Online dating sure beats marrying your cousin

Everyone wants to know what is going on inside the minds of young British Muslims. Do they feel British? Is the government's anti-terror legislation fuelling Islamism? Do they blame the war on Iraq for the growth of radicalism? Read the newspapers or watch the television and you would think that those are the questions obsessing British Muslims. Talk to them and it quickly becomes clear that they have something else on their mind: how on earth are they going to find someone to marry?

Back in the bad old days this was a wretchedly simple matter. You left it all to your parents to arrange and it usually involved rounding up the nearest cousin - cue a hasty wedding and a succession of mono-browed children with eyes slightly too far apart.

Given this alarming prospect it is unsurprising that my childhood was blighted by the threat of an arranged marriage. My father began discussing marriage when I was 15, and I spent my teenage years trying to find ways to persuade him that I was not ready to marry a girl from some godforsaken village in Pakistan. The trouble was my parents' aspirations came from their traditional Pakistani upbringing, whereas my ambitions were inspired by the soft-rock ballads of the Eighties band Foreigner: I wanted to know what love was.

Twenty years later and, parents being parents, they still have not quite given up. A few years ago my mother guilt-tripped me into contemplating an arranged marriage. The deal was that she would provide me with the names and details of "suitable" girls and, if they seemed acceptable, I would telephone them and see where it went. This plan quickly turned into a farce because my mother always oversold my potential brides; she claimed that one girl was a Cambridge-educated dentist, but she turned out to be a dietician who had studied in Cambridge, but not at the famed university.

Eventually it became clear that my mother's matchmaking skills left something to be desired, and since then my family have left me alone to fend for myself. But freedom can be frightening. Most of my Muslim friends are single; they are successful, independent-minded professionals who have outgrown the old methods for finding partners but are finding it maddeningly difficult to meet any decent prospects in their everyday working lives.

None of my single thirtysomething Muslim friends would contemplate an arranged marriage. So it is rather curious that, just as they are falling out of love with traditional arranged marriages, along comes a BBC television series that seeks to bring Asian-style matchmaking to British - read white - singletons. Arrange Me a Marriage is presented by Aneela Rahman, who had an arranged marriage herself and who believes that she can use those same principles to help non-Asians. It's an intriguing premise, but it only works when you can trust your parents' judgement; and that's not a given among British Muslims or British Asians. In the words of one friend: "I wouldn't trust my mother to pick a sweater for me, never mind a bride."

That is why so many British Muslims have embraced the internet and gone online in their search for a spouse. The biggest matrimonial website is Shaadi.com and of its ten million members, around 700,000 are registered in Britain. Websites like this are great news for British Muslims because they offer a greater sense of empowerment: you can write your own entry, explain what sort of partner you are looking for, and specify everything from age to religion to height.

In the past it was often only the men who got to lay down their requirements, but on the internet girls can check out boys with as much enthusiasm as the boys searching for girls. Were these encounters arranged by parents, they would be face to face and there would be much more significance given to any rejection; online you can just keep clicking until you see someone with whom you think you might click.

Matrimonial websites may resemble dating sites like Mysinglefriend.com, but they have distinctly Asian touches. A male friend of mine went online recently looking for potential matches for his sister. Having found a number of men who seemed to fit the bill, he tried to contact them to follow things up - only to be told that the website did not allow communication between two people of the same gender.

The people who are posting their details are not, on the whole, looking for someone to date but someone to marry. And they can be very choosy: on Shaadi.com you can search on the basis not only of age, location and religion, but also mother tongue and, my favourite, by profession. If you believe your ideal match is a 29-year-old London-based Muslim who speaks Urdu and practises medicine, on Shaadi.com you can hunt them out.

The only thing you cannot know is whether you will actually fancy them or if you will have any chemistry. Still, you can have fun finding out and it sure beats marrying your cousin. I have white friends who have also ventured into internet dating, but they do so as if they are buying tickets to see James Blunt - furtively and with great embarrassment. Internet dating doesn't carry that same rank stench of desperation for British Muslims - for them it's a breath of fresh air.

www.sarfrazmanzoor.co.uk

Sarfraz Manzoor is the author of "Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion, Rock'n'roll" published by Bloomsbury (£12.99)Columns

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