Wiebe Ruijtenberg
Marital breakdown among British Asians opens with Selma, a divorced, UK‐born Pakistani solicitor, claiming that the ‘typical immigrant working‐class families’ with whom she deals have ‘taken to divorce like a duck to water’ (p. 1). Selma’s choice of words may be contentious, as Kaveri Qureshi writes, but her observations correspond to the available statistics that indeed indicate a dramatic rise in marital breakdown among British Pakistani Muslims. Individualization theorists have understood this as a form of ‘catching up’ with the rest of UK society, while others have analysed women’s decision to divorce as an actual Hobson’s choice. In this important contribution, Qureshi moves beyond stereotypical analyses of British Asian families as stuck in time, and of British Asian women as either victims or heroines, offering an authoritative account of marital breakdown and divorce among British Pakistanis that attends to gender dynamics within marriages, families, and communities as they intersect with dynamics of class, race, and immigration.
To do so, Qureshi draws on extensive fieldwork among British Pakistanis in East London (2005‐7), Peterborough (2011), and both cities (2012‐14), resulting in interviews with fifty‐one women and twenty‐three men, as well as a long‐term engagement with twenty‐nine participants. Acknowledging the difficulties of interpreting accounts of marital breakdown and divorce, Qureshi proposes to analyse them as ‘narratives’ through which divorcees actively reconfigure their post‐break‐up relationships. She also interprets her material in a more realist way to make it speak to public and academic debates on conjugality, legal pluralism, and new kinship.
Talking about their divorces, most divorcees mention as the main reasons for conflict a lack of love, intimacy, and sexual satisfaction, as well as men’s inability to live up to their role as providers. In such cases, both men and women sought support from their natal families, who often shaped the nature of the conflict: for example, by encouraging them to stay or leave their marriage, or by allowing/not allowing them to return to their natal home. Qureshi goes on to caution against conceptualizing such family mediation, often cited as traditional, as a form of law, arguing that this perspective provides no new insights and may render the concept of law meaningless. She does describe sharīʻa and state law as inherently plural but emphasizes that they do not stand on an equal footing, with state law appearing more authoritative and powerful.
Post‐divorce, shared parenting was the norm, but mothers were much more likely to become the resident parent. Pushed into their role as mothers, women maintained and developed intimate relations with their children, natal families, and friends. In contrast, divorced men often remained socially isolated, and were less likely to remarry. The male bloodline remained important, shaping relations between parents and their stepchildren, and between half‐brothers and sisters. These post‐divorce family dynamics only partially fit with an understanding of recombinant families as ‘families of choice’ as elaborated by the new‐kinship literature.
Marital breakdown among British Asians concludes with Qureshi’s assertion that rising divorce rates among British Pakistanis indeed reflect changing family dynamics and gender norms, with notions of individual choice and conjugal love gaining in prominence. Concurrently, women and men aspired to and upheld traditional gender roles and expected the active involvement of their natal families in their marital life. It would therefore be wrong to take rising divorce rates as evidence for women’s emancipation. Inspired by Saba Mahmood, Qureshi instead suggests that women’s capacity to self‐sacrifice and compromise is a form of agency. ‘It is not necessarily more agential to leave an unhappy marriage than to stay in one, and as analysts, if not as activists, we should be mindful not to uphold one choice over another’, Qureshi concludes on the book’s final page (p. 309). The point is well taken, and carries an important political message within the British context, even if interpreting women’s ability to self‐sacrifice as agency may also gloss over their actual oppression, whether in the United Kingdom, Pakistan, or elsewhere. However, by concluding in this way, the author also appears to reduce her study to one of British Pakistanis, whereas she could have made it a study of social change in the United Kingdom more broadly. Nevertheless, Marital breakdown among British Asians stands as an important contribution which will be of interest to researchers, professionals, and activists working on the politics of immigration, family life, and gender in the United Kingdom and beyond.
