Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the attempt by the Ahmadi Muslim community to construct a model of education for girls that is simultaneously Islamic and progressive and the inadvertent social consequences of this programme, including higher divorce rates and the anxiety of solitary lives for women.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the much discussed issue of the education of Muslim girls in colonial India and in a contemporary British diasporic Muslim community in comparative perspective. The Ahmadi Muslims have, from their earliest years, championed the education of women as both a progressive and profoundly Islamic practice. Yet, one possible unintended outcome of education for girls today in the diaspora includes rising divorce rates and the prospect of future lives without the opportunity for remarriage.

The uncertainty and disquiet failed marriages produce for a community which considers the family as central to its social and religious identity revolve, in part, around the conservative requirements and interpretations of Islam the group holds. The responses to such everyday anxieties include pre-marital counseling for young women and men, organized and delivered by senior community members, as well as seminars for the parents of teenagers in an attempt to guide them in planning the marriages of their children in a 21st century British context. However, a complex set of tensions (educational, gendered, religious) remains unresolved. The recent highly politicized debates on the educational needs and Islamic injunctions relating to girls provides a further complication for the Ahmadis when seeking to locate themselves as a Muslim community in relation both to the mainstream British culture and other Muslim groups. This paper is based on ethno-historical research and ethnographic fieldwork.