‘You don’t have to meet someone but it’d be nice’
By Farooq Ahmed
Published: September 21 2007
Finding a date is hard enough but for many modern Muslims in the west it’s even tougher. Meeting in bars is prohibitively difficult due to Islamic temperance laws. A similar injunction against unmarried Muslim men and women canoodling, or even spending unchaperoned time together, rules out many other forms of dating. And thus, young Muslims find themselves torn between the values of their immigrant parents, who champion semi-arranged or assisted marriages, and the dominant western culture, which prizes “love marriages”, usually preceded by some form of casual dating.
Five years ago, however, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) held its first “Matrimonial Banquet” and as a result a form of Muslim speed dating was born.
The banquet is part of a long-running annual convention organised by ISNA, an umbrella organisation for Muslim groups in the US and Canada, similar to the Muslim Council of Britain. Young Muslims, the organisers realised, were already using the event to meet and mingle. Now all that was needed was a little structure and supervision. The banquet followed a matrimonial referral service that had been provided by ISNA. Under the old system, a Middle Eastern Muslim woman living in the Pacific North-west, for example, could comb through folders, sorted by age and geographical location, to obtain the contact information of a 25-year-old, Egyptian engineering student with dark hair and dark eyes, of moderate religiosity, who lived in Seattle. Whether the two would ever meet was entirely up to them.
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