My Muslim Boyfriend Wants to Marry Me

Question:

I know versions of this question have been asked many times on this website, and I have read some of your articles on this issue; however, I feel compelled to ask again from my personal perspective.

I have never had any pretenses towards limiting myself to a Jewish spouse—I am the product of a very happy interfaith marriage (though my father did convert to Judaism when I was about 12). I had imagined, however, that any potential spouse of mine would be ambivalent about his own religion, and would support raising our children as Jews.

At college I began dating a Muslim, and our relationship became quite serious. My boyfriend believes that selection of a partner based on religion is a form of racism. He says that we all have a responsibility to prevent “othering” of individuals expressing different viewpoints by merging ideas and traditions whenever possible. Consistent with this viewpoint, he proposes that we get married and we raise the children in both faiths. He says that as long as the whole family attends services from both religions, and education in both religions is compulsory for the children, there will be no conflict.

I appreciate his idealism; however, I have my doubts, and present one such doubt to you:

It seems to me that there is less conflict in a Christian or a Muslim educating their children in the Jewish faith, as Judaism is the foundation for the later Abrahamic religions. However, regardless of the merits of Islam, I am very uncomfortable with the idea of raising my children Muslim or Christian because many passages of the New Testament and Qur’an are devoted to either refutation or expansion of Jewish traditions and teachings. It seems to me that Judaism as a doctrine unto itself would be lost in this proposed arrangement.

In any case, I can come up with a million reasons why our lives together would not work; however, the above is the most pressing. It is very important to me that my children have a Jewish identity and feel connected to the Jewish people, and I want to ask you if you know any couples who have made such an arrangement work. What is your intuition regarding the children, forgetting for a moment the doctrine that Jews not marry non-Jews?

Answer:

Your Muslim friend has a point—this world of ours is not going to work if we can’t come to a cognizance of “the other.” Human beings live in harmony, and peace comes to earth, only when we realize that there is someone else besides “the me.”

The first step to knowing the other, however, is to know yourself. Better put: the two go hand in hand. You can't know the other without knowing yourself, and you come to know yourself by knowing the other. Adam did not recognize that he was a man until he knew woman. An adult does not realize what it means to be an adult until he or she has a child. So, too, you come to know that you are a Jew through your interaction with one who is not.

I don't believe that this is what your Muslim friend has in mind. How could it be? A marriage is a union, not only of two bodies “to become one flesh,” but of two psyches and two souls. You may find your identity as a Jew through discussion with a Muslim, through sharing and comparison of ideas. But how could you find that identity by living in marital union with him? By sacrificing your role as a Jewish mother? By blending Jew with Muslim, Muslim with Jew, in amorphous confusion?

As a woman, you think more of the future, raising children, building a family. In the two decades that I have been doing this job, the most confused, turbulent letters often come from the children of mixed marriages—especially young people who are seeking identity and spirituality. No soil is more fertile for a growing child than the firm soil of community and belonging. No gift is more precious to the child than that sense that “I belong”: as an African tribesman described it, the knowledge that “I am because we are; we are because I am.” The child who grows without that affirmation grows upon loose, dry sand. With enough nurture, anything can be overcome, and many wonderful people have proven that. But if I were to plant a seed, I would first seek out the most fertile soil.

There’s another comparison to shifting sands. Marriage today of any sort is risky business. How much more so intermarriage:

According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.

In a paper published in 1993, Evelyn Lehrer, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that if members of two mainline Christian denominations marry, they have a one in five chance of being divorced in five years. A Catholic and a member of an evangelical denomination have a one in three chance. And a Jew and a Christian who marry have a greater than 40 percent chance of being divorced in five years.

—Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Interfaith Marriages Are Rising Fast, But They’re Failing Fast Too,” Washington Post, 6 June 2010

I don't know where this man stands, whether he is a secular Muslim, a literalist or a mystic, or has beaten his own path. But it is not possible that there will not be conflict over these issues. On the one hand, as his wife, you will need to defend him before family members and other Jews. Yet it’s not possible that in all issues you will agree. After all, if you did, where would the “other” be? The conflict could be deeply painful, destructive of family ties and friendships for both of you. Rather than leading to self-discovery, it may lead instead to a sacrifice of your own identity to save the marriage.

In the end, if you truly love this man, direct him on the right path. Let him realize that for him, a happy marriage will be union with a mate to his own soul, and raising children within his own community, without confusion, with a clear message, “This is who we are and this is what is expected of you.” There he can find happiness, and so too the family he will raise.

May you too find a soulmate of your people and build a family within your people. That is the Jewish concept of the messianic world: not a mush of blended egos, but a magnificent panorama of colors and textures, each individual, family and people playing its part, each contributing its own part in the symphony that is humankind.

Please see our additional articles on Jewish Intermarriage on the Judaism Website.