Informal Muslim Marriages: Regulations and Contestations

This special issue of the OJLR focuses on informal religious-only marriages occurring within Muslim communities in various jurisdictions with differing traditions of marriage and state regulation. It is widely accepted that religious marriages are entered by Muslims seeking to embark on a religiously lawful intimate relationship.1 In general, a religious-only marriage usually2 results in the parties not benefitting from state legal protections available to legally recognized spouses. This is an issue, to varying degrees, in all five of the jurisdictions considered in this issue, whether Muslim-minority (England and Wales, Italy, Malta, and Finland) or Muslim-majority (Tunisia).