Rishta in Leicester

Reading a Leicester profile properly

Sect and school of thought, said plainly

Sect is an open field on every profile on this site, and in a city as mixed as Leicester it does more work than almost any other filter. Sunni and Shia are both well represented here, and within the Sunni community the school of thought — Barelvi, Deobandi, Ahl-e-Hadith — matters to some families a great deal and to others not at all. We do not take a position on any of it. We publish the field so that families can sort themselves before an approach rather than after one.

Use it accordingly. If your family will only consider within your own sect and school, set the filter and write it in your preferences; that is a common and perfectly respectable position and saying it saves everybody time. If your family is easier about it, say that too, because it widens what you will be shown considerably.

Where a proposal does cross between sects — and in Leicester these come up regularly — the questions to settle are practical, not theological, and they should be settled before the nikah rather than discovered after it. Who will perform the nikah and at which mosque. Whose practice the household will follow day to day. How the children will be raised and taught, which is the question that causes the real difficulty years later. Which mosque the family attends. How Muharram, or the other occasions each community observes differently, will be handled in a joint household. And whether both sets of parents are genuinely at peace with it, because a couple who agree while their families quietly do not are carrying a problem into the marriage.

One thing should be said firmly. Nobody should be pressured into changing their sect or their practice as a condition of a marriage, and nobody should pretend to have changed. A person who conceals what they believe in order to get a proposal accepted has started the marriage with a deception, and it will surface. Say what you are, let the other side decide, and accept a no without resentment — it is a legitimate answer and not an insult.

Marrying outside the Pakistani community

In Leicester this is not a hypothetical. A Pakistani family here may receive a proposal involving a Gujarati, Somali, Arab, Turkish, Bangladeshi or East African Asian Muslim, or someone who has converted to Islam, and these marriages happen in this city every year.

The religious position is not complicated: there is no bar to a Muslim marrying a Muslim of another ethnicity, and the Prophet's community was itself made of many peoples. What families actually object to is cultural distance, and that objection deserves to be answered honestly rather than dressed up as a religious one. So answer it with specifics instead of in principle.

The real questions are these. What language will be spoken at home, and can the elders on both sides talk to each other, which is a kindness question as much as a practical one. What food will be cooked, and does anyone mind. Which customs will the wedding follow — mehndi, the baraat, the particular rituals each community has, and which of them are being quietly dropped. Where will the couple live, and whose family will they live near. How will the children be raised, in which language and around which relatives. And in which community will they stand when there is an illness or a death and people come to the house.

Where one party is a convert, add a few more. Are their own family supportive, and will they be at the wedding — a question that deserves warmth rather than suspicion, because a convert often has no Muslim relatives at all and is marrying into an entire extended family alone. Who will stand as their wali or representative. What support will the family give with learning and practice. And a plain instruction to the Pakistani side: do not treat a convert as a lesser match or make remarks about their background. It is contemptible behaviour and it says far more about the family doing it than about the person they are judging.

Ask the brother's wife

Here is the best single check available to anybody considering a proposal, and it costs nothing. If the family already has a daughter-in-law, find out how they treat her.

Not how they describe her. How they treat her. Does she see her own parents regularly, or has that quietly stopped. Does she have any money of her own. Is she working, and was that her choice. Does she eat with the family or after everyone else. Was she allowed to finish her studies. Who looks after her children, and does she get any rest. When the family talks about her in front of other people, is it with affection or with complaint. A household's treatment of the bahu it already has is the most reliable prediction available of how it will treat the next one, and it is far more informative than any amount of conversation about religion, salary or biradari.

So ask her, if you can do it kindly and without putting her in difficulty — ideally through a woman in your own family, away from her in-laws, with no pressure to say anything. If she is careful and says very little, that is itself information. If she is warm and open and tells you the family looked after her when she was ill and that her mother stays for weeks at a time, you have learned more in ten minutes than in three meetings.

The same works in reverse, and families offering a proposal should expect it. If you have treated your sons' wives well, you have nothing to fear from the question and everything to gain — in a community this connected, a household with a reputation for being good to its daughters-in-law gets the best proposals, and deservedly so.

Two related questions worth asking while you are at it. How does the family treat its own daughters, because a house that educates its sons and holds its daughters back will treat a daughter-in-law the same way. And how did they behave towards the last family whose proposal they declined, because how people act when they want nothing from you is the truest version of them.

The walima and the hall: what a British wedding actually costs

Weddings in this country have grown enormously, and a great many families are quietly going into debt for one day. It is worth saying where that pressure comes from, because it is not from the religion.

The walima is the marriage feast and it is a recommended practice — a meal to announce and celebrate the marriage. What is not recommended, and is consistently discouraged, is extravagance and competition. A modest walima that people enjoy is complete. Six hundred guests, a hall with a stage, a videographer, three outfit changes and a bill that takes two years to clear is a local custom that has attached itself to a religious occasion, and nobody is obliged to take it on.

So do the money before the date. Separate the events — nikah, mehndi, walima — and decide which are actually happening, because each one added is a hall, a caterer and a guest list. Agree a guest number first and a budget second, since the number drives everything else. Write down who is paying for what, including the clothes, the jewellery, the cards, the transport, the videographer and the hall deposit, and remember that a hall deposit is usually non-refundable, which is why the date should not be booked until the two families have actually agreed. And agree what happens to the costs already incurred if the wedding does not go ahead.

Two warnings specific to Britain. First, be careful with credit taken for a wedding: a loan or a card balance for one day is a real debt that the couple, not the guests, will carry into the first years of the marriage, and it is one of the commonest sources of early strain. Second, if relatives are flying in from Pakistan, settle who is paying for flights and where people are staying well in advance, because that is the item families argue about most and plan for least.

And a word to the couple. If both of you would rather have a small nikah, a good meal and the money kept for a deposit on a house, say so early and say it together. A great many people want exactly that and assume they are not allowed to ask.

Istikhara is guidance, not a verdict

Almost every family in this community prays istikhara over a proposal, and it is a good thing to do. It is also widely misunderstood in a way that causes real harm, so it is worth setting out what scholars generally say about it.

Istikhara is a prayer asking Allah for guidance and for good in a decision. It does not require a dream, it does not produce a sign in the sky, and there is no verse or hadith promising a yes or a no delivered overnight. The ordinary scholarly advice is to do the groundwork first — make the enquiries, ask the questions, take advice from people who know you and know the other family, which is mashwara and is part of the process rather than separate from it — then pray istikhara, and then act on whichever course seems best, trusting that good will be in it. Ease of mind afterwards is a mercy, not a requirement, and uncertainty is not a prohibition.

What it is not is a substitute for checking. A family that performs istikhara and then skips the references, the documents and the video call has not been pious, it has been careless. Allah is not expected to do the work that He gave you eyes and relatives and a telephone for. Pray, and also ask the brother's wife.

And it must never be used as a weapon. Two misuses are common in our community and both deserve naming. One is the family that says the istikhara came back negative in order to decline a proposal without giving a reason, which is cowardice wrapped in religion; if you wish to decline, decline politely and let the other family keep its dignity. The other, far worse, is the parent who tells a son or daughter that their own istikhara was favourable and so the matter is settled, overriding a young person who has said no. A nikah requires the free consent of both parties. No prayer, no dream and no elder's conviction replaces that, and a marriage pushed through over somebody's refusal is a wrong done in the name of religion rather than by it.