warning Hi, we've moved to USCANNENBERGMEDIA.COM. Visit us there!

Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

Muslim-American Women Challenge Age Discrimination In Conservative Communities

Brianna Sacks |
February 17, 2014 | 6:42 a.m. PST

Editor-in-Chief

(Huffington Post live chat on issues Muslim-American women face/Brianna Sacks, Neon Tommy)
(Huffington Post live chat on issues Muslim-American women face/Brianna Sacks, Neon Tommy)
Supriya Iyar* avoids social gatherings in her tight-knit, conservative Muslim community in the San Fernando Valley. She is 27 with a master’s degree, and a budding career –but her parents still want to know why she isn't married.

Iyar’s struggle to pursue her education and career while still fitting into her religious community and family’s expectations is not a unique tale As some daughters of South Asian Muslim immigrants enter their 20s and 30s, they face the challenge of navigating American freedoms and going home to an Indian-Muslim household.

Comprised of a mix of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi families, the San Fernando Valley is home to more than 80,000 Muslims spread across Northridge, Granada Hills, Porter Ranch and Reseda. Eleven thousand of them are South Asian families and mostly first-generation, and for Iyar, it was like growing up in a bubble.

When she was young, that bubble supplied necessary comfort and security. Now, it’s smothering. Muslim women, even in America, face age discrimination and societal pressure to marry young. Muslims in America are more progressive than in South Asian countries like India, and first-generation Muslim-American women are more highly educated than women in every other religious group except Jews, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. Still,  many communities expect their daughters to marry young.

“There is a viewpoint in the community where I grew up that women should be educated to a point, and then you should get married,” said Iyar.

Indian-American Zeba Iqbal, a real estate professional who is now engaged at 35, discussed the “alarm bell age” of 25 on a recent HuffPo Live chat with six other Muslim-American women, explaining that while many women are breaking restrictions, age discrimination remains a significant issue in Muslim communities.

(Nadiah Mohajir/HEART Women and Girls)
(Nadiah Mohajir/HEART Women and Girls)
Nadiah Mohajir, co-founder and director of HEART Women & Girls, a nonprofit organization that provides health education for Muslim women, says many struggle with the idea of self-worth, independence and marriage because of cultural pressures placed on them by their community.

“If you can’t get a man, your educational achievements, as impressive as they are, go down the drain,” said Mohajir.

Working with matchmakers, Iyar’s parents introduced her to her first potential husband at 16.  And while the meetings made her “uncomfortable,” she says, “I knew they would help me meet my potential husband.”

Many of Iyar’s peers married at 18 or during their senior year of college. She says that as children, she and other girls in her community were taught to see marriage as a fairytale, a Disney-Bollywood kind of existence and the true mark of adulthood.

But college, a graduate degree in marriage and family therapy, and working as a domestic violence counselor for South Asian Women in Los Angeles offered an alternative. 

“You see the real, difficult and sometimes ugly side of marriage,” she said. “No one taught me that.”

Counseling women who came from similar cultural backgrounds and then endured abusive or patriarchal marriages also fueled Iyar’s desire to be independent before marriage. 

“You see what it means when a woman is not educated, or not taught to be strong, when she is raised to be dependent,” she explained. “It affects me a lot.” 

Iyar says many women do not know that abuse is wrong because their communities do not discuss marital problems. As a result, many of her friends experience emotional and verbal abuse, but don’t have the tools to change it. A few of her friends divorced before they were 25.

That’s why Mohijar started her organization. It’s a safe space for women and girls to learn about sex, health and self-esteem, topics that aren’t usually broached in Muslim households.

“Many of our values and morals need to change because we are changing, our communities need to adapt,” said Iyar.

But Iyar doesn’t fault her parents for her upbringing. 

“My parents lost so much of their culture moving here,” she explained. “They tried to shelter us from the outside world as much as possible but we were growing up in it.”

While her parents cooled the husband quest when she was in college, they still introduced Iyar to potential suitors at 17,18 and 22. And when she graduated from UCLA, the pressure to settle down intensified.
 
“When I turned 21 my mom’s friends started to assume there was something wrong with me,” she said

At 25, the pressure was “palpable,” and attending social events became painful: the absence of a wedding ring served as a glaringly personal scarlet letter.

Iyar’s relationship with her parents is stable, but strained, since they accept but do not appreciate how far she has come in her career and education.

Although she keeps her distance, Iyar says her South Asian Muslim community is a wonderful resource—but its gender expectations need to change.

She was the first girl in her community to move out of her parents’ house before marriage.  At the moment, her career is her top priority; marriage is not. She wants the freedom to live how she wants, but she also wants to respect and keep a relationship with her parents. 

Iyar paused, carefully choosing words to describe balancing her two identities.

“My community doesn’t know how to teach us women, us daughters, the right values,” she said. “We don’t need to be codependent anymore.”

* Supriya Iyar is not her real name. The young woman originally agreed to be fully identified but changed her mind after several interviews over the past month for fear of backlash within her community, and from her family. A conversation she had with her parents, angered that she was discussing her story with a reporter, made her adamant about her request for anonymity.

Reach Editor-in-Chief Brianna Sacks here



 

Buzz

Craig Gillespie directed this true story about "the most daring rescue mission in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Watch USC Annenberg Media's live State of the Union recap and analysis here.