Re: Marriage in the Islamic World

In Life At the Bottom, Theodore Dalrymple provides several anecdotes about Muslim marriage in Great Britain, including the following:

A sixteen-year-old Muslim girl was referred to me because she had started to wet the bed at night. She was accompanied by her father, an unskilled factory worker of Pakistani origin, and was beautifully dressed in satins and chiffon, her ankles and wrists covered with gold bangles and bracelets. Her father was reluctant to let me speak to her on her own but at my insistence eventually permitted me to do so.

I realized at once that she was both highly intelligent and deeply unhappy. Because of my experience in such cases, it took little time to discover the source of her unhappiness.

Her father had decided that she was to marry in a couple of months' time a man-a cousin-of whom she knew nothing.

She, on the other hand, wished to continue her education, to study English literature at university and eventually to become a journalist. Although she controlled herself well-in the circumstances, heroically-there was absolutely no mistaking the passionate intensity of her wishes or of her despair. Her father, though, knew nothing of them: she had never dared tell him, because he was likely then to lock her in the house and forbid her ever to leave, except under close escort. As far as he was concerned, education, career, or choice of husbands was not for girls.

The chance of this changing in a West with-out backbone is zero. Dalrymple notes the acquiescence of his country.

In my quarter of the city there are private-detective agencies that specialize in locating immigrant girls who have run away from their husbands or parents. Once they are found, they are likely to be kidnapped by relatives or vigilantes-an experience which several of my patients have lived through. It is surprising how little reaction bundling someone off the street and driving away with him or her in a car causes nowadays-people do not wish to involve themselves in problems not their own. And the police are generally less than vigorous in their investigation of such cases, for fear of being criticized as racist.
Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom