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Barbara C. AswadWestern EuropeRecent changes in family relationships and gen-
der hierarchy among European Muslims are due to
women’s pragmatic use of their migration experi-
ence, and to the fact that younger generations,
especially women, born and socialized in Europe,
have marked the difference between cultural tradi-
tions and Islamic faith.
Women did not come to Europe simply following
their husbands: far from being passive participants,
women have their own migratory project inside the
context of family migration. Since the 1990s, in
Italy and Spain women have also arrived on their
own. Emigration imposes confrontation and adap-
tation; it prolongs and perfects the changes that
have already begun in the societies of origin. Inser-
tion into Europe does not result in estrangement
from the culture of origin: it generates an attempt
at critical synthesis, typical of the diaspora condi-
tion, in which women play a role both conservative
and innovative. This process is of course neither
obvious nor painless.
As critical and pragmatic participants, women
experience emigration as an opportunity to make
changes in their private life (freer marital choices,
western europe 151access to work, shifting in the dynamics of the cou-
ple), but also as a chance to strengthen certain val-
ues that in their eyes are non-negotiable, such as the
priority given to motherhood, and faithfulness to
the ethical principles of Islam as a framework for
behavior.
Fewer and fewer marriages are arranged by
parents, and they do not necessarily take place
between members of the clan, or of the same ethnic
and/or national group. Women still accept arranged
marriage, but only as long as the free choice of the
individual is respected.
Family constraints were, for the first European
cohorts, the main reason behind the departure of
runaway girls, whose rebellion against parental
dictates led to exclusion from the family and sepa-
ration from the community. Nowadays, in the
name of respect for the Islamic rule prohibiting
coercion, which renders any action invalid in the
eyes of God, women utilize religious tradition to
break free from cultural pressure.
However, the real turning point is in marital rela-
tionships. All the empirical research on the Euro-
pean diaspora shows female demands that traverse
all national communities (be they Turkish, Moroc-
can, or Pakistani). Women demand, in the follow-
ing order: more equity, reciprocal esteem and
respect, and real communication between partners.
They express explicit refusal of polygamy. They
demand acknowledgment of equal shared responsi-
bility by the couple, especially regarding the edu-
cation of children, an implicit criticism of the
traditional masculine model of authority. This gen-
eral wish for change is faced with the following par-
adox: on the one hand the still ingrained custom of
choosing endogamic unions, on the other hand the
shortage of potential husbands in a marital market
where a partner meeting this description is rare
merchandise in the breeding ground of “mummy’s
pets” educated like son-kings. Among North Afri-
can women in France, aged between 25 and 29,
only 38 percent are married, alongside an already
not particularly high national average of 48 per-
cent. In the eyes of the fathers, yielding to a career
appears preferable to the dreaded choice of exo-
gamy. The increase of celibacy and the postpone-
ment of marriage show the new feminine demands
synthesized in the irony of the joke: “a good hus-
band must not be like a mother-in-law” (Schmidt di
Friedberg and Saint-Blancat 1998).
Traditional patriarchal relationships are never-
theless unconsciously very strong. An individual is
still not completely autonomous from his/her fam-
ily and kindred. Fathers, brothers, cousins have
rights over him/her, and he/she duties to them.