When sharing religion is not enough: A transregional perspective on marriage,piety,and the intersecting scales of identity transmission among female converts to Islam in mixed unions

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork conducted among converts to Islam (France and Quebec), this article focuses on women who are in unions with partners of Muslim background. As these women commit to make a union based on shared religious identity, they face the double challenge of learning to be a Muslim and of transmitting identity to the children. Addressing these issues opens a space of ongoing negotiations within the couple (sometimes involving the in-laws) over the definition of the ‘authentic’ Islam, and the articulation between religion and ethnicity. These conjugal debates create new areas of mixedness through women’s own identification processes as Muslim and French or Quebecois. This negotiation is framed by the social and cultural capital each partner is granted in their specific context of living, including experiences of having minority status, as well as by the specific representations each partner draws on the ethnicity and space of origin of the other.

Introduction

Common stereotypes around women’s conversion to Islam revolve around the narrative of an innocent Western woman eager for a romantic love affair who falls victim to the charms of a handsome but morally oppressive Arabic man. However, my fieldwork among female converts to Islam in Quebec and in France since 2006 reveals a different and more nuanced story. I have met just as many women who became Muslim before meeting their Muslim partner as I have women who embraced Islam as a result of their encounter with a Muslim-background man (i.e. a man from a Muslim lineage), sometimes for the sake of being accepted by their in-laws (some of whom are squarely opposed to the mixed unions). Nevertheless, whether they embraced Islam before or after meeting their partner, most female converts I met abide by a strict view on Islam ¹ and do get married to a Muslim-background man (usually of Maghrebi descent) under the assumption that the latter will be more proficient in Islam and therefore will be able to train them in religious principles and practices. Whereas both partners see conversion as a strategy to negotiate their mixedness and to favor smooth identity transmission to their kids, sharing religion does not flatten the discrepancy within the couple regarding ethnic background.

For all new Muslims I met, identity is a core issue. Their Muslim identity unfolds around the challenges of transmission and recognition: first, the identity transmission that, in Islam, is mostly the mother’s duty and often involves women’s change of religion; second, the constant challenge of legitimizing their belonging to Islam and conformity to Islamic identity. It follows that the recognition of converts’ Muslimness derives from their capacity to transmit Islamic identity to their children. In this article, I approach both challenges that converts face through the social practices and relationships that they develop in order to negotiate their new identity in the context of the mixed unions they contract with Muslim-background partners. By drawing on fieldwork among female converts to address the issue of mixed unions, I broach the problem of mixedness from the other way around. In this regard, I use mixedness as a heuristic device (Collet and Philippe, 2008; Varro, 2003) that allows me to examine relationships between Muslim-background and convert partners, but also to understand the emergence of an alternative way of being Muslim when identity heritage and identity choice are not aligned. I will show how the identity project these women build for their children exemplifies this process as well as the different markers and strategies they invest in their way of being.

For the female new Muslims who are in mixed unions, the double challenge of learning to be a Muslim and of transmitting identity to the children at the same time opens a space of ongoing negotiations within the couple (sometimes involving the in-laws) over the definition of the ‘authentic’ Islam. Negotiations are all the more complexified that they encompass issues related to the status of women and gender relationships in Islam that resonate differently with partners according to their previous socialization process. Since these conjugal debates revolve around the articulation between religion and ethnicity, they create new areas of mixedness through women’s own identification processes as Muslim and French or Quebecois. This negotiation is, however, framed by the social and cultural capital each partner is granted in their specific context of living, including experiences of having minority status and to some extend being stigmatized or marginalized.

Mixed unions and conversion to Islam: conceptual framework

Sociologist Beate Collet defines mixedness in reference to the specific social order and norms that prevail in a given setting, but also by taking into account ‘the intricate power relations that bring culture into play (nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, language), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, gender, age, migration, social belonging and state politics’ (2017: 144). All such factors build and feed inequalities in terms of socio-economic status and social prestige or economic, cultural and social capital, depending on the sociopolitical context in which the individual lives. In other words, they impact the individual’s resources tied to his social networks and belongings, as well as the cultural skills (habitus) and professional recognition he usually acquires through family transmission (Bourdieu, 1979). Mixedness is therefore a social, cultural, and political construct. The literature shows that mixedness entails tensions between the intersectional discrepancies couples are exposed to, and the decisions they have to make regarding their conjugal lives and their kids’ education. Along with most authors, Collet (2015), as well as Rodríguez-García (2006), emphasize that mixed unions are embedded in complex cultural, historical, social, and political backgrounds and conditions related to gender, social class, and personal experience with migration. Just as in assimilation theory, the culture conflict hypothesis between two partners has been abandoned in favor of more nuanced views of each partner’s identity decisions. While Le Gall and Meintel (2015) and their team in Quebec (Canada) observe that each parent tends to transmit their own cultural referents so as to equip the children to let them ‘choose later’, Rodríguez-García (2006) finds in Spain that mixed unions entail processes of negotiation over each partner’s cultural background and situation. Collet (2015) labels these arrangements ‘intercultural modes of conjugal adjustment’, and she distinguishes the following three types: the minority partner adjusts to the dominant culture, the majority partner adjusts to the minority culture, or both partners seek an intercultural balance.

These ‘intercultural modes of cultural adjustments’ are substantially complexified when one of the spouse converts to his partner’s religion, thereby balancing the identity negotiations with his or her own path of religious change (Buckser and Glazier, 2003). Empirical literature on conversion has emphasized how changing religion is a gradual, personal, and social process that encompasses various stages (Rambo, 1993) as opposed to the Christian theological view that has long-dominated representations on conversion as a sudden and sometimes dramatic event. While Christian conversion is built as a break-up and complete transformation of identity and self-perception, conversion to Islam is framed in line and continuity with personal life pathway and identity construction (Le Pape, 2009). In this perspective, Islam is experienced as a new paradigm that aims at improving the self by aligning him or her with what they consider as the truth (Mossière, 2012). According to empirical studies, embracing Islam situates converts in an intermediate situation where they have to gain new legitimacy among their group of origin (family, nation) who see them as betrayers, and among the Muslim community (partner, in-laws, coreligionists) who sees them as neophytes (Le Pape et al., 2017; McGinty, 2006; Van Nieuwkerk, 2006) in a broad context where Western and Muslim identities are presented as incompatible. Betwixt and between both belongings, converts face the challenge of building an identity that is recognizable by both groups (Muslim and non-Muslim), usually by breaking down ethnicity and religion and reassessing their interplay (Galonnier, 2015; Jensen, 2008; Mossière, 2010; Özyürek, 2014). In this regard, mixed unions form an intimate space where this identity is built and played out on an everyday basis and where the negotiations of the identity issues regarding recognition and transmission are best exemplified (Puzenat, 2015). Literature still needs to explore more in-depths the complexities of these identities and the dynamic way they are constantly revisited, on symbolic and social terms, along with the gradual path of converts into their new religion.

Converting to Islam in France and in Quebec: comparing contexts

The research was conducted in Quebecois and French contexts that have much in common. While both settings count Muslim minorities, states have enacted no specific rules to regulate mixed unions. As Therrien and Le Gall (2017) have shown for Quebec, the secular context allows the individualization of religious choices and family models in such a way that the religious transmission relies on the parents. The same is true in France (Puzenat, 2015). This situation paves the way for negotiations between partners and for original construction of identity references and experience. While mixedness is sometimes seen in terms of power or agency differential (including suspicion of white and gray marriages by migration legal authorities), minorities are even more of an issue because they are seen as putting social cohesion at risk. It follows that national contexts do not affect mixed unions’ identity projects as much as how such projects play out. Nevertheless, French and Quebecois contexts also differ regarding management of diversity, treatment of Muslim populations, postcolonial history, and the civic status of foreign partner (Lavoie, 2016; Venel, 2004). As a settler society, Quebec is more likely to show a higher degree of pluralism and openness to diversity, although tolerance also tends to increase in France as a result of the multiple waves and generations of migrants and effects of globalization (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008). Still, by and large, mixedness is more positively valued in Quebec than it is in France. This reflects each context’s politics regarding the management of religious diversity. In Quebec, the ‘intercultural model’ is designed so as to include cultural differences (provided a few core collective values are respected like democracy, French language, equity between men and women) while the French ‘republicanist’ view on social integration has historically aimed at consolidating the process of nation building (Noiriel, 2016). As a result, conditions of ‘becoming national’ in both countries are more restricted in France than in Quebec.

Yet, collective debates on the role of migrant populations in the construction of Quebecois collective identity have recently led the politics of othering in Quebec and in France to converge (Brodeur, 2008). Until the 2000s, Quebecois considered Islam more as the identity of strangers (similarly to Hindus, etc.) because Quebec had no particular colonial history with Muslim populations. France, meanwhile, has had past experiences of conquest and competition with Muslim populations and has traditionally made Muslim people into the ultimate figure of Otherness (Mossière, 2016). In the last decade, however, in the course of public debates influenced by overall tensions over the presence of Muslim population in Western countries, Islam has turned into a stigmatized religion associated with many stereotypes regarding women’s subjugation (Benhadjoudja, 2017). The representations that news and social media circulate within public imagination have now made their way into Quebec through public policy, such as the Bill 21 officially on state secularism (laicité) that forbids any religious symbols for civil servants in contact with public in government institutions since 2019. In conclusion, while discourses of social and political belonging may be discriminatory in both settings, it is usually less vehement in Quebec where the Canadian multicultural context as well as the local history make the country rely to a perhaps greater extent on immigration. Although these social and political considerations are central to understanding new converts’ narratives, my demonstration is more focused on the subjective representations and experiences that converts build around these living conditions rather than on their objective features.

A few words on ethnographic fieldwork

The long-term ethnographic project I have been conducting in France and in Quebec since 2006 focuses on converts to Islam (Mossière, 2013). It started in 2006 when I did my first interviews and observations among women who had embraced Islam. When I finished the first phase of the research in 2008, I had interviewed 78 women (40 in France and 38 in Quebec). Interestingly, the majority of them were below 30; among them, 62 were or had been involved in a mixed union (29 in France and 33 in Quebec) and two French women were married with a convert man. This first phase of the research has been completed by a longitudinal approach including case studies with some women in mixed union with whom I stayed in touch through email or social media. I also met 15 of them for a second interview between 2016 and 2019 (seven women in France and eight in Quebec). Whereas in the first phase of the project, only 38 women (out of 78) were mothers, especially due to the young age of my respondents, in the second phase of the project, eight of the 15 women I met had had children since our first encounter. This article deals with the total of 46 (out of 78) new Muslims who are mothers in my data.

Most of the women I focus on were married with men of Maghrebi descent (mostly Algerian in France and Moroccan in Quebec), with some of them being born in France, and all of them being first generation migrants in Quebec. Others who are more into the Sufi branch of Islam have partners of West African background. In Quebec, a few converts have also entered unions with men from the Mashrek region; some had children from previous unions with non-Muslims, which sometimes complicated the couple relationship as well as the identity transmission. The women who embraced Islam after entering into a relationship recounted varied narratives of their first contact with their partner, such as meeting at work or chatting in the subway or during a rideshare. Women who embraced Islam before getting married faced more barriers to finding a partner given that their interpretation of their new religion prevents them from socializing with men ² and that their non-Muslim family cannot arrange dates as it occurs in traditional Islamic settings. For those women, their close social circle mediates potential partners. For example, either the imam at the mosque identifies two compatible partners or the convert’s female friends ask their own husband to spread the word in their male social environment that there is a new Muslim seeking marriage. In addition to a few Internet sites that arrange virtual dates, I have found a Quebecois association that organizes speed dating between Muslim men and women on the basis of the affinities they highlight through questionnaires completed prior to the activity. Their Muslim background partners display a variety of understandings and relationship to their inherited religion, including non-practice. The converts women are usually more rigorous in their religious practice although the latter may vary according to the interpretation of Islam they abide by, which include Sufism (a handful of my respondents), Salafism (slightly less than half of my data), and progressive itjihadis (more or less half of my data; Saeed, 2007). This discrepancy usually impacts the couple relationship as well as its sustainability, with 22 women (above 78) who had divorced at least once when I had met them in 2006–2008; most of them having contracting another union with a more strict Muslim partner.

While in the first phase of the project, interviews dealt with the women’s path to conversion, learning process of Islam, construction of gendered identity as well as relationship to French and Quebecois society, the interviews I conducted 12 years later were open and addressed the progression of the converts’ paths within and with their religion as well as their current concerns. As they were framed in the interviews, the latter usually dealt with the gradual stabilization of their identification in Islam and status within the Muslim community, including in-laws and husbands, as well as with the issue of children’s education in relationship to their environment. I quickly observed that for most women, identity construction and transmission were the core issue, which led them to build a variety of family strategies in relation to geographical and social space and transregional circulation.

Delineating exclusive religious identity to contain ethnic mixedness

Revisiting religious mixedness

Many couples see women’s conversion to Islam as an asset to control mixedness, as well as the intersectional identities it might involve. In fact, for the women I met, religion governs many behaviors and references related to conjugality and parentality: couples’ everyday lives (and the management of conflicts), relationship to maternity, desire for having children, and values orienting children’ education. In this respect, the narratives I collected reveal a consensus regarding the referents used in identity transmission: the children’s first names are Muslim, young boys are circumcised, kids have Muslim affiliation and they are shown religious practices, like hygienic and dress habits, and family values are attributed to Islam (modesty, respect, and care for elders, etc.). This consensus relies on the religious views the parents share. Sarah ³ (30, married for 2 years) who comes from the south of France lives in Paris with her husband from Algeria. She recounts that when they got married, her partner sketched a circle in the sand and pointed to the interior of the circle to indicate Islam and that their relationship should evolve within this perimeter. This gesture conveyed a sense of security that nothing contrary to Islam would occur or be admitted between them. Should one of them infringe upon these rules and go outside of the circle, the other would be allowed to call it to attention: ‘Hey, you’re not abiding by your duty’. Sarah then added that since the two of them have a strong and explosive ‘Latino’ temperament, when they begin to argue they tend to stop debating after a while for fear of hurting the other. Above all, though, she says that they catch themselves in order to avoid saying something that could displease Allah.

For many of my informants, smoothing out the relational bumps attributed to their mixedness is then a question of developing competencies in Islam. For converts who have not been socialized in Islam, entering into unions with Muslim-background partners is a strategy for learning Arabic (the language of the Holy scriptures), religious rituals (how to pray, etc.) and their underlying beliefs, as well as for leading their everyday life in an Islamic way. They also hope to find a sort of emulation in the religious practice. Yet, since most of them need to develop their own social circle and long for a sort of autonomy in Islam, they fish for information about the religion on the Internet and are very active in associative life, especially within mosques where they attend ‘lessons on Islam’ given by preachers who can offer cultural and human capital stemming from their knowledge in Islam. In such associative environments, new converts find spaces where Islamic orthodoxy and renewal are conveyed and they are enabled to embrace a meticulous, cognitive, and scriptural knowledge of Islam that often impels them to develop strict views of Islam and its prescriptions. It so happens that when new converts share their newfound knowledge and practices with reaffiliated Muslims (i.e. people who, being born but not socialized in Islam decide to commit to their religion), they tend to be viewed as overly zealous. This tendency for religious orthodoxy that has been documented in the literature on conversion (McGinty, 2006; Özyürek, 2014) also results from social pressure and control, as well as from the mutual emulation of Islamic performance that the inner circle of Muslim practitioners convey as the common goal of being a ‘good Muslim’.

This learning process is also driven by the couple’s education strategy for their children because many of them aim at transmitting religious values and practices by being an example. For women who have not been socialized in Islam, the transmission project then becomes the site of an outdoing of Islamic performance based on the perfect Islamic doxa. The latter draws on interpretations of Islamic binary domains of purity/impurity that convey a view of Muslim identity as a pure, ahistorical, and decontextualized belonging that is deprived of any local cultural references.

Delineating new tensions

While conversion allows mixedness to be subsumed into a social construction of sameness that is based on the exclusivity of one’s religious identity, identity formation and transmission do not happen free from confusion and tension between religion and ethnicity. While both referents may overlap in some ways, the possibility of their convergence has become a site of ongoing debate over their interpretation and dissociation for most couples. Observations show how mixedness is negotiated around cultural traits whose Islamic dimension is constantly questioned and discussed. For example, when it comes to naming a new-born child, one of the first steps in transmitting Muslim identity, many converts are very careful not to give simply an Arabic name but instead a Muslim name (chosen among the 99 names of Allah). Their Muslim-background partners, by contrast, do not tend to make such a distinction. The same attention is given to initiation rituals when, for example, new Muslims want to whisper the call to prayer (al-Adhâne) into their infant’s ear as is prescribed in the Sunna. They might also adamantly oppose their in-laws who wish to perform various rituals regarding protection from evil eye, like moving the baby above smoke for example. Narratives of family life reveal a variety of zones of tension around the duties of each partner and the distribution of parental tasks. For example, how engaged should the father be in their children’s education? Is the woman allowed to do activities besides taking care of the household? Should a woman work, and what is she allowed to do with her income if she has? The interplay between interpretations of common religion and the role of cultural practices in everyday life around which such questions revolve, as well as animated discussions about them within couples, reveal the power relations inherent to claims by Muslim-background partners regarding their level of religious competence (acquired from being raised in a Muslim environment) versus by new Muslims’ affirmations about their knowledge of ‘authentic Islam’ (acquired through reading the sacred texts). Many women associate these issues with Muslimness following their learning process of Islam that, as I explained earlier, relies heavily on the spaces of sociability they share with other converts and where they are exposed to a strong sense of imitation and pressure of conformity in religious practices. Nevertheless, these social circles also allow new Muslims to take some distance and gain autonomy from their husband’s influence over Islamic premises.

Many women report how disappointed they became as they sensed their husbands behaved in a chauvinistic manner, or as they seemed to be too lax regarding conformity to Muslim practices and Islamic prescriptions. In France and Quebec, more than half of the converts who are mothers presented their partners as non-practitioners, at least when they met and some of them committed to return to Islam after marriage. Some women first got married with men they qualify as non-practitioners before breaking up and turning to more pious partners. Interestingly, more than half of the women I met developed their own religious practice independently of their partners, or even by opposing them. The women relate their partners’ ways of being to a ‘cultural Islam’ or Islam from the ‘bled’ that they devalue as a form of corruption of the ‘true Islam’ that they practice themselves. In such conflicts, the issue revolves around each partner’s legitimacy in Islam. Within the couple, this is best exemplified in a mantra common among new Muslims: ‘Luckily, I discovered Islam before meeting Muslims’. As they ascribe a local ethno-religious identity to their spouse, women distinguish themselves by self-identifying as merely ‘Muslim’, suggesting thereby, a pure and essential identity purged from local referents. Such struggle over the definition of Islam and its ethnic charge often triggers a matrimonial trajectory wherein new Muslim women work hard to bring their Muslim-background partner into religious practices that conform with their interpretation of Islamic tenets. The ones who fail in this task usually choose to divorce and contract a union with another Muslim man who, being prone to a more literal reading of Islam, is quite often a second-generation immigrant who reverted to Islam after being raised in a non-religious lifestyle. In this context, couple’s trajectories are rarely linear. Nathalie, 27, married for 2 years, who lives in Quebec, first got married with a man from Morocco with whom she has two children. Since her partner only reluctantly abided by Islamic practices, she divorced him and contracted a union with a practicing man of Algerian descent. The couple then had twins, all the while taking care of the two children from Nathalie’s previous marriage.

While narratives attribute tensions around the interpretation of Islam between new Muslims and Muslim-background partners to ethnicity, they actually draw on social class, gender structure, educational background, authority models, and categories of identification in Islam. Indeed, many women report that relations within the couple may vary according to their partner’s region of origin (Maghreb, Mashrek, or West Africa), divergence in educational background (which depends on socio-economic status differentials), and the role of kinship regarding pressures and expectations in identity transmission. Sarah, who is married with a practicing Muslim from Algeria, is very uncomfortable with her husband’s style of authority over their son, which is based on strictness and admonishment while she favors dialogue and patience. She came to better understand her husband’s background when she met her in-laws in a rural area of Algeria where she observed that it was common to yell at children, and that children are prone to yell at one another as well.

Negotiating local constraints

New Muslim women’s critical view of their husband’s ethnic baggage appears to be a question of identity protection. Interestingly, all of the women I met claim to be Muslim and Québécoise or French and wish to transmit the elements of their own cultural background that fit with their view of Islam. This wish to include their children in their own cultural lineage is part of a consensual narrative of continuity that aims at situating their turn to Islam within their own biography and cultural heritage where, theologically speaking, Islam supposedly succeeded Christianity. This is where they also claim that their personality has not changed even though their religious affiliation has. When they decide to change their first name after embracing Islam, the new name is supposedly meant to more faithfully describe their real character, with one woman choosing Najwa (the secret in Arabic) to refer to her reserved side (Mossière, 2019).

This complex negotiation of Muslim identity within the couple hinges on the way converts frame ethnicity as a motive of heterogamy and mixedness. In French and Quebecois contexts, where the legal, symbolic, and social status of Muslim-background people, as well as local representations around Islam, tend to ostracize them, such views contribute to an ethnicizing of Muslim people and a reification of ethnic categories (Puzenat, 2015). The emergence and construction of these new areas of mixedness raise power differentials within the couple that are amplified when the husband’s civic and legal status hinges on their wife’s citizenship. A few of the women I met have been very active in normalizing their husband’s status in France or in Quebec. For example, one couple that had been married for 15 years at the time of the interview had first contracted a union in order to get a visa for her partner. This is seen by many women as a way to offset the influence their husband’s kinship may have over their family life.

For new Muslims, questioning their partner’s authentic Muslimness is not only a matter of changing the power balance within the couple. In fact, it is also a strategy to cope with the surrounding social context in which Islam and Muslims are epitomized as Others and are often prone to discrimination. The couples’ identity projects consider seriously the impact of such predicaments on their children’s status and opportunities in their country of residence. Indeed, the literature shows that structural external factors may influence and limit identity negotiation within the couple and transmission for the kids (Purkayastha, 2005; Rodríguez-García, 2007; Rumbaut, 1994; Song, 2009; Waters, 1990). Such is the case for a woman whom I interviewed named Hélène. After Hélène embraced Islam in 1974, she and her husband from Turkey raised their children within a strict Muslim frame aimed at isolating them from the Christian heritage of the surrounding Quebecois society. For instance, they were forbidden to participate in school parties because there was pork or because there was mixing between girls and boys. At that time, Muslims were quite rare in Quebec and the children often rebelled against such a strict upbringing. When I met Hélène in 2006, none of her children aged 29 and 26 had maintained Muslim practices, despite negotiating with Muslim prescriptions that had been instilled in them from a young age. Her son lives with a non-Muslim Quebecoise woman who accepted to have a religious marriage ‘to please his father’. Hélène’s daughter feels torn over her own concerns about meeting a man who will respect the basic principles of Islam. Although Hélène fears the moral and emotional impact of her children growing distant from what she describes as the ‘right path’, she wishes that she and her husband had not been so strict and put their children in such a difficult situation vis-à-vis their social environment in Quebec. Her example exemplifies how the structural constraints and environment may impact and redirect parental identity transmission project.

Anthropologist Dan Rodríguez-García (2012) suggests that symbolic, social and political capital related to cultural belonging may play a part in the construction of identities in the context of mixed unions. He notes that the affirmation of mixed or hybrid identities may be a response to local constraints that allows people to move beyond socially imposed identity categories. However, hybridity is rarely an option for the new Muslims I met. To take naming practices previously mentioned as an example, most of the women I met give Muslim names to their children, and some names have an obviously Islamic character. For example, Manon, one research participant, named her son Abdallah. Nevertheless, some women choose to compromise by choosing a less culturally Islamic marked name in order to protect their children from potential stigma and out of a concern for opportunities for social mobility. Such is the case for Amélie, a woman who embraced Islam in 2003 after meeting her husband from Morocco. The couple has two sons whom they decided to name Adam and Ryan. Amélie and her husband chose those names in part out of consideration for the likelihood that they would make their life in Quebec and such names would help to avoid discrimination: ‘We know we are Muslims, but we live a Western lifestyle because we live in Quebec, so we do not live as if we were in Morocco’. The ‘adapted Islam’ they abide by is supposedly more flexible and more ‘modern’, allowing them to adjust to local constraints of space and time by catching up on prayers at a later time or taking off the veil in some circumstances. However, this strategy has its own limitations, such as when values promoted at school are not aligned with parental religious orientations (e.g. sexual education).

Interestingly enough, the women that gave Muslim connoted names to their children are also the ones who considered the possibility of living and socializing their kids in a Muslim-majority country. The examples of Amélie and Manon highlight new Muslims’ concerns for the roles, possibilities, and limits imposed by their environment, and they also raise a deeper question: How does one transmit an identity one has not been socialized into and also that has a minority status prone to stigmatization, discrimination, and prejudice in the surrounding environment? Drawing on the two different naming practices I have presented, it would be easy to conclude that converts either compromise with their society or settle abroad. But the reality is more complex. While Amélie’s pragmatic strategy displays a clear posture of adjustment to her minority status in the Quebecois context, her in-laws in Morocco are also heavily committed to her children’s identity transmission. For example, Amélie and her family go for long visits to Morocco, communicate often using video calls, and speak about sponsoring Moroccan siblings for immigration to Quebec. Six months after Amélie delivered her baby, her husband went with the infant on a 3-month trip to Morocco while she had to stayed in Montreal for work. Although this choice comes at odds with Quebecois conception of parentality based on attachment theory, Manon says refusing this journey would be selfish from her part given that the infant does not belong to her but is part of the entire family. She is also highly critical of Quebecois mothering-style she depicts as based on possessiveness, control, and mothers’ reliance on their children.

Transregional practices and ‘authentic Muslimness’

New Muslim women’s view of Muslim identity as pure, ahistorical, and decontextualized impacts their strategy for identity transmission. Since many of them consider living in a country where Islam is a minority religion to be an impediment to learning and transmitting Islamic values, they transpose these processes onto a transregional scale in which regular travel to Muslim-majority countries will supposedly help their identity projects. The places they plan to go to are usually their husband’s home countries, and so this identity strategy of transnational travel also becomes part of family practices aimed at creating and reinforcing relationships with in-laws (Le Gall and Meintel, 2011). More often than not, in-laws are highly supportive of the union and most of them see the bride’s conversion to Islam as something that positively reflects on them and gives them social and economic capital.

Transregional practices are usually instrumentalized in very creative ways that parallel the couple’s story, the new Muslim’s personal biography and path in Islam, as well as the partners’ relationships with in-laws and people in various localities. The trajectories are far from linear and smooth. They illustrate what Schiller and Salazar (2013) label as ‘regimes of mobility’ that take into account the borders as well as the driving and limiting forces of circulation in differential ways that compare privileged movements with powerless and limited ones. In the case of new Muslims, regimes of mobility heavily hinge on their civic status as well as on financial constraints. Above all, their circulation is framed by the imaginaries they build in relation to Muslim-majority countries, as well as the images and ideas they maintain about such spaces that feed their transregional activities. While Glick-Schiller’s concept of transnationality draws on a critical view on the national scale, my respondents’ narratives show that their representations of Muslim spaces are graded on a regional scale that encompasses several Muslim-majority countries. The term ‘transregional practices’ that I borrow from Hoerder (2012) emphasize how these practices connect regions in processual and adjustable ways that overcome fixed territories of bordered states. Likewise, on one hand, my respondents view non-Muslim majority countries as grouped together under common representations, that is as regions with multicultural governmentality where religious freedom is considered to make everyday life for Muslims convenient. On the other hand, they sense that countries with republican style governmentality of minority religions make their living fraught with social tensions and conflicts. Referring to this notion of transregional, I also adapt Bell’s (2003) notion of mythscape that defines myth as ‘the discursive realm, constituted by and through temporal and spatial dimensions’ (p. 75) in which nations are built. In light of the data I gathered, I contend that such myths are also part of processes of redivision of political and cultural regions that are rooted in the idealization of bounded territories that may attract or repulse mobility. In the following pages, I present transregional trajectories that exemplify how representations of spaces and identity projects intermingle in context of mixed unions. I start with Juliette, a woman I met in Paris three times (in 2006, 2018, 2019) all the while keeping in touch with her through social media.

After embracing Islam in 2006, Juliette met her husband, an Egyptian man, in 2007, and helped him to get documents for citizenship. They had a daughter and a son to whom they gave Muslim names. Although she has a university degree, Juliette stays at home. She refused to register her children in the French education system and decided rather to homeschool them. She educated her children in Islam with the idea that showing an example is the best educational strategy. While her sociability circle mainly revolves around practicing Muslims and converts, she fears the role of the French political environment on her children’s education: ‘I could not see any future for my kids in this country where from a very young age you are instilled with the shame of being a believer and where Muslims are stigmatized’. Juliette, therefore, moved to her in-laws’ bled in Egypt where she settled with the aim of raising her children in an ‘Islamic way’, waiting for her husband to join. When I meet her in 2018, she explains she made this decision in the interest of her children:

It is really for the kids, otherwise I would never go. I really don’t feel like staying over there [in Egypt]. That’s why right after the school year is over I leave and come back to Paris. I have no reason to stay over there.

While settling in Egypt is presented as an identity transmission strategy, it also heavily derives from the French environment’s perceived hostility toward the Muslim veil, since Juliette explained that she anticipates her daughter would not be able to study because of her veil. Interestingly, her narrative on mobility through localities is fraught with various ideas about each space. On one hand, Juliette sees Egypt as the cradle of Islamic knowledge and Muslim civilization, as well as a country that grants freedom of religion (for Muslims) and equal possibilities for education of girls and boys. On the other hand, when thinking about her life in an Egyptian village, she expressed deep disappointment regarding the ‘culture of the bled’ where an ‘un-Islamic Islam’ prevails. In this regard, she recounts funerals she attended during which bands played music, something she sees as haram (unauthorized in Islam). She is also critical of the education system that trains pupils for socio-economic success at the expense of their human and psychological development. As she revealed during our interview, she feels very bored and isolated in her in-laws’ bled and her eyes brighten when she thinks about the day her husband will finally join her and they will move to Alexandria. Juliette describes the metropolis as a cluster of cosmopolitanism that invokes her own Western culture and art of living, where the alternative modes of education she subscribes to are widely available (Montessori, homeschooling, etc.). When I saw her in 2019, she was back in France explaining her husband had not managed to achieve his professional goals of starting an import–export business he would be able to conduct from Egypt. The couple decided that she and the children would return to Paris and settle there. Although she wished to homeschool the children, her husband, drawing on the same concern for success that is common in his country of origin, refused because he wanted their son to develop ‘proper social skills’. The couple decided to register the children in a Catholic private school where institutional religious sensitivity would supposedly make teachers more open to the pupils’ religious education than in the public education system.

Juliette’s identity transmission project is closely tied to the mythologization of her husband’s home country that mixes a sense of romance of a righteous path with an idealized space where authentic Islam would combine with a comfortable cosmopolitan lifestyle free from local cultural constraints. As such, the mythscape triggers new Muslims’ physical movement, and it can lead to a confrontation between the imagined spaces to which they aim to journey and the actual spaces in which they end up settling. As Juliette’s case shows, the myth does not always withstand the test of reality. Such a discrepancy pushes a sense of nostalgia for a lost civilization and of disappointment for the inauthenticity of Islam today. While the imagined Muslim region may fall within the domain of a fantasized refuge, the mythscape upon which it hinges is delineated across various scales that sketch out a here and a there: bled versus metropolis, rural versus urban, local prejudices versus imagined freedom. Furthermore, each of these dichotomies carries with them their own models for identity transmission. Such representations of opposing spaces place identity transmission practices in a transregional frame wherein identity is staged at various scales, with actors navigating on various levels according to the myth they build around territories, their experiences of the local, and the identity resources, imagined or real, each offers. As a result, I argue that transregionality may be an important strategy for identity transmission although it may also sometimes bring its share of disappointment and challenges.

While Juliette’s regime of mobility allows her to adjust her identity construction to the predicaments of localities, what happens when family institutional barriers constrain circulation? Manon’s case sheds light on this question. Manon’s husband was studying in Montreal when she first met him in 2008, and she had already embraced Islam. Before their marriage, they carefully filled in their wedding contract: her husband required that the couple would settle back in Morocco, his home country, after the end of his studies because he wanted to live and create a family close to his parents. Having heard about the cold winters in Morocco, Manon requested that their house be equipped with a heater during the winter months, in addition to an air-conditioner in the summer. She also wanted her husband to participate in household chores. Despite leading a thriving professional career in Montreal, Manon fulfilled her commitment and in 2017, she settled with her husband and their two children in Marrakech. When I met her in Montreal before their departure, she seemed enthusiastic about the move, seeing it as an opportunity to improve her Islamic knowledge and piety and to raise her kids in a Muslim environment. She also mentioned the prejudices her husband regularly faces in Montreal due to his highly stigmatized first name: ‘Oussama’. When I met her 2 years later in Marrakech, she confided that their standard of living had significantly decreased due to both partners’ professional precarity, and their two children were struggling to adapt to their new environment. Nevertheless, she never entertained the possibility of returning to Montreal out of respect for her marriage commitment. She also explained how living in a Muslim-majority environment unexpectedly complicated her Islamic identity transmission project:

For sure, in Quebec, I could always tell the kids ‘well, WE are Muslims and THEY are not. This means that what they do at home is their business and WE, we behave this way because we are Muslims, we follow what Allah says, we do such and such thing, blablabla’ I used to give Islamic reasons to the kids. Since we’ve been in Morocco, they’re surrounded by Muslims at school, but their peers might not be in practicing families, so, you know, it’s just like in Quebec where people are Christian but not practicing. It is a challenge when you have to say that ‘THEY are also Muslims’, I have to add another layer, I have to show the hadiths to my son, to give an Islamic lesson. I cannot justify: ‘THEY are not Muslims’

In Manon’s case, transregional mobility was first designed to reinforce Muslim identity through gathering the family together in a Muslim country. By drawing on the local prejudices that apply to Muslim populations in Montreal, the mythscape Manon builds around her husband’s country of origin also gives meaning to their mobility path. At the same time, social experiences lived in Morocco reframe the mythscape tied to Muslim-majority spaces and shape sub-regions along new moral and pious lines. Within these sub-spaces, converts in mixed unions find resources and legitimacy to reinforce their view of a pure and ahistorical Islamic identity. As this mythology draws on new Muslims’ efforts to learn Islam, it grants them authority and induces a power relationship based on knowledge that renews Western hegemony in the region, and transposes historical colonial hierarchies within the intimate family realm based on the logic that the more women learn Islam, the more they get legitimacy and power within the union.

Conclusion

While the literature usually relates negotiations within mixed unions to contextual variations regarding social degrees of acceptance of diversity, as well as regarding policies for managing cultural diversity, my findings show that they also reflect the definition and acceptance of Otherness that the worldview of each partner conveys. In neoliberal contexts where mastering diverse cultural competencies is seen as an asset, partners in mixed unions often choose to transmit plural identities (Meintel, 2002). However, in the case of my respondents’ understanding of Islamic principles, mixedness needs to be framed in a context where identity is exclusive and circumscribed within Islamic domains of purity as opposed to domains of impurity (Puzenat, 2015). Here, conversion supposedly allows both partners to subsume religious mixedness into a process of social construction of sameness based on the exclusivity of religious identity that has to be transmitted to the children. In this article, I explored the construction and deconstruction of categories of difference among Muslim couples and showed the limits of this strategy to build homogamy based on the emergence of other categories of mixedness in light of social and ethnic concerns. While the women’s newness in Islam may differentiate their legitimacy in the couple’s shared Muslim identity, they also affirm their status in the union by entering into a learning process of Islam that develops an ahistorical understanding of Islam deprived of local references and around which they build their authority in the family. This strategy for transmitting identity to their children highlight how recognition and legitimacy are central issues in mixed unions where the children’s Islamic identity becomes the best indicator of the women’s Muslimness.

The example of mixed unions between female converts to Islam and men of Muslim-background shows that tensions revolving around mixed ethnicities and minority status in stigmatizing contexts can be bypassed by transposing the process of identity formation and transmission on a transregional scale. This might involve the circulation and settlement in the partner of minority status’ home country where imagination and space play a central role, in particular, through the mythscapes that partners build around localities of living and elsewhere(ness). In the case of female new Muslims, such representations impact the view of Islam that prevails in the identity transmission to the children and thus shift power balance within the couple and may invert low local prestige markers attributed to identity. As these women tend to essentialize Muslim-majority countries around their Islamic hallmark, local experiences lead them to build mythologies that divide the region along lines of piety and morality based on an ‘authentic’ interpretation of Islam. Women’s authority regarding Islamic identity is not alien to the fact that the duty of identity transmission is usually put on their shoulders. Such an observation calls for a gendered reading of identity transmission in mixed unions because the specific role devoted to women in mixed unions, as well as the expectations that they have to address from their husband and from in-laws, undoubtedly mitigates the power balance within the couple.