Half of Faith

Half of Faith AMERICAN MUSLIM MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A READER Half of Faith AMERICAN MUSLIM MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A READER Kecia Ali (editor) Aminah Beverly Al-Deen Zahra Ayubi Juliane Hammer Debra Majeed Asifa Quraishi-Landes Suggested catalog entry: Kecia Ali, ed. Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: OpenBU, 2021). https://hdl.handle.net/2144/42505 Table of Contents Editor’s Introduction 1 WEDDINGS Weddings: Love and Mercy in Marriage Ceremonies (2017) 4 Juliane Hammer Acting on a Frontier of Religious Ceremony (2004) 17 Kecia Ali A Wedding Khutbah (2004) 22 Kecia Ali Rethinking Marriage Guardianship: Lessons from the Role of the 26 Wali of American Muslim Women (2021) Aminah Beverly Al-Deen MARRIAGE Sharia and Diversity: Why Some Americans are Missing the 31 Point (2013) Asifa Quraishi-Landes Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity 34 for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law (2003) Kecia Ali A Meditation on Mahr, Modernity, and Muslim Marriage 52 Contract Law (2013) Asifa Quraishi-Landes “Afterword” from Polygyny: What It Means When African American 68 Muslim Women Share Their Husbands (2015) Debra Majeed DIVORCE Specific Issues in Muslim Divorce (2006) 76 Zahra Ayubi No Altars: A Survey of Islamic Family Law in the United States (2004) 80 Asifa Quraishi-Landes and Najeeba Syeed Negotiating Justice: American Muslim Women Navigating Islamic 111 Divorce and Civil Law (2010) Zahra Ayubi Secular is Not Always Better: A Closer Look at Some 125 Woman-Empowering Features of Islamic Law (2013) Asifa Quraishi-Landes What to Consider If You’re Considering Divorce (2021) 129 Zahra Ayubi Toward Love and Mercy: A Concluding Note 135 About the Contributors 137 BISMILLAHI AL-RAHMAN AL-RAHIM Introduction Half of Faith gathers a selection of resources on, and reflections and analyses of, Muslim marriage and divorce in twenty-first century America. In the United States as elsewhere, marriage is central to ongoing Muslim conversations about belonging, identity, and the good life. The articles collected here, written over the course of two decades, provide a window onto moments in American Muslim life and thought. They help us think about women’s varied experiences with getting married, being married, and leaving marriages. A few things are published here for the first time, but most of these pieces have appeared elsewhere: in Azizah magazine, in professional or policy newsletters, and in edited volumes or academic journals. They range considerably in length and tone, which makes sense considering the variety of audiences they originally addressed. They cover a broad range of topics, including diversity in Islamic legal thought, marriage contracts, wedding customs, dower norms, divorce practices, and experiences of polygyny. But this reader is neither comprehensive (it omits both interreligious and same-sex marriage, for example) nor programmatic. Contributors do not speak with a single voice. Some of us argue with our past selves in addition to each other. Because the contributions go back twenty years, some statistics are dated and some norms have shifted. By bringing together and making more widely available existing publications alongside a few purpose-written essays, this reader aims to enrich current conversations. It also helps document decades of scholarly debates and community activism, though of course there remains much to do. This reader is a pandemic project. It came together as we entered the second year of the global COVID-19 crisis, which has magnified and exacerbated existing inequalities. Marginalized and impoverished people have suffered disproportionately, both around the world and inside the United States. Alongside and intersecting with deadly racist disparities in virus exposure, illness, and care, there have been strongly gendered impacts. Even as it has shifted how Muslim communities observe weddings and other lifecycle events, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on women’s professional lives. This is especially true for those whose care duties include parenting small and school-aged children. Putting together a collection of all-new chapters was simply not feasible. But one lesson of this extended crisis is that we can adapt. This reader is an exercise in taking what we have—in this case, a body of existing but difficult to find research and writing—and making it more accessible. I’m mindful, still, of its exclusions and distortions. For every piece and author included, numerous others are excluded. It’s meant to be a contribution to, and an entry point into, an ongoing conversation, not the last word. Figuring out how to present these articles posed challenges. They don’t separate easily into “tying” and “untying” the knot. Discussions of contract provisions like dower are tangled up with divorce settlements. Several of these essays address, at least in passing, the issue of unregistered marriages, whether monogamous or polygynous. Indeed, alignment or conflict between civil and religious law is a persistent theme. (Of course, that concern isn’t unique to the United States context or to places where Muslims are minorities. Even in places where national law is ostensibly Islamic, INTRODUCTION 1 issues abound about how private extrajudicial acts—whether contracting marriage or pronouncing divorce—affect civil status. But that’s a whole other reader.) Because so many lines of connection emerged among these pieces, I considered chronological order and even debated presenting them alphabetically by author name. Ultimately, I opted for three sections: Weddings, Marriage, and Divorce. Each piece is preceded by an author’s note that reflects on its original context or current implications. In several cases, these notes illuminate an ongoing dialogue among the scholars and work in this reader. This dialogue is always smart and vibrant, by turns loving and contentious, and occasionally downright messy, just like community life. This is a project defined by constraints—limited time, limited budget, limited energy—yet marked by tremendous enthusiasm, generosity, and good will. The contributors, who Gisela Webb would classify as “scholar-activists,” are members of my academic network; despite pandemic exhaustion, each responded positively to my initial invitation within hours and met deadlines with alacrity. Editors of journals and anthologies replied to emails about republication rights quickly; numerous presses and publishers granted permissions. Designer Komal Zehrah skillfully did the creative and technical work to produce the reader on time and on budget. At Boston University, the project was supported by Associate Dean Karl Kirchwey through grants from the Humanities Research Fund and the Associate Dean’s Discretionary Fund. Department of Religion administrator Wendy Czik handled the necessary paperwork with her customary expertise and good cheer. OpenBU librarian Eleni Castro advised on matters of access and copyright. Boston University doctoral student research assistant Sandry Matondo and University of Wisconsin librarian Jay Tucker helped obtain digital files. I am grateful to everyone. Bringing these materials on marriage and divorce together, and making them freely available online for Muslim community members, students, and scholars, has reminded me both how much important work already exists and how much remains to do, on the page, and in our homes and mosques, and in our community spaces, both physical and virtual. This reader is an offering, highlighting women’s scholarship, centering women’s lives, and trusting in God’s justice. Kecia Ali April 2021/Ramadan 1442 Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Suggested citation: Kecia Ali, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Kecia Ali, ed., Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: OpenBU, 2021), pp. 1-2.https://hdl.handle.net/2144/42505 Weddings Weddings: Love and Mercy in Marriage Ceremonies JULIANE HAMMER (2017) This chapter appears in a volume on the practice of Islam in the United States and I wrote it in 2016 after having attended a significant number of Muslim weddings over the course of the previous year. Our charge as contributors to the volume was to write without jargon and in such a way that the reader could imagine being in attendance at the respective religious practices we were writing about. My goal was to show that every Muslim American wedding is unique and different from the next one; that Muslim couples and families negotiate their ideas about religion, gender norms, culture, and family in their preparations for and celebration of a couple’s nuptials; and that Muslim wedding practices are embedded both in Muslim traditions (very much in the plural) and in the US context that they take place in. In and through their weddings, Muslims navigate changing gender and sexual norms while also defining them through their choices. They have to account for a wide range of ideas about gender norms and practices as they exist in their family and community networks, and weddings most often in my experience end up being a compromise based on the smallest common denominator. What the chapter could not make visible is that the common focus on the couple to be wed actually distracts from the fact that wedding preparations not only involve extended families but are most often driven by family members other than the couple itself. I had originally planned to

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