Muslim-Christian Marriage, With Eyes Open
Year Delivered or Published: 2006
Author: Elise Ehrhard
Author's Faith: Christianity
Date Submitted to Inspiration and Issues: December 16, 2006
Topic: Interfaith Issues
A few months ago I attended one of those 400-guest wedding receptions where you barely know the bride and groom. Dinner guests at my table made small talk about spouses or boyfriends while we waited for the entrees to arrive.
“He’s an Arabic linguist,” I said when a woman inquired about my future husband’s line of work. “He’s originally from the Mideast.”
“Guys from there kidnap the kids, you know,” a tired and cranky man sitting next to me suddenly said. His wife put her hand on her forehead with embarrassment. I didn’t mind. The man needed meat. The entrees were taking way too long to arrive. The awkward moment ranked up there with the time somebody asked me if I saw the movie, “Not Without My Daughter” in which Sally Field’s character flees from her Iranian husband through Turkey.
I do not mention the man’s comment to imply that most Americans are hostile towards Middle Eastern or Muslim immigrants. I firmly believe that the United States is one of the most welcoming countries on earth. My encounters with immigrants from all walks of life who applaud America’s warm embrace continually confirm this perception.
The dinner guest obviously heard about Middle Eastern governments such as Saudi Arabia and Libya that have turned a blind eye to international parental kidnappings. Disastrous relationships between non-Muslim western women and Muslim men from the Mideast have inspired books, movies and Congressional hearings.
So why do I remain confident of a happy marriage in light of such harrowing stories of Middle Eastern oppression and intercultural marriage run amok? Partly because I love the people I met from my husband’s homeland of Iraq (not all Middle Easterners embrace backwards Wahhabi creeds or patriarchal oppression), partly because my future husband shares the American values he adopted as his own the day he proudly became a U.S. citizen, and also because an intercultural or interfaith marriage can work if two people understand what love requires of them.
In 2004, the Vatican addressed Catholic-Muslim intermarriage in particular in a controversial release that read “When, for example, a Catholic woman and a Muslim wish to marry…bitter experience teaches us that a particularly careful and in-depth preparation is called for. During it [the preparation] the two fiancées will be helped to know and consciously ‘assume’ the profound cultural and religious differences they will have to face, both between themselves and in relation to their respective families and the Muslim's original environment, to which they may possibly return after a period spent abroad.”
If you research interfaith marriage on the internet, you can find a few support groups for Muslim-Christian spouses and many more ominous warnings from non-Muslim women who left oppressive marriages to Muslim men. I came across some of the ominous stories while researching the topic. Surprisingly, I felt more confident in my own future union after reading their bitter testimonies. The women who described bad marriages also revealed the wrong reasons for entering into marriage in the first place. They fell in love with the attention the man originally showered on them or they wanted stability or meaning in their lives and saw marriage as a magic bullet. None of the non-Muslim women asked critical questions about values, family or children until it was too late.
One anonymous poster described how she planned to secretly teach her children Christianity after she married because her Muslim fiancée only wanted them to learn Islam. Did she really believe such deception could work in a marriage? Another woman ignored the fact that her boyfriend always sided with his mother over her before they walked down the aisle. A single mother fell into a bad intercultural marriage so her child could have a father, any father. Other women just wanted so badly to be loved that they ignored incompatibility with the person who proposed.
I am not trying to judge these women. They suffered, but reading their threads and comments only confirmed how certain contemporary notions of love lead to disaster whether the marriage is intercultural or not. Love is not rooted in the “I.” It does not leave room for lies or self-deception. If you are ignorant of your future spouse’s cultural background and beliefs then you should not marry. If you and he do not share the same values and accept each other as you are then you should not marry. If you cannot openly discuss your differences then you should not marry regardless of whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Druid. Sometimes love even means letting go if two people are not meant to be together. If my future husband told me my faith could not be discussed in front of our kids or I acted embarrassed at the sight of a hijab in our house then we would seriously have to reconsider “until death do us part.”
So yes, I have seen “Not Without My Daughter.” Alfred Molina looked hot and Sally Field dived into her role, but I do not see my future in her story. If I ever do find myself fleeing into Turkey in the dark of night, I will eat my words, yet still feel no regret for the decision I made based on the man I know.
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Elise Ehrhard is a weekly religion columnist for UPI. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, The American Feminist and others. Her latest feature article, an in-depth profile of a nun who survived war and poverty, recently appeared in the Catholic women’s magazine Canticle.
