c. 2005 Religion News Service

EDISON, N.J. _ Islam forbids unsupervised dating, so the recent gathering of young, unmarried Muslims in the banquet hall of an Edison restaurant was billed not as a singles party but as a weightier Muslim Matrimonial Event.

The modern “speed-dating” technique was blended with old religious practices, giving it an Islamic twist with clear rules: Chaperones would roam while the 100 unmarried “candidates” got to know each other through small group talks. An imam would lecture on how the prophet Muhammad valued marriage. There would be a break for evening prayer.

The singles _ 56 women, 44 men _ would take notes to keep track of the candidates each would meet. And there would be little subtlety about the reason they were there.

“If you don’t take notes, there will be no follow-up,” organizer Khalid Ozair gently chided after the first few rounds of conversation. “And that will defeat the purpose of this event.

“We want follow-up, and we want, inshallah (God willing), that people should get married as a result of this event.”

Nervous laughter from the candidates followed, but most of them _ doctors, teachers, computer programmers, engineers and business people who have lived in the United States most of their lives _ had the same wish, to marry someone of their faith.

“I’m interested in marrying someone who is Muslim, someone who has strong faith,” said Ali Qureshi, 32, of Manhattan. “Along with that comes someone who has similar morals and values, which is important.”

Muslim gatherings like this have sprouted up around the country in the last few years because finding good matches for religious American Muslims remains difficult, singles say.

“The ones that are not religious, it is easy for them to find,” said Ayman ElSawah, 28, of Woodbridge. But as an observant Muslim, “what you are looking for is someone who’s at least the same level of faith that you are, if not more.”

Muslims are not the only group in this predicament, of course. Generations of Jews, Greeks, Italians, Asians and other minority groups in America have tried _ or felt pressure _ to marry from among their own.

At the same time, single American Muslims live in a society where it can seem easy to abandon their religion’s dating norms.

This is widely discussed in Muslim circles. The lead article of a special marriage issue of Islamic Horizons magazine two months ago lamented that too many Muslim families consider “free mixing of the genders” and unsupervised outings acceptable, even in environments such as Islamic centers.

“With such acquiescence to the dominant, mainstream culture, it has become even more difficult for Muslim parents to guide their children to interactions, relationships, and ultimately marriages that are based on Islamic principles, rather than dating and promiscuity,” the article said.

The widely circulated bimonthly magazine, which is published in Indiana, has a “Matrimonials” page in which Muslims, usually parents, “invite correspondence” from eligible singles who are similar to their adult children.

At the Edison event, Qureshi sat at tables with four other men and four or five women, everyone chatting for about 10 minutes while chaperones _ some of them parents of the candidates _ looked on. Then the men rotated to other tables of women, each time observing the 10-minute guideline.

Most people seemed to talk easily, though some seemed shy and others bored, flipping their pens. Conversations _ when they weren’t interrupted by an organizer yelling, “One more minute!” _ touched on jobs, nationalities, levels of religious observance, even jokes about family pressure to be there.

Most of the singles positioned a piece of paper in front of them to show their e-mail addresses to the people across the table.

ElSawah said that, unfortunately, the three women he liked most did not post their e-mail addresses.

“I have to hope that they took mine,” he said.

Along with concerns over being e-mailed are worries about meeting someone of the same cultural background.

“It becomes hard for someone like me, who was raised and born here with an Egyptian background, to (be with) someone who was straight from there,” said Shaymoa El-Ansary, a longtime attendee of the Islamic Society of Central Jersey, the mosque that ran the Edison event.

“There’s a culture clash: He was raised there (in Egypt), I was raised here.”

Add to that the angst over how to classify one’s level of religious observance in a 10-minute talk with eight other people, El-Ansary said.

“I don’t know what to call myself. Liberal? Conservative? I pray five times a day, I do all the … five pillars. I teach at the mosque,” she said. “Thankfully I was raised in a Muslim household.”

Like many other Muslim singles, El-Ansary has parents who have tried to arrange a marriage for her. Singles both defend and fret over the prospect of arranged marriages in person and on Internet sites like http://www.islamicaweb.com.

The way it generally works is, two sets of Muslim parents who find each other’s family a good match arrange dinners and meetings where a respective son and daughter meet. The singles decide after each of the first few meetings if they want to meet again and if they want to consider marrying at some point. Nobody is supposed to be forced into a marriage.

Several singles at the Edison event said they were thankful their parents had tried to arrange a marriage for them. But many said they view a hypothetical match from a matrimonial event to be a better bet than a hypothetical arranged marriage.

“I wish they had these kinds of things when I was in my 20s; I definitely would have attended,” said Maqsood Murad, 39, who grew up in Piscataway and lives in Manhattan.

Murad, who does not consider himself very religious, said that parental set-ups are nerve-racking because “you’re kind of expected to get married without dating. I need to get to know the person a little bit better. These events help, because it’s not too much pressure and you’re talking to a lot of people.”

MO/JL END DIAMANT

(Jeff Diamant is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of unmarried Muslims at the `Muslim Matrimonial Event.’