Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  As the cliffs separated to form a wide arena, our jaws dropped. In front of us was an enormous building almost 40 metres high, half constructed, half hewn from the solid rock. Beyond that we could see entire homes and edifices carved out of a mountain, retained in exquisite detail after thousands of years. The cliffs had been cut into elegantly and in keeping with their spirit and size, so that it looked like the rooms had been there ever since the cliffs themselves were formed. What stunned me most was that a human being had stood in front of these impenetrable mountains that were thousands of times taller than any person, and had the imagination and creativity to envisage a home, a temple, a crypt, a whole human community living in this space.

  The Qur’an mentions a place which is believed to be Petra, the place of abode of the people of ‘Thamud’. It records that ‘They carved out houses from the mountains, feeling safe …’ Who wouldn’t feel safe ensconced in this valley under the overwhelming protection of these epic mountains? The people were known for their immense skill in carving rock but the Qur’an describes them as uninterested in looking for deeper meaning or the Divine. They built their success through sly monetary means, often cheating others. They were proud of what they had achieved, both financially and architecturally, believing that their success would be infinite and indestructible.

  The Qur’an recounts their story to impart the wisdom that greatness will come to an end if you are arrogant and engage in acts which are wrong. In the case of the people of Thamud it was cheating people of their money. The Qur’an advises people to travel and see the remains of civilisations like Petra, and while it may have described what happened, nothing could match the visual impact of seeing the place first-hand. Wandering around the site and observing the size of the architecture as I stood next to it made the point obvious: even great empires come to an end through corruption. No wonder the Qur’an encouraged people to visit historical monuments. The vision was unforgettable.

  Petra was one of many stories of the rise and fall of empires, people who built large buildings and thought themselves immortal, impenetrable. Pharaoh was another, a man who killed thousands of innocent babies. In his self-proclaimed divinity he wanted to build a spiral staircase into the heavens so he could reach up and kill God. But when it came to the story of Pharaoh, I was more interested in his wife Aasiya than him. Now there was a real woman.

  Since our visit to Egypt, I had been thinking of her a great deal. She was Pharaoh’s most beautiful and most intelligent wife, and as a result she was also his favourite wife. Egypt was a great civilisation of its time, and as its queen she was one of the most powerful women in existence. She would have enjoyed all the luxuries, pleasures and status imaginable; the world would have been at her feet. Aasiya could not have wanted for anything: she was Queen of Egypt.

  I admired Aasiya because she saw more than just the wealth and power around her. Despite the favour she held with Pharaoh, she knew that he was a tyrant and a murderer. She knew that he did not uphold justice or equality, and killed innocent people. Pharaoh said that he was God but she did not accept that. He was furious: how dare she disobey him! Instead, she followed her own heart towards the truth and did not blindly accept what her husband told her. She chose to believe in a Creator and Cherisher, One God. Her belief was that this Divine Being was the Truth, and all the principles that flowed from that truth – justice, equality, respect – were to be upheld to the best of her ability. So she confronted Pharaoh, and would not accept him and his despicable ways.

  She prayed, asking for spiritual closeness to God who has no physical location: I would like to be near you in heaven.

  Even though he loved her so much, Pharaoh’s pride forced him to call for her execution because she was defying him with her belief that there was One God and that Pharaoh himself was not a deity. She should just enjoy being the Queen and not worry about the way he ruled the country. Pharaoh begged her to change her mind but she refused. What kind of wife would she be if she did not point out her husband’s heinous errors? What kind of woman would she be if she did not offer her life in the path of truth and justice?

  As I looked at the huge buildings around me, my respect for Aasiya grew. She was Queen of all Egypt, Queen of the Pyramids. She could have had anything. But she chose to challenge the most powerful man of her time and gave away her love, her life and her status to make a stand for humanity.

  We walked from one cavernous awe-inspiring room to the next, marvelling at the temples, crypts, baths and living quarters, dutifully ticking each one off our guidebook list. We gasped at the individual artistry of each site until the sun began to fall, the heat softened and the shadows grew.

  The lights in the little cafés started to illuminate and sparkled romantically in the dusk. We were so wrapped up in laughing, admiring and revelling in the experience that we failed to notice how quickly night was setting in, and by the time we reached the gates it was dark. The local men had gathered in the cafés to relax after their hard day. Once all the visitors had left, their true personalities unfolded and the atmosphere changed. It was a glimpse of local life rather than the Disneyesque charade that they put on to meet tourist expectations. We loitered, chatting to them as we sipped our drinks.

  ‘You won’t find any way out of Petra at this time,’ they told us. ‘You can stay here if you like, and then leave in the morning.’

  Tourists were not permitted to stay in Petra. The locals knew this. At their invitation, though, we could enjoy something that no other visitors could experience. A moonlit night in Petra sounded adventurous and romantic!

  ‘Try these pastries,’ they said. ‘Do you want some tea?’

  We shook our heads, deep in discussion about whether to take up this exciting one-time-only offer. Not only would it be an extraordinary experience, it would also save us the trouble of finding transport to our next destination at this time of night. Petra was too far from any town to be able to find a taxi or bus.

  There was much rapid whispering between the four of us. We kept our voices low for privacy, but those serving the tourist industry are remarkably adept and seemed to be able to follow conversations in all languages, even when whispered or mumbled. Their faces changed expressions each time we raised a new idea about the merits of staying. We all turned abruptly back to face them and said, OK!

  There was a look of astonishment on the men’s faces. Since all four of us wore headscarves, we were a group of women who were obviously Muslim. And we had agreed to spend the night in Petra. Big smiles spread over their faces and they licked their lips.

  ‘Well then,’ they grinned, ‘we will certainly enjoy ourselves tonight.’ They burst out laughing.

  At that moment we knew what we had to do. It was one thing to be adventurous, independent and daring, another to be reckless of our safety. The four of us turned to look at each other and then swivelled back to face the men. ‘No thanks!’ We reversed our decision in chorus, and then turned on our heels, running out of the gates and up the hill.

  The next morning, we piled into the back of a pick-up truck for a tour of the Jordanian desert. We sat out in the open under the increasingly fiery sun. Sara and I sat opposite two English boys and a French girl. The two pasty-faced boys were at the start of a pan-Arabian tour. They wore baseball caps, loose T-shirts and baggy shorts to protect their as yet untanned skin. The French girl was also about our age, wearing shorts and a low-cut vest. Sara and I wore our usual linen trousers, long sleeved shirts and white scarves. There wasn’t much conversation as the truck bumped through the desert, stopping every so often so we could look at the bizarre rock formations. We took numerous photos and then oohed and ahhed at these incredible alien creations of the endless dunes and seas of sand.

  The French girl, Anne, eventually spoke. ‘Aren’t you hot wearing those scarves on your heads?’

  ‘It’s better to wear them in this heat than not, you’ll get sunstroke without one,’ said Sara, pointing to the two boys whose baseball caps we
re covering their heads and casting shade over their faces.

  ‘But there is no-one here to make you wear it,’ continued Anne.

  ‘No-one is making us do it,’ I responded. ‘It’s our choice.’

  Anne got cross. Choice was not something that Muslim women were supposed to exercise. ‘You Muslims are always proselytising.’

  I’d never heard the word before but luckily Sara stepped in. ‘We’re not asking anyone else to cover up.’ Then she repeated, ‘it’s our choice to cover ourselves.’

  Both Sara and I had to bite our tongues. It seemed futile to point out that in a country where modest clothing was prevalent as part of the culture, and also a requirement to protect yourself from the heat, that revealing attire was bound to attract attention.

  ‘You people are backward, living in the Middle Ages, with a religion of ignorant Arabs. You should get educated and learn some proper values like we have developed in Europe.’

  I smiled at her bare-faced emotion, impressed that she had cut to the chase so speedily. At least she wasn’t hiding her true, pernicious feelings.

  ‘Sara,’ I turned to face her, ‘did you not study “enlightened” European teachings whilst you were at Oxford? I thought you won a first for your essay on the rationalist thinkers?’

  Sara switched into perfect French to carry on the conversation and I followed her lead. ‘I’m not an Arab, are you, Shelina?’ she teased me.

  I switched back into a posh English accent. ‘I’m a European, aren’t you, Sara? I was born in London and have lived there all my life.’ I paused. ‘Apart from when I studied at Oxford.’ Whilst I had deliberately hidden this information from suitors who I did not want to judge me, I used it for precisely that purpose in this case.

  Anne was not to be outmanoeuvred. ‘You Muslim women are oppressed, forced to cover up and not express yourselves. You have to stay at home and men run everything.’

  I pulled out my mobile phone. ‘Sara, could you call your husband … oh no, that’s right, you don’t have a husband. Let’s call mine. Oh! I don’t have one either.’

  ‘Let’s call your dad,’ she countered. She held the phone to her ear. ‘Is that Shelina’s father? Yes, yes. I was just calling to check. She is oppressed, isn’t she? Yes, yes, understand. You forced her to suggest that she goes travelling on her own to show her how repressed and subjugated she is. Yes, yes, it makes complete sense. And yes, of course you insisted that she should be unaccompanied.’

  My intertangled insecurities still reared their head at times like this. I fumed defiantly beneath the scorching sun. How dare she suggest we were oppressed: we were educated at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, we spoke probably ten languages between us, had read a wide variety of literature from numerous cultures and languages, and had also travelled through many countries. Here we were, right in front of Anne, travelling unaccompanied in the Middle East, of our own choice. Surely no-one could count us as oppressed? She looked at us as though we were duck droppings. ‘You only think you are free but they are still controlling you women. Stop kidding yourselves. Muslims are evil and Islam is a religion of barbaric people who threaten to kill people who don’t become Muslims.’

  Muslims would typically respond to someone like Anne with the statement: ‘Muslims were discovering the laws of alchemy and algebra and laying the foundations of modern science and philosophy and the European renaissance whilst your ancestors were still in the dark ages, wearing loincloths.’ But we could no longer be bothered to point this out to her, nor highlight the absurdity of her passion to travel through the Middle East if she thought it had nothing to offer and was only full of barbarians. She was obviously not in the mood for listening.

  Sara and I drifted into thought about whether people like Anne would ever really hear what Muslims said, even when faced with real Muslims who could converse directly with them and wanted to engage, discuss, create connections and perhaps agree to disagree. We discovered that Anne had never met a European Muslim before and her views were based entirely on what she read in the papers and saw on television.

  It had never occurred to her that we had chosen to be Muslim. Yes, we had been born into Muslim families. Yes, we might never know the answer to the question, ‘Would you have become a Muslim if you weren’t born one?’, because that was an existential question that was impossible to answer. What we were sure of was that we had made a conscious decision to be practising Muslims. Many others who were born Muslims had not done so, and saw being Muslim only as part of their culture and heritage.

  We felt our free will choice was a response to the needs of our subconscious and gave us a clearer understanding of our conscience. We believed Islam held simple answers to the big questions of being a human being. It started from a very basic premise: that there was no god. Nothing. Except one unified divine entity. Some called it Nirvana. Some called it Enlightenment. Some named it Truth, or Justice, Yahweh, God or Love. As a Muslim, the Divine Being had all these names but was most commonly called Allah.

  Finding the divine inside ourselves was the journey we all had to go on. That meant connecting to the Creator. It also meant making the world a better place for the people who lived in it by working towards what all human beings cherished: equality, justice, love, harmony. We believed that Islam outlined a strong way to reach those universal goals. We had chosen Islam because we felt it made us free as human beings. We had chosen to be Muslims, not blindly, but because to us it made sense.

  *

  The desert in Jordan was a haunt of Lawrence of Arabia. The strange rock formations that we had seen scattered through the harsh golden sands created an eerie, indomitable vastness that seemed to stretch to infinity. The land was mirrored by the most expansive sky I had ever seen. We spent the hot nights there camping in the open air beneath the sparkling stars. I would like to claim to have chosen to sleep al fresco, but as a beautifully turned-out city girl this was not something I did by choice. All the beds were booked up. Camping it was.

  I reconciled myself to this hardship by imagining I was an Arabian princess. I sketched out my character: dark windswept hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, hidden in my little curtain-covered camel-top seat. I smiled at how nineteenth-century European depictions of Arabian beauties had endured so strongly over time and had even seeped into my own imagination. I could be Princess Jasmine for a few days, I told myself. I wondered where my Aladdin was. My princess fantasy was short-lived.

  ‘Make sure you are properly covered,’ cautioned the receptionist, ‘there are a lot of mosquitoes out there.’ She was pointing out into the dark horizon but there wasn’t anything there to see. I squinted in confusion in the indicated direction. After a moment’s silence on my part, she cackled.

  ‘Habibti, my dear, you have to just sleep in the middle, wherever you want,’ she scoffed.

  ‘Just check there are no nasty insects. Better to pick a place with less rocks in the ground, saves on the back pain in the morning.’ She arched her body out and then stretched her arms to emphasise her words. ‘Don’t worry, take it easy. At least it’s free to sleep here.’

  Sara and I grabbed our rucksacks and walked back towards the open expanse. In the distance I could hear a bass beat. Dum, dum, doof, doof. We were drawn to the sound, and walked over, mesmerised by the pounding rhythm radiating invisibly out of the blackness.

  Sara fell about laughing, pointing at an enormous luminous rectangle that had just come into view. Here, in the quiet Arab desert where our urban lives with their constant saturation of light, sound and people were a distant memory, was a colossal screen playing a blockbuster Bollywood movie. Despite our Arabian setting, all the songs and conversation were in Hindi with Arabic subtitles. When the dancing sequences appeared, the shoulders and hands of the engrossed audience twitched up and down, synchronised with the movements of the actors.

  We walked on and eventually found some open space at a good distance from others who had already set up camp for the night. We p
ulled out our mosquito nets and the multi-purpose sheets we always carried with us. These were useful as picnic cloths, to sleep on, in or under; we used them as prayer mats or for wrapping ourselves up in when it got cold; in desperate times they even served as towels. We created individual cocoons, protecting ourselves from the infectious flying beasts that were out to suck our blood. And then, exhausted from the day, we lay back in silence.

  Instead of closing my eyes, I opened them. There, in the beautiful midnight sapphire sky, sparkled a kaleidoscope of stars. I had never in my life seen so very many twinkling lights, shining in their glory, undimmed by competition. There was no urban light for an unimaginable distance around, and even the nearest city was the relatively tiny city of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The moon sat at a different angle from that which I was used to. The British crescent rested at an angle facing diagonally upwards. Here the moon hung like a smug silver smile, with its complimentary star like a kitten’s nose. The horizontal moon and star were the symbol of Islam. They had adorned countless books, political movements, flags, websites, Eid cards and posters. Seeing them with my own eyes was a reality I had never experienced before.

  For an hour, all I did was stare. Stare and stare. The stars were not scattered erratically as they seemed to be in London, but they were thick, dense, palpable. Not something out of fairytales and distant dreams, but present, here, part of our lives. The way the stars dominated the desert night, it did not surprise me that Muslims had invented world-leading instruments for navigation and astronomy. The history of mediaeval life, travel and destiny being governed by the stars suddenly felt meaningful and real.

  I want to come here on my honeymoon, and sit with my sweetheart beneath these stars.