Your Heart Knows The Way: A Guide to Christian-Muslim Marriage

By Helene Ijaz

The book offers an approach to Christian-Muslim marriage defined by a couple's mutual love and respect, the equitable treatment of their religions, and a shared focus on God. It draws upon the wisdom teachings of Jesus and the Qur'an and the author's learnings as a partner in a long-term intermarriage.
The book argues that emphasizing religious differences leads to division and conflict. An interfaith couple needs to listen to their heart: show openness, love, and compassion for each other and fairness, humility, and faith. This will promote unity between them and help them grow as human beings.
The book describes scriptural teachings in Christianity and Islam, doctrinal precepts, and religious rules, practices, and traditions. It provides a helpful list of communication strategies for Christian-Muslim couples and important tips for raising interfaith children. A successful interreligious marriage is portrayed as a partnership between spouses that tries to balance their different religious identities through openness to and respect for otherness and a focus on shared spiritual values.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Feb 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9780228867197

Helene Ijaz

Helene Ijaz, PhD, is an educator, mediator, and consultant in crosscultural, interracial, and interfaith relations. A Roman Catholic Christian, she has been married to a Muslim for over fifty years.

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Your Heart Knows The Way

Copyright © 2024 by Helene Ijaz

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-6718-0 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-6719-7 (eBook)

To Ahmed, Sabina, and Nadine,

Bayan and Saeed

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: Religious and Social Factors

Impacting a Christian-Muslim Marriage

Interfaith Marriage as a Perceived Threat

Cultural Differences as Sources of Misunderstanding

Gender-Based Inequalities

Racism and Discrimination

Fear of the Unknown

Chapter 2: Living from the Heart: The Key to a Spiritually Informed Interfaith Marriage

Principles for Living from the Heart

Guidelines for Inner Growth and Transformation

Focus on Relationships

Marriage as a Union of Mutual Love and Respect

Interspirituality as a Path to a Unitive Interfaith Marriage

Chapter 3: Similarities and Differences Between

Christianity and Islam

Shared Spiritual Values and Moral Principles

Jesus as Christ versus Jesus as Prophet

Five Pillars of Islam

The Purpose of Religious Rules

Religious Rituals and Their Meaning

Religious Celebrations and Traditions

Models for a Religious Life

Sharing Religious Experiences

Chapter 4: Balancing Different Religious Rules and

Practices in Islam and Christianity

Prayer Rituals

Dietary Practices

Dress Codes

Rules for Borrowing and Lending Money

Deepening Mutual Respect

Chapter 5: Love-Based Communication

Principles for Effective Communication

Strategies for Effective Communication

Communication as a Key to Emotional Intimacy

Chapter 6: A New Paradigm for Christian-Muslim

Marriage

Authentic and Mutually Respectful

Decision-Making

Wedding Planning as a Test of Mutual Respect

Charting a Successful Life Path Together

The Transformative Power of Love

Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Growing in Consciousness as the Key to Living from the Heart

Chapter 7: Raising Children in a Christian-Muslim

Family

Spiritual Education as the Main Goal of Religious Education

Child-Naming and Birth Rites

Providing Experiences of God and the Sacred

Building a Religious Discipline

Facing Religious Differences

Teaching Moral Values

Promoting a Balanced Identity and a Coherent Outlook on Life

Fostering Spiritual Growth by Building Trust

Integrating Different Religious Identities

Lifelong Spiritual Growth in an Interfaith Family

Conclusion

From Fear to Love

Interspirituality as a Love-Based Approach

Problematic Aspects of Religions

Refocusing on Spiritual Growth, Transformation, and Mutual Respect

Efforts Toward a More Equitable Approach to Christian-Muslim Marriage

Embracing the Unknown and Otherness

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Introduction

You are a Christian-Muslim couple, have

fallen in love with each other, and want to be and stay together. How do you make your marriage work? Interreligious marriages are becoming increasingly common. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center Survey, almost four in ten Americans who have been married since 2010 have a spouse who belongs to a different religious group.¹ One in five Muslims is in an interfaith marriage. Christian-Muslim couples face unique challenges, including a potentially complex interplay of religious and social factors. Despite such challenges, many such marriages work out. This book provides helpful advice and strategies for building a harmonious, rewarding interfaith marriage.

I am a German-born Roman Catholic Christian living in Canada, who has been married to a Pakistani Muslim for more than fifty years. I am fully aware of the difficulties that can arise in a Christian-Muslim marriage, including the religious education of children. But based on my long-time experience of such a union and of counseling individuals in similar relationships, I have come to understand that a couple’s religious and social differences need not be a barrier to a harmonious marriage. What matters is how those differences are treated.

Many people advocate against Christian-Muslim marriage. Some go as far as viewing it as literally sleeping with the enemy. If you are a Christian in a relationship with a Muslim, your family and community may approach your partner with apprehension, mistrust, or suspicion. They may make negative assumptions about them, based on stereotypes and prejudices about their faith, ethnicity, or race. Stereotypes about Muslims abound in the West. They are constantly fueled by a variety of events at a local, national, and international level, and related media reports. Islamophobia is pervasive, and Muslims are often likened to terrorists.

Many Muslims have deeply ingrained prejudices against Christians, especially Western Christians, stemming from colonialism and the Crusades. Others interpret the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and a Trinitarian God as idolatry and conflicting with tawhid, the oneness of God and the central teaching of Islam. Many Muslim immigrants to Western countries may discourage their children from marrying outside their faith out of concern about losing their identity, including their language, culture, and religion. If you are a Muslim woman looking to marry a Christian man, you may be marginalized, ostracized, and even disowned by your family.

Many religious leaders in Islam and Christianity discourage interreligious marriage out of concern about the long-term effect on the faith life of members of their religion. Some argue that it may lead to marital problems and conflict between spouses. Both the Catholic Church and Sunni Muslim religious authorities are forceful in their rejection of intermarriage.² The 2011 document Marriage: Roman Catholic and Sunni Muslim Perspectives³ describes the Catholic position as follows:

The Catholic Church seeks to uphold the strength and stability of all marriages and the family life that flows from them. This full sharing of life is more easily assured when both partners are of the same faith community. Practical experience and past studies of married life indicate that marriages between Christians of different denominations or between a baptized person and someone who is not baptized present significant difficulties for the couples and for their children. Thus, Catholics are exhorted to marry other Catholics.⁴

The Muslim position states:

It is crucial that a Muslim man avoid marrying a woman who might, even in the slightest way, lead their children away from Islam. Some contemporary scholars are conscious of the fact that in a situation of immigration to a predominantly non-Muslim country, the number of Muslims in a country may be small.⁵

Therefore, Muslim men should be actively discouraged or even prohibited from marrying non-Muslim women because, under such circumstances, a number of Muslim women in the immigrant community might remain unmarried, given that they are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men. Since this would be injurious to the Muslim faith community, some jurists are recommending that the permission to marry a … Christian woman be temporarily suspended.⁶

These statements treat Christian-Muslim marriages as a threat to their religion and faith community. They ignore the fact that marriage is a union of love. They also overlook that individuals have responsibility for their own spiritual and religious life.

Both Islam and Christianity treat their religion as the only true faith. They insist that it is the exclusive path to Heaven or Paradise in the afterlife. Islam and some Christian churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church, have rules to prevent and/or regulate interfaith marriages. These rules seek to ensure the centrality of their religion in intermarriage, suppress the religion of the outgroup spouse, and require children arising from the union to be raised in their own faith. In a marriage between a Muslim woman and a Christian man, the man must convert to Islam.

As a Christian woman who loves and has been married to a Muslim man for many years, I believe this approach to interreligious marriage is divisive. It may create a disconnect between a couple’s love for each other and their religion, and it promotes inauthentic conversions, contravening freedom of religion, a basic human right. It also conflicts with teachings by Jesus and the Qur’an, the sources of Christianity and Islam, respectively, about marriage and the purpose of religion.

Both Jesus and the Qur’an link our relationship with God to our relationship with other people and, in turn, to realizing our true self. Both argue that we are physical as well as spiritual beings and that, to become a whole, integrated person, we must grow in spiritual awareness. Both teach that human diversity is God-willed and God-created. The Qur’an says that the purpose of human diversity is for people to get to know one another.⁷ Jesus not only calls upon us to love our neighbor, that is, every human being, but even our enemies.⁸ The Qur’an is explicit that "there is no compulsion in religion."⁹

Aside from a couple’s religious differences, various social factors can affect a Christian-Muslim marriage. Spouses may come from diverse cultural backgrounds and/or belong to different racial groups. They may experience bias, prejudice, and/or discrimination because of their religion, ethnicity, or race, and the long-standing adversarial relationship between Muslims and Christians. They may also face gender-based inequalities between spouses, which continue to be widespread in both communities. All these factors can influence a couple’s daily life and their relationship.

Christian-Muslim couples straddle two worlds. They must navigate the different religious and sociocultural values and practices with which they were raised, and the dynamics between and among the groups to which they belong, and find ways to balance them. This is not always easy. Sadly, often such relationships end up as a power struggle between husband and wife, or with one spouse dominating the relationship and the other surrendering important aspects of their identity.

There are two aspects of religion: as a faith community and a social tradition; and as a path to one’s inner growth and transformation. When religion is treated as a faith community and a social tradition, this provides us with a sense of security as a member of the religion to which we belong. It may also accentuate differences between our own and other faith traditions and cause competition between them. But when we strive for inner growth and transformation, we are likely to focus on spiritual values, many of which are shared by all human beings. This may promote a sense of unity among people belonging to diverse religions.

Both Christianity and Islam have emphasized personal eternal salvation as the goal of religion, and adherence to their belief system and religious practices as the path to achieving it. This approach has the effect of neglecting, in many ways, spiritual aspects of religion. It pays little attention to the teachings of Jesus and the Qur’an concerning human diversity, interpersonal relations, and marriage. It essentially treats interreligious marriage as a contract between spouses, whose parameters are defined and enforced by religious authorities in their faith communities.

Islam and much of Christianity, in addition to sacred scripture, treat traditions as sources of religious teachings. While for Muslims the Qur’an is the literal word of God, the Sunnah, the way of the Prophet Muhammad as embodied by the things he did, said, and approved of in others, is largely treated as equivalent to divine revelation. Shari’ah, a body of injunctions formulated by Islamic scholars and jurists based on their interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, is widely regarded as divine law.

In his book Islam, the Straight Path, John Esposito describes how Islamic tradition and law came to be considered a product of divine revelation. He explains that during the early formative centuries of Islam a sacralized tradition was produced, based on tribal traditions of Arabia in which the line between revelation and human interpretation [was] often blurred … Its authority was attributed not to a human community but to God’s revelation.¹⁰ Over time, tribal customs and practices were replaced by the practice of Muhammad or practices attributed to him by the traditions, which became the authoritative basis for what was allowed and prohibited in the Muslim community.

In Christianity the Bible is regarded as the word of God put in writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.¹¹ In the Catholic Church the apostolic or sacred tradition is viewed as flowing from the same divine source as the Bible.¹² It is believed to transmit the word of God as it was handed down by the apostles orally, by their teaching, their example, and the institutions they established.¹³ Bishops are considered the successors of the apostles.¹⁴ They have teaching authority, including defining Church doctrine.¹⁵ The apostolic tradition is distinguished from ecclesial traditions, which refer to various theological, devotional, and other practices that have arisen in local churches over time, and can be modified, even abandoned.¹⁶

It is noteworthy that the Christian denominations differ in their emphasis on sacred scripture and sacred tradition. While in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches sacred tradition is viewed of equal authoritative weight as the Bible, the Anglican and Methodist churches consider tradition, reason, and experience as sources of authority, but as subordinate to scripture. The Lutheran and Reformed traditions teach that the Bible alone must be treated as the basis for all Christian teaching.

The sanctifying of religious traditions in Islam and Christianity may well have contributed to a shift in focus from God to their own religion as the exclusive path to God, and from deepening one’s awareness of God to striving for personal eternal rewards. Religion seems to have become more ideologically than spiritually driven. It emphasizes social membership in one’s faith community instead of one’s relationship with God and other people, assent to doctrines and dogmas as absolute truths, and abiding by prescribed religious practices and traditions, instead of growing in one’s inner self. It has been dominated by an increasing power of religious authorities and a male-dominated perspective in religious teachings. Shari’ah, Islamic law, is founded on an interpretation by men of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, the model and accepted teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. It is rooted in the cultural context of seventh-century Arabia, where men were the chief decision-makers on all important matters of life. The laws on interreligious marriage in the Roman Catholic Church are part of Canon Law, created by a priesthood that is exclusively male and defines all doctrinal, legislative, and ethical teachings of the Church. As a result, religion has become a source of division instead of unity between human beings, and even a source of discrimination against those belonging to a different faith tradition.

However, in recent times, there has been a growing awareness among religious leaders in both Christianity and Islam of the need to refocus on spiritual growth and inner transformation as the essential purpose of religion, and on a search for the truth instead of truth as an absolute, definitive concept. Pope Francis, in a major change from the historical code of Catholic discourse, wrote in an open letter to Eugenio Scalfari, a well-known Italian journalist and atheist:

I would not speak about absolute truths, even for believers … Truth is a relationship … As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.¹⁷

Well-known Islamic scholar and jurist Khaled Abou El Fadl points out that, in interpreting Qur’anic teachings, many Muslim scholars have argued "that God does not seek an objective or singular truth,"¹⁸ but that the search itself is the "straight path, the ultimate truth."¹⁹ There has also been a growing recognition that different religions represent different paths to God and that as human beings we are interconnected and interdependent, with a shared responsibility to bring about peace and harmony in the world.

Clearly a different approach to Christian-Muslim marriage is needed. My decades-long experience in such as marriage suggests that the key to such an approach can be found in the wisdom teachings of Jesus and the Qur’an. Wisdom teachings are spiritual teachings that reflect universal truths, provide guidance, and aim to promote the inner growth of human beings