Paper short abstract:

Through a study of marital breakdown among South Asian Muslim couples in Britain, this paper takes up Fadil and Fernando’s suggestion that ‘being sexual’ offers a site in which to examine the workings of Islamic normativity in the everyday, as well as a site in which to gender this debate.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes up Fadil and Fernando's suggestion that 'being sexual' offers a promising site in which to examine the workings of Islamic normativity in the everyday: this also appears to be a promising site in which to gender this debate. The paper draws from a study of marital breakdown among South Asian Muslim couples in Britain. In this study, I found that Islamic literature and TV programming about marriage were being consumed by South Asian Muslim families in Britain, much of which develops themes that were established in the late 19th century/early 20th century reformist work from South Asia, but addresses these themes to stem a recent tide of divorce. In the long term of difficult marriages, I found women to be educating themselves about, and working themselves into the mould of these Islamic norms, but also using the teachings in ways that diverge from the intentions of the authors and TV hosts: taking these statements as benchmarks of what a wife should expect from a husband, and considering them justification for ending their marriages - and for remarriage - rather than reversing the contemporary swell in divorce. Lest the everyday again be read as resistive, in contrast with the patient submission of the religious virtuoso, we can recognize how Islamic norms themselves provide women with grounds for separating from their husbands. At the same time, like the poetry examined by Abu-Lughod, it is evident that divorce is not straightforwardly emancipatory but equally saturated by relations of gendered power.