‘When I told my parents I was going to marry a Muslim…’: Social perception and attitudes towards intermarriage in Italy,France and Belgium

Abstract

Based on biographical interviews held in Italy, France and Belgium with mixed couples where one partner has a Muslim background and the other a Christian one, the analysis highlights the factors involved when a relationship generates negative reactions among the family of the majority partner. The article questions the assumption according to which mixed marriages are the result of the diminishing of group boundaries. Its findings suggest that these couples may often highlight the continued presence of strong social barriers. Muslim men – particularly if they have a lower socio-economic status – are more likely to face the opposition of their families-in-law. The fear of the majority group of losing ‘social prestige’ indicates that the intertwining of social class and ethnic difference plays a major role, especially at the beginning of the relationships. Islamophobia emerges as a both ‘racialised’ and ‘gendered’ category, strengthening the stereotype of the Muslim man as the emblem of ‘otherness’.

Introduction

In Europe, the stigmatisation of Muslim minorities and their association with a threat to ‘national identity’ is a key argument of many populist political parties that construct a monolithic ‘Muslim identity’ as the emblem of ‘otherness’ (Ribberink et al., 2017). In the public debate, this reinforces the paradigm of the ‘clash of civilisations’ suggested by Huntington (1996). As a consequence, marriages between Muslim and non-Muslim partners represent a microcosm in which to study the majority-minority group boundaries and the social perception of Muslim minorities by mainstream society.

Research concerning mixed couples has historically investigated attitudes towards intermarriage as a marker of the diminishing of group boundaries in society (Davis, 1941; Gordon, 1964; Merton, 1941). The assumption is that ‘a mixed marriage connects the families and social networks of the two partners, which will lead to more interethnic contact and possibly more mutual acceptance and lower ethnic prejudice in the two origin groups’ (Kalmijn, 2015: 247). However, the degree to which a mixed marriage implies the erosion of racial, ethnic and religious boundaries has been recently questioned by qualitative research suggesting that strong barriers of social division persist between majority and minority groups (Cerchiaro, 2016; Collet and Santelli, 2012; Odasso, 2016; Rodríguez-García et al., 2016). Drawing on 172 biographical interviews held in Italy, France and Belgium, the current article adds to the existing debate by offering an in-depth analysis of the social perception of mixed couples where one partner was socialised into Islam and has a migratory background and the other into Catholicism and has a European background. ¹ Often categorised as Christian-Muslim, ² these couples indeed represent an emblematic case study of ‘mixedness’, ³ since they incorporate multiple layers of differences; not only ethnic and religious, but, often, also ‘racial’ and in terms of social class. Despite this, in public – and often academic – debate, religious difference is often assumed to be the primary conflictual dimension of these couples (Allievi, 2005; Al-Yousuf, 2006; Ata, 2003; Bangstad, 2004; Roer-Strier and Ben Ezra, 2006). The analysis focuses on narratives that reveal the reactions of the majority partner’s family, in order to analyse how these couples represent (or do not) an indicator of proximity between majority and minority social groups. In this regard, partners’ life stories shed light on the ‘social reactions’ they experience from the moment of the couple formation onwards. More specifically, the analysis highlights the factors involved when a relationship generates negative reactions ⁴ among the family of the majority partner. These episodes are often emphasised in partners’ life stories. They emerge above all when the interviewees describe the beginning of their relationship and the first social reactions to it. The analysis of this fragment of couples’ life stories offers a form of social laboratory, where the social perception of the couple is revealed, and allows us to study if and when these marriages imply the erosion of ethnic and racial prejudice and the lessening of social boundaries between different groups. The analysis deconstructs the factors that lie behind these conflicts. In so doing, adopting an intersectional approach, the aim is to ‘move away from an additive model by treating each division as constituted via an intersection with the others’ (Anthias, 2008: 13). The attempt is not to present ‘separate’ categories that are obviously conflated in the social realm but, on the contrary, to analyse when they become visible, how they conflate, to what extent and in which way. In particular, the narratives about the early reactions of the minority partner to the family of the majority partner highlights the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the majority and minority groups – and symbolically defines the moment at which the couple’s ‘alterity’ emerges as an ascribed social category from the perspective of the majority group. Through a qualitative exploration of partners’ narratives the article aims to shed light on how similar conflictual dynamics were found in the three countries analysed. The analysis of these dynamics not only questions the general theories according to which mixed marriages imply an erosion of ethnic, racial and religious boundaries and are thus conducive to the acceptance of minority groups by the majority community, but also deepens our understanding of the social perception of Muslim minorities in Europe and how Islamophobia is concretely shaped and impacts on the everyday life of these families.

Mixed couples and group boundaries: social perception and attitudes towards intermarriage

Scholars taking a quantitative approach have historically defined mixed couples as the ultimate marker of the integration or assimilation of a foreign partner into mainstream society, an indicator of the permeability of social boundaries and the highest proximity achieved between different social groups. These couples have been interpreted as indicating the weakening of fixed ethnic and racial boundaries and the overcoming of negative attitudes, as well as of the racial, cultural and religious stereotypes and prejudices prevailing among majority and minority groups (Davis, 1941; Gordon, 1964; Kalmijn, 1998; Merton, 1941; Safi, 2008; Voas, 2003). For these reasons, mixed couples are considered the ‘litmus test of assimilation’ (Alba and Nee, 2003: 90). For its part, qualitative research has approached mixed families mainly as a ‘social laboratory’ (Barbara, 1993) in which to observe the intercultural practices of family members, transmission and the challenges of parenting. The majority of research into religiously and ethnically mixed marriages has thus focused on couples’ interactions and parenting transmission as the main analytical dimensions in exploring how partners deal with their different heritage (Arweck and Nesbitt, 2010; Cerchiaro, 2016, 2019; Cerchiaro and Odasso, 2021; Collet, 2015; McCarthy, 2007; Odasso, 2016; Therrien and Le Gall, 2012; Varro, 2003). The two resulting bodies of literature have frequently not related to each other and have produced somehow parallel understandings about mixed families. Qualitative scholars, guided by a family-centred approach, have focused mainly on how family members negotiate their identities and, as a consequence, the social reactions to mixedness remain often underexplored, whereas quantitative research needs a deep understanding of the dynamics and difficulties a newly formed mixed couple can encounter with regard to its acceptance among the respective family networks.

In the last decade, the assumption that mixed marriages imply greater socio-cultural integration of the foreign partner and closer proximity of different social groups has therefore been contested. Scholars have problematised the complexity and multidirectional nature of the processes of integration (Cerchiaro, 2020; Cerchiaro et al., 2015; Collet, 2015; Osanami Törngren et al., 2016; Rodríguez-García, 2015; Song, 2009). In particular, some studies have demonstrated that mixed couples may encounter social discrimination, particularly from their respective families, who react to an intermarriage as a source of risk for the national identity and social cohesion (Collet and Santelli, 2012; Koelet and de Valk, 2016; Rodríguez-García et al., 2016; Song, 2009). The comparative research by Alba and Foner (2015) on mixed unions in six different countries in North America and Europe (Canada, the United States, France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands), suggests that religion and ‘specifically the exceptional position of Islam’ (Alba and Foner, 2015: 40) emerge as the most prominent markers of social division in Europe, while ‘race’ is the main divisive issue in the United States. In a similar vein to Alba and Foner’s findings, the qualitative research by Rodríguez-García et al. (2016) in Catalonia (Spain) found that ‘familial rejection is based on negative stereotypes and prejudices linked to the partner’s origin, phenotype, religion (in particular, Islam), gender, or social class (and often an intersecting combination of these factors)’ (Rodríguez-García et al., 2016: 539). The familial disapproval analysed by these researchers was found particularly in unions involving a Moroccan partner, suggesting that Islamophobia and negative attitudes towards Muslims are important elements that motivate the stronger opposition experienced by some mixed couples.

As these recent academic studies highlight, we still need a better in-depth understanding of the social impact of and reactions to mixedness in order to obtain a more complete picture of what it implies with regard to the relations between majority and minority groups. What does a mixed couple signify in terms of the prejudice and social perception of the majority group? Does this entail the erosion of prejudices and the inclusion of the minority partner in the majority group? Why do mixed couples with a Muslim partner apparently spark major social visibility and why are they considered more conflictual? With regard to gender, what are the implications if the Muslim is the male rather than the female partner? Focusing on the reaction of the majority partner’s family, the proposed analysis represents an attempt to focus on how the majority react to a marriage ‘outside’ their group. In so doing, the article addresses the issue of ‘attitudes towards intermarriage’ and seeks to contribute to the understanding of what a mixed marriage implies in terms of ethnic, racial and religious boundaries.

The study

Research contexts

The findings analysed in this article draw on data from three studies conducted between 2010 and 2019 ⁵ in Italy, France and Belgium. For the sake of synthesis and the focus on family reactions, the article does not discuss in depth the specificities of the three social contexts where the research took place. In France and Belgium, the formation of mixed couples is particularly influenced by the colonial history: for France, mostly the Maghreb and Northern Africa; for Belgium, Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Italy has a more recent migratory history (largely beginning in the 1990s) and mixed couples’ composition is not linked to a specific ethnic group from former colonies. What has affected these three countries similarly is the strong presence of anti-Muslim public discourses that have increased over the last two decades. In this regard, Italy, France and Belgium offer three meaningful contexts in which to study the social implications of, and the external reactions to, the formation of mixed couples. As highlighted by Allievi (2005), one of the paradoxes of today’s Europe concerns the transition from an ‘Islam in Europe’ to an ‘Islam of Europe’. This is creating a contradictory situation that could be summarised as ‘substantial integration, conflictual perception’ (Allievi, 2005: 9). Scholars have emphasised that unemployment in Europe is increasingly creating resentment towards immigrants in some countries; particularly towards Muslim minorities (Allievi, 2012; Croucher, 2013; Laurence and Vaisse, 2007; Meer, 2013). Drawing on an extensive survey that enquired into how ordinary people view Muslims in Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany, Statham (2016: 234) highlights how, due to the absence of an openly anti-Islamic party, in contrast to the continental countries, Britain presents a ‘low-level undifferentiated resentment expressed against Islam’. In France, Belgium and Italy, on the other hand, the rhetoric of the populist right-wing political parties (respectively Le Front National, Vlaams Belang, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia) has particularly targeted Muslim minorities as ‘the enemy within’ (Ribberink et al., 2017). Since 9/11 and subsequent acts of terrorism, these political statements have acquired greater legitimacy, creating both widespread anger and hatred directed at Muslim minorities (Cerchiaro, 2020; Cerchiaro and Odasso, 2021) and a general demand that they ‘identify with (…) the core values and norms’ (Statham and Tillie, 2016: 179) of the country of residence. In turn, these have direct consequences for social perceptions about mixed marriages, specifically those between native Europeans and migrant or second-generation Muslims (Allievi, 2012; Croucher, 2013; Gottschalk and Greenberg, 2008; Laurence and Vaisse, 2007; Meer, 2013).

Methods and participants

This article draws on qualitative interviews conducted during an 11-year (2010–2021) period of research fieldwork in Italy, France and Belgium. The three research projects ⁶ that I personally conducted share a focus on mixed families, where couples are characterised by one partner socialised into Islam (and with a migratory ancestry) and the other into Catholicism (with a European ancestry). Individual interviews were conducted with partners living in: the Veneto region, in Italy (40 couples), the metropolitan area of Paris, in France (20 couples), Antwerp, in the Flemish region (11 couples), and in the Brussels-Capital Region (15 couples), in Belgium. In total, I conducted 172 individual interviews and 43 joint interviews with the 86 couples involved.

A wide variety of data were collected, as the aims and scope of the three projects were different: couples’ intercultural practices, parenting, religious education, children’s ethnic and religious identifications, external reactions and social perceptions, political engagement, and social change through the activities of mixed couples associations. These topics are all connected with the wider aim of studying mixedness not only as something related to the familial microcosm, but also in terms of social reactions, as the perceptions of the couples reflect the close relationship between majority and minority social groups. In the current article, I focus on partners’ narratives that reveal experiences of conflicts or tensions. The issue of how the respective families and relatives reacted when the couple revealed their relationship was always inquired during the interviews, but only some of the interviewees reported having experienced negative reactions. Individual interviews were of an in-depth biographical nature, which refers to the ‘life story approach’, and, in particular, to the work done on ‘oral autobiographical narratives’ by Daniel Bertaux (1998), who uses the term récits de vie, and Franco Ferrarotti (1981), who uses the term storie di vita. Through the use of open-ended questions, this approach aims to shed light on ‘the interviewees’ world’ within their universe of meaning (Bertaux, 1998), in order to collect significant socio-historical fragments that are representative of a wider group of interviewees. I personally conducted all the interviews, which had an average duration of 2 hours. I was initially introduced to some interviewees through contact with Christian-Muslim couples’ associations. In order to vary the sample as much as possible, I then relied on snowball sampling, through contacts gathered with the help of Islamic associations, or through personal contacts with local migrant communities.

In view of the particularities of the Muslim presence in Italy, France and Belgium – characterised as it is by fragmented ethnic groups – the choice of the sample was not limited to couples where the migrant partner came from one particular ethnic-national group. ⁷ With regard to gender, 71 out of the total 86 couples are composed of a migrant man (or, in 11 cases, one of immigrant descent) and an Italian, Belgian or French woman. Thus, 15 of the 86 couples were composed of a migrant woman and an Italian, Belgian or French man. The imbalanced composition is due to the Quranic norm, which affects the orthopraxis and prohibits a Muslim woman from marrying a non-Muslim man. ⁸ This represents an inevitable limitation of the article; however, it does not claim to be representative of the totality of mixed couples, but rather to identify some recurrent issues in the reactions of the majority partners’ families. The issue of Muslim women marrying outside their religious group represents even more of a challenge, deserves a dedicated analysis, and is therefore not addressed extensively here. Muslim women indeed face much harsher opposition from their families, and their marriage outside the faith cannot be registered in Muslim countries unless the male partner officially presents a certificate of conversion to Islam. ⁹ With regard to religion, in 11 cases in the sample, one partner had converted to the other partner’s faith. In eight cases, it was the woman (majority group) who had converted to Islam. In two cases, the man (minority group) converted to Catholicism, and in just one case the man (majority group) converted to Islam.

Findings

How the family of the majority partner reacts to the newly formed couple

For the interviewees, revealing the relationship to their parents represented a pivotal moment, often narrated with particular emphasis. Sentences such as ‘Knowing what my parents are like, I was afraid to tell them’, open a dedicated ‘life chapter’ that sheds light on the social reactions to ‘mixedness’. Of the 86 couples interviewed, 58 explicitly reported ‘tensions’, ‘conflicts’ and ‘rejections’ concerning the family of the majority partner. Some 50 out of these 58 couples described having initially kept their romantic relationship hidden from their parents for fear of being rejected.

The focus here is accordingly on the negative reactions of the majority partner’s family. In particular, partners focused on the centrality of three factors that I analyse in the three following sub-sections: religion, social class and race-ethnicity.

Due to the necessity to synthesise the results, I provide a broad description of one or two of the most representative narratives for each of the factors analysed in the sub-sections, in order to present more elements for discussion. Obviously, these sub-sections allow deeper investigation of the three analytical dimensions that emerged as closely connected and often intertwined in the same couples’ narratives. Gender also emerged as another determinant variable, and is accordingly analysed across the three sections. By employing an intersectional approach I will thus see the connections and overlap among religion, social class and race-ethnicity.

Religion

Religious difference represents the symbolic dimension that often labels these couples, in both public and academic debate. The assumption that these partners are overexposed to conflicts because of religion is often misleading. As I have discussed elsewhere (Cerchiaro et al., 2015), most of the couples in fact did not report having experienced marital conflict because of religion. Instead, religious difference was reported as a ‘problem’ only in terms of their relationship with the social context. In particular, the strategies adopted by Muslim men to deal with the public discourse that often represents them as patriarchal and fundamentalist has clear repercussions on how minority Muslim men married to majority group women have to manage their masculinity (on this subject, see Cerchiaro, 2021). In a great variety of narratives, a demeaning opinion of Islam and of Muslim minorities emerges, particularly when the minority partner in the couple is the man. Comments about how these partners have to face the majority family’s stereotype of Muslim men as patriarchal and oppressive over women represent a recurrent conflictual dimension that exemplifies how Islamophobic rhetoric present in the public space in the three countries has a direct impact on these couples’ everyday life. In the provincial area of Northern Italy where one study took place, it emerged in a more clear-cut and often disruptive way. The hegemonic presence of the right-wing political party Lega and its openly anti-Muslims hate speech seems to have created a particularly hostile attitude towards Muslim migrants. Many of these issues are evident for example in Claudia and Jamal’s story. Above all, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, couples reported the increased stereotyping of Muslim men as violent and patriarchal, and a blurred overlapping between ethnicity and religious affiliation (e.g., ‘Moroccan’ often overlapped with ‘Muslim’). Although previous studies on mixed families highlight how the arrival of a child reduces tensions with the extended families (Cerchiaro, 2016; Le Gall and Meintel, 2015), the birth of children can also offer an opportunity to renew some tensions with the majority family due to their interference in educational decisions:

My parents still talk about my husband in the same way they did twenty years ago. Things have never changed. When you hear something bad on television concerning a Muslim man… because religion has now been added… in the beginning it was because he was the poor Moroccan… now it is because he is Muslim. So if the media report the news of a Muslim father who kills his daughter… they tell me ‘be careful because it could happen to you too’. If a Moroccan husband beats his wife… ‘be careful because it could happen to you too. They do this. It’s their culture’. […] The brainwash of the Lega Nord discourses really worked here (Claudia, 45, Italian woman married to Jamal)

Her family has always been against me. From the beginning. Because I was a Moroccan… and today because they hear a lot of bad things about Muslims. I’ve never had a good relationship with her parents, in short.… But they didn’t do it in front of me… but behind my back.… So then we maintained relations just enough to keep up appearances. Not more. (Jamal, 48, Moroccan man married to Claudia)

These narratives emphasise how Islam is instrumentally used to symbolically oppose the two cultural worlds represented by the partners. They also add recurrent references to the role played by the mass media in reinforcing the stereotypes against Muslim men.

Religion emerges to an even greater extent as a conflictual element between a couple and the majority partner’s family in the cases of religious conversion to Islam. In all the eight cases where the majority partner who had converted to Islam was the woman, conflicts occurred around the conversion and the relationship with the family. In some cases, the majority partners who converted to Islam decided to break off their relationship with their parents, at least initially, in order to protect the couple from family pressure. This was, for instance, the case for Elena, who converted to Islam during her engagement to Murad:

With my family it was a nightmare at first. I had to break off all relations with them because they didn’t accept I was going to convert. They said… ‘what are you doing? Is this the way we educated you?’… To them, I was betraying my culture. For my mother it was my husband who had brainwashed me… That’s why we had to distance ourselves and isolate from them. (Elena, 39, Italian woman married to Murad, 41, Moroccan)

Without entering into the specific issue of conversion, which is beyond the scope of the current article, it is sufficient here to report again how gender influences these reactions. When majority women describe having converted to Islam, this was reported as a ‘real’ conversion followed by a daily observance of Islamic religious practices and strong opposition from, and conflicts with, their families. In the two cases where the majority partner who converted to Islam was the man, these conversions were declared to be ‘fake’ and described as merely instrumental, in order ‘to be able to register as a married couple in the Muslim country of the minority partner’ (Mario, 44, Italian man married to Soraya, 42, Moroccan) and ‘to satisfy her Muslim family, who were worried about their daughter marrying a non-Muslim’ (Dries, 34, Belgian man married to Ünseli, 32, Turkish). In these two cases, the men did not report any conflict with their families, neither of which opposed the marriage.

Social class

In all, 32 out of 58 couples, equally distributed in the three countries, reported having experienced a clear rejection of their relationship due to the difference in their socio-economic status. The moment of ‘coming out’ when they told their parents about their partner was described as a ‘fracture’. Often, the radical opposition to the couple caused an early break in the relationship between the couple and the majority partner’s family. My findings suggest in particular that these situations occur when the minority partner with a lower socio-economic status is the man, while such conflicts are not reported when it is the woman. Indeed, the Muslim women I interviewed did not report having experienced particular problems with the parents of the majority partner. In this regard, the story of Mohammed (47, Moroccan) and Giovanna (46, Italian) is particularly representative, as it offers an archetypical example of the opposition similar to that experienced by many of the other interviewed couples. Their life story allows us to analytically highlight the phases of the relationships between the couple and the majority partner’s family, and to analyse in greater depth a major underlying issue: the relevance of the socio-economic gap between partners.

Mohammed arrived alone in a city in Northern Italy at 18 years of age with a low level of education and with no financial support from his parents in Morocco. He initially found a job as a worker in a waste disposal cooperative. When he started dating Giovanna, she was a university student and came from a middle-class family of entrepreneurs. Giovanna explained how her relationship with Mohammed was initially a simple friendship that did not cause any problem for her parents. What triggered the conflict was the changing nature of the relationship, from a friendship into a romantic attachment. Giovanna said,

In the beginning, Mohammed came to my house like all my other friends. Without any problems for my parents. Then when my parents understood there was something more than just a friendship everything changed. They ‘closed the door’… they didn’t want to know anything. They just said ‘NO’. It was a prohibition. ‘You must no longer date him’. They put it like this, very harshly.

As confirmed by other scholars (Luke, 2003; Odasso, 2016), couples react to initial hostility by strengthening their relationship and protecting it in a way that is often directly proportional to the strength of the initial reaction:

Because initially they didn’t want me to see Mohammed, I reacted in the opposite way, by pointing out that ‘No… I will continue my relationship at any cost’… I was furious and I threatened to leave home and not talk to them anymore. So I kept dating him in open opposition to my parents: ‘I will see him even if you don’t want me to. You have to know this’. Then I said: ‘But as Catholics you should be open to migrants and then, in the end, you are so racist’.… For a long time, however, we [Giovana and her parents] didn’t have any relationship, or rarely, and just with me. And it was no longer allowed to talk about my relationship with Mohammed. It had become a taboo. For them, I had betrayed their expectations for me.

Giovanna went on to explain the reasons for this strong opposition:

When we were just simply friends there were no problems, but when they realised that we were a couple, everything changed. It was really something related to the fact that he was ‘the Moroccan’. They said, you know… ‘the Moroccan is the beggar’. For them… they were scared above all because he had no security, economically speaking. ‘What are you going to do with him?’ ‘But do you realise that he lives on charity?’ This is what they told me millions of times. ‘He has nothing. He lives off charity’. Because it was true… he lived in a place run by a charity at that time and, in this sense, was not self-sufficient. So… for them this was… inconceivable.

Therefore, it is meaningful that the conflict arose when a friendship turned into an emotional relationship. At this moment, Giovanna’s parents realised the ‘risk’ that Mohammed could enter their ‘family circle’. Thus, Giovanna highlighted an aspect that helps us to understand the clash between majority and minority groups. Sociologically interesting, it was the betrayal of their expectations concerning their daughter. The gap in the socio-economic status and the different level of education emerged at the heart of the parents’ disapproval. Ethnicity was indeed presented in degrading terms associated with the stigma of the Moroccan as a beggar (in Italian, the word vucumprà was used, indicating a street vendor). Social class thus emerged as the point of conflict: the Moroccan is a vucumprà, a person who ‘lives off charity’. The demonstration that this was the ‘difference’ that triggered the first strong opposition from their parents was proved, according to Giovanna, by the transformation in Mohammed’s life:

There was a gradual acceptance and a pacification… he worked so hard and he started earning money. And this had a big influence on my parents… they saw that he bought his first car… which I used too. Then he rented his first apartment… so they started accepting the relationship.… after he started working and they saw the effort he was making to buy a house, also for me,… they started including him in the family celebrations as well. Dinners, lunches… and that was the sign that they had accepted him. (Giovanna, 46, Italian woman)

The pacification process between the couple and Giovanna’s family started with the demonstration that the partner had ‘worked so hard’ and had acquired a degree of economic stability (the purchases of a car, and later a house, become symbols of social mobility in the eyes of Giovanna’s parents). In his narrative, Mohammed highlighted even more the centrality of the social class gap in the initial strong opposition from Giovanna’s parents:

The reason for them being strongly opposed at the beginning had nothing to do with the fact that I was a Muslim.… One episode more than anything else was significant. At the beginning of our relationship, Giovanna’s parents came to where I was living, a Catholic Institute that hosted migrants. They talked to me with the priest who was the director of the Institute. All of us together. It was very tough. They put pressure on the priest, too. And during this meeting they tried to convince me to stop. The director said to me: ‘she is a good girl from a wealthy family .’… You know, her parents wanted a doctor for her. Not me. For them I was not worthy of her, you know, a Moroccan.… I was determined to continue the relationship with her, so I kept dating her. For years I didn’t go to her house… it was always difficult, especially for her father to admit that their daughter who had studied at university, for whom they had great expectations, was in a relationship with a Moroccan who had nothing.… It took a long time, when I found a job, a car, I bought a house, I started to demonstrate that I was able to achieve something… then things improved and I was ‘admitted in the family’. (Mohammed, 47, Moroccan)

The narrated episode amply reflects the power imbalance between the majority and the minority groups: the hegemonic context (the director who hosted Mohammed in the Catholic institute), the pressures of the Italian family on the relationship (Giovanna’s parents put pressure on the director to discourage the continuation of the relationship), the structural weakness of the foreign partner (Mohammed was economically dependent on the institute) and the role of social class in disapproving of the relationship (‘she is a good girl from a wealthy family’). The achievement of a certain economic independence facilitated the rapprochement with Giovanna’s family: the purchase of a car, a stable job position and buying a house were all factors that made Mohammed become the breadwinner in the eyes of his wife’s family. This story is particularly representative of those couples where the man was an economic migrant, seeking an improved standard of living in the new country. Conversely, in the cases where the male minority partner was of immigrant descent and his family was more settled in the new country, the socio-economic gap was smaller and so were the conflicts due to it.

Race-ethnicity

The issue of race ¹⁰ and ethnicity emerged in the stories of 44 out of 58 couples as another relevant factor at the centre of the conflictual reaction of majority families. The fact that most of the couples who mentioned this were composed of an African migrant partner (or one of African ancestry) implies that being part of an ethnic minority ¹¹ was intertwined with visibility due to skin colour. It is indeed clear in my findings, in line with Song’s (2018) research in the United Kingdom, that the overlap of race, ethnicity and religion often makes the analytical division of these categories problematic. I try here to analyse how racial and ethnic differences were found to be relevant in couples’ life stories. The sense of ‘social disapproval’ reported by ‘white-black’ interracial couples due to the partners’ different skin colour emerged, in some narratives, as intertwined with the stereotypes concerning some specific ethnic groups depicted in subordinated and demeaning terms by the majority group. Partners with a dark phenotype in my group of participants (those from Mauritania, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Bangladesh) reported that skin colour represented an element of ‘disapproval’ or ‘suspicion’ when they first met their partners’ families. Particularly in Flanders (Belgium) and in the Veneto Region (Italy) couples refer to openly racist statements made by the majority family, while in France these episodes were reported as less explicit, even though still present. Again, gender and class emerge as relevant connected variables. When the minority partner was a man with a lower socio-economic status, the opposition discussed was indeed stronger than for couples who shared a similar status.

This was the case for Leen and Asad. When they first met in Belgium, Leen was a 20-year-old university student from a middle-class family and Asad was a 27-year-old Gambian man with a lower socio-economic status and a lower standard of education. He first migrated to the Netherlands to join his brother and then moved to northern Belgium. When he met Leen and they fell in love, the initial strong opposition by Leen’s family induced the couple to move to Gambia for a year:

For my parents, the problem was that he was completely different from what they wanted. First of all, because he was black… and my parents didn’t want a black man in the family. ‘It is what it is’ they told me. The problem was that he was simply too different from what they expected. And the opposition was so great because there were three things they didn’t like, and they told me in this order clearly: ‘we don’t want him because he is black, he is Muslim, and he is a ‘down-and-out’ ’… he was not the lawyer they wanted… He was the complete opposite. He was black, non-Christian and poor. If I had married a Belgian white man there wouldn’t have been any ‘problems’. But the fact that I was going to marry a black man, a Muslim, a ‘down-and-out’… was something that shocked them. I heard everything in that period… about black Muslim men being terrorists, polygamous, invaders…So we married alone, in the municipality. And then we moved to Gambia for a year because we didn’t want to live surrounded by this disapproval. (Leen, 48, Belgian married to Asad, Gambian)

We can see here how the intertwining of class, race, ethnicity and religion is recalled to produce a sum of perceived distances between the majority family and the minority partner that results in the stronger rejection of these relationships. In the case of Leen and Asad, the negative reaction based on the stereotype of black Muslim men ‘invading Europe’ by marrying local women was so strong and persistent that the couple left Belgium to live in Gambia for a year after their marriage.

The couples who share a high educational level and/or the same social class did not report a strong rejection, even if the skin colour of the minority partner and the demeaning status attributed to their ethnic group caused a degree of disapproval and discontent within the majority family. This was the case for Amir and Amélie, a Moroccan-French couple who met as students at university in Paris:

My mother was a maths teacher and my father taught French. They both pushed me to come here. And they knew I could meet a French girl… it was something absolutely normal for them… But, for Amélie’s parents, at the end… I am not white French upper class. I am Moroccan, even though I studied here in France at the university. So the fact that we met at the university, that we both had a degree and we shared a lot… was important… because her parents knew I was a highly-educated man and so on… But still the fact that I was not from here, that I was not a real French man, that I was a Moroccan… it made a difference.… They were not that happy in the beginning… I still feel I have to prove more than a ‘normal couple’, that I am a good boyfriend, husband… for her parents.… This is the point. I have to prove that I am not ‘like the other Moroccans’… I had to face their stereotypes about Muslim men, do you understand? (Amir, 33, Moroccan married to Amélie)

It is true that my parents were a bit disappointed… they were not happy in the beginning. It would have been different for my parents if he hadn’t been… if he had been white, Catholic… French… this is also because I was the daughter. And they were more worried… they had this idea in mind that Moroccan men are more oppressive with women and so on. (Amélie, 33, French married to Amir)

Amir mentioned his parents’ educational level to suggest there had already been a degree of proximity between him and Amélie. Moreover, Amir stated that his parents were conscious that the choice of sending him to study in Paris could lead him to meet a French girl, and that this was not a problem for his family. By contrast, he perceived a certain disapproval due to his skin colour (even if they did not experience any open conflicts) from his wife’s parents.

Conclusions

Mixed couples composed of a Muslim and a non-Muslim partner represent a microcosm through which to study majority-minority group boundaries and question the assumption that mixed marriages are the ‘litmus test of assimilation’ (Alba and Nee, 2003: 90) and imply by definition the lessening of ethnic, racial and religious prejudices between majority and minority groups. My qualitative analysis, indeed, suggests that certain types of mixedness, such as the one at the centre of this study, still highlight the presence of strong social barriers. These couples might be more often the agent that, over time, produces this lessening of social boundaries rather than the consequence of an already accomplished process of erosion of prejudice and a symbol of the closest proximity achieved between majority and minority groups.

The analysis, thus, deepens our knowledge of how social boundaries work, particularly when the two groups meet at the beginning of a ‘mixed’ relationship. Results not only illustrate the intertwined factors underlying the conflicts and the opposition to the relationships, but also provide some information about their gender implications. The disapproval was reported in particular by couples where the Muslim man belonging to the minority group had a lower socio-economic status, demonstrating how the centrality of social class difference represents a major cause determining the initially strong opposition to a relationship. The role played by the rise of male status in the subsequent pacification process testifies to how these conflicts are triggered by the fear for the majority family of losing ‘social prestige’ through the marriage of their daughter to a man with a lower status. The findings generally suggest that partners who belong to similar social classes and have a similar educational background are less likely to experience initial conflicts with the majority family. These similar dynamics reveal that to share the same social class downplays the role/perception of other differences regarding race, ethnicity and religion. It is also important to note that a closer contact with the foreign spouse has a positive impact on eroding the individual and the families’ prejudices over time.

Although some research indicates that the racial boundary works as a stronger barrier of social division in the United States, while religion – and particularly Islam – is indicated as ‘equally prominent’ in Europe (Alba and Foner, 2015: 40), other research highlights how Islam can also be racialised (Meer, 2013; Rodríguez-García et al., 2016). As Song (2018: 1141) states: ‘many analysts continue to conceive of anti-Muslim sentiments and actions as having an exclusively religious basis, as opposed to being, as Meer (2013) argues, co-constituted with race’. My results highlight how social class, religion, race and ethnicity relate to one another and must be seen in their mutual relations as socially constructed categories. This inter-dependence emerges as an essential element in explaining how the ‘alterity’ of the couple is socially constructed. Islam is indeed not only ‘racialised’, as already highlighted by Meer (2013) among others, but also ‘gendered’ in the co-construction of the stereotype of the Muslim man. The findings confirm Song’s results in the UK context, where Muslims are ‘subject to demeaning discourses and stereotypes in which the distinctions between racial, religious, and ethnic inflections are often quite blurred’ (Song, 2018: 1141), and results for Catalonia (Rodríguez-García, 2015: 19), where ‘looking Muslim’ becomes a synonym for ‘a low-status racial attribute […] associated with negative stereotypes and prejudices’ and ‘Muslimness’ emerges as a blurred marker of religious and ethnic ‘otherness’. A stereotypical image of the Muslim man as oppressive, violent and unreliable was reported as a dominant stigmatisation experienced by the couples at the very first stage of their relationship. Although reported with particular emphasis by couples living in Italy and Belgium, similar narratives referring to Islamophobia and racism suggest that in these European countries the majority group still perceive these marriages as a threat for the social prestige of the majority family. The partners’ stories, indeed, underline how ‘race’ still constitutes a central element that – above all if associated with a lower-class status – motivates the disapproval of the couple by the majority group. This finding endorses what is also found in Therrien’s (2020) research on Muslim-non-Muslim families in Morocco, confirming that it is not the black/white racial boundary or the religious difference per se that automatically explains the negative attitudes towards these mixed couples, but their intersection with social class and gender. Gender transversally represents a significant variable, since the majority group particularly opposes the couple when the Muslim partner is the man rather than the woman. It reveals how the female majority partner has to face judgement and claims of control over her romantic choice, as well as a ‘sense of betrayal’ of parents’ expectations. Similarly, although these reactions were not analysed in the current article, Muslim women did not report having experienced opposition from the majority partner’s family, but instead, more often from their own family. This suggests that the marital choice of a daughter is much more subject to control by her family than that of a son, and for this reason it more readily triggers conflict if she marries a member of a racialised social group who has a lower socio-economic status.

The limitations of this study are extensively reported in the methodology section. In order to focus on the majority family’s reaction, a number of relevant issues and implications were omitted: the reaction of the minority family to the formation of the couple, as well as the variable of a second-generation Muslim married to a non-Muslim, and the relationships between the couple and their wider social networks (friends, religious leaders, educational institutions, etc.). Further analysis of these issues is suggested in order to complete the complex puzzle that makes mixedness a meaningful indicator of the relationships between majority and minority groups, and this would allow us to better understand the multidimensionality and controversies of integration processes.