From Washington Post
By Naomi Schaefer Riley, Friday, April 12, 2:39 PM
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “ ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America.”
When it comes to intermarriage, Muslims are becoming the new Jews.
About a century ago, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were immigrating to the United States, only about 1 percent, by some estimates, married non-Jews. Now, about30 percent of Jews are married to someone outside the faith. American Muslims are going through a similar transition, one that could profoundly change the Muslim experience in the United States.
Unlike the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, most of these Muslim immigrants, the biggest groups of whom arrived in the 1970s, were from the middle and upper classes and came for a university education. Some planned to return to their countries, but as the political situations at home deteriorated, a large population settled here. Today, American Jews and Muslims make up a similarly small portion of the population; they are generally highly educated and well-off, and both groups are concentrated in major metropolitan areas.
Although estimates of interfaith marriage among small population groups such as Muslims are hard to pin down, a 2011 Pew Research Center study found that about 16 percent of Muslims who are married or living with someone have a non-Muslim spouse or partner. That was the first year Pew studied whom Muslims married, and it’s one of the only organizations to do so. Muslims intermarry less often than other faith groups with longer histories in the United States, such as Catholics and Jews, but they do so more often than Hindus (10 percent) and about as often as Mormons (17 percent), according to a 2007 Pew study.
Heather and Abdullah are one of these intermarried couples. (I use only the first names of couples here because some of their families are unfamiliar with their stories or have not accepted their marriages.) They met on Match.com in 2004; his profile had an Americanized version of his name — Al — and said he was neutral toward religion. Heather’s profile said she was looking for a Christian, a detail Abdullah says he hadn’t noticed. His family had left Afghanistan for upstate New York when he was 3. And although he went to religious school every week for almost 10 years, it didn’t take. In high school, he started dating non-Muslims but never told his parents. “As I got older, religion became more of an issue for people [I dated],” he told me. “But it really wasn’t something that defined me.”
