1st Edition

Wellbeing of Transnational Muslim Families Marriage, Law and Gender

    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book examines the needs, aspirations, strategies, and challenges of transnational Muslim migrants in Europe with regard to family practices such as marriage, divorce, and parenting. Critically re-conceptualizing ‘wellbeing’ and unpacking its multiple dimensions in the context of Muslim families, it investigates how migrants make sense of and draw on different norms, laws, and regimes of knowledge as they navigate different aspects of family relations and life in a transnational social space. With attention to issues such as registration of marriage, civil versus religious marriage, spousal roles and rights, polygamy, parenting, child wellbeing, and everyday security, the authors offer national and comparative case studies of Muslim families from different parts of the world, covering different family bonds and relations, within both extended and nuclear families.



    Based on empirical research in the Nordic region and further afield, this volume affords a more complete understanding of the practices of transnational migrant families, as well as the processes through which family relations and rights are negotiated between family members and with state institutions and laws, whilst contributing to the growing literature on migrant wellbeing. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social policy with interests in migration and transnational communities, wellbeing, and the family.

    1. Introduction: Wellbeing, Family Life, and Transnational Muslims in the West  2. Converts, Marriage, and the Dutch Nation-state: Contestations about Muslim Women’s Wellbeing  3. Wellbeing, Law and Marriage: Recognition of Nikāh in Multicultural Britain and the Finnish Welfare State  4. A Mosque Programme for the Wellbeing of Muslim Families  5. Polygamy, Wellbeing and Ill-being amongst Ethnic Muslim Minorities   6. Transnational Families Navigating the Law: Marriage, Divorce and Wellbeing  7. Somali Parents in Sweden: Navigating Parenting and Child Wellbeing  8. Transnational Finnish-Somali Families and Children’s Wellbeing  9. Raising Children of Somali Descent in Toronto: Challenges and Struggles for Everyday Security and Wellbeing  10. Childhood, Wellbeing and Transnational Migrant Families: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

    Biography

    Marja Tiilikainen (PhD, Docent) is Senior Researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland.



    Mulki Al-Sharmani (PhD, Docent) is Senior Lecturer of Islamic Theology at the Faculty of Theology, Study of Religions Unit, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the author of Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: Negotiating Muslim Family Law; the editor of Feminist Activism, Women’s Rights and Legal Reform; and the co-editor of Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition.



    Sanna Mustasaari is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Finland.

    "A valuable contribution to wellbeing studies, notable especially for its novel attention to the ethical dimensions of wellbeing, especially in the context of Muslim women’s perspectives; and its illuminating analysis of the ways that wellbeing emerges or is blocked in the interplay between transnational families’ relations with each other, the wider communities, and the state(s)." - Sarah White, University of Bath, UK