Muslims and the new trend in internet dating
Posted by Bob Bulmer on Tue 30th October 2007 at 02:18 AM, Filed in Niche Dating
It’s a known fact tht the majority of young muslims today have their parents select the partner they will epend the rest of theor lives with. Whilst many of us outside of the muslim faith can’t comprehend this it works for muslims.
However many muslims are now logging on for love because they are not breaking any of theior islamic laws and physically dating before they marry.
One such website is based in India and called Shaadi.com has 10 million members, 700,000 of them being based in the UK. And of the 100,000 members of singlemuslim.com, 10% are british.
These websites have been clever enough to respect traditional rules and allow such functionality as ‘parent browsing and organise cheperones’. A whopping 10% of profiles on singlemuslim.com have been uploaded by parents!
Are we seeing the new wave of muslims hapy to rely on technology to find their siblings a suitable partner? It cerainly makes sense to me, I am sure that this way of sourcing a partner will solve the huge issue of unwanted brides and grooms.
Mr Younis, the website’s founder said that he was inspired to set up his website after he attended Leeds University and found that Muslim men and women were not mixing. “Although there were lots of eligible men and women, they weren’t mixing, because Islam doesn’t encourage men and women to mix,” he said. “Everybody was at the point where their parents were pressurising them, saying: ‘Now that you’re a young professional, the next step is marriage.’”
He said that many second and third generation Muslims were turning away from traditional arranged marriages in favour of a more modern approach. “People put up a profile, and what they’re looking for — how religious they are, age, height, disabilities, pretty much everything. Then they can search for people. Everything from a basic search within an age range to every possible criteria.
“Then people get their wali, a guardian, involved. We encourage people to meet up with their guardians in public or usually the guy will go to the girl’s place. The wali can ask all the tough questions, they can get to know each other and, if they’re not compatible, they can say ‘Assalam alaikum, sorry it didn’t work out’ and continue the search.”
(Via The Times)
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