Introduction

‘Luxury is family and time’, said recently Fiona Swarovski, a prominent Austrian and heiress of the Swarovski Crystal empire. The dream of a family – by which I mean the longing for community, safety, acceptance and support realised through the family – can take different forms, but is common to many people, independent of their culture, tradition, religion or nationality. The family is valued, is in fashion, maybe even more than ever before, seen as a constant part in an inconstant world, imagined as a secure haven in an insecure, changing and globalised environment.

This chapter investigates Muslim migrant families in Austria and their dream of a family. Their views on the family are shaped in their countries of origin, and in the country of immigration as idealised images from their childhood or youth. Families are cherished in the new home country as part of a cultural heritage. Consequently they are idealised, by contrast with what is an imagined (but not really known) representation of ‘Austrian’ families. The same is true of Austrian representations of Muslim families. In these representations imagination plays a greater part than reality.

Muslim families are at the centre of much current interest due to their increasing numbers and presupposed ‘otherness’, in which religion plays an important role. Most of the present studies of Muslim family relations, however, concentrate on such issues as the status of women, on arranged (or forced) marriages, or on female genital mutilation and honour killings (neither of which are of Islamic origin). Few investigate the Muslim family in the round, as a social unit, its evolution and internal and external interactions with mainstream society, especially in the context of migration and integration. Generally, there has been a tendency to approach the subject from other points of view such as legal status, situation in the labour market, or from the standpoint of integration policies. Even when discussing integration the emphasis has been on individuals rather than on families, or on specific family members – wives, children, etc.

There is a particular need for studies from the perspective of immigrant families in Europe, and in this chapter, I focus on the life of Muslim migrants, and seek to contribute to a better understanding of their family values, principally through the voices of a limited number of Muslim respondents in Austria (see appendix at end of this chapter).