A recent article written by Emma Green in The New Yorker explores the underworld of secret marriages among American Muslim college students. Needless to say, it had quite the ripple effect in various Muslim social media circles discussing the crisis. Reading the article, I found myself smelling a familiar scent in its tone that got me wondering about the author. It’s important to be conscious of how rhetoric is constructed to emotionally condition the reader to be receptive to a general argument and worldview being deployed. Our attitudes take shape over time, and it’s not any specific thing we read or watched that we can point to. It’s the amalgamation of what we permitted to enter our minds through various media that ultimately conditions our sensibilities to incline towards one way of thinking over another.
When you look up her profile, Green is benignly referred to as a journalist who covers education and academia at The New Yorker, and was previously covering religion and politics at The Atlantic. However, in going through her portfolio and reading some of the articles in both publications, I don’t find Green just “covering” these subjects. She’s framing them for the reader to walk away with an impression that’s not really all that enlightening from the perspective of what’s already in popular cultural currency – religion is oppressive and turns us all into hypocrites, and our happiness and personal fulfilment rests on our emancipation from it. Green’s work has generally focused on Christians in America, and with her latest work here she now adds Muslims. I don’t think her timing or the specific topic is an accident. Following an increasingly political presence, for the past couple of years American Muslims have also been increasingly visible in entertainment where they can flex their creative chops in the only way they’re given permission; by showing how we’re all sexually repressed because of…*drum roll*…RELIGION!
Gripes with Green aside, the subject matter she does “stumble” upon to meet her article production quota is one that does require attention. With the incredible statistics on *practicing* Muslim college students who engage in premarital sex, and the challenges one faces to get legitimately married, it’s not really that surprising to see an increase in secret marriages among those caught in the crossfire between their pornified culture’s enhanced compulsion towards achieving physical euphoria and their (mostly) socially conditioned moral sensibilities. We’re social creatures with biological imperatives that will seek outlets to the degree these imperatives are stimulated. Without the acceptable social structures in place to allow for the proper expression of those biological imperatives, those imperatives will eventually innovate social structures of their own to be expressed through. Either the human rides the elephant, or the elephant will ride the human.
In a Hadīth related on the authority of Abu Hātim al-Muzanī in the collection of Imam at-Tirmidhī, the Beloved ﷺ is reported to have said:
“إذا أتاكم من ترضون دينه وخلقه فانكحوه. إن لا تفعلوه تكن فتنة في الارض وفساد كبير. قالوا: يا رسول الله وإن كان فيه؟ قال: إذا جاءكم من ترضون دينه وخلقه فانكحوه … ثلاث مرات”
“When someone whose religion and character you are pleased with comes to you then marry (her to) him. If you do not do so, then there will be turmoil (Fitnah) in the land and discord (Fasad).” They said: “O Messenger of Allah! What if there was something about him?” He said: “When someone whose religion and character you are pleased with comes to you then marry him.” (And he ﷺ said this) three times.
In his commentary on this Hadith, Imam Muhammad Abdul-Rahman al-Mubarkfoorī stated:
وذلك لأنكم إن لم تزوجوها إلا من ذي مال أو جاه، ربما يبقى أكثر نسائكم بلا أزواج، وأكثر رجالكم بلا نساء، فيكثر الافتتان بالزنا، وربما يلحق الأولياء عار فتهيج الفتن والفساد، ويترتب عليه قطع النسب وقلة الصلاح والعفة
“That is because if you do not marry her off except to the one possessing wealth or status, it may lead to most of your women remaining without husbands, and most of your men without women, which increases being tested with fornication, leading to shame befalling the guardians, and thus inciting turmoil and discord. This will also result in severing kinship ties and reduction in righteousness and chastity.”
There’s a recognition in the Sharia that individual behaviour is not to be evaluated with the exclusion of the social milieu in which the individual is behaving. This is not an abdication of personal responsibility. We’re not determinists in that sense. However, as our mother Lady Aisha RA observed, had the prohibition of intoxicants come all at once in a society where men boasted in poetry and social gatherings about their wine drinking, no one would’ve been able to give it up. There was a social transformation over time that led to the community’s response when the final unequivocal prohibition came down, where the streets of Madina flowed with the wine being discarded. There’s also the famous Hadith about the serial killer who wanted to repent and the advice that ultimately saved him as related in the Hadith was to migrate from the city he lived in. And let us not forget the Hadith about being upon the religion/way of your closest friends.
We live in a hypersexualized society. I’m old enough to remember how Sharon Stone’s scandalous scene in Basic Instinct created a frenzy. Ice Cube’s The Players Club was a sought after watch for underaged boys because it was their proxy access to strip clubs without having to produce a fake ID. Nowadays, that would be G-rated content. Mainstream shows today include scenes so explicit they would’ve been appropriately classified as pornography 50 years ago. This visual assault (mostly by male producers for the record) overwhelmingly impacts men, who are well established from the available research to be the visually stimulated gender. Most pornography consumption is by men. In contrast, erotica novels are almost exclusively a women’s domain. In this context, men use intimacy as a means to achieve the goal of having sex, whereas women have sex to achieve the goal of building intimacy.
Added to the pornification of society is the infantilization of men combined with the removal of traditional barriers that prevented unfettered access to women. Traditionally, part of the marriage process was the man having to at some point meet the father, which is by definition an intimidating confrontation where the prospective suitor has to impress an older male who typically can smell any b.s. he tries to pull from a mile away. The prospective suitor has to show objective reasons to convince the father that this man is not only worthy of his daughter, but also a man who can be trusted to be responsible for her protection and maintenance. He has to demonstrate to the father that he understands the seriousness of marriage and is going level up as a husband. The social dynamic in the near past was such that a man couldn’t court a woman without the matter quickly reaching her father and any brothers or male cousins she has, and he will then have some questions to answer.
Nowadays, it’s Omar talking to Layla in Sociology 235 or at some MSA event, and slowly (or quickly) building up a familiarity that eventually leads to Omar most likely being the one who will try to push it to the next level. Layla will want Omar to speak to her dad. Omar knows it won’t go well. Really, he should’ve sought permission to speak to Layla from her dad before it even got to this point. But these are different times. He’s just a junior in college. No job. No savings because he didn’t hold down summer jobs or if he did, he blew his pay cheques on nonsense immediate gratification purchases because he wasn’t thinking about preparing himself for marriage responsibilities. He also complains about his Sociology grade being unfair because the professor is an Islamophobe.
But the man has game. He has Layla’s heart. We’ll have a good opinion of him and say she has his heart too. Their problem is that marriage is an institution that comes with rights and responsibilities, the heaviest material burden of which falls on the man’s shoulders. They also have the problem of not having studied the basic Fiqh of it and their knowledge of Islamic rulings on marriage amounts to very little more than reading a few answers to questions on Islam QA and Seekers Hub. Furthermore, despite hours of talking and thousands of words exchanged on text messages, they really haven’t had serious conversations about issues that will actually impact the quality and longevity of their marriage. They didn’t even know this part because there were no elders involved to guide this process in the first place.
That’s not even the worst of it. There’s also the small matter of cultural expectations; the high dowry, the dream wedding that will leave them and their children and children’s children paying it off, and the honeymoon to end all honeymoons. After all, that Instagram feed needs content. With time, Omar’s physical desire for Layla grows and Layla’s desire for intimacy with Omar magnifies. Their sense of shame for their unsanctioned relationship keeps lingering, more so with Layla than with Omar because, well, that’s just how it is. They want to be close but they know what’s necessarily known from the religion. They want to make it halal and be in the clear. But the combination of legitimate Sharia-rooted and accrued reasonable and/or unreasonable cultural expectations make a proper marriage untenable for them.
Despite the odds and signs telling them this romance may not see the light of Sharia’s day, their youthful flames for each other burn their rational conclusions into ash. The secret marriage arrangement is a proposal most likely initiated by Omar. The reason it’s mostly males who propose it is the same reason it’s mostly males who view pornography. Their primary interest is not building a family. To be blunt, what these male college students engaging in secret marriages want is sex without feeling the guilt of it being done outside the bounds of marriage. It’s important for young women to recognize and accept this fact even if they don’t understand it. Any young sister out there who thinks she’s going to have a family and a white picket fence from a secret marriage with a male individual has been deluded. A man would come to her house from the front door, not sneaking around the back window to avoid the scrutiny and approval of her protecting guardian.
The issue of secret marriages among Muslim college students needs serious engagement from the Muslim community based on our terms, not terms dictated to us by the Emma Greens of the world. As evidenced by another article in the New York Times written this time by a Muslim woman discussing her “struggle” as a writer in Hollywood given her “lack of experience” in the bedroom, our discourse on relationships is being directed in a way that’s antithetical to Islamic morality and cultural norms. Our engagement has to be premised on the acceptance that things will not go back to exactly the way they were. We need to address the crisis of masculinity among young Muslim men. We need to reconnect with our tradition as a living one as opposed to a romanticized ossified relic of rules one tries to artificially impose on the present.
