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The British Sikh men trying to stop women marrying outside their religion

Sikh-intermarrying1

Source: The Independent

Britain’s Sikhs, long seen as a minority success story, are plagued by a faction of young men ‘defending’ their vision of the culture – and seeking to impose their views by attacking the nuptials of women who marry ‘out’

It was meant to be the happiest day of their lives – a celebration of modern multicultural Britain at the biggest Sikh gurdwara (temple) in the Western world. On 7 August 2015, in west London, a British Sikh bride and her Polish Christian groom sat together and absorbed the religious blessings at their wedding ceremony. She wore a cream and red dress, while he wore a red turban, in keeping with Sikh traditions.

But that morning, 20 uninvited men were determined to put a stop to the wedding. They stormed upstairs to the main hall and demanded that the priests end the ceremony, hurling insults at people who objected. One of them told a priest that, if their demands weren’t met, he would get 1,000 of his friends to come to the temple within the hour. The police were called and eventually the couple were forced to proceed into a hurried ceremony, while the protesters watched and took pictures of them to publish online.

This was not an isolated incident. The next weekend an interfaith wedding in Lozells, Birmingham, nearly turned into a mass brawl after protesters tried to stop it and, again, the police had to be called. The following weekend, another wedding in Coventry only managed to go ahead after some negotiations with the disrupters. In each case, the bride was a Sikh woman and the groom a non-Sikh man.

Under the media radar, such disruptions of interfaith marriages at Sikh gurdwaras have become worryingly commonplace across Britain. In July 2013, a Sikh woman and her Christian husband in Swindon were locked out of their own wedding by 40 protesters, who afterwards posted a gleeful video online of the bride’s mother pleading with them to stop. When the BBC Asian Network looked into the controversy that year, its reporter met a family who’d had their windows smashed as a warning about an upcoming marriage. Most were too afraid to say anything in public.

But not Sim Kaur. One of the very few Sikh women willing to speak about her experience, she says: “Our gurdwaras are run by men and the protesters are all men. All the cancellations I’ve heard about have been of Sikh women marrying non-Sikh men or men not born into the Sikh religion and I doubt that’s a coincidence. I do believe it’s a faith issue, but it’s also about gender and race.”

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Categories: Europe, Sikhism, UK

1 reply ›

  1. A Muslim is not allowed to marry a non-Muslim.

    Marriage is as important to the future of the nation as climate change and poverty, a senior family lawyer said yesterday. Baroness Deech said the growing numbers of families without fathers was doing more harm to the next generation than other factors such as smoking, alcohol, poor diet and lack of exercise. And she warned that a conspiracy of silence surrounded the issue because political leaders were afraid to say married families were better for children than cohabiting families or single parent families. Children of single mothers have greater problems than those of cohabitee parents, and children of cohabitees have greater problems than those of married parents. Without both a mother and a father children don’t get the whole package when they are growing up and don’t develop the whole gamut of emotions. Children deserve natural parents who are prepared to make the act of commitment and aspiration found only in marriage, in order to demonstrate to those children that they intend to be there for them, without question, as they grow up.

    The wedding ceremony highlights the fact that marriage is the strongest bond ever invented to link together two people and two families, for now and posterity – intimately, legally, politically, religiously, civilly and publicly. God gave us instructions to follow so that we would live properly. Religion is pushed aside. It’s ok now to have children outside marriage. It’s ok to be homosexual. You don’t get punished properly for coming crime. It’s ok to sleep around and do what you want… Take God out of the equation and the world goes to rack and ruin. Just look at the world getting worse over the years. Oh, and before someone says religion causes war… Religion doesn’t cause wars. It’s mans own greed that twists religion to suit his need that causes war.
    IA
    http://www.londonschoolofislamic.sorg.uk

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