Making the Forbidden ‘Acceptable’: Intercultural & interfaith marriages among the Iraqi Arab-Shiite community in London

Public discourses often depict that the patriarchal notions and practices of the Muslim immigrant communities come in direct conflict with the more progressive values of Western countries. Within anthropological literature, Muslim immigrant women marrying ‘out’ of their faith are often associated with great anguish experienced by their families and other members of the Muslim community. These are seen as indicative of the prevalence of exclusionary boundaries among Muslims and their lack of integration. Rather than looking at these contestations to ‘out’-marriages as indicative of a lack of integration, I argue that we need to problematize these exclusionary boundaries and better understand their social context. To do so, this thesis looks at the social and discursive processes under which contested intimate relationships are re-negotiated to become ‘acceptable’ by ‘integrated’ members of the Iraq Arab-Shiite community. Drawing on the works of Andreas Wimmer and Claire Dwyer I demonstrate three principle findings: (1) member’s integrated self-definition is not exempt from the influence of public discourses on integration issues; (2) exclusionary boundaries within the community are not only defined under ethno-religious and gendered terms, but are also defined under class, race, age and family standing; (3) re-negotiation of exclusionary boundaries is not indicative of integration, but rather of the classificatory negotiations and struggles between actors situated in a particular social context. The findings are based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among individuals part of the Iraqi Arab-Shiite community in London, who have decided to or have already ‘out’-married, and their family members