Intimate Connections dissects ideas, feelings, and practices around love, marriage, and respectability in the remote high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. It offers insightful perspectives from the emotional lives of Shia women and their active engagement with their husbands. These gender relations are shaped by countless factors, including embodied values of modesty and honor, vernacular fairy tales and Bollywood movies, Islamic revivalism and development initiatives. In particular, the advent of media and communication technologies has left a mark on (pre)marital relations in both South Asia and the wider Muslim world. Juxtaposing different understandings of ‘love’ reveals rich and manifold worlds of courtship, elopements, family dynamics, and more or less affectionate matches that are nowadays often initiated through SMS. Deep ethnographic accounts trace the relationships between young couples to show how Muslim women in a globalized world dynamically frame and negotiate circumstances in their lives.

ANNA-MARIA WALTER is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oulu in Finland and is part of an interdisciplinary team working on conservation, tourism, and remoteness in Europe. She lives in Munich, Germany.

— Attiya Ahmad, author of Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait

— Katherine Lemons, author of Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism