Dressed in a rust-orange hijab and a contrasting green dress, Mariam waits in the aisle of an appliance store in Houston. She and professional matchmaker Hoda Abrahim are waiting for Omar, who is flying in from Los Angeles to meet Mariam for the first time. Mariam has no tolerance for coffee-shop first dates. “I studied software engineering,” she says. “My actual work pays me like two hundred bucks an hour, and a man is paying me five dollars for a cup of coffee and my time?” Plus, she needs a new washer/dryer. Mariam wants to gauge how her date is with finances—by assessing his suggestions about her impending purchase.
Mariam is a thirty-year-old Egyptian-American woman who is successful, independent, and looking for a husband. After three failed engagements, she has decided to enlist professional help. She’s always wanted ten children, but given her age, she would settle for four. She credits her age for finally knowing what she wants in a partner: an Arabic speaker who is family-oriented and sociable. Among her dealbreakers: someone who is bad with finances, smokes, or jokes too much. She might overlook it if a man does not regularly pray, but she wants a conservative Muslim, a “leader of the family,” a protector. Hoda, in her professional opinion, disagrees. She thinks that Mariam would be better suited to a man who is less conservative and more “open to her self-discovery process.”
Over in New York City, in an Arab-owned coffee shop, matchmaker Yasmin Elhady meets with thirty-three-year-old Bangladeshi-American Noureen, who has hired her to help find a partner. Noureen is dressed casual-chic in a denim jacket and knee-length-dress paired with gold jewelry. She wears her long black hair down. An attorney, Noureen’s past relationships have suffered from her unwillingness to “take shit from anybody.” In her own words, she does not strictly eat halal or dress modestly, but she prays five times a day and is seeking a partner who would be open to her faith growing over time. One dealbreaker: “No Misery Muslims”—religious folks who have “a holier-than-thou attitude.” She would prefer a tall man (she is five-foot-ten). But after some prodding from Yasmin, she modifies this requirement to “tall-ish.”
Yasmin matches her with Fahim, a fellow Bangladeshi New Yorker, and their first date, at an arcade, goes well. They share a sense of humor and are around the same height. But Fahim is twenty-nine, four years her junior, and is very close with his mother. “Sometimes, [with] brown boys, you know, it’s mom or nothing,” she sighs.
Muslim Matchmaker, which was created by Smriti Mundhra and debuted on February 11 on Hulu, follows in the tradition of other ethnic matchmaking shows, including Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking (2020) and Jewish Matchmaking (2023), which were also created and produced by Mundhra. These shows all bring the seemingly old-world concept of matchmaking into the modern medium of reality television. Across eight episodes, Muslim Matchmaker follows two professional matchmakers, Hoda and Yasmin, as they work together to help American Muslim singles find marriage partners. In its ability to present Islamic norms around courtship and marriage as familiar and logical guidelines to approach American dating, Muslim Matchmaker offers viewers a window into the diverse, everyday religious expressions of U.S. Muslims. A heartwarming and fun watch, the show will not only appeal to fans of dating shows, but also to those interested in catching an informative glimpse of lived Islam in America.
The matchmakers often advise clients against getting too serious too soon, and they suggest that the singles consider how their “halal/haram ratios” (lawful/forbidden), or the balance of how they approach Islamic living, measure up against the other’s.
Hoda and Yasmin share key similarities, which at first glance might conceal the diversity of Muslim experiences honored on the show. They are both fair-skinned, fashion-forward, Arab American women who wear hijabs and bold colors and have perfect manicures and make-up. Yet they have very different backgrounds. Of Egyptian heritage and from North Carolina, Hoda is twenty-eight, happily married, and, during the filming of the series, pregnant. She has worked as a professional matchmaker since she was twenty-two. By contrast, at thirty-nine, Yasmin is a twice-divorced single mother who plays the older sister figure to her clients. Libyan and Egyptian, she worked as an attorney before becoming a comedian and matchmaker. Her status as a divorcee is a striking choice by the show’s producers, given the stigmas in various Muslim cultures. Or maybe it isn’t a bold choice at all, but a reflection of attitude shifts among Muslims toward dating, marriage, and family. For her part, Yasmin narrates divorce as a major trial, an experience that has made her an empathetic matchmaker with a heightened ability to look out for her clients.
Hoda and Yasmin frame their matchmaking terms in the “rule of threes.” Clients should commit to three dates over the course of three months, and over the course of this period, go through three hundred questions with each other on weekly Zoom calls. These questions help each potential partner understand if the other wants children and how many, would be willing to relocate, and would support the other partner should he or she want to go back to school. The matchmakers often advise clients against getting too serious too soon, and they suggest that the singles consider how their “halal/haram ratios” (lawful/forbidden), or the balance of how they approach Islamic living, measure up against the other’s. For example, they explain that for someone who has never touched alcohol, a Muslim who drinks would not be a suitable match. After the three-month period of three face-to-face dates, couples must decide whether they want to end things or be exclusive and move forward with their relationship. From then on, couples will decide on their own about marriage.
Hoda and Yasmin’s gentle, guided approach is a far cry from that of another famous reality-TV matchmaker, Mumbai-based Sima Taparia, affectionately known as Sima Auntie, of Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking. Across three seasons, Taparia never shied away from judging her clients, especially the women, for being “too picky.” In contrast, gentle and honest prodding, and redirecting clients’ “non-negotiables,” undergirded by Islamic principles, are at the heart of Hoda and Yasmin’s matchmaking strategies. They listen to their clients’ desires and checklists, validate them, then nudge them to think differently about certain criteria. They also offer guidance and support throughout the process; when necessary, they admonish clients who stray from the process.
Matchmaking is not presented here as something that must be sold to non-Muslim audiences; rather, working with a matchmaker is presented as a kind of natural alternative to those weary of an app culture that has left single folks dejected and depleted. Muslim Matchmaker also arrives within an existing milieu of dating shows that center on marriage: TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé, the Danish series Married at First Sight, and of course the wildly popular Love Is Blind franchise. Love Is Blind, on Netflix, first aired in 2020, the same year as Indian Matchmaking, and has had eight seasons to date; its popularity has undoubtedly normalized, at least for American reality-TV aficionados, the notion of couples having serious conversations about marriage within a short span of time. In the exhausting culture of swiping left and right, American audiences today may be more sympathetic than ever to the idea that single women and men would seek out a matchmaker.
Though its drama quotient might be lackluster compared to its flashier reality counterparts, Muslim Matchmaker has the key elements of any good dating show: a combination of cute, cringe, and heartwarming moments. When Fulani excitedly shows his date, Omniya, photos of his beloved cat, she is standoffish, deadpanning, “I’m allergic to cats.” Without looking up from his phone or skipping a beat, he assures her, “Well, they have shots for that. For the cat and the human.” In another case, Faryal goes silent when Uneeb expresses his love of all things Marvel and dressing up at Comic-Con. (He’s also a fan of the dad-joke: “get married or chai trying!” he insists at one point.) Imran, who has his pilot’s license, takes Nurin on a lovely flying date over the San Francisco skyline.
Ultimately Muslim Matchmaker reflects the insider status of Muslims in the U.S. today. Its narrative takes for granted the Americanness of its featured Muslims, showcasing them in their various fashions, careers, and hobbies. In so doing, the show provides insights into the particular issues that single Muslims face on the dating scene—ageism, classism, stigma surrounding divorced women, and family judgment and pressure—and highlights how the Muslim matchmakers mediate these conversations through an Islamic lens.
For instance, when the age difference between Noureen and Fahim repeatedly comes up in their courtship, the matchmakers encourage them not to fixate on it. They also remind Faheem that the Prophet Muhammad was married to a woman fifteen years his senior—his beloved first wife Khadjiah, the wealthy businesswoman who proposed marriage to him, who was the first convert to Islam, and who provided Muhammad with emotional and financial support. Khadijah and Muhammad were married monogamously for twenty-five years before her death; she is often upheld as a seventh-century feminist icon.
Noureen and Fahim both seem to take Hoda and Yasmin’s advice to heart, and their relationship progresses smoothly throughout the series. But Hoda and Yasmin do not always have solutions to issues. When Yasmin asks Bucky, a Pakistani American dermatology resident in New York City, how she could possibly still be single, given her looks and brains, Bucky says that she is the daughter of a cab driver, not an appealing background for many potential suitors. The recently divorced Algerian American Yasmine is broken up with over text message by tactless Adnan, who tells her that he was caught off guard by her divorce and was not attracted to her. In these cases, the matchmakers provide a sympathetic ear and encourage their clients to lean into their faith.
Matchmaking is not presented here as something that must be sold to non-Muslim audiences; rather, working with a matchmaker is presented as a kind of natural alternative to those weary of an app culture that has left single folks dejected and depleted.
Muslim Matchmaker puts on full display the broad diversity of Muslims in the United States and the range of ways that Muslims engage with their faith. Muslims on the show are Egyptian, Bangladeshi, African American, Black Arab, Indian, Pakistani, Algerian, Bosnian, and Malaysian, and they hail from all parts of the United States. In showcasing such diversity, the show normalizes and celebrates people being honest about their tastes and preferences on levels of religious observance. For example, it normalizes the prohibition on pre-marital sex, highlighting women like Mariam and Bucky, who are modern, independent, and insist on physical boundaries. This is fundamentally different from, for example, the colorblind approach of Love is Blind, in which contestants, who speak to each other through a wall, and decide before they ever physically meet whether to get married, are forbidden from inquiring about their dates’ race and ethnicity (and at times, are also encouraged to overlook religious difference).
By contrast, Muslim Matchmaker comfortably asserts Muslim difference and validates being explicit about one’s preferences in a partner. At its core, the show validates the premise that a Muslim might prefer to marry another Muslim. This is a part of a broader bid to inculcate a method of intentional dating that takes seriously not only matters of race and religion but also politics. Taking such matters into account is not an endorsement of racism or religious discrimination, but rather an honest reckoning with how the intersectionality of one’s identity informs life experiences, and thus a couple’s compatibility. For instance, cat-lover Fulani, who is an African American, Atlanta-based content developer, is upfront that he would prefer to be matched with a Black woman, because he wants a partner who will understand his day-to-day experiences as a Black man. For him, his future wife’s race is just as important a factor as her Muslimness. Muslim Matchmaker, then, simultaneously asserts Muslimness as American and validates Muslim difference. In the process, it can encourage even non-Muslims to be more forthright and intentional in their dating lives. In a dating culture marked by absolute app fatigue, these lessons should have universal appeal to all those who are single and looking.