Western critics conflate forced and arranged marriages to mark Muslims as feudal

Evidence

Although forced marriage is the impetus for the book, and the problem to be solved, it quickly becomes clear that the real problem is the culture of Muslim migrants itself. There is a slippage in Human Visas between forced and arranged marriages and little effort is expended to distinguish them. Arranged marriages are declared to be a patriarchal custom and part of the culture of honour and are practised only in those places where women’s status is low. Europe’s own history of arranged marriages for its wealthier classes is acknowledged, but is used to indicate that whereas Europe has freed itself from its feudal past, Muslim societies have not. … The collective history of the family’s reproduction, a history of immigration fraud and arranged marriages, is graphically presented as a chart of cells multiplying; the comparison to disease is inescapable. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 263 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

From the book’s beginning, the problem of forced marriage is analysed as essentially one of culture clash between the West and those non-Western societies where feudal values still rein and where ‘an individual’s worth is entirely dependent on religion, clan, caste, and class.’ There has not been open debate about the problems that non-Western immigrants bring to the West because older colonial countries are too guilt-ridden, the book declares. Even Scandinavia, where debate is more open, Storhaug laments, is still polarized for and against immigration. In contrast, Human Rights Service is primarily interested in integration. Immigrants are failing to integrate because they marry within their own cultures, often bringing spouses from their countries of origin, and thus perpetuating the feudal cultures from which they come. The book’s argument is a simple one: marriage patterns indicate that immigrants marry persons from their homelands. Often such marriages are forced and involve rape. These practices occur because immigrants want to bring their relatives to the West through family reunification, and they occur because such cultures are deeply patriarchal. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 260 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Most of all, when a practice is condemned so unequivocally as originating in culture, there is little space left to explore how arranged and forced marriages may be understood both as an internal community practice and as a practice profoundly affected by a community’s sense of peril. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 302 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Forced-marriage discourse frames Muslim culture as feudal and unintegrable — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 260; Anti-Muslim texts conflate arranged marriage with forced marriage to indict migrant culture — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 263; Western desire to domesticate Muslim cultures is marked by Islamophobic estrangement. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 243 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-Muslim texts conflate arranged marriage with forced marriage to indict migrant culture #corroborates (0.97) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 263
• Forced-marriage discourse frames Muslim culture as feudal and unintegrable #corroborates (0.92) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 260
• Culture-centric condemnation closes off how community peril shapes arranged marriage #complicates (0.76) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 302
• Cultural framing blocks seeing community peril shaping forced marriages #complicates (0.74)