British Pakistani women's use of the ‘religion versus culture’ contrast: A critical analysis

Abstract

This paper's aim is to highlight a series of problems related to data collection, analysis and ethics of research on British Pakistani women and their marriage choices. The authors will argue that much of the literature on this topic has stopped one step short of critically engaging with the ubiquitous and thus meaningful 'religion versus culture' paradigm. This leads both to a sort of acceptance of the existence, but especially of the effectiveness, of this paradigm, and to a missed opportunity in analysing the crucial part that this paradigm plays for women at a cognitive level. The authors' focus is on 'religion versus culture' as an important historically contextual social fact, but argue that further research needs to be carried out to properly evaluate the effectiveness of such paradigm on courses of action relating to marriage (and implicitly to education and other lifestyle choices). The authors recommend that interviewee recruitment should include women before and after marriage, and that the researchers should approach the ethics of their data interpretation differently if they want to go beyond the sanitised narratives that are, according to this paper, crucially influenced by the role Muslim women feel they play in giving Islam a positive public image, the postcolonial context and the generational tensions among British Pakistanis.

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“…Echoing findings of other research (Bolognani and Mellor 2012;Gu 2014), these young females separate culture and religion, favoring the latter over the former, as an attempt to negotiate the culturally defined gender ideologies that frame their development. They see not so much conflict between religion and education as between culture and education.…”