Thread:"Muslim Inter-Cultural Marriage"

I'm a Kashmiri Muslim married to an Gujjar Muslim(from Jammu), alhamdulillah.

Here's an interesting question: does culture have any place in discussions of marriage among Muslims?
Should a difference in cultures be a factor

that is at all considered between two Muslims who are thinking of getting married?
First,a general observation: sadly, what is common in the Muslim community is the use of cultural differences as a barrier to marriage. Valley based brother marrying to a girl from Chenab valley?

Not possible.
An Arab man wants to marry a South Asian girl? No way. An American convert wants to marry an Sudanese Muslimah? Never. A Pakistani guy has proposed marriage to a Bengali girl? Ha!
Unfortunately, this seems to be an entrenched thought pattern among many Muslims:

over-emphasizing the importance of culture at the expense of Islam. Some Muslims parents have this mindset, staunchly opposed to their son or daughter marrying a spouse outside their own culture or race or ethnicity, even despite all parties being practicing Muslims.

These elders will sometimes go to the extreme of outright forbidding their child from marrying anyone outside their own village or tribe from their motherland--and have no qualms about rejecting an otherwise perfectly compatible spouse for their child.

So the marriage of that child is delayed...and delayed...and delayed.
People have to wait longer to get married and sometimes even remain unmarried into their 40s( not less than 30% women population alone in srinagar city under this age are unmarried, ...++

this survey came into public domain in 2017) because not only does an acceptable spouse have to be on their same religious level.
but they also must be economically, educationally, socially, and culturally identical. What are the chances of finding this perfect match, ++

who checks all these boxes? For this reason, the marriage of young men and young women is made virtually impossible, when Allah has made it so simple
Zina becomes more tempting, because the halal path has too many roadblocks.

Clearly that's a detrimental and un-Islamic stance.

But the question is :
if you don't have this mindset of categorical opposition to cross-cultural marriage, can you take cultural differences into consideration AT ALL?
My answer is yes. Avoid either extreme: overstating or understating the place of culture.

It's bad to overstate the importance of culture, but it's still worthwhile to take culture into consideration as one factor among many, when considering a potential spouse. The reason is that oftentimes, culture dictates what Islam doesn't.

Islam regulates all aspects of a person's life, but still leaves room for some cultural norms to be practiced, where they do not contradict Islam. It is in precisely these types of scenarios in which cultural differences may play a role in spousal harmony versus clashes.

When a non-kashmiri man proposed marriage to me, I felt uncertain. Here are some considerations that one might keep in mind (not to be used as reasons to block a marriage--but simply to think about):
>Pre-marriage expectations: For example, the mahr:

:Islam simply dictates that a man give a woman a mahr, without dictating what it has to be (just that it not be extravagant or exorbitant).
In some cultures, the mahr can be giving land or furniture. In other cultures, the mahr is never anything but money.

If a person from the former culture is interested in marrying a person from the latter culture, this issue of what the mahr should be MAY become tricky.
Again, it's not that this will definitely inevitably be an intractable problem. Not at all.

It's possible for the two people and the two families to work things out as reasonable adults, and to bridge the gap between their two disparate cultural expectations regarding mahr.

But will it involve some negotiations and explanations that two people from the same culture would not have? Sure.

∆ To be continued insha'Allah ∆