When “Sweetgal,” a 29-year-old British Muslim from central England, began looking for a new husband last year, at first she didn’t know where to turn.

The answer, it turned out, was to the Internet.

She’d been married once — a union arranged by her parents — to a man from Pakistan. It lasted seven years and produced children but broke down due to cultural differences, and she didn’t want to go through a similar trauma again.

Post-9/11 immigration restrictions mean more British Muslims are choosing each other for marriage. Increasingly, they’re finding each other online. Photo courtesy Reuters.

At the same time, being a respectful Muslim who wears a hijab, she wasn’t going to start “dating,” and knew her parents would have to be involved in her new search in one way or another.

Over the past two years, there has been a boom in the use of websites that introduce Muslim men and women, not for casual dating, but for those actively seeking traditional Muslim marriage.

Where once, young British Muslims might have had a marriage arranged to a spouse from the country of their parents’ origin — perhaps Pakistan or Bangladesh — it is now much more common for them to marry within the Muslim community in Britain.

“Sweetgal,” who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, has been registered on www.singlemuslim.com for several months, in which time she’s found someone she hopes could be a marriage prospect.

“My parents are coming round (to the idea),” she says. “He’s a British Pakistani Muslim and more in line with what I’m looking for.”

Where marriages used to be fixed up solely by parents with the help of religious leaders, the Internet now plays an influential role in bringing partners together, even if parents remain part of the equation.

Singlemuslim.com, which calls itself Britain’s largest Muslim introductions agency, has seen registered users more than double over the past year to 100,000, as word has spread about its service, not only among singles but their parents, too.

Such is the demand for trustworthy introductions that its founder is now opening sites in the United States, Canada, and Australia to cater to their large Muslim communities.

“Our success rate is extremely high,” says Adeem Younis, who founded the site from his base in West Yorkshire six years ago.

“Two people a day, on average, are coming off the site having found success, which is a lot really. We’re seeing the number of traditionally arranged marriages dropping quite rapidly as this becomes more popular.”

One of the most marked effects of the growth of sites that cater to Muslims, as well as Sikhs, Hindus, Tamils and others across South Asia looking for traditional marriage, is the empowerment of women.

On some sites, more than half the registered users are professional women with above-average incomes who use the service to save time and broaden the scope of their search. They are direct and demanding about what they are looking for.

“It’s been a major revolution,” says Geeta Sri Vastav, the UK head of www.shaadi.com, which calls itself the world’s largest matrimonial service, with 10 million registered users, most in South Asia.

Another impact of the sites, particularly in Britain, is to increase the tendency for young people to “marry in,” rather than looking to marry someone from their “home” country.

Rapid changes in lifestyle, wealth, and outlook have increased the gap between Britain and the countries where most of its Muslims originally came from — Pakistan and Bangladesh — making cross-national marriage a much trickier affair. New immigration laws introduced since 9/11 have also made it more difficult for potential brides or grooms from countries like Pakistan to enter Britain for marriage.

There are no precise figures on Muslim marriages in Britain, but community leaders say arranged marriages have fallen sharply in recent years, and point to education and the Internet as the main causes.

Courtesy of Reuters. © Street News Service: www.street-papers.org.