‘Muslims don’t date, they marry’. Since its founding, the Muzzmatch app has been helping Muslim men and women meet their future spouse on their own terms
We often associate dating apps with a very liberal approach to love and sexuality. While everyone knows that one couple who managed to fall in love thanks to a dating app like Tinder or Bumble, they are often used for casual sex and looking for a brief romance. It would seem that there could be nothing more untraditional than online dating and allowing technology to select a partner for one night or longer. However, dating apps have become so popular that they have also found fans among representatives of the world’s major religions, such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
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In 2011, a year before Tinder was created, Shahzad Younas, a British man of Pakistani descent, created Muzzmatch, a dating app aimed at Muslim men and women looking for their other half. What set the Muzzmatch app apart from its competitors was its slogan: “Muslims don’t date, they marry”. While it seems paradoxical to create a dating app without dating, Muzzmatch has been helping Muslim men and women meet their future spouses on their own terms since its founding. Any other form of meeting, such as dating, informal relationships or one-night stands, are not welcome uses of the app.
An app instead of a matchmaker
“Say goodbye to pushy aunties” claims another slogan of the app. This is because Muzzmatch seeks to take on the role of matchmaker in Muslim communities that aunts, mothers, or grandmothers usually play, while maintaining the traditional way of marriage. Because one of the basic rules of marriage in Islam is the presence of a third person at the meeting, the app allows adding a family member to the chat room, as well as webcam chatting with a potential bride’s father.
While browsing through the profiles of potential spouses, we will learn not only about their interests and attitudes towards their future partner, but also how often they pray, whether they wear the hijab or niqab, and what ethnic group they belong to. Due to its popularity, the Muzzmatch app is in conflict with other major players in the dating app market. In 2022, Muzzmatch lost in court to the leader of the global dating app market, Match Group, which includes Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, among others. Younas was accused by them of misleading male and female users by associating the Muzzmatch name with the Match Group company. As a result of the lost court case, the word “match” disappeared from the app’s name, and only “Muzz” remained.
Kosher dates
Despite the financial losses incurred in the name change process, Muzz is now the largest dating app for Muslim men and women, although no longer the only one. Salams is an app with a more progressive outlook, where male and female users can also provide information about the faction of Islam to which they belong. LoveHabibi, on the other hand, can be used by Muslim men and women, as well as by Christian Arabs and Arab women.
Although apps for Muslims and Muslim women are most popular among representatives of the three monotheistic religions (Muzz – 5 million downloads, Salams – 1 million), Christians and Jews also use this form of getting to know each other.
The most popular app for Christians men and women is Eden (more than 500 thousand downloads on Google Play), where partners are filtered by a Christian denomination. There are Catholics, Evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians to choose from. Religious Jews and Jewish women, on the other hand, can download the Jswipe app (100,000 downloads), where users also choose the denomination and level of kosher observance.
A part of the modern world
Of course, dating apps are only a part of the phenomenon that is online dating. There are many websites that support followers of various religions in finding a future spouse. However, it is the apps that are the most widely used tool by the younger generation, which allows believers and practitioners to feel part of the modern technological world, while maintaining a conservative approach to the principles of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.
Ida Zając – volunteer of Salam Lab, student of Middle Eastern studies at Freie Universität in Berlin. Graduate of Hebrew Studies at the UW, Hebrew language teacher.
