Religious Double Standards Leave Many Muslims Single

Munira Ezzeldine, a marriage counselor in Irvine, Calif., who is one of the instructors of a premarital course, tells me that Islam in America is at a “kind of crossroads now.”

She explains, “We don’t have something called dating in the Western context, you know with pre-marital sex and all the stuff that comes with it.” But young Muslims are also not interested in having arranged marriages as their parents and grandparents did. “They actually want to get to know the person for a certain amount of time, but also within the boundaries.”

If a young Muslim is aiming for this kind of compromise, there are other resources too. Ezzeldine, who wrote a short book called “Before the Wedding: Questions for Muslims to Ask Before Getting Married,” tries to offer her coreligionists a way of getting to know each other without violating the standards of the faith. Ezzeldine wants Muslims to have “the conversations to get to know somebody for marriage in a way” that is more than superficial. Right now they often just say, “Oh I think we get along,” but they don’t know “what you need to know about a person” before you marry him or her. She also notes that families in the Muslim community have wildly different expectations of religious life and marriage so it is important for everyone to be on the same page.

Interestingly, the lack of communication between Muslim men and women before marriage noted by many Muslim leaders is actually part of a larger problem that Ezzeldine believes is resulting in more interfaith matches. Ezzeldine suggests that the Muslim community’s standards for interacting with members of the opposite sex are actually having a deleterious effect on marriage in the community. It is often easier for a Muslim to meet a non-Muslim of the opposite sex–in school for instance–than for a Muslim to meet another Muslim in a religiously sanctioned setting because Muslim prayer and religious education are all segregated by sex.

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