Interchurch families: CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM MARRIAGES

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CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM MARRIAGES

Gé Speelman of Utrecht University in the Netherlands spoke on Christian-Muslim marriages during the Graz European Ecumenical Assembly in 1997. By clicking on the above link you can read a shortened version of her paper. The Muslim partner is often confronted with what most people around him think is natural, obvious, self-evident; he/her is the other, the one who has to prove him/her self. Many Muslim partners find they have to defend their faith against attacks which associate Islam with intolerance, backwardness and irrationality. In reaction, many Muslims become very much aware of their cultural and religious heritage. As one Muslim man said: “I would never have known so much about Islam if I had stayed at home and married an Egyptian girl.”

Another factor is that interfaith partners are seen as representatives of their communities. The Turkish Muslim represents the “terrible Turks” who have shaped the history of so many Eastern European countries. The German wife is the “imperialist European” whose community has been responsible for so much repression and bloodshed. Many problems in an interfaith marriage are exactly the same as those experienced by many other couples. But in their case, family and friends are looking out for problems; when they occur, they are defined as arising from differences in culture. A Dutch woman said she did not want to recognize the serious communication problem in her relationship because she was determined to prove to those who said it would never work that her marriage was fantastically successful. The partners had put off talking about their problems until it was too late.

Loved ones want to be more than merely “that Christian”, or “that Muslim”. Of course, they are also “a Christian” and “a Muslim” – much of what we are ties up with our religious traditions. German theologian Ulrich Dietzfelbinger, who described, in a lecture he gave in 1989, his relationship with his Turkish Muslim wife. He describes his tendency to reduce the differences in their beliefs to minor points, the pull to reduce their faith to the lowest common denominator. “After all, we both believe in Almighty God.” In the end, he recognizes that this way of reducing their differences is a way of denying them, leaving both partners with very little faith at all. What he learns is that one should not try to make the other the same as oneself. With new eyes he looks at the doctrine of incarnation. It is strange that God has community with a human being (and therefore with all human beings) in such a way that God is in his/her utmost being qualified by that humanity, while at the same time human beings are not deified and God remains God. Is there not in this strange incarnation something analogous to his marriage, where only love is the guarantor that he respects his partner as being inalienably other, different, and yet at one with himself? Maybe we should just let this question stand.