Intermarriage
often gets a bad press. But you just can't beat fusion love.
September 2007
Alex Stein and Seth Freedman have both written comments on the
insularity of different religious communities and how they frown upon
intermarriage. But neither touched on the beauty, variety,
richness and excitement of the kaleidoscopic world of mixed or multicultural
pairings.
Dismiss me as a hopeless romantic, if you want,
but I happen to believe that love is blind to race, religion and social class –
and if it isn’t, it ought to be. I believe that cross-cultural pairings have
much to recommend them, which may go some way to explaining why, over my life,
I have rarely been involved with anyone of the same ethnicity or faith.
For about eight years now, I have been in a
loving multicultural relationship. Our diverse backgrounds and very different
but compatible personalities have enriched us both beyond measure. As a couple,
one plus one, for Katleen and I, equals at least five
languages, three different cultures, two religious heritages, and a secular,
humanist outlook on life. Over the years, we have challenged each other to see
things from multiple perspectives and I believe our claim to being
multicultural is not a hollow one. Our long debates have had a profound
influence on our worldview, politics and social outlook.
Our own individual diversity and flexibility
has aided us and our understanding of the other's background has helped us to
make allowances and accommodations. Although Katleen
is a fair-skinned, blue-eyed northern European and I am a brown-skinned,
curly-haired North African, our cultural differences are not as great as they
might appear at first sight.
Katleen speaks fluent Arabic, studied
Islamic history at university, did a master’s in Middle Eastern politics and
her current job regularly takes her to Arab and Muslim countries. As for me, I
have a strong European side – I partly grew up in the UK and have now lived in Belgium for the
last six years and speak fluent Dutch and a smattering of French. In addition
to the Middle East, I write about the EU and
Belgian affairs.
Geography is a challenge and we find ourselves
constantly wondering whether we should stay here or go there and for how long.
In mixed marriages, families are
often the greatest barrier, usually out of distrust or fear of the “other”. Again,
we have been fortunate in this regard. I get on very well with my in-laws and
my family adoreKatleen and
the fact that she can joke with them in Arabic.
However, such pairings as ours are
much-maligned in the western and Arab media, with coverage focusing on
kidnapping of offspring, corruption of values, domestic oppression or, even
worse, brainwashing, as the case of Muriel Degauque, the Belgian suicide bomber,
illustrates.
Some years ago, when I was working as a wire
journalist, I had to fly down to Luxor to cover a hostage crisis in
which an Egyptian was holding four Germans as bargaining chips for his
children whom his German wife had smuggled out of the country. This made headlines
around the world and probably elicited knowing shrugs from those who oppose
such mixing.
Admittedly, cultural differences can be an
obstacle in mixed marriages, but that’s only in the cases where the couple
allows them to be. Inter-cultural relationships more often fall apart for
personal reasons, but people find it easier to blame it on culture. Besides, monocultural relationships are hardly roaring successes.
After all, just because you speak the same language, that doesn't mean you can
communicate.
“Why does the media
have to portray women who marry Arabs or Muslims as weak-willed, oppressed and
downtrodden? Why can't they come and see people like us for a change?” Katleen – who goes to conflict zones for a living and
manages an international group of older men at work – once asked after reading
an unfavourable article in the press.
And why can’t they? After all, our relationship
is no exception. A significant number of our friends have got themselves mixed
up in the same dizzying cocktails, with combinations including
Egyptian/English, Egyptian Muslim/French Jewish, English/Turkish,
Palestinian/Scottish, Algerian/Belgian, German-Egyptian/American,
Senegalese/Belgian, American/Egyptian, Indonesian/Belgian and more.
At a dinner in London hosted by our Japanese-Egyptian friend
and her German boyfriend, it suddenly dawned on us that just about everyone at
the party was in a mixed relationship and we privately
toasted the brave new world of fusion love.
