Abstract
Challenging top-down approaches that “concentrate on classical archival sources and ignores ordinary people’s collective history” (p. 22), Crafting Marriages centers ground-up ethnographic accounts of Palestinian American women in Milwaukee who immigrated and married in the 1950s–1980s and the 1990s–2000s. Using qualitative data collected over the course of 30 years on what the author claims as nearly every aspect of everyday life of the Palestinian and Arab community in Milwaukee, this book aims to be an ambitious yet personal account of not just how Palestinian women of varying generations perceive, experience, and challenge marriage and family formation processes, but also as a testament to the transformations of the Arab American community at large. For instance, while the first cohort of women, who immigrated and married from the 1950s–1980s, understood marriage through a nationalistic and cultural lens, Othman finds that the experiences of the later cohort, from the 1990s–2000s, were deeply shaped by religion and religious organizations. This change was not exclusively internal. Rather, it was as much a reflection of the social and political movements within and surrounding the region of Palestine in the United States.
While marriage was the starting point for the individual immigration histories of many of these Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim women, their actual motives for getting married were both complex and diverse. For instance, for some women in the West Bank who wanted to pursue education and a career, marriage with a Palestinian American produced an opportunity to break out of the gender constrictions that predominantly channeled women into the household. These women were nonetheless deeply attached to Palestinian culture and values, leading them to uphold the ideals of marrying and forming family and kinship ties with co-ethnics and co-religionists, both for themselves and their children. For others, especially those who came later and in the second generation, these ideals were changing. Less nostalgic about their homelands and yet forever marked by the heightened Islamophobia unleashed after 9/11, the second-generation women did not require their spouses to be Palestinian. Their partners could be from other ethnic/national backgrounds. Instead, for this younger cohort, religion stood as an important measure of compatibility. As Othman explains, this was because the Palestinian cause itself has come to be largely depicted and understood through a religious and activist lens by Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and those outside these communities.
A relatively short and accessibly written book, Crafting Marriages has four substantive chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. The first substantive chapter begins by describing marriage and family in Palestine since the Nakba of 1948. Othman then traces the history of Arab immigration to the United States and the formation of a transnational Palestinian American diaspora. This historical overview is important: as the following two chapters show, each cohort of women wrestle with and navigate gender, family, and kinship roles in dialogue with Palestinians’ collective memory, nationalism, and religious identities. While these first, second, and third substantive chapters fit together quite comfortably, the fourth chapter seems to do a little less so. In this chapter, Othman takes a step back to observe the pre-marriage or dating practices of the young and second-generation women in the Palestinian American diaspora. Situated between traditional arranged marriages and Western forms of dating, Othman finds that young Palestinian women’s dating practices (such as online “halal dating”) and marriage customs respond to local factors like whether they attended Islamic school or public, demographic changes, and the ongoing social and political environments. Othman ends the book reflecting on Muslim women’s efforts to enlarge their social circles and increase their agency. She predicts that marriage patterns for Palestinian women will become more diverse and difficult to explain using a single framework. The world is fast changing and the women’s relationship with globalism will shape how and who they choose to as romantic partners.
Overall, the strength of this book is in the rich descriptions of the participants’ discursive strategies about marriage and how these decisions are shaped by notions of Western feminism, Orientalism, social networks, and adaptation to American and Palestinian cultures over time. The findings may not seem very new or surprising—readers of Zareena Grewal’s and Nazli Kibria’s works will find similar patterns of dating and marriage among other Arab and Muslim American immigrant communities. However, rather than a weakness, these similarities in and of themselves are important. In the current political environment, Palestinians in the United States often either face epistemological erasure or are collectively disparaged as an unparalleled Other. The generalizability of this book’s findings shows that at least with regard to women’s dating and marriage customs, Palestinian women are not unlike many other ethnic and religious American groups.