The good news is I’ve solved the conflict between Muslims and Jews. All we have to do is agree that the opposite sex is evil and that singles should only mix in pursuit of immediate marriage. Whaddya say, kids? Doable?

Those of you who are loyal Jewlicious readers are likely to remember a post I did last year about a site for frum (religious) teens called, well, FrumTeens, which had a post cautioning girls (in 71 different “reasons”) to “Never never never talk to boys…” According to “It’s Muslim Boy Meets Girl, But Don’t Call it Dating” (NY Times), American Muslims “equate anything labeled “dating” with hellfire, no matter how short a time is involved.” (Well, they’re kind of right. Or at least it feels like hellfire sometimes. But usually a trip to the doctor clears that up.)

The couple of hundred people attending the dating seminar [at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention, which attracted thousands of Muslims to Chicago over Labor Day weekend] burst out laughing when Imam Muhamed Magid of the Adams Center, a collective of seven mosques in Virginia, summed up the basic instructions that Muslim American parents give their adolescent children, particularly males: “Don’t talk to the Muslim girls, ever, but you are going to marry them. As for the non-Muslim girls, talk to them, but don’t ever bring one home.”

But what about online dating and email messages? Surely that constitutes innocent and pure behavior, providing a safe space for Muslim singles to interact? Not so fast…basically, the article tells us, to Muslim ears, “dating” is a euphemism for premarital sex. Or, as the dating seminar moderator put it, “All of these are traps of the Devil to pull us in and we have no idea we are even going that way.”

Still, most American Muslims acknowledge that the optimal mate-finding process–an arranged marriage–is unattainable in this day and age. But they still want to be involved in the process.

So here’s the idea…a Joint Muslim-Jewish Task Force on Eradicating the Evil Process of Dating in the Modern World So That Singles Can Hurry Up and Get Married Already But Not to Each Other (Heaven Forbid). The JMJTFoOEtEPoDitMWSTSCHUaGMABNtEO(HF) may just revolutionize relationships, between Jews and Muslims as well as among their respective singles populations. And you heard it here first, folks…

About the author

Esther Kustanowitz

For more posts by Esther, see EstherK.com, MyUrbanKvetch.com and JDatersAnonymous.com.

37 Comments

  • I was once over on Cyprus, doing a bit of buying and selling, anyway, the whole foreign merchant community was abuzz w/ the news of some red light Lebanese girls just arrived, that ahem, blew the competition out of the water.

    But yes, the Islamic world is very backwards in their ways, no one wants to state this. Like this business of killing a Arab girl if she sits on a park bench w/ a man not that the family likes.

    And then it’s out fault in the west because we can’t appreciate their culture.

    Chop em down!

  • So, you talk to the non Muslim girls, but you don’t bring them home. But isn’t that exploitng them? Unless they are formally in business, of course, in which you would pay what was asked, I suppose, in currency.

    Esther is right.

    I TOLD you guys not to date! I TOLD you just to hang out, in daylight, decide whom you like and talk and talk and talk, then need a soda, and keep talking until you either fall in love or decide this is not the one. In DAYLIGHT.

    Dating is a waste of time, money and mascara.

  • Er, men are enough of a mystery- I don’t need to wed a stranger to feel that sense of “Who is this man?”
    Seriously, all the women that I know who have done that are now divorcees.

  • “Don’t talk to the Muslim girls, ever, but you are going to marry them. As for the non-Muslim girls, talk to them, but don’t ever bring one home.”

    Wouldn’t it be unwise to encourage Muslim boys to talk to non-muslim girls? What about the seductive powers of the…well..do they have a Muslim word for “shiksa”? Or is “talking” a Muslim euphemism for “rampant, meaningless sex with no commitments,” as in, “Go and have as much wild sex as you want with those poor, trashy girls, because when you graduate and come home, you’re marrying the rich girl next door whom you’ve been promised to from birth.”

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