What is it about?
Love is often described as an important part of Islamic marriage, but men and women are not always taught about love in the same way. This study examines 71 Swahili-language Islamic marriage advice booklets written over nearly 90 years in East Africa and compares them with oral marriage advice given to Muslim women in Zanzibar. The research shows that written marriage advice, usually written by men and often given to men before marriage, frequently tells husbands to love their wives. Women, however, are more often taught how to encourage, maintain, and protect their husbands’ love through their behavior, speech, care, and emotional efforts. By analyzing how the Swahili verb “to love” (-penda) is used, the study reveals a consistent pattern: men are more often portrayed as the people who love, while women are portrayed as the people responsible for making love last. Although many texts describe love as mutual and desirable, sustaining love is often assigned to women. These patterns appear across different historical periods, even as ideas about marriage, sexuality, and romance have changed. The findings suggest that gender inequalities are reproduced not only through laws and social institutions but also through everyday teachings about emotions, relationships, and married life. The study shows how religious advice shapes expectations about love, marriage, and gender, and how emotional responsibilities can be distributed unevenly between husbands and wives.
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Why is it important?
This study shows how ideas about love, marriage, and gender are taught through everyday religious advice in East Africa. By analyzing nearly ninety years of Swahili-language Islamic marriage guides, it reveals that men and women are often assigned different emotional responsibilities: men are encouraged to love, while women are expected to cultivate and sustain that love. The findings highlight how gender inequalities can be reproduced not only through laws and institutions but also through language, emotions, and ordinary moral instruction. The research offers new insight into Islam, gender, emotional labor, and African Muslim societies, while contributing to broader conversations about how cultures teach people what love and marriage should look like.
Perspectives
This article brings together two strands of my research that I have been pursuing for many years: the study of Swahili-language Islamic advice literature and ethnographic work with Muslim women on the Swahili coast. I was struck by a recurring contrast. Men’s written marriage guides often encourage husbands to love their wives, while the advice women share with brides tends to focus on how to cultivate and maintain a husband’s love. By examining the grammar of love in these texts, I found a surprisingly consistent pattern across nearly a century of publications. As both a scholar of religion and a longtime student of Swahili Muslim communities, I am interested in how everyday language shapes expectations about gender, emotions, and ethical life. I hope this research encourages readers to think about how ideas of love are taught, not simply felt, and how seemingly ordinary advice can help reproduce or challenge social inequalities.
Professor KD Thompson
University of Wisconsin Madison
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Love’s grammar: Gendering agency in Swahili-language Islamic marriage advice, Contemporary Islam, August 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s11562-026-00626-2.
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