Rishta in Huddersfield

Reading a Huddersfield profile properly

Jahez: the list, and why there should not be one

Sooner or later in a proposal somebody mentions what the girl's family will be sending. Often it is not said directly. It arrives as a remark about what another family gave, or a question about whether the furniture will be new, or an aunt explaining helpfully what is customary. Occasionally it arrives as an actual list.

Say it plainly: demanding jahez is not part of the marriage and never has been. The payment that Islam attaches to a nikah is the mehr, and it runs in the opposite direction — from the groom to the bride, and it belongs to her alone, not to her in-laws and not to the household. A family that expects goods, gold, furniture, white goods or a car as a condition of the marriage is asking for a price, and in Pakistan demanding dowry has been restricted by law for decades precisely because of the harm it does. A gift freely given by parents to their own daughter, with nobody asking and nothing conditional on it, is a different thing entirely and nobody objects to that.

The practical advice is simple and it holds in Huddersfield as much as in Mirpur. If a list appears, treat it as information about the family rather than as a negotiation. People who put a price on their son at the start will put a price on their daughter-in-law later, and the first year of that marriage will contain comments about what was and was not sent. Decline and move on; there are many families on this site who would be ashamed to ask.

And settle the mehr properly instead, which is where the attention should have been all along. Agree the amount, write it into the nikah nama, record whether it is paid at the nikah or deferred, and if anything else is promised — gold, a share in a property, a business — write that down too and keep a copy with both families. Unwritten promises between two families who like each other in year one are worth nothing in year five. Our own blog has a piece on the nikah nama clause by clause, linked further down this page, and it is worth half an hour of anybody's time before a wedding.

Fair, tall, slim: what the physical description is doing to this community

Anyone who has read Pakistani marriage adverts knows the vocabulary. Fair complexion. Tall, slim, beautiful. Wheatish. It runs through our community at home and abroad, and it is worth being honest about what it is: a prejudice inherited from somewhere else, with no basis in religion, that does real damage to perfectly healthy young women and to the men who are told they are too short.

You will notice that this site has no complexion field, and that is deliberate. We will not build a filter whose only function is to let families sort human beings by how dark they are. Height is on the form, because people have genuine preferences about it and because a profile with no physical information at all is not useful — but height is one line out of forty, and a family that narrows a search to a three-inch band is throwing away good matches for nothing.

If the other side asks about complexion, you are entitled to find the question unpleasant and you are also entitled to answer it simply. What you should not do is let it become a negotiation, or allow a daughter to grow up hearing the family discuss hers. The specific harm is not abstract: it produces young women who believe they are unmarriageable, who spend money on creams and treatments that do nothing, and who accept worse proposals than they deserve because somebody told them at nineteen that they were not fair enough.

The system on this site is built to take the pressure off this. Photographs stay locked until the member chooses to release them to a particular person, so nobody is browsing faces and ranking them, and when a photo request is accepted it goes to one family that has already read the whole biodata and decided the match makes sense. That ordering is the right way round. Read the education, the family, the work and the preferences first; look at the photograph when you have a reason to.

Health, disability and what has to be said

This is the disclosure that families most often avoid, and avoiding it causes more broken marriages in this community than almost anything else.

A nikah is a contract, and a contract entered into by concealing something material is a deception. If there is a long-term health condition, a disability, a history of serious mental illness, an ongoing treatment, or a condition that may affect having children, the other side has to be told before the marriage and not after. That is not a cultural nicety. It is the difference between a spouse who knew and chose, and a spouse who finds out in month five and feels they were tricked — and the second one very often ends in a divorce that could have been avoided, because in a great many cases the condition was never the problem. The lie was.

Families fear that disclosure ends the proposal. Sometimes it does. Far more often it does not, particularly when it is said early, calmly and with the facts: what the condition is, what the treatment is, what the doctor has actually said about the future. People marry each other with diabetes, epilepsy, asthma, heart conditions, physical disabilities and histories of depression every day of the week, and they are good marriages. What people cannot forgive is being kept in the dark.

Two further points. First, mental health in particular is still spoken of in this community as though it were shameful or a matter of weak faith, and that attitude keeps young people from getting treatment and keeps families from being honest in a proposal. It is an illness like any other and it is treatable. Second, where there is a disabled sibling or a parent needing long-term care, say so during the proposal, because it affects the household the couple will actually live in and the responsibilities they will carry.

For anything medical — a condition, a treatment, what it means for children — the person to ask is a doctor, not a relative with an opinion and not a page on a website. Ask the GP, get the facts in writing if you can, and bring those to the conversation rather than guesses.

An engagement with no date is not a commitment

Mangni is announced, the families are pleased, rings and sweets are exchanged, and then nothing happens for two years. It is one of the most common and least discussed injuries in our community, and it falls almost entirely on the woman, because the years she spends engaged are years she cannot spend looking.

So fix the date at the time of the engagement, not afterwards. A month and a year is enough; the exact day can follow. If a family will not name even a season, ask why, and listen carefully to the answer — a visa in progress, a house being finished, a brother marrying first and a sister who must go before her are all real reasons with real timescales, and all of them can be stated. Vagueness that persists past a second conversation is usually not about logistics. It is a family keeping its options open.

While you are at it, settle at the engagement the four things people argue about later. Who is paying for what, in writing, with the nikah, the walima and the travel separated out. What scale of event everyone is expecting, which is the real argument hiding behind the money. Whether either side will visit Pakistan beforehand, and who travels. And what happens if the engagement is called off — specifically, that gold and gifts go back and nobody is shamed for ending something that should have ended. Agreeing that calmly in advance makes it much easier for a young person to say no later if they need to, and the ability to say no is the thing that makes the yes worth having.

One last point for parents. A long engagement is often kept going because nobody wants the embarrassment of cancelling. Weigh that embarrassment against a daughter in her thirties who waited three years for a wedding that never came. It is not a close contest.

Kirklees is not one town, and the pool runs both ways over the Pennines

Two bits of local geography that change a search here.

The first is Kirklees. Huddersfield shares a council with Dewsbury, Batley, Mirfield, Heckmondwike and Cleckheaton, and a family new to the district often treats the whole borough as one community. It is not. Those towns have their own histories and their own composition, and the biradari and sectarian make-up of Batley or Dewsbury is noticeably different from Thornton Lodge or Crosland Moor. That is an argument for searching across all of them, not against it — just do not assume a match from one town comes from the same world as a match from the next.

The second is the Pennines. Huddersfield is on the boundary, and the M62 puts Oldham, Rochdale and Manchester within half an hour, which is closer than Sheffield and about the same as Leeds. So the honest pool from here is both counties at once: Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Dewsbury and Batley on the Yorkshire side, Oldham, Rochdale, Manchester, Bolton and Blackburn on the Lancashire side, Sheffield to the south. Families here genuinely marry in both directions and always have. Set the city to Huddersfield to see what is local, then work outward across the whole band rather than staying inside one county out of habit.

One practical note about the valleys. If a proposal involves a family living up the Colne or Holme valley, or out at Meltham or Holmfirth, be realistic with a bride coming from a city or from Pakistan about what that means: beautiful countryside, a car essential, the nearest mosque and halal shop a drive away, and very few other Pakistani families nearby. Plenty of people are happy there. Nobody should arrive and find out.