Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  We chatted for a short time, delaying our journey to the wedding, prioritising this meeting and feeling that even though it was they who had turned up three hours late, we had a duty to be polite and host them. Karim was intelligent and charming. He was also deeply connected to his faith as a Muslim, and that appealed to my spirit. My heart raced as I spoke to him. His smile sent shivers through me.

  For once I felt tongue-tied, but he had enough skill and grace to carry the conversation. Although we only talked briefly, I felt that there was magic. At 7 p.m. we all exited our house. They returned to their home and we went to our wedding.

  I was still annoyed at them for being so late and for the lack of courtesy, but I was smitten. He scored six out of six on the Shelina-Suitor-Scale of Essentials. The qualities I found so hard to locate elsewhere were abundantly present in him: he was a practising Muslim who was deeply involved in running youth activities at his local mosque, he was looking for a wife who wore hijab, he was the right age and a smart human being who was easy to talk to. And looking into his beautiful eyes, he met a few of my other Desirable qualities too.

  Finally I had found someone who shared my vision of faith and who I felt compatible with. I kept thinking about him, hoping that he had felt ‘that feeling’, too. I was sure that he had. All the signs were there. He had looked right in my eyes as we spoke and his smile had a certain warmth. Most importantly of all, he had told me how nice I was, and how refreshing it was to meet someone like me. I was sure that we would meet again.

  Several days later we had still heard nothing. It wasn’t proper for my mother to call them. The girl’s family could not be so forward: the next move had to come from the boy’s side. We all grumbled about how we were at the mercy of the boy’s side and how humiliating it was that they controlled the whole situation. We pointed out to each other how Khadijah, the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, who was herself a successful business woman, had taken the initiative in sending a marriage proposal to Muhammad. And yet despite this, we felt through the force of cultural standards that it would be too shameful to call them.

  As the days went by, I lost hope and licked my wounds. I mourned that when I had finally found someone who was suitable and who I liked, he didn’t like me. Maybe it was the blue nail polish.

  Three weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, we got a call. It was Karim’s mother. ‘We’d like to visit you tomorrow, Saturday at 2 p.m., so Karim and Shelina can meet again.’ We were all shocked. We hadn’t heard a squeak for three weeks and now they wanted to come over tomorrow. Stunned by this revelation, my mum forgot to remain cool and agreed to her request, despite the fact we already had guests arranged. She rushed to reschedule. Suitors always took precedence: you never knew when you’d get the chance again.

  At 10 a.m. we cleaned the house. At midday we made samosas and sweets. At 1 p.m. I started to get dressed to make sure I achieved a look that was both cute and modest. At 2 p.m. we waited. At 2.30 p.m. we continued to wait. At 3 p.m. we waited further, getting agitated. At 3.30 p.m. we grew furious. At 4 p.m. they arrived. I saw him and I melted. We talked and talked. He smiled at me and his beautiful hazel eyes lit up. I sank into them. What more could I ask for? I could feel the sparks flying. We exchanged mobile phone numbers and e-mail addresses at the end of the meeting. As they left, his mother gave me an enormous squishy hug. She looked straight into my eyes and in an adoring manner told me, ‘You are a very lovely girl, Shelina, I like you very much.’ I smiled with affection. I was in with the mother!

  Since Karim and I had exchanged contact details, my parents assumed the official liaison between them and his parents was over and left it to the two of us to negotiate further developments. They would, of course, be keeping a wise and guiding eye on the proceedings. I hadn’t done this before. The rules of meetings were changing, morphing. With new technologies and changing attitudes, mobile phone calls and e-mails were now possible. By Tuesday, I had heard nothing from him. I decided that as a modern woman I too could grasp the reins of my future and get in touch with Karim. I sent him a brief e-mail.

  Salam alaikum, Karim

  It was nice to see you again on Saturday. I hope your weekend went well. It’s always tough to go back to work on a Monday. I’m a bit bored right now so I thought I’d drop you an e-mail to let you know that I’m off on holiday next Monday to Canada to visit my grandmother who is living there. Can’t wait. I’ve been to Toronto several times before, but this time we’re going to drive to Montreal as well and spend a couple of days there. Really looking forward to it.

  What’s new with you?

  Shelina

  I felt this struck the right balance between nonchalant and leaving the door open for him to respond without feeling pressured. I had deliberately closed with a neutral question so he had to respond but did not feel that it held weighty meaning. The note also created a time line for him to get in touch as I was going away.

  I got no response.

  The following Monday, I sat on a plane ready to take off for Canada. I succumbed and wrote a short text message to him. ‘Off to Canada today. Hope all is well with you. Catch up with you after my return at the weekend. Shelina.’

  It took me half an hour to frame this message in order to achieve a tone midway between interest and detachment. I felt like a teenager. I was excited, breathless, truly believing that he was the One. In Montreal I bought him a T-shirt as a souvenir. I’d never done that before. I wasn’t sure how or when I would give it to him, but I already felt a connection. I knew that somehow he was going to be special in my life.

  A week after my return I’d still heard nothing back. I tried one more e-mail but got no response. Karim’s mother called my mum the following weekend. She was distressed.

  ‘I like Shelina so much,’ she told my mother, ‘She is so nice, so religious, wears hijab, pretty. But my son, I don’t know what to do with him. Whenever I ask him, he says “yes, she’s nice” but then doesn’t do anything. I want to see him get married, and he needs an educated, religious wife, and I show him Shelina and he is ignoring me. He says he is busy trying to set up a new business with his friend and he’s going to give up his good job. What should I do?’

  My mother was trapped between counselling this poor woman and trying to secure her son for me. But she was also annoyed at this dillydallying. We’d been through too much of this before and firmly believed that clarity and honesty was the best way forward. She also knew from hard experience that when someone like Karim came along, turning our noses up in a snotty huff would do us no favours either.

  My mum told her about the e-mails and text messages, and then gently consoled her and told her to be patient.

  A few days later, I got a reply to my email.

  Dear Shelina, salam alaikum

  Thanks for your messages. I saw your first e-mail and just before I was going to respond our house was struck by lightning!

  There was a power surge to my computer, which I had to fix. I think the hard drive was corrupted, and I lost your e-mail and your e-mail address. I will give you a ring later in the week.

  Take care

  Karim

  I never heard from him again.

  I can’t do this anymore. I can’t I can’t. How can they all be so awful, and the one I like doesn’t even give me a second thought? Maybe my father was right – maybe there isn’t any such thing as the perfect man. Should I stop looking for Prince Charming? Will that crackling chemistry never materialise? Perhaps my ideal of Prince Charming was just that – an ideal, a dream, something that could never be real.

  Or perhaps the problem was with me. Did I expect too much? Surely I couldn’t really imagine that falling in love would mean living happily ever after? Despite pretending that I was immersed in the depths of my faith, and saw marriage as part of completing that faith, I had to admit to myself that it was Prince Charming from the fairytales that I was looking for. I demanded such a person from the Creator. I failed to reciprocate with the right a
ttitude. If I saw my partner through the right eyes as a companion in life and faith, then he would be perfect indeed.

  Perhaps I should have learnt from Karim that there would not be a perfect man. He had shown that despite meeting all my criteria on paper, and apart from the huge fact that he had evoked ‘that feeling’, he lacked both the character to treat me well and the desire to be with me.

  My rejection should have pushed me to assess honestly what I wanted in a partner and what the reality of choosing my companion should be. I should make a choice based on who would treat me well, and then trust in God to put the mercy, compassion and love between us, as promised. My experience in meeting Karim should have reinforced how important integrity and manners were – more important than that elusive spark.

  Instead, I still prioritised ‘that feeling’ above all else. I was still waiting for my romantic dreams to be fulfilled and believing that they would bring me a sense of completion and happiness. But that love, the love that we describe through ‘that feeling’, is not an understanding of the eternal and universal truth of Love. That superficial feeling of attraction is about as far from the Divine Love as it could be. Despite knowing the words to explain that, and regurgitating what I had learnt as a Muslim about my faith and the extraordinary universality of love and its connection to the Divine, I didn’t really know it. It is easy to say you know something, but a completely different matter to live it with your being. I would have to fall harder still before I would be able to pick myself up and look directly into the face of love.

  FIVE

  None of the Above

  Six Stages of Self-pity

  As time passed, the quality of the men being presented by the Aunties began to decline even faster. My parents exchanged worried glances as the introductions were made and yet another suitor was rejected. They were concerned that I would never find anyone to be my exact match and that I should think carefully if any of the men that we had met so far could be a strong contender. ‘Three out of six,’ said my dad, referring to the diminishing number of my requirements that I should look to find in a man. I asked them, if we could go back in time and have our pick of the boys we had met, which of them would they like me to reconsider. With great sadness, they agreed that none of them had been a suitable match. We were sitting in front of a blank drawing board.

  Life was on hold until I got married, and it was the same for my friends. Girls were offered two life settings: before marriage and after marriage. So until I found a husband, everything else had to wait. Soon I would realise that this was a false dichotomy, and that actually I could quite happily get on with my life and search for a partner at the same time.

  I would get together regularly with my friends Sara and Noreen to compare notes on our search. We looked forward to sharing these intimate thoughts and the emotional stresses we were facing in order to gain inspiration from each other, as well as consolation.

  Each time we met, our conversations followed a similar format: the Six Stages of Self-Pity.

  1. (MUSLIM) WOMEN ARE AMAZING

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I would begin, initiating the well-worn format of our conversations. ‘You’re both so beautiful, so smart, so funny. I just don’t understand why men aren’t falling over themselves to marry you.’

  Noreen started giggling. ‘We could ask you the same thing … You could have married Syed and his cricket addiction. Or you could have grown three inches and said “yes” to Khalil, the dentist who wanted an exact-height wife.’

  ‘Don’t laugh!’ I chided. ‘The state of men like that isn’t funny.’

  ‘It’s not, it really isn’t,’ she confirmed, sobering up her expression.

  ‘I don’t get it either,’ said Sara, ignoring Noreen’s premature dive into hysteria. Commentary about all the awful men we had met did not usually take place until Stage Three of the conversation. Sara carefully returned us to this first stage of our discussion: to eulogise about how talented Muslim women were and how they were excelling in their education, careers, communities and spirituality. ‘We’ve worked so hard to become the women we are today, it hasn’t been easy at all.’

  Noreen and I both nodded in agreement. Our parents had arrived as part of the immigrant waves of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. During this period, Britain had been changing socially and culturally, while at the same time the world was becoming more connected and we all started living in a ‘global village’. We were all the first generation of our families and communities to be born and brought up in Britain. That meant we had to navigate our way through the challenges that faced all Asians and all Muslims. Many of those challenges were the same that any second-generation child of immigrants might experience in creating a solid sense of identity that combined both their parents’ culture and the culture that they found themselves growing up in.

  Muslim women had risen to the challenge and were using all the opportunities presented to them. They were outstripping Muslim men at school, university and in some cases their careers too. They also seemed to be more confident in their identity and in finding a way to integrate together their faith and their Asian and British cultures; and they were more open about these different elements that made up their lives. In our circle of friends, all the Muslim women we knew were university-educated and professionals of their trade.

  There was one area that was particularly clear though – the Muslim women we knew were still very much connected to their community, their mosques and their faith. In all these areas they were much more visible than men, and worked hard to keep them together. In our experience, Muslim men only seemed to return to these spaces after they were married. Muslim women were pushing forward the debate about our community’s understanding of Islam. We were questioning ‘how things were’ in the way that our faith was practised. Our spirituality and faith were important to us, and we wanted to have our voices heard and our questions explored. We were confident that we would be the ones who could create real and positive change in the Muslim community and in extricating the faith of Islam from the cultures that had taken root in its practice.

  In that far, far away alternative universe, where hard work, effort and creating positive change was directly rewarded, and where it was known that we deserved wonderful men in our lives, we would not need to hold regular heartbreak sessions with our girlfriends about not being able to find a husband. Real life should have been like that, but it wasn’t.

  ‘If it makes you feel better, it’s not just Muslim women like us who are amazing and having difficulty in finding amazing men,’ I consoled the girls.

  ‘You’re right, I have so many incredible friends who are female and they are all finding it hard to find the right man,’ agreed Noreen.

  ‘Nope,’ said Sara shaking her head emphatically, ‘that does not make me feel one bit better at all.’

  2. WHERE ARE ALL THE DECENT MEN?

  ‘They must be out there,’ said Noreen, ‘somewhere.’

  ‘But where?’ chimed in Sara. ‘I’ve looked everywhere. Are they invisible?’

  We had been searching for so many years and yet we hadn’t found any decent specimens. Where were they hiding?

  ‘The good ones are all married,’ sighed Noreen.

  ‘But maybe they only got “good” once they’d been whipped into shape by their wives?’ I was thinking out loud to the girls. ‘Maybe living with a woman is what turned them into “decent men”?’

  ‘So maybe what we need to do is spot the potential in a man, marry him and then magically, just by living with us, he’ll turn into the perfect Prince Charming!’ Noreen threw her hands into the air in excitement.

  ‘Or maybe,’ said Sara breathlessly, ‘they are all hiding from us, frightened that we’ll pounce on them. They might be hidden in some kind of underground bunker or on a desert island, and if we can just find them then we’ll have our choice of men galore!’

  I placed my hand on Sara’s forehead. I wondered if the intensity and stress of the search had ma
de her delirious.

  It wasn’t just us as single women that despaired about the absence of eligible men. Mosques and community leaders did not know where to find them either.

  ‘I met a couple of nice boys at a wedding last month,’ Noreen told us. Weddings were always a good place to meet previously unknowns. They were rarely present for more mundane social activities but were required by family intervention to attend such significant events. ‘Both of them seemed like good possibilities. One was setting up his own business, the other was an architect. Both of them very nice, intelligent and charming.’

  ‘Very smart,’ said Sara, intrigued. ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘We exchanged details but I never heard anything back from them.’

  ‘Did you contact them?’ I asked, and then added cheesily, ‘There’s no point being backwards in coming forwards.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ declared Noreen, ‘but I’ve heard nothing. I don’t mind making contact, but I’m not going to be desperate.’

  ‘I think these men are not looking for women through the traditional routes of family and friends, maybe they think it’s just too “old-fashioned”,’ commented Sara. ‘And because they meet us in these environments, they think we’re too “traditional” and can’t see us for everything we are, even though we need someone like them who is out in the world.’

  ‘Where are all these men hiding?’ I asked again.

  Sara responded: ‘More importantly, who are they marrying?’

  3. MAYBE THERE ARE NO DECENT MEN LEFT

  ‘If nobody can find them, maybe they don’t exist,’ wailed Noreen. ‘Everyone knows everyone else or knows someone who does, so by now between us we ought to have met any half-decent single, breathing man.’

  ‘You’re right,’ agreed Sara, ‘there aren’t any. We’re going to have to live out our lives as lonely spinster Aunties in our nylon shalwar kameez, fixing up matrimonial matches between the new batch of girls and boys.’