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Gé Speelman of Utrecht University spoke on Christian-Muslim marriages during the Graz European Ecumenical Assembly in 1997. We are grateful to be able to print a shortened version of her paper.
I have long been involved in interfaith dialogue with Muslims. In dialogue groups, I sometimes meet couples in an interfaith marriage: one partner Christian, the other Muslim. Often they can make a great contribution to the dialogue. I have discovered that couples in an interfaith marriage are living a life of permanent dialogue; because they have to live together, they have to figure out how to deal with the issues.
There are groups of couples scattered through Europe. The oldest is probably the Groupe des foyers islamo-chrétiens in France. Founded by three mixed couples in 1976, they meet regularly over the Pentecost weekend. The older participants have grown-up children. They discuss how they deal with their differences, the legal consequences of their marriages, the way they educate their children. I also know of a group of Christian-Muslim couples in Brussels, one in Turin, and one in the Netherlands.
The real experts
What fascinates me when I meet people who are active in such groups is that here you are talking to the real experts on interfaith dialogue. They know what it means if you live in a situation where you cannot escape the questions.
It seems to me that the basic question being asked is: “How can we recognise the other as really other?” One Christian woman with a Muslim partner who spoke on educating children in an interfaith family, said: “(Another speaker) just now said that we, Christians and Muslims, believe the same. I am convinced that what we believe is not the same thing. But I do believe that our faith points in the same direction. I also believe it is of the utmost importance for this world that we learn to accept that we do not believe the same, instead of burying our differences.”
This insight is meaningful for us all, because we have to learn to live together in society in spite of our differences. How can we really accept that which is different from us, accept the otherness of others, without feeling threatened?
A win-win situation?
The same woman spoke of how she and her husband talked before marriage about the religious education of their children. She said: “I thought, well, whether you like it or not, my children won’t get an Islamic education only. And of course he thought, whether you like it or not, my children won’t get a Christian education only. And we were clear on that from the beginning; we promised each other the freedom to express what each of us thought was important for their education, without overriding the other partner.” This formula is not a guarantee of success. The woman described the education of their children as a power struggle, in which each had to fight for what they thought important. The notion of struggle fascinates me. She said that in her case she felt she had won the struggle for the religious education of her children. But this did not bring her total satisfaction. She thought it should be possible to have the sort of struggle in which both partners win.
I think she was right. Interfaith dialogue is not always being polite to each other. It has to do with finding a way to go on living together, in spite of differences. This implies struggle. In that case, an important question is: can we find ways to make the struggle one in which both partners can win? both partners feel they are being taken into account, that what they regard as central to their life is being respected as sacred by their partner?
A struggle
A struggle implies there are power-factors at work. Let us take the most typical case: that of a Christian, Western European woman, married to a Muslim man with a recognisably different cultural background. Structurally, they both have different power-resources. One is a man, the other a woman. I know that women and men in Western Europe are supposed to have reached equality, but feminist research into Dutch marriages has shown that there is a discernable difference in power between women and men sharing a home; they found a lot of discontent among women.
There is also a power difference when one partner belongs to an ethnic minority. In our typical interfaith marriage, this power difference works the other way round. The Muslim partner is often confronted with what most people around him think is natural, obvious, self-evident; he is the other, the one who has to prove himself. Many partners tell me how 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.”
A third factor has to do with the socio-economic situation of the partners. Often the European, Christian partner has the better job, better access to housing and so on, and is also supported by her community. This can cause tensions in the relationship, which are frequently translated into a struggle about religion. When the partner who is the more “other” in the relationship feels he is not respected for who he is, he tries to win back self-respect by stressing what is central and most sacred to him: religion.
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 told me she did not want to recognise 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.
Maintaining identity
But what is at stake in the power struggle is not merely the winning of prestige, or an easy life. Interfaith partners are looking for a way to maintain their identity. In everyone there is an inner core of conviction about who one is, what the world is, how God is spoken of, and how self-respect, the identity chosen for oneself, can be maintained. We all feel a deep need to be recognised and respected at this level. We keep negotiating with others, trying to get recognition for this basic identity. Partners in a mixed marriage feel a deep need to be heard, understood and respected by the person of another faith whom they love.
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. At this core to which I refer, religious traditions are always reflected traditions: I believe this or that not only because it is in the Bible or the Koran, but also because it is what I really hold and value with my life. If you do not try to understand what I regard as most precious, then you do not respect me, the real me. This is why the struggle of mixed-faith partners can be so deep and prolonged.
Four strategies
Is it a struggle which both can win, or can one partner only maintain him/herself by annihilating the otherness of the other? Interfaith partners have to face this question, and it is the most important question in a dialogue between those of different religions. I see four strategies used by couples; I call them annexation, yielding, ignoring, negotiating.
Annexation and yielding are complementary. When one partner holds particularly strong religious convictions, he or she (mostly he – men have more difficulties in dealing with what is different) tries to convert the partner to his faith and way of life. The other may respond by attempting to annexe her/his partner in turn (these marriages are not likely to last long), or by gradually yielding to all the demands.
Ignoring is the policy by which both partners, tacitly or not, try to deal with their differences. It may work for a time, but leads to unexpected surprises when there is a family crisis. It may be a sorrowful experience (a parent of one partner dies, one partner has to face unemployment), or it may be joyful (the birth of a first child), but when crises arise, and especially when children come, real and existing differences cannot always be ignored.
The fourth strategy is the difficult and uncertain one of negotiation, which is like an open-ended story. Partners keep promising each other things, going back on their promises, bringing their resources into play in order to get the upper hand. But that is not the only story. If marriage was only a power struggle, why be married at all? If interfaith dialogue were only about who gets the upper hand, where would the world end? How can we be truly reconciled to our brother and our sister, and how can partners in an interfaith marriage really found a family if that is all there is?
Being other; being in relationship
I return to my first question: how can we recognise the other as really other, and still be reconciled to him/her? Looking for an answer, an answer I have not yet found, I search my own Christian tradition. And I find two pointers. But first I want to affirm that it is not, in our Christian tradition, unacceptable or unnatural to want what the partners in an interfaith marriage want – to be heard and seen for what they are, to refuse to be completely adapted to or amalgamated in their marriage partner. This is the self-respect every human being strives for. And Christian tradition says that this self-respect is due to every human being because we are all recognised and respected by God. That is the foundation of our self-hood, and also of the relationship between human beings and God. As the psalmist says: God is the One who knows us for what we are (Ps 139).
Does this self-respect also lead to respect for the otherness of others? We have learned that there is only one unbroken and indivisible Truth that we should follow. How can we account for the otherness of others?
In Christian tradition, we affirm two things about God that give direction to our thinking about the recognition of the other as other. One is the idea of incarnation. I call here as witness the 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 recognises 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? I just let this question stand.
The second idea is that God is not the unmoved mover of Aristotelian tradition. In the doctrine of the Trinity, Christians affirm that God is essentially a God of movement, of dialogue. The theologian Moltmann points out the importance of the perichorese, the constant movement within the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit towards each other, so much that it is impossible to speak of one person of the Trinity apart from the others. God is a God of relationships.
Here are two pointers for Christians who deal with the otherness of others, directing us beyond the formulation of the lowest common denominator and also beyond the tendency to want to make the other like oneself.
Gé Speelman
6.2.12-13
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Published by the Association of Interchurch Families, England
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