With its broader exploration of gender relations, this chapter complements the narrower focus on marriage in the previous chapter, showing why it is essential to look beyond marriage relationships for a fuller understanding of what is happening in Muslim family life. Continuing to address core questions at the heart of the book, it sets out a case as to why it is valuable to adopt a relational approach to enhance understanding of what is happening in Muslim family life and relationships. It explains how a relational approach offers a more comprehensive perspective of changing gender relations through bringing into view multiple connections between relational, cultural and structural factors. It also encourages us to consider a wider range of relationships and relationship practices, instead of the dominant primary emphasis on marital relationships. A key aim is to highlight how such an approach helps to foreground the centrality of caring roles and responsibilities and the connected emotional, intimate dimensions of people's family lives. In doing so, the chapter encourages broader, inclusive consideration of both men's and women's lives, which is novel as Muslim men's family lives are usually overlooked. It considers how dynamics and patterns of gender relationships are changing and how this affects social and emotional relationships. It asserts that the value of a relational approach extends to exploring the dynamic, gendered relationship between the private domain of family life and the public domain, drawing attention to the impact of inequality and forms of racism.

The chapter includes anonymized excerpts of data collected from my own research involving interviews with Muslim men. The interviews were carried out as part of a research study into the impact of a child sexual exploitation crisis on a town in Northern England. The town had endured an increase in hate crime, sustained far-right activity and unsuccessful prosecution of local Muslim men charged with public order offences following a far-right demonstration (Britton, 2019). The age of the men ranged from 26 to 52, and the men identified their ethnic background as Pakistani or Azad Kashmiri. As this chapter shows, the interviews captured relational and intimate dimensions of men's personal lives as well as the impact of racism.