WHY OUR PARENTS BEHAVE AS THEY DO
DEALING
WITH OUR PARENTS DECISIONS
Our research has provided us with the
reasoning behind why our parents make the decision they do about our marriages which are most often arranged or forced marriages.
To put it into one word; culture. There are a number of factors which affect the way our parents behave,
of which culture is the dominant one. As we mentioned earlier, in case you hadn’t already noticed, our parents feel
they quite literally OWN us. As boys, you are of the reasons our fathers have pride in the community, because having sons
is seen as a personal achievement and not an act of God.
The following details the factors which
influence our parents:
1)
CULTURAL OBLIGATION
a) Patriotic Mentality
Unfortunately our parents are super-glued to their culture. You cannot really blame them because, after all, they
grew up in that culture and in course it has shaped their mentality, hence the extreme patriotism.
Our research
showed that the parents had adopted a one track mind when it came to their children’s marriages. The vast majority could
only see their sons and daughters marrying from Pakistan, and that was it. There was NO alternative. For them the cultural
pressure is IMMENSE. For them it is a bit like ‘keeping up with the Jones’ except they are not just copying their
neighbours buy buying a bigger plasma TV or a flashier car, they are quite literally playing with their children’s lives.
Why else would you marry your daughter to someone you know very little about, even if it were their nephew.
b) Family Pressure
i) The main reason that our parents can only foresee their children marrying one of their nephews
or nieces is because the rishtay have been often been done years before the marriage. The promises have been made
to their brothers and sisters (your chacha’s, thaya’s, phuppo’s khala’s and mamu’s)
years ago. In Pakistani society, and most commonly in the villages, matchmaking is done when the children are very young,
sometimes when they are infants, as young as 5 years old. THIS IS TOTALLY AGAINST ISLAM.
Commonly, they have made
promises to their brothers and sister that they will marry their ‘Asghar’ with ‘Shazia’ when Shazia
has finished college. Now we come to the crux of the matter. You see, now that they have made these promises to their families,
the besti would be too much to bear if the rishtay did not go ahead. We have always heard our parents ‘Loga ki pata
chalsi tha kitnee besti hosi, log ke aakhsan’ OR ‘assa loga ki moo dasne ne kaabel na renlagey’ (Mirpuri).
It means that they care more about what people will say than the if Allah (SWT) has allowed or forbade a certain action.
Here comes the sick part. If your rishta was done when your future husband was say, 13 years old and now that he is 24 and
has no education, no job, is a lofar and is not exactly Tom Cruise in the looks department, your father will still
happily marry you to him. Sorry, did I say marry, I meant IMPRISON you to him. I said ‘will HAPPILY marry you to
him’ because our fathers do not think of our happiness when these marriages are forced upon
us, it is only THEIR happiness in keeping that promise to his brother or sister which is important. To keep face in the family.
What a messed up culture! They are fearful of losing their brothers and sisters forever if
they don’t do this. There are hundred of examples where brothers and sister have not spoken for YEARS because their
children did not inter-marry. This is yet another un-Islamic habit. It is quite ridiculous that you cut off,
for sometimes DECADES, with your own flesh and blood, whom you grew up with, just because your culture dictates these arranged
marriages.
If they do not get their children married within the family, their relatives and
the baradari in general say things like ‘they had so many good rishtay in the family and they went OUT’
and ‘there were so many good-looking girls in their family and they went OUT’. What is ‘OUT’? ‘Baaroo
rishta karna’ or going outside the family for marriage is considering a huge sin in our culture. We found that
there is often a power struggle between the parents. The father will try his best to get his children married to his side
of the family and the mother will try the same for her family back home. The winner is determined by the one who ‘wears
the trousers in the household’. Winner?, I make it sound like a game. Well it is, where the children are the pawns and
the parents, the kings and queens. What type of parents would ‘play’ this sort of game just out of zid
(stubbornness) to beat their partner. The choice or feelings of the children are NEVER even considered.
ii) Why the Pressure?
Feedback we received also highlighted
a major problem with families and that was of blackmail. Our grandparents (Dadi,Dada,Nani or Nana),
uncles and aunts, mostly Chachay, Thayay and Phuppya, often resort to emotionally blackmailing
our parents into making these marriages happen. I must point out that this problem was more prevalent in the Mirpur District
than anywhere else. They will say things like:
‘We will never forgive you, and will disown
you if you don’t make this rishta happen’ from grandparents
‘If this rishta does not happen then you can consider us as dead for you, we
don’t want to know you’
iii) Blackmail!
Oh
yes! Blackmail, and emotional blackmail to be more precise. The old favourite, tried and tested from Glasgow to Greenwich,
guaranteed to traps us everytime and some of us only realise what has happen when it is far too late. Emotionally blackmailing
us into accept these marriages. They use the same heartless tactics that their families used on them because it is their way
or the highway. Our parents say they will never ever forgive us if we disobey them. They will even give us Quran and Hadith
to justify it, and we are sometimes bowled over.
A major factor in what forces us to cave in and
reluctantly accept is due to the fact that the vast majority of us live in close family units (often crammed into small terraced
houses) and are often working in the family businesses, like A1 Pak Watan Superstore. We have nowhere to run hence
we give in to the pressure. Often Pakistani parents put so much pressure on us as children that we have been accustomed
to never refusing any orders they give us. It is their culture which makes them behave this way. This constant pressure from
them often results in so many of us running away from home, but still our parents do not realise the error of their ways.
They are prepared to lose their children forever than to be unfaithful to their backward culture!
The
other point is that strange thoughts come into our minds like, ‘how bad can it be marrying from Pakistan’,
‘after all I won’t be the first, or the last’ or ‘so and so seems happy and she married from there’
or ‘he/she is my cousin so I can make the marriage work’ or ‘my dad says he has a masters degree, runs his
own business and is Hafiz Quran’. Our parents are very good at convincing us to marry whom they
want us to spend the rest of our lives with because for them NO is not an option. Many people who
contacted us, especially, women, told us that they saw it as being disrespectable and an act of disobedience to their parents
if they did not accept their proposals.
Have you never thought why our parents don’t
openly condemn Pakistani society as morally corrupt and fully expose their corruption. How else will they convince you to
marry from there. Most of us are brainwashed into marrying from Pakistani, without even knowing it. The fact that our families
are constantly quarrelling and back-biting amongst each other seems to pass us by. You would think that we would run
a mile from people who behave like this, instead we are convinced to marry into people like them. We have seen and heard all
our lives the horror stories about women who married from Pakistan but it never stops us catching PK786 to Islamabad to marry
Mr Right.
c) For Inheritance (Jaidad)
Research
showed that there was a deeper ulterior motive behind our parents wanting us to marry our cousins from back home. I don’t
like this ‘back home’ expression. How can Pakistan be our ‘home’ when we have never lived there. Anyway
back to the point. Our parents want their Jaidad (family inheritance) to stay firmly within the immediate family
(Dadke). What simpler way to guarantee this than to make their daughters the sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.
What is unbelievable is that our fathers will almost certainly end up fighting amongst their brothers over this land/property
which is so precious to them that can spare a few daughters for it. Truly shocking! I mean what on earth has that 2 kanal
plot of land near the chowk got to do with us living in Bradford!
Why not just throw
your daughters to the lions, at least the suffering will be shorter, whereas for a girl to be married to a Pakistani is a
guaranteed lifetime of misery, abuse and suffering. I can’t help but think that this has a little bit
to do with our parents feeling of resentment and anger when the nurse told them ‘Congratulations Mr Khan it‘s
a girl’. Is this why they have no regard for their daughter’s feelings when deciding for them THEIR future.
2) There is no number 2 because culture is the one and only reason. If you can imagine
it like a jigsaw. Our parents have planned OUR lives the way they would like them to turn out and it is mapped out like a
jigsaw. When we do not obey our parents orders it is like a piece of the jigsaw is missing. For most of our parents nothing
would give them more pleasure than to tell people that they married all their children from Pakistan. Even when we feel our
parents have given in and accepted it is just a ploy because they are always over-confident that their children will HAVE
TO eventually give in when the pressure is applied. In the end they almost always win.
It is not only totally against
the teachings of Islam but shows heartlessness not to consider your children’s opinion when deciding who their
intended LIFE partner will be. There cannot be a bigger injustice or infringement of a person’s liberty.
CONTRARY TO WHAT YOUR PARENTS MAY HAVE TOLD YOU, ISLAM DOES NOT MENTION ANYTHING ABOUT MARRYING
YOUR COUSIN, LET ALONE ENCOURAGE IT
It is a fact that the ONLY reason that these marriages take place is
because they are cousins and NOTHING else. There is no other compatibility factor.
WE WOULD LIKE TO
MAKE A FINAL AND CONCLUDING STATEMENT WHICH IS THAT IF A HIGH PERCENTAGE OF ARRANGED MARRIAGES BETWEEN PAKISTANI NATIONALS
AND BRITISH PAKISTANIS WERE SUCCESSFUL AND BOTH PARTNERS LIVED IN RELATIVE PEACE THEN WE WOULD NOT HAVE SET UP THIS WEBSITE
BUT, AND IT IS A BIG BUT, THE REALITY IS THAT THERE IS NOT ONE, I REPEAT NOT ONE WOMAN WHO CAN SAY SHE IS HAPPILY MARRIED.
THE RESULTS OF OUR RESEARCH WERE SO SHOCKING THAT WE FELT OBLIGED TO ACT.
WE ARE CHALLENGING THE ENTIRE BRITISH
PAKISTANI COMMUNITY TO FIND US ONE WOMAN WHO IS HAPPILY MARRIED TO A PAKISTANI NATIONAL.
