Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  My parents recall it as a time of forgotten difficulties and magnified excitement. ‘We overlooked the hardships,’ they reminisce, ‘because we were young and we wanted to experience the world.’ They had exchanged living in a spacious modern flat in the centre of Dar-es-Salaam for a cold one-bedroom place in the suburbs of grey wintry London, with an outside toilet and a shared bathroom and kitchen. My father was refused jobs because he was of Asian origin. The bank manager insisted on a 50 per cent deposit when they bought their first house because he was Asian. The neighbours ran a campaign to prevent them from buying it. They withstood this discrimination and resolved to build a solid life for themselves. They had seen their own families living as minorities in East Africa, and the efforts they had gone through there to build up their wealth and status were still fresh and raw. Now that they found themselves in a similar minority situation in the UK, they got on with the job of doing the same in their new home.

  The keys to success, in my father’s eyes, were education and hard work. And by working hard he gave both his children a first-rate education. ‘Give a man a fish,’ he told us repeatedly, quoting from the well-worn proverb, ‘and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he’ll eat forever.’ Success and material wealth were not to be relied on, he cautioned us. ‘Did you see what happened to the Asians in Uganda?’ he would ask rhetorically. ‘They were good people living good comfortable lives, and then one day they had to leave everything behind and become homeless refugees. It shows you, wealth and prosperity can come easily and can disappear even in the blink of an eye.’ The rise of bloodthirsty Idi Amin was a cautionary tale for migrant Asians who had been exiled with the threat of extermination from their homes in Uganda in the early 1970s.

  Modernity has persuaded us that it is essential for us to fulfil certain needs: comfort, style, status, romance. But these are not the essentials. Instead, what the exiles had experienced first-hand was that life at its most threadbare is a desperate scramble for survival.

  ‘How precarious is a person’s position in any country?’ My father would pause and remind us with cautionary love: ‘The most important thing for you always, the thing that we teach you and urge you to always keep, the thing that will always keep you true to yourselves and to be good people in this world, is to ensure that you do not abandon your faith and to always remember God.’

  My parents loved to travel. Perhaps it was something to do with the itch of the migrant in their blood. My school holidays were punctuated with trips abroad to interesting and exotic places, despite the fact that we were not wealthy. Every year we went away to see new places and explore their hidden treasures, and I gathered people, places and experiences in my memory. The visits embedded signposts in my wild, porous imagination and marked out the landscapes of a connected, multilateral reflection of a world that had yet to catch up with my longing optimism.

  My first holiday memories are of a trip to Tanzania at the age of four to visit my extended family. We still have old projector film with movie clips from this trip. It’s the kind of film you wind around a wheel and when it ends it makes a funny clicking sound and a white light is projected onto the screen. The scene that most surprised me years later was a vignette of me on the beautiful sandy beaches of Dar-es-Salaam. I am unaware of the camera’s eye and unconcerned by social constraints. I am wearing my favourite red shorts and red Jungle Book T-shirt. It was only years later that I admitted that the T-shirt was too small for me to wear. I am busy with my bucket and spade, surrounded by a ring of young boys hanging on my every word and obeying my instructions, all of them trying to please me.

  When I was three I began at nursery school. My parents had deliberately chosen to speak to me only in Kuchi, the dialect of Gujarati that we spoke, and so I didn’t speak a word of English when I first started. Within weeks I was fluent. By the age of four I was reading children’s English perfectly. At the same time my parents began teaching me to read Arabic script. They firmly believed that as a Muslim I should be able to read the Qur’an directly in its original language. Every evening I would sit playfully on my father’s knee and practise reading a page of the children’s manual to reading the Qur’an. I adored this intimacy with my father and I raced through the pages.

  The Arabic script was a mystery that I took delicious pleasure in unravelling. It was not something alien in our home but part of who we were. It was like the fact that in my parents’ bedroom the bed was pushed to one side so that there would be enough space for two prayer mats, one each for my mother and father. These were specific prayers that were done early in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. They combined special movements with words from the Qur’an, and all Muslims around the world prayed in exactly the same way, in the direction of Mecca. I would race to lay out the mats at prayer time and stand next to my mother who would gently direct me as to what to do. At the end of the prayers I would read out loud the most recent chapter from the Qur’an that I had learnt.

  At the age of five I completed reading the children’s manual and began the full Arabic text of the Qur’an itself. This I completed when I was six. I found it easy because the Arabic phrases had a simple melodious rhythm and the verses often rhymed, almost like poetry. At the age of six and a half I entered a competition at the mosque to give a talk about the Prophet Muhammad and what we could learn from his life. Diligently, and with the innocence and simplicity of a young child, I had prepared my own talk about the good behaviour and kindness of the Prophet. I admit to some plagiarism – I copied it almost entirely from a book about the Prophet, changing some long words I didn’t understand and couldn’t pronounce into six-year-old vocabulary.

  At the end of the speech I added one of my favourite stories about the Prophet. Every day he was forced to walk along a particular street where an old woman would throw rubbish at him because she did not agree with the belief in one God that he was propagating. Each day he would come home covered in foul-smelling litter. One day he walked along the street but there was no rubbish. Instead of being happy at the absence of the woman as most of us would have been, he investigated why she was not carrying out her daily activity and discovered that she was unwell. He went to visit her to see if he could offer her any help. She was shocked that he would show such kindness after her longstanding harassment. Muhammad advised her that looking after even those who show you difficulties is what being a Muslim was all about. I was convinced that the inclusion of this story as the closing part of my speech would win me the prize.

  The mosque was a small converted community centre. Some mosques were purpose-built, some were in small converted houses, others were old buildings of worship that had been closed down or in disrepair and then rescued and revived as a place of worship, but this time as a mosque. The floor was covered in large rugs, and as in all mosques, you had to remove your shoes in the cloakroom before you entered. The mosque was the centre of Islamic community life. Prayers were held there, along with Qur’an classes for children, lessons for adults, and other religious lectures and events. It was the hub of Muslim existence because it was a centre of learning and spirituality, but also a place to meet friends and family and fulfil your social needs.

  When we arrived at the mosque, I would normally have joined my mother in the women’s section, as women and men sat in separate parts of the mosque. Instead, in order to participate in the competition, I had to go into the men’s side to give the talk. Since I was only six, this was OK. I felt slightly strange being the only girl in a roomful of men, all staring intently at me, waiting to see what a young child would say. The bright video lights were glaring and the cameras were rolling. I stood three foot tall and confident and reeled off my presentation, word perfect and carefully intoned, pausing at the right moments for effect. I spoke for five minutes and I performed the whole speech entirely by heart.

  I was awarded only second place, runner-up to a ten-year-old boy, who was commended for his insight and deep analysis. I was disgruntled and ref
lected that of course his speech would be deeper and more insightful than mine: I was six and he was ten.

  A few weeks later I was asked to prepare a short speech for a presentation day at the end of term at school, which would showcase the religions of all the students. Instead of the enthusiasm with which I had greeted the mosque competition, I was in fact deeply reluctant. There was one other Muslim in my class, a girl whose parents were from Turkey. But it was I who was asked to speak about being a Muslim.

  ‘Why can’t she be the one to speak about Islam?’ I whined uncharacteristically. I did not want to stand up in front of the whole school and talk about the details of Muslim life: that was reserved for my time away from school.

  ‘Perhaps the teachers think that with your excellent speech skills you will do a good job of explaining what Islam is,’ suggested my mother. I envied the confidence of her belief and the way it infused all parts of her life so naturally. Even to her friends who were not Muslim, she never preached, but her wisdom and advice, which were born of her faith, were naturally woven into her words and actions. She never elaborated about Islam but rather of living a good life. The separated worlds that I inhabited were a series of disjointed, uncomfortable hyphens. Her worlds were connected together with contented, respectful smiles.

  I loved attending religious Sunday school. It was called madrasah, the Arabic word which simply means ‘school’. The mosque was not large enough to provide suitable teaching facilities for the several hundred students who attended the classes once a week, so a local school was usually hired out for the morning. We were divided into groups by age and had four lessons, each taught by a different teacher, who was normally a parent who volunteered their time to prepare and deliver the class. Each week we were given homework and at the end of term we were given reports, followed by an end-of-term-celebration, just like at school.

  As I was still in the primary classes, we spent our lessons learning the basics of religion. First was the declaration of faith as a Muslim, ‘There is no god but One God, and Muhammad is the last messenger.’ It was crucial to being Muslim to understand and really mean these two sentences. If someone wanted to become a Muslim, this is what they had to say. The first part meant taking all other gods out of your heart. My teacher used to joke, ‘Someone who says there is no god is already half way to being a Muslim!’ One God meant that this Being had no place, no time and no physical shape. The belief that Muhammad was the last messenger was based in turn on believing that there were many prophets before him, like Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Noah, Joseph and so on. Prophet Muhammad came to give exactly the same message to human beings as all the other prophets: believe in God and be good human beings. I loved hearing the stories of all the prophets and all the different kinds of people that they lived amongst, and this was always my favourite part of madrasah.

  We also learnt that Allah, which is the Arabic word for God, was kind, compassionate and loving. God had created the whole universe, and human beings were the best of all creation. It always appealed to me to be the best. I was, after all, the child of Asian parents: only the top grades in any situation were sufficient. Finally, we were taught that the world we lived in was not the End. There was something more to come, and it would be called jannah, ‘paradise’. I imagined paradise would be like the inside of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

  We were also taught about the actions we would have to carry out as Muslims. The first was salat, the prayer. I already knew the movements and words for the ritual prayers that were to be performed every day, because my parents had taught me. Next was fasting. Every year, for thirty days during the month of Ramadan, Muslims would refrain from eating and drinking from dawn until dusk, and spend their time focusing on their spiritual development. I didn’t have to fast yet because I was too young. Then there was hajj, the famous, once-in-a-lifetime journey that all Muslims try to complete: to visit Mecca and the House of God, which is called the Kaba. Fasting, prayer and hajj were personal duties to connect you directly to God. There was also charity to give, and that had to come out of your time as well as your wealth.

  I was the star pupil at the madrasah, so was selected to appear in a video for children about how to pray. My mother dressed me in my favourite green shalwar kameez, tied my hair into two thick plaits and pinned a white cotton scarf over my head. My father bundled me into the car and we set off to the other side of London to the house where the video was to be filmed. I was going to be the star of the film. Fame had called early.

  My celebrity would spread far and wide, and marriage proposals would come flooding in. Not at the age of six. But it already laid the foundations of my public persona in the minds of our social circle and community. What my parents had implanted into my heart were the seeds of faith, love and community service.

  In my own mind, my life would unfold according to the rules of a Disney cartoon. I knew that when I grew up, the mysteries of princes and marriage would be revealed to me. For now it was enough for me to read my favourite fairy tale: Beauty and the Beast. Butterflies fluttered in my tummy each time I read it. It was the perfect love story – full of eternal romantic truth. The hero of the story was undeniably handsome as the prince. As the beast he was dignified and patient. Whether monster or man, he was always true and dedicated in his love. The heroine was gracious, beautiful and saw the beast’s inner beauty. The story hinged on a white rose bush. Each night the Beast would pluck one of the exquisite roses to present to Beauty as a token of his love, until she was won over by him. In our back garden at home we, too, had a magnificent white rose bush that burst forth with the same pure snowy petals as in the paintings in the fairy story. The roses fluttered, innocently fragrant, throughout the fairytale summers of my childhood.

  Kulcha

  It is a universally acknowledged truth that all Asian parents want their children to get married and settle down. It is the final and most important duty of the parent towards their child. It is also an Islamic responsibility to help your child find a suitable spouse. Only when the offspring are paired off can the mother and father sigh with relief. So momentous and significant is this obligation, and so huge is the impact of the choice of partner, that parents fret about finding that spouse from the moment the child is born. It is the job of parents, mothers-in-law and Aunties to network furiously and line up candidates. The girl and boy do not necessarily need to be involved. They can just turn up on the day, if they are required, in order to attend the communal meeting, as Ali and I had done.

  Cultural norms dictate how the meeting of the two parties will play out. It may involve members of both parties being present, along with tea and civilities, and a subtle but rigorous scoping out of the other side. Or the boy and the girl might not even be there. The only certainty is that the meeting could change significantly the lives of the two people who are at the heart of the discussion.

  The Buxom Aunties, those round matriarchal women in nylon shalwar kameez with their chiffon dupattas pulled deftly over their heads, therefore wield enormous power as matchmakers in the lives of young men and women and their parents who are searching for a partner for their child to build a life with. Behind closed doors, over cups of tea and crispy just-fried pakoras, the seasoned mothers-in-law, the nylon-clad naanis and the grandmothers, all of whom function as matchmakers alongside the Aunties, talk with the authority of wisdom and experience to those women who are wannabe mothers-in-law in search of a wife for their son.

  Wannabe: I’m getting too old to look after Ahmed on my own.

  Nylon Naani: It’s time you got him a wife.

  Wannabe: I know, but where do I find someone suitable? Someone who can cook, look after the house properly like we used to do and who will give me grandchildren and not go out and about abandoning her responsibilities. Girls these days are just all about themselves. They don’t have the patience and tolerance that we had. You’re a naani already, a grandmother, and you’ve sorted out your daughters-in-law so well. So hard with girl
s these days.

  Nylon Naani: You’re right, it’s very tough. So many couples getting married and divorced willy-nilly. And your Ahmed is such a good boy. Have you talked to him about going back home and choosing a girl? They are the best you know, well-trained and obedient. They know how to look after a mother-in-law.

  Wannabe: Talk to Ahmed about going back home to find a wife? Pfah! He doesn’t want to even talk about getting married. He doesn’t know I need someone to help around the house. Besides (and her voice softens here), he needs someone of his own and I’m getting old. Who will look after him when I’m gone?

  Nylon Naani: That’s your mistake. Boys are never ready, you have to just surprise them. Show them a few pretty girls and even the one who says no, no, no, he will fall for one of them. Boys can’t resist a pretty girl. You might need to encourage and persuade him a little bit or perhaps even push him. But he’ll thank you in the end.

  Nylon Naani pauses, and then looks furtively in all directions, Godfather-style. Even with no-one in earshot, she leans in conspiratorially.

  Nylon Naani: I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about finding a daughter-in-law. Only four things and you will be laughing, laughing, so happy. First, do not involve your son. He does not know what he wants and will only complicate matters. Next, avoid girls who are oh-so-independent. This is not a good quality for a daughter-in-law. They will not be committed.

  Wannabe: Hmm, yes, hmm. So wise, so wise, yes, you are right. Such wonderful wisdom.

  Nylon Naani: Three. Make sure she is pretty and she can cook. And the younger, the better. And last, look for a girl from the same culture, so that she can ‘fit’ with you.

  When I am older, with many sons, fretting about finding them wives, I will write a sequel to my book. It will be called Love in a Nylon Dupatta.

  THE BUXOM AUNTIES’ RULES