans already feeling and being made to feel as though they would be unwise to exercise any physical or external expression of their cultural heritage, and with inter-ethnic marriage continuing to grow as a phenomenon within the Muslim-American community, only time will tell how the effects of inter-marriage interact with integration and assimilation of Muslim-Americans into North American culture, in general. For the time being, it seems fair to say simply that this phenomenon will only increase in the frequency with which it occurs, thereby endangering the preservation of authentic socio-cultural infrastructures in the course of blending these with those of the cultural environment to which Muslim-Americans or their parents emigrated. While Muslim-Americans have been historically slow, relative to other such ethnic groups, in assimilating into American culture, this trend may indeed experience a reversal of sorts, though not in such a way as represents a genuine integration of Muslim-Americans into American culture, but through a manner in which inter-ethnic marriage functions to dilute the cultural differences that have historically impeded such assimilation, for better or for worse.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Qanta A. “Column: Islam, Interfaith Marriage Go Hand in Hand.” Usatoday.com. USA Today. 2 Feb. 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Constant, Amelie F. & Gataullina, Liliya & Zimmermann, Klaus F. "Ethnosizing Immigrants." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, March 2009, vol. 69(3). 274-287.

Furtado, Delia. "Human Capital And Interethnic Marriage Decisions." Economic Inquiry, January 2012, vol. 50(1). 82-93.

Riley, Naomi Schaefer. “When Muslims Intermarry, Do They Keep The Faith.” Washingtonpost.com The Washington Post. 12 Apr. 2013. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Sirin, Selcuk R. “Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities Through Multiple Methods.” Presentation at Montclair State University, 2010.