“Shariah Style” Marriage: Daily practice of Islamic ethics in England
Billaud, Julie
“Shariah Style” Marriage: Daily practice of Islamic ethics in England - 2018.
42
In England, the Muslim marriage industry has drastically expanded over the past twenty years. Services available on the market include mediated matrimonial encounters labeled “halal.” These services, increasingly popular among the second generation of British Muslims, reflect the semantic sliding of categories which hitherto belonged to the field of Islamic jurisprudence towards cultural and identity labels visible in public space. The practices presented in this article highlight the emergence of a new public culture (Göle, 2014) in which moral boundaries are constantly renegotiated. In counterpoint to recent studies on Islamic morality that focus on the “ethical formation” of the subject through the pursuit of virtuous dispositions (Mahmood, 2005; Hirschkind, 2006; Agrama, 2010), the quest for the “good ethical life” is conceived here as a tightrope walk in which each step involves finding the right balance between values that are not all necessarily dictated by faith. These embodied practices reveal the fragmented and ambivalent nature of modern subjectivities based on the coexistence of contrasted motivations, objectives and identities (Ferrié, 2004). It is this “moral flexibility” (Schielke, 2009) which best characterises Islamic modernity (Göle, 2000).
“Shariah Style” Marriage: Daily practice of Islamic ethics in England - 2018.
42
In England, the Muslim marriage industry has drastically expanded over the past twenty years. Services available on the market include mediated matrimonial encounters labeled “halal.” These services, increasingly popular among the second generation of British Muslims, reflect the semantic sliding of categories which hitherto belonged to the field of Islamic jurisprudence towards cultural and identity labels visible in public space. The practices presented in this article highlight the emergence of a new public culture (Göle, 2014) in which moral boundaries are constantly renegotiated. In counterpoint to recent studies on Islamic morality that focus on the “ethical formation” of the subject through the pursuit of virtuous dispositions (Mahmood, 2005; Hirschkind, 2006; Agrama, 2010), the quest for the “good ethical life” is conceived here as a tightrope walk in which each step involves finding the right balance between values that are not all necessarily dictated by faith. These embodied practices reveal the fragmented and ambivalent nature of modern subjectivities based on the coexistence of contrasted motivations, objectives and identities (Ferrié, 2004). It is this “moral flexibility” (Schielke, 2009) which best characterises Islamic modernity (Göle, 2000).
Réseaux sociaux