‘When I Marry a Mohammedan’: Migration and the Challenges of Interethnic Marriages in Post-War Germany

Abstract

Discussions about intermarriage between foreign Muslim men and German Christian women from the 1950s to the 1970s shaped concepts of Islam, gender and difference found in more recent integration debates. Those insisting on inherent incompatibilities between Germans and Turks since the 1970s have drawn on these tropes developed decades earlier. Yet the post-war context differed from the later period in three important ways: the Muslim foreigners were students and interns, not guestworkers; it was German Christian women (not foreign Muslim women in Germany) who were the presumed victims of Muslim men; and it was principally national church institutions that formulated the language about difference.

Romantic relationships across boundaries: global and comparative perspectives

“…For example, recent work on the history of intermarriage has demonstrated how government officials worked together with charities and feminist organizations in postwar Germany to dissuade young women from marrying non-western foreign menand especially Muslims. Concerns about religious difference in the home, alongside anxieties about polygamy and presumed propensities for domestic violence amongst men from the Middle East, played into these developments (Woesthoff, 2017(Woesthoff, , 2013. And yet, these concerns were not unique to religious minorities or non-Western men.…”

Interfaith Marriage in Islam: Classical Islamic Resources and Contemporary Debates on Muslim Women’s Interfaith Marriages

“…With the increased number of interfaith marriages among Muslims in Western countries, there is a growing interest in Muslim-non-Muslim marriages, and the subject has been studied from various perspectives, such as sociological, anthropological, and religious perspectives. However, the majority of research on Muslim interfaith marriages is focused mainly on the marriages of Muslim men to non-Muslim women (Ata 2009;Cerchiaro 2019Cerchiaro , 2022Cerchiaro et al 2015;Woesthoff 2013); Muslim-non-Muslim families, wherein most men are Muslims; the implication of religious differences in everyday family life (Cerchiaro et al 2015;Daneshpour 2003;Daneshpour and Fathi 2016;Gaya 2022;Gungor 2016); and children and the formation of their religious identities in Muslim-non-Muslim families (Arweck and Nesbitt 2011;Cerchiaro 2020;Froese 2008;Therrien 2022). On the other hand, few studies have focused on the interfaith marriages of Muslim women, their experiences in intimate interfaith relationships (Elmali-Karakaya 2020; Feise-Nasr 2022; Jawad and Elmali-Karakaya 2020) and religious aspects of Muslim women's interfaith marriages (Al-Yousuf 2006;Azzam 2015;Haqqani 2022).…”

“Foreigners and Women Have the Same Problems”

“…5 Yet, by the time Mahmoody's story was published in Germany, the members of the ''Association of Bi-national Families and Partnerships-Alliance of Women Married to Foreigners'' (''Verband bi-nationaler Familien und Partnerschaften-Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirateten Frauen,'' hereafter IAF), as it was then known, had been working actively for more than fifteen years to counter the widespread opinion that binational marriages were particularly prone to problems due to the foreign partner's cultural background. 6 The IAF contested the routine stereotype of binational marriages as unions of naïve and helpless German women bossed around by foreign pashas and worked to improve the legal, economic, social, and cultural conditions of binational couples in Germany. The IAF women sought recognition that the ''problems'' that they faced were created by a state that denied these women their rights as German citizens.…”