Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Assalamu alaikum. I'm Latasha Russo, Executive Director of Sapelo Square and welcome to on the Square, a special podcast brought to you by Sapelo Square in collaboration with the Mae Dime, where every month Sapolo Squad get on the Square and into some real talk about race and Islam in the Americas.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hello, my name is Tahira Naeeladine and I'm a special guest host for on the Square.
On this episode, we look at the impacts of singleism on mental health of unmarried Muslims. Our guest today is Dr. Amina McBride. Dr. McBride is a recent PhD graduate in community Health Sciences from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and she holds a Master's in Public Health from the University at Buffalo in community health and health behavior.
Her research focuses broadly on mental health of Muslims at the intersection of gender and race. Her dissertation examines the mental health consequences of singleism or singlehood stigma among unmarried Muslims living in North America with a focus on differences by age and gender. She currently works as the lab coordinator for the Stanford Muslim Mental Health in Islamic Psychology Lab and you can follow her on Instagram at Black link Muslima PhD. Thank you again so much, Dr. Amina, for being here today.
Today's conversation is really going to be focused on what you learned from your studies, from your dissertation and what it can teach us as a community as a whole, those of us trying to get married, those of us trying to support the unmarried community.
And yeah, hopefully we can start to think about how to address, address the, the issue of the marriage crisis.
For, for me, I, you know, you contacted me because of some of the projects that I've worked on revolving around love and marriage. I did a photo series in 2021 and 2022 called the ISMS Project, focusing on Muslim women and their experiences trying to get married, looking at potential isms or the stigmas that are preventing the marriages. So like ageism, racism, sexism, all of these things of, of, you know, making it more difficult for women to get married, serving as blockage, blockages in the community in terms of like finding matches, suitable matches, finding interested candidates, or even be able to make it to the finish line of the niqab because parents get involved and the stigmas come up. And so yeah, I'm interested to hear more about your perspective from, from witnessing that photo series and then, you know, would love to just get into how, how the study went. But you definitely want to hear about inspiration and that maybe that project served or, or other types of inspiration for you in getting you going for, for this dissertation.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Yeah thank you so much for the opportunity to be on the podcast. It's an honor.
Yeah, the. The ISMS project definitely served as a huge inspiration and motivation for the work that I.
I'll say that it was one of the first sort of formal projects that I came across that really captured what I was seeing in my friend group and what I was seeing in the community in a way that was more academic and more intentional than kind of some of the stuff that I was already seeing on social media.
And so that was really sort of a spark for me because I realized that this is a huge problem in the Muslim community. The discrimination and pressure that single folks face in the community, from the community is something that we all talk about, we've all seen, but not something that has been sort of categorically studied and understood and examined in a way that can help develop resources and tools and solutions.
And so the ISMS project was definitely one of the first that I saw that I was like, wow, okay, this is a way of talking about this issue.
Definitely. Yours was on the more artistic side of things, and I really appreciated that. I think it really gave a visual sort of voice to the. To the problem. That was one of the inspirations. I think the other inspiration for me was seeing. Seeing the experiences that friends that I had were going through as they were trying to get married. People from different backgrounds, different experiences, and all kind of having a sort of universal experience when it came to trying to find a partner, trying to figure out what it means to.
To be single in this world if you're not married.
And then even beyond that, like how to stay married, and then if the marriage wasn't a success, how to kind of navigate that experience after the marriage ended. And so seeing those various stories and challenges in my own friend group and in some of my own experiences as well, I wanted to be able to use what I was learning in school to better understand the problem and to hopefully use that as momentum to develop solutions.
Great.
[00:05:22] Speaker B: And just generally, like, can you talk about your. What you studied before you got into this dissertation? Like, what was your Ph.D. supposed to be in, generally?
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So I originally came into the PhD program.
Well, I guess in my master's program, I.
My capstone project focused on this topic, and I was interested in it, but it wasn't something that I necessarily thought big picture about and thought that it could turn into something like a dissertation.
But I.
So I kind of put it off to the side. I didn't think people would be interested in it. I didn't Think people would find it valuable or see the, see the sort of contribution that the scientific side of things could make.
So at the end of my master's program, I kind of was just like, okay, this was a cool project, moving on.
And I was interested in resiliency and grit in black urban youth.
And so that's what I initially came into my PhD hoping to study.
And I was going through the program of. Probably about a year and a half into the program, I realized that I wanted to do something that I felt would be more impactful to my direct community.
Not that my previous topic wasn't going to be impactful or help, you know, in any way, but I wanted something that I could directly tie to the Muslim community and directly help the Ummah at large. And so I kind of returned to that topic and I was like, okay, I've already done some work in this area. Let me see if this is something that I can expand on. And I was noticing sort of an uptick in the Muslim community sort of conversation around this in general. And I was like, okay, let me see what I can do. And by that point I had learned a little bit more from the PhD process in terms of research skills and what it took to actually like conduct a study of this kind. So that's initially kind of how I got started and very blessed to have a PhD advisor that was very cool with me, kind of just switching in the middle of my program like that. But that's sort of how I ended up here.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's really awesome. Yeah, it's definitely a much needed topic for exploration from a scientific academic standpoint.
The Muslim marriage crisis is something that I've seen discussed for the last, I would say like 15 years, like in, you know, behind closed doors. But even at the Mimbar too, it's some, some imams, like, have been dealing with, you know, fielding questions from like, concerned parents, saying, like, I have not able to get my child, particularly my daughters, you know, college educated daughters, married. And, and so yeah, that's, that's something. Why, that's one reason besides my own personal difficulties.
You know, what, what made me so interested in, in wanting to look at what was being done, you know, or what we could do as a community to try to tackle these issues.
But we need more folks like you that are actually like, in these spaces where you can like, search for the funding to like, get, get the survey results, get people, get the actual numbers. Because even when I've talked to some researchers and like, that are doing Marriage, family counseling, Muslim marriage and family counselors, to look at the divorce rates. Like we don't really have those numbers in our community because there's lack of funding. No one's you know, actually doing the work to like get these studies going and then yeah, the, on the other side. So it's like, okay, we need to actually know what's happening with our married couples. But then before that even like how, how can people even get into these relationships? So looking at singleism and the impacts of that on mental health is super important. So I really big kudos to you for delving into that. But for, for the listeners I want to like get into the study. Like can you like set out the metrics for us? Like the parameters of the study and what metrics used to, to, to determine the impacts of, of on the mental health of the community that you surveyed. So like set it up for us.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll say before I jump into that, that I think that to your point about getting research done in the Muslim community, one of the other challenges that we often have as researchers in the community is getting people engaged in the research.
So beyond finding the funding, beyond having the sort of academic platform to be able to do the research, it's actually getting people to participate and getting people to engage that can make research like this incredibly challenging.
And in getting the numbers that you need to be able to conduct a study like this, you need, you know, several hundred if not thousands of people to contribute to the study in order to make it meaningful.
And so this would be my sort of plug to the listeners to say like, you know, when you see a Muslim researcher conducting a study, definitely if you qualify, try to participate, it really helps, it really helps further the work for the Muslim community and make future opportunities and resources available to us as possible. But for me, this study really I needed to start out understanding whether singleism existed in the Muslim community to begin with. And what I mean by that is that we talk about it in the Muslim community, we see it on the blogs and the platforms and the social media things and you know, all of that. But from a research perspective, I can't talk about a problem if I don't have the numbers to back it up. Right. I don't have the support, the evidence to justify why I'm studying this in the first place. And so in order for me to do the deeper work of understanding the effects of this or the relationship between experiencing singleism and mental well being and the different other socio cultural factors that play a role in this I needed to understand who experienced it the most. Who and what does that experience look like across the Muslim community?
So my initial part of the study looked at whether singleism existed. Are there differences across gender and age in particular, in rates of singleism? Do certain groups experience singleism more or less?
And what types of singleism are people experiencing?
So I came into that first part of the study thinking that what I would see would be that older women would experience singleism the most and that younger men would experience it the least.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: And when you say older women, like, can you give numbers to that? What numbers? What ages are you talking about?
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Yeah, so in this study, I defined older as above 35.
So initially, I wanted to look at it even more sort of granularly, looking at folks who are single in their 50s and 60s versus people who are single in their 20s, 20s, 30s, 40s. Right.
But again, we need more people to participate in the research for me to be able to actually look at the numbers in that way. That was my initial question that I asked was what are the differences and experiences of synchronism across these different age categories and gender categories?
And again, I came in thinking that older women would experience the highest rates of singleism and that younger men would be the least. And I wasn't really sure where the other categories would fall. But those are my two sort of grounding points.
And as I started working with the data and as I started calculating the numbers, something really interesting came up, and that was that in general, when you're looking at sort of overall synchros, I'm not looking into different specific types of synchros. And just overall, women definitely experienced higher levels of synchrosism than men, and older folks definitely experienced higher levels of symbolism than younger folks.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: So that outlined with what you were thinking generally.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: Yes.
And there were specific types of singleism.
So, for example, interpersonal singleism was one that women in particular had really high rates of compared to men. So gossiping and bullying and different forms of sort of interpersonal pressures and negative experiences around being single. But one of the interesting things that we found was that when we looked specifically at familial singleism, meaning pressure and stigma that came from within the family.
So this could be your, you know, your parents or even extended family. There was an interesting sort of switch that happened. So when you're comparing older and younger people, older people had higher rates of single, higher rates of familial singleism. But when you looked at the intersection between gender and age, younger men, younger women, older men, older Women, what we saw was that younger women had higher rates of singleism than younger men. But when we look specifically between older men and older women, what we saw was that older men actually had significantly higher levels of singleism than compared to older women. And one of the things that I think might explain this is that there's a cutoff point in the Muslim community, age wise, after which women are kind of seen as expired. Right. Or they're just not on the, able to be on the quote, unquote, marriage market anymore. Generally, this is not looking at specific personal experiences, but generally overall in the population.
And so the reason you see higher rates for younger women is that you're experiencing this ramping up of pressure in your mid to, you know, early to mid-20s, because you have to meet that social expectation and sort of check that social box before you get to that cutoff age.
Whereas for men, they're expected to have a career, they're expected to be able to provide, they're expected to be able to support a family. That takes time. And so they're given a little bit more leeway and freedom to be able to do that before they start experiencing the pressure. And I think another thing for men in particular is that there's also a parental aging effect is what I call it. In some subsections of the Muslim community, the oldest son is viewed as the parental caretaker.
What that really means is that his wife is going to take care of her in laws. Right. And so as they get older, as the parents get older, they're starting to realize I don't have that support that I need as I age. And so I'm going to add pressure onto my oldest son to start finding a partner so that I can have that care and support that I think that I need. Those were some of the sort of explanations that I thought of as I was looking at the data and as I was looking at these numbers. But that was generally kind of what we were seeing.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: So let me just clarify. So the, so the older women.
Sorry, you said the older men experience more. Some of the older men experience more singleism than the older women.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So by far, older men experienced much higher rates of singleism, familial singleism than familial.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: And that's defined as pressure from the family.
And when, and when you're saying singleism, you're, you're, you're saying it's not just the experience of being unmarried, it's what it, what comes with the territory of being single. So that, that's like Dealing with the internal pressures, external external pressures, feelings of shame, what else is encompassed in that?
[00:17:10] Speaker A: So the way that I define singleism is the external experience of discrimination and marginalization based on the fact that one is sing, that can be sort of internalized similar to the way that you would experience racism. And then you could internalize that experience of racism and sort of put that back on yourself.
That's how I define synchrosm. So symbolism is external force from the community in particular, that is judgmental, shameful, looking down upon you, thinking that you're immature, thinking that you there's something wrong with you.
Kind of all of those sort of stereotypical things that we hear about what it, what single people are taking that, and that is what singleism is.
It can also be defined sort of even broader than that to look at systemic singleism. And that is where institutions categorically like exclude singles or provide better benefits for married folks as compared to single people. So when you think about things like tax benefits or job benefits, things like that, that are institutional policies that benefit partnered people as opposed to single people. So it's an external experience and then it can be internalized. But for the sake of this study, I didn't look at that so much. The other forms of singleism that I studied in this project did show that women experienced higher levels of symbolism in those forms than men. So social judgment, interpersonal singleism, feelings of defensiveness or a lack of fulfill being single, those were all higher among women than they were men. So I think, yeah, I think it's just important to clarify.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Expected? Yeah, it's to be expected. That's to be expected. Okay. And so for the women that you talk to that were feeling those increased feelings, what were those feelings actually like, okay, so they experienced the, those, the negative treatment, the pressures.
But what was the feelings that resulted from that? What was the state of their mental health from that?
[00:19:22] Speaker A: I would say in general, a lot of the women that I interviewed, so the third paper in my dissertation were interviews of unmarried Muslim women. All of the people in my study were unmarried at the time of the study. But the third study in particular only looked at women. There was definitely a sense of feeling unfulfilled, feeling that there was an incredible amount of pressure from family, from society, from their community.
And a lot of that pressure was internalized.
And for a lot of them, that led to sort of cycles of feelings of depression and sadness and loneliness was a big thing that came up a lot.
But in all of that, I think what was really interesting was that many of the women, most of the women, focused on their relationship with Islam and their relationship with Allah as a form of buffering against those experiences. And so the way that I sort of conceptualized what all of these women were telling me was that there was a lot of cultural misunderstandings and cultural pressures that were being used as tools to convince women that they should just accept that there's something wrong with them if they don't want to be married, that there's something wrong with them if they can't find somebody, that focusing on academics and career advancement was wrong.
And there was a lot of use of culture to prop those ideas up in the community.
And what the women tended to respond with was, well, that's not what Islam tells me. And a lot of them really focused on developing their Islamic education, their Islamic knowledge to be able to push back on those ideas and use examples from Islamic history of these incredible contributors to the Muslim stories who weren't married, who never got married or who, you know, were widows or divorcees and didn't remarry after that experience, but still were incredible contributors to the Muslim community, the Muslim ummah at large. But just fields, their fields, science, medicine, engineering, you know, whatever. Whatever kind of fields that they were involved in, they were contributing to those in a very meaningful, very powerful way.
And so that's what I saw a lot of is really kind of using Islam as a. As a protection, as a shield, as a justification for why they were not married.
So they used Islamic history, but they also used, like, Islamic principles of qadar and tawakul and trusting in Allah and trusting in his plan. A lot of women talked about the viral clip of Romance isn't Rizq.
That came up a lot in interviews where people were talking about, you know, it just might not be my decree, my naslib, that I get married and learning to be okay with that and finding other ways of social fulfillment.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: And for those who that don't know what that reference is, Sheikh Omar Sulaiman did a series during Ramadan, I believe it was for 2024, and it was in one of the episodes. It was titled, like, Romance is like Risk. And the point being that, like, not everyone is going to experience that in this life. Potentially in Dunya, just, like, you might not have money, you know, in this life, you might not achieve, like. Like fame or, you know, different. Different level of success that you want. You might. You might not find your match. And so online that, like, it was like a frenzy online social media, where people were very shocked to hear him say that, because they had always been told, well, like you're gonna find that person. It just might take some, some time, some years.
He kind of put out there that that might be your test in this life. You might not actually find someone and you have to find, find contentment in that. And I think that that troubled a lot of people who maybe they had like to be pot, you know, in the more positive sense. Like they had this view of like, perception of, in the relationship with the law that like, oh, I was going to give me whatever I asked for, like, maybe not when I wanted, but like at some time. And, and I think that that is true. It's just that might get carried off into the next life. We don't know.
And so I do think that that while that causes some people some pain, like it should provide more comfort knowing that like it's out of your hands, like whatever Allah provides for you, it's, it's, you need to find contentment with that, make peace with it. Because at the end of the day, like, we don't have control over these things.
And so. Yeah, so I just wanted to let people know who might not know that whole phenomenon from last year.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And to your point, a lot of, a lot of women spoke about that, like internalizing that idea very positively and finding a lot of comfort and a lot of solace in that and being able to sort of let go and, and feel like, okay, this is not, this is in the hands of more powerful hands, more powerful than mine. And I'm not going to, to stress myself or worry myself about something that's not in my control. You know, I've done my part. I've, I've put myself out there. I, you know, improved myself. I'm working on myself. I've done all the things and at the end of the day it's, you know, whatever Allah has planned.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: So that's great. So those women that express those feelings and this was on like these, this was in like a one on one conversation with you. This wasn't just a survey. Right. This was like formal interview. Okay, that was, that came up in conversation. And did you have a scale for those folks, those women specifically, what the level of like anxiety or depression that they were feeling? Like, were you able to correlate that feeling of contentment with how they were doing in their mental health?
[00:25:33] Speaker A: So not in the interviews.
We didn't have scales that I used in the interviews. However, in the second study, we did look at the relationship between singleism and, well, Being and compared across sort of levels of religiosity or levels of engagement in religiousness.
And what we found is that as singleism increased or as level, like as the level of experience of singleism increased, those with very high or high levels of religiosity, you saw an increase in their well being.
And it's hard to describe verbally, you kind of have to see a picture of it to understand the relationship between these different elements. But essentially what it showed was that religion was providing religiosity. Spirituality was providing a sort of buffering effect against the negative impacts of symbolism on well being. And so for those who really highly engaged in their religious practices, whether that be through prayer or increased increase in Islamic knowledge, or reading the Quran or different, different acts of spirituality, the more that that was used, the better they were able to process and navigate the experiences of symbolism. I'm extrapolating a little bit from, from the findings, but generally like, if you want like a very sort of summarized version of, of what it was that we saw, that's what we observed is that religion can provide a sort of protection against some of the negative experiences and what those negative experiences will do to someone's mental well being.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: That's wonderful because I think that that's something that we're told often by scholars or you know, the community leaders, imams, shake, shake. But it's, it's different when you see the numbers and when you, when you see that like, okay, this is, this experience has been taken from all of these different, you know, individuals and added together like this is the collective result. And experience is like, you know, being more firm on your dean, being more engaged in your religious practice, your spirituality, like that's going to help you in something as massive of like feeling down about being, you know, unmarried, married, being single, like that can be applied, I'm sure.
You know, I don't know the studies on that but like on everything else in life, like I'm, you know, I don't, I don't have the job that I want, but I'm getting closer to my Lord and so that material aspect that I'm missing, it matters less because I, I know the, the greater reward is in the next life.
You know, I, I don't have children and I, I want, I want children. But like knowing that Allah is going to provide for me whatever I want, if that includes children in the next life, then he's going to give me that. And so that takes off some of that anxiety.
You know, it could be attributed to everything and so yeah, hearing that from you about what, what you found from the numbers of these individuals, like being able to rely on, on a love, rely on their faith and it leading to this, you know, feeling of more, more relief or greater contentment and their current status, like that's, that's wonderful. And I think a lot of people will be happy to hear that because maybe they're on a pathway of trying to find, you know, find their level of practice, you know, fine tuning that and are struggling with, you know, depression, anxiety, discontentment and in not being married. And so that, that's a way out for people. Maybe they, you know, maybe they're struggling to find a way like leave the apps for once, once and for all leave like forget about the matrimonial events and then just really focusing on their connection with the law. Like we're hearing so much about self care, like focus on, you know, going to the spa, like going on this vacation to find escape from, from the madness that's within internally or you know, externally in this world. But like knowing that going back to the basics and the basics of like knowing yes, I'm like connecting with our Lord, like that could provide a freedom and a relief. Like that's, that's really helpful and I think that's going to help a lot of other people when they're struggling to figure out like what's next, you know, Inshallah.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: And then back to like the, the books that I was talking about, especially the Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key.
She talks about like lack of faith, you know, at some point. I think she even talks about like being like atheist or, or just not just not knowing, you know, where, where to find grounding in like the spiritual realm. And so she'll do things like, or she did do things. In the book she talks about, it's a memoir, so it's, it's all legit, like real life stuff. She talks about like excessive spending, excessive traveling, like doing excessive like sexual engagements, like doing things.
The void of the sadness that like is, is there because she doesn't, you know, is seeking this romantic relationship that she's not able to find.
And so I feel like, you know, from like Muslim women, like we're, we're blessed that we, we know how to channel our grief, how to, how to channel this discontentment. And it's, it's putting it back into, you know, our fortifying the relationship we have with, with. With our religion and our creator. So that's. Yeah, when I was reading that book, I was Just thinking, like, oh, like, I'm. I feel really blessed to, you know, know what. What I'm prioritizing in life because otherwise probably I would, you know, have a drinking problem, you know, be dealing with all these other things that. As a way to find a distraction. And I. I feel like a lot of people, both men and women, you know, feel the same in terms of.
Yeah. Looking for escape. Because, you know, I don't. I don't know. Some people, like, if. When you were talking to people about this subject that were maybe outside of the academic world, if they looked at it, like, lightly of, like, singleism, I don't. What. What's your experience with people, like, their perception of singles and, like, do they, like, downplay it? Did they ever. Did you meet people that were just like, well, is that an issue?
You know, what's your experience with. With. With that?
[00:32:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think I've ever met anyone that since I've started this work that has acted like this wasn't real or that this wasn't a problem in the Muslim community in particular. I think it's very. I think it's very apparent and it's growing more apparent that. That there is this marriage crisis, that there is this challenge of. Of getting people married, keeping people married and keeping them married in healthy marriages. And so, you know, you see a lot.
Great, great work to try to rectify the situation.
One of my personal Heroes and Mentors, Dr. Anissa Nadir, is doing some really, really incredible work on preparing people to get married and helping them navigate, learning the things that they need to learn in order to have healthy, functional, effective marriages.
And so I think that's what people are focusing on a little bit more now that I think, think it's. It's really great to see that it's not just the. The wedding day is not the end. The wedding day is not the deadline. The wedding day is not the, you know, the goal post or the finish line. It's really beyond that, that we need to start working because it's. It's easy to put two people in a room and have an imam there and give them. Have them sign a piece of paper. Right.
But it's what happens after that that I think people.
I think we as a community need to start thinking a lot about. About a lot more than we already are right now.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Absolutely.
And so in terms of, yeah, like, preparation is definitely important in preparation for the marriage, but I feel like there's some people that are like, well, I am prepared. Like, I am Doing the work. But like, I can't meet anyone.
You know, I don't, I just can't even get in the same room. I can't even go on dates.
I can't. You know, there's. There's no one. Like, there's not anyone that's on the, like, same level of religiosity or compatibility or, or I'm just not meeting men. Like, what would you say to those folks?
Does this, like, study help you?
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Help.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Help give any advice to those types of individuals?
[00:34:23] Speaker A: So I think for individuals who are going through that, the advice that I would give is kind of going back to your D and relying on dog. But also like, don't, don't give up on different platforms just because you had a negative experience.
There's little asterisks next to that. I've heard some really horrible things from certain platforms and certain avenues of finding people.
So I'm not saying put yourself in horrible situations or, you know, unsafe situations by any means. I'm not saying that.
But what I am saying is just be being open to potentially unique ways of finding people. Right?
And I think the onus on, in this situation is actually not on the individuals who are going through this. The onus in this situation is on communities. It's on the organizations in the Muslim community, the third spaces in the Muslim community that need to do better at creating opportunities for engagement. We have this really weird dynamic in the Muslim community of like, on one hand, this sort of extreme gender segregation, and then on the other hand, this obsession with marriage and so trying to find like a middle path. Islam is all about balance, right? And I think in this area, we're not, we're not as balanced as we should be.
And so I think we need to do better as organizations that serve the Muslim community in creating our opportunities for folks to, to engage in appropriate halal, you know, professional ways that allow them to learn about people. Not for the sake of marriage, right? Not going into a room to do some sort of speed dating activity or something like that. Those are great and those have worked for certain people. And maybe that's your no sleep, who knows? But having other opportunities just to learn about people and to learn about who they are as a person outside of the pressure that those kind of environments create where everybody's on their best behavior, everybody looks their best, everybody's dressed their best, right?
That can sometimes create a false image of who you're meeting.
And so creating these other opportunities that, you know, volunteer opportunities, look at how they engage under pressure how are they serving the community? In different ways, different things like that. That I think we need to do better as a community in creating and creating space for.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: That's great. That's, yeah, really important.
And then what would you say for, like, the people that are, like, the parent, I guess, the parents that are putting those. These unnecessary pressures on people, on their. Their children or. Or just the younger people in the community?
You know, I. I remember interviewing this one brother, like, for this article I was writing, and he was talking about how he goes to the masjid. And this one, this uncle always says, hey, are you married yet or are you getting married? Asking him that question over and over again.
And I told him, well, let's take it as a positive, because he's. He thinks like, oh, you're such a catch that you should be married by now. But I can see that that was something that was weighing on him. It's like, I'm actually trying. Like, people don't see what I'm trying to do to get married.
So, yeah, what would you say to those. All those other folks that are like, you know, maybe unintentionally pressuring the young folks in the community?
[00:37:46] Speaker A: That's a tough one, I think, because if you're aware of yourself and you're aware of, like, the way that you engage with people, you already kind of know that this might cause pressure, right? You're not supposed to, like, begin people's business like that, you know, unless you're actively trying to, like, help somebody and you know them and they're like a friend of yours or like a, you know, connected to you in some way.
But oftentimes the people who engage in that kind of behavior are just not aware of their actions and the harm that their actions can cause. And I think that that was really one of the things that I was hoping that would come out from this. From my research is just elevating these stories and really showing people the harm that people can cause when they are inadvertently or with good intention, badgering people about this.
And I think that, you know, it's the. It's the responsibility of the community leaders to have conversations with the community.
Not about. Not just about getting married and the importance of getting married and finding people to get married and the process of doing that, but talking to the parents and talking to the rest of the community and highlighting for them the detriment that they're creating.
People in those positions of authority and leadership need to be speaking up about this issue in a way that is proactive for people who are searching, but also protective for people who are not finding success or are not interested in marriage. So I think, you know, imams, community leaders, Ustadas Shaykhs, different people like that.
When you have a parent come to your office and sit down and say, hey, my child doesn't want to get married, or I can't find my child a spouse being the one to initiate the conversation about, okay, well how are you approaching this conversation with your child? Are you applying pressure to them in a way that is not going to be effective or that's potentially harmful?
We know in the Muslim community we have challenges with mental health just in general.
We have challenges with suicidality and different really harmful, extreme forms of mental illness. And you never know who you're talking to or what you might be triggering in creating that pressure. And so if I were talking to those people who are well intentioned, trying to help but maybe causing harm, or those who are maybe not well intentioned, just saying, like, you know, being, being more self aware and being conscious of, of the pressure and harm that you can create in a situation. When you talk like that, in terms
[00:40:26] Speaker B: of like, when you talk about like stories like from, from the interviews, like, is there any story that stood out to you as one that was really like heartbreaking in terms of the impact, the negative impact that singleism had on, on these men or women?
[00:40:41] Speaker A: There were several stories that really kind of sat with me and struck me.
I think one that really stood out to me in that I, I think even now I'm still trying to process the depth of the story that was shared with me was one individual who had been previously married and is, is no longer married, but was pressured to such an extent at such a young age to get married that she was married very soon after high school or she might have still been in high school.
And it was just a cycle of trauma and violence and trying to escape the cycle and then getting put back into the cycle and not having people in the community or people in her family that she felt like she could go to and they would be protecting her and they would support her. And I think that that really satisfied, sat with me in a way that like, we as a community have failed this sister. We as a community did not do what we were supposed to do as her, as her brothers and sisters, as her siblings, to be there for her and with her as she navigated a situation that in all honesty, she shouldn't have been put in in the first place.
It was a failure on the community for even allowing this to happen. It was a failure on the. The leader of that particular community who allowed that marriage to happen, that created a situation where she had decades of trauma and abuse because she didn't have a community to support her. Another story that sticks with me is one of actually a few folks who had very similar stories. And they were converts to Islam.
And the challenges that they experience, I think are very unique in the Muslim community, particularly if they're women, particularly if they're black and brown women who are Congress to Islam.
Some of the stories that they shared with me were just incredibly.
It just demonstrated sort of the incredible, like, audacity that we have in the Muslim community to talk to certain people in certain ways or to have perceptions of certain people in certain ways. For example, one of this. One of the participants told me about how she met a brother through some avenue. I can't remember. I don't want to misquote her story, but she met this brother, she's a convert to Islam, and she went to meet him and, you know, they had been talking for a while. She thought he was a great guy, whatever. They were going to meet up just to be in person.
And she's. She's with him and he takes a phone call and turns out that he's like, engaging in the sale of illegal substances and saw nothing wrong with it. And she was like, where did this come from? And why do you think that I would be okay with this? And the assumption was that, well, she's just a convert and she should just accept whoever is interested in her. And because of her quote, unquote history, an assumed history that they didn't even know was true or not. But an assumed history that no Muslim man, no real Muslim man is going to want her. Right? Like these, these tropes and really just harmful ideas that cause deep, deep wounds for people who have to navigate them.
Right.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Yeah, this, this brings up to me the fact that like, you're studying. You studied single is the impacts of singles. But like, really it's. You're touching on a lot of different subjects of like how. Of how. Of the importance of marriage and how it's gotten like, you know, distorted.
You know, something where it's like something that was encouraged by Allah, but like now it's being used as like a requirement. Like people saying, like, you know, you. You have to marry or else you're gonna be. You're lesser than in society. Like, you know, the. The level of pressure to.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: For.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: For incompatible individuals to work out is over. Over, like incompatibility is better than having nothing is basically what they're saying, you know, when they're, when they're pushing these really terrible matches together. Like, it just shows a lack of understanding of, of, of, of the significance of marriage in, as a whole in the community.
And there's a lot of cultural baggage from that. You know, it's not just misunderstanding of, of, of nsm, but like the cultural baggage that people are dealing with, bringing from, from their home countries to, you know, the west, to the US specifically.
It's just, it's a mess. It's a complete mess.
And so, yeah, like you're this topic, it just, it brings out so, so many different, different aspects to this.
And I also wanted to ask about the race. Did you look, did you see notice anything in regards to, you know, one race having more difficulties or experiencing more, more negative impacts on their mental health than others?
[00:45:58] Speaker A: So for this particular study, there were some logistical and technical issues that didn't let me examine race in the quantitative portion of the study. So the surveys, race was brought up to some extent in some of the interviews, but I think that sort of the way that we were just talking about the experience of converts or the experience of previously married individuals, I think the relationship between race and singleism needs its own sort of whole study to unpack, right? And same with divorce and widowhood and converts.
I think one of the things that was brought up in the interviews was just the added challenge that a lot of black Muslim women in particular face when it comes to marriage. And actually I'll amend that to say black and Latina Muslim women, because what, what was often described was a challenge finding people who would be interested in them or a sort of fetishization of them where there's this, even if they were born Muslim raised Muslim, you know, generations of Muslims in their family, there was this idea that this just like face judgment of them, that they acted in a particular way or they were.
Held certain particular values or opinions, which a lot of these women very clearly were like, that's not me, that's not who I am.
But they had this judgment value placed on them and it was directly tied to the fact that they were black or Latina. And I think that if I were to sort of summarize what their experiences were around, particularly matchmaking and like seeking a spouse, it's that we as a Muslim community need to stop passing off our racism as preferences.
And a lot of times what they would get is, oh, I just don't prefer this. Or like, I'll Talk to you until I find somebody from my own culture wasting people's time, getting their hopes up, just causing all sorts of emotional and psychological trauma only to kind of not be interested. They were never interested in the first place. Right.
So I think there's a lot of unpacking that needs to happen there and we know that this is an issue in the community.
So looking forward to Inshallah, this being sort of the next step for me in this research.
[00:48:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Like what's your next project?
What's, what's your next focus now that you're graduated and on to, I guess looking for full time work, looking for like next steps. So this looking intersection of race and single ism, that's something that you want to explore further?
[00:49:00] Speaker A: It definitely is. I think now that I've graduated Alhamdulillah, I want to be able to first put these papers out into the world as academic papers.
That's my first priority, is getting that out into the world.
And then inshallah, if it's mine asleep, to find an academic position where I'm able to continue this research. There are some other colleagues of mine, friends of mine that I think are also doing very similar work that focus on race.
Dr. Jahara Ferguson, I think is her last name.
She just graduated from Rice. Her dissertation was on Black Muslims and marriage seeking. And so I would encourage folks, if you're really like interested in this topic, definitely check out her work.
But yeah, inshallah, this is an area that needs a lot more exploration, a lot more understanding and, and hopefully that exploration and that understanding can turn into the creation of like, interventions and resources and tools that can benefit unmarried Muslims and the community at large. Inshallah.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: Inshallah.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: Thank you so much for going, you know, working on this amazing topic, much needed topic, because yeah, there's, there's like, like I said earlier, there's a lot of people, a lot of women's, but particularly that are hurting thinking, you know, why me? You know, why, why in terms of not being able to get married and being able to understand that this isn't a individual issue, that this is something that a lot of people are dealing with and that we as a community need to tackle together. I think that provides some relief or I hope that it does. And that's kind of been my motivation in writing about these things, doing the photo shoot, like, you know, having these conversations with people like yourself so that we can understand that, that you know, it's not, it's not an individual issue. It's, it's a wider systemic problem that we, we need to tackle in the age of the marriage crisis. And yeah, be knowing that you're not alone is, I think, something that's helpful to, to know that you're not alone in, in any situation and that you're going through in life.
And I hope it continues to allow people to build community.
Thank you you for tuning in to this episode of on the Square, exploring Singleism and the Muslim Marriage Crisis. It's a special podcast brought to you by Sapello Square and the Maiden. Thanks to our guest, Dr. Amina McBride. You can find more information about what we discuss, including links and more, by visiting Sapa square.com onthesquare. Hope you guys tune in next time. Thank you.
[00:51:42] Speaker A: SA.
Sam.
