Prof. Dr. Annelies Moors (University of Amsterdam): Problematizing unregistered marriages: The law, public debate and everyday life in the Netherlands and Palestine

About the Speaker:

Annelies Moors is professor of contemporary Muslim societies at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. She studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has done extensive fieldwork in the Middle East (esp. in Palestine and Yemen) and Europe (esp. in the Netherlands), and has published widely on gendered visibility and multiple belongings, material kinship and material religion, gendered mobilities and spatialities, and controversies on Islam and Muslims in Europe and beyond. From 2001-2008 she has been the Amsterdam ISIM chair, where she directed the program on Muslim cultural politics. Currently she is the PI of a NWO grant on ‘Muslim Activism’, and of an ERC advanced grant on ‘Problematizing “Muslim Marriages”: Ambiguities and Contestations’, which investigates the relation between public debates and everyday life at a global level.About the Topic: The last years Annelies Moors has been engaged in an ERC research project ‘Problematizing “Muslim Marriages”: Ambiguities and Contestations’, which focuses on how particular kinds of ‘Muslim marriages’, such as unregistered marriages, have become problematized. Who are the actors involved? What lines of argumentation do they follow? And how are they able to claim a position of authority? The main interest is then in how this relates to the ways in which the parties concerned actually enter into such more or less controversial forms of Muslim marriages. Do they recognize these problems or not? Or do they experience other problems, perhaps caused by such processes of problematization? In her presentation Prof. Moors will discuss this for the issue of Muslim marriages that are not registered with state authorities. Two particular cases are highlighted: ‘Islamic-only marriages of converts in the Netherlands’ and ‘Urfi-marriages in Palestine’