Young Muslim women and the Islamic family: Reflections on conflicting ideals in British Bangladeshi life

Abstract

In this chapter we will be examining attitudes to marriage among young British Bangladeshi women. We see the move to new forms of Muslim piety among these women as related in part to the problems posed by marriage in the contemporary British environment. New Islamic groups provide both social and intellectual resources that may help to resolve difficulties and issues in relation to marriage and the family, including tension between Western models of romantic love and marriage and the desire to behave in a proper Islamic way. At the same time, the specific forms of Islamic practice adopted may also be constitutive of a new sense of self and a new identity which carries along with it a new and different sense of what the marital relationship, the woman's relationship to her own body and self and her relationship to her present or future children might be.