“There’s more to marriage than love and attraction”: Reconciling arranged marriage and romantic love in Muslim British Asian chick lit

In this article, I analyse three novels whose Muslim British Asian protagonists try to reconcile their own expectations concerning love with their families’ demands for an arranged marriage. Each text provides a rather different closure for its protagonists and articulates different possibilities in terms of how choice and a happy ending are correlated. Firstly, Sagheer Afzal’s The Reluctant Mullah alters the conventions of chick lit and presents an ambivalent position towards arranged marriage, criticising it but also deeming it inevitable. Secondly, Halima Khatun’s The Secret Diary of an Arranged Marriage debunks the prejudices surrounding arranged marriage and posits it as just another path to love. Finally, Tasneem Abdur-Rashid’s Finding Mr Perfectly Fine questions the need to get married at any price as well as the criteria that make one person marriageable. By looking at these three case studies, I argue that British Asian authors are upcycling the chick lit novel while simultaneously providing a multifaceted approach to arranged marriage, which may ultimately contribute to debunking some of the taboos attached to this practice.