Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  The spell of the sublime was broken. Why had romantic love intruded into this realm of experience? These minutes should have been mine and mine alone, where only my breath and the heartbeat of the milky starlight should have existed. Where had this misfit thought about finding and loving a man appeared from and spoilt this moment between myself and the universe? This moment was not part of the rush to find the special someone; it was not part of the world of introductions, matchmakers, Aunties, shy smiles and fluttering eyelashes. This moment was an escape from the superficialities of work, clothes, social whirl, shopping, giggling, worrying, planning, stress, tears. Only hope and love remained from that old life in London, which now seemed a distant memory.

  The innate sense of love and hope were inseparable. I don’t know what I hoped for. Was love, romantic love, mythical epic love, my objective? Would that fill me up as a human being? I don’t think I even knew to ask that question as I lay on the sand, staring up at the stars. I hoped. I hoped to find meaning, to find out who I was and what I was supposed to do. And in the thought about my honeymoon I had crystallised the idea that love was what I hoped for deepest in my heart. The one that I was searching for would find some connection here. The stars on their own were not enough. The man alone would not suffice. There was something in the combination of the two that would create sparks. This was the search for love. It was not the one-dimensional search for a tall, dark, romantic heart-throb. Nor was it the mono-focus devotion of the ascetic, of the monk or the nun.

  The two searches – for the love of a partner and for the love of the Sublime – these two loves ran intertwined. I didn’t have the words to explain this, but only later would I understand that these were the same search, the same love, which could not exist or be nurtured or thrive on their own. That is why romantic love seems so fulfilling to start with, because it reaches for another, deeper love. And that is why romantic love feels so empty as it runs its course unless it is replaced by a more profound long-lasting love.

  Romantic love was a stepping stone in that paradigm, the love of a Prince Charming. I wholeheartedly believed he was out there. Of course he was. For without him, what was life? What did love mean, if there was no-one to love? To find a man, fall in love and live happily ever after was a simple formula. Wasn’t this what people dreamt of? Perhaps as young women we could describe it better and feel confident to articulate it, and we would not be laughed at for our sentimentality; but I knew that men wanted this too.

  I wanted a soul-mate who tapped into my spirit and through whom my soul would grow, would learn about Love, with a capital L, and be part of that Love. It was only much later that I discovered the idea of yin and yang, which explained how a man and woman were only halves on their own and could only be whole together. I had sat through innumerable lectures and seminars at the mosque, as well as countless weddings where the theme was always about romantic human love being part of the love for the Creator, but it hadn’t sunk in until now. The desert landscape reflected the sky. The desert needed the sky and the sky needed the desert, but they both had to be what they were themselves and not try to be the other. The two extraordinary horizons merging together made it clear: each was beautiful in its own existence, but when connected together, they created a new holistic meaning.

  Lying under the stars was the first time the seeds of sublime love were laid in my heart and that the very principles of my faith as a Muslim seemed to take root. I’d heard the words ‘love comes after marriage’ so many times and in so many ways, but it was this spectacular moment that illuminated the meaning of how the search for love of the Divine could help me find the love I was looking for in a man. My faith was trying to tell me that if I found love for Him, that would create the love I searched for in a person.

  ‘And one of His signs is that He created pairs for you from amongst yourselves, so that you find peace in each other, and He puts love and mercy between you.’ I could hear these words from the Qur’an being sung deep in my heart. These words always made me shiver. I yearned for this pair of mine, and to experience this new and unknown kind of love and kindness. I didn’t yet understand the idea of balance and partnership, of harmony. I thirsted for these things. But what was mirage and what was real? I had been given a cookie-cutter description of love in order to find it. I was the same as all the women I knew, Muslim and otherwise. But we weren’t satisfied with the relationships we found, instead suffering malaise and discontent, finding that romantic love was not enough.

  I thought about how the Qur’an describes the sun, the moon and the stars. Each one follows its own course, not outstripping the other. And the Qur’an described how everything comes in a pair: day and night, earth and sky, light and dark. Human beings were no different. The stars twinkled in contentment, at peace, knowing their place. I smiled. It was rare to see that in the world I lived in. One of the stars was particularly piercing. I couldn’t yet decode the sign that it held for me but I would one day understand its gift.

  I mused again on the words, ‘He created a pair for you.’

  I was ready.

  The 3 Ms of Love: Method, Manner, Meaning

  He was tall, but not too tall. And handsome, too, with features that were chiselled but not harsh. His hair was cropped and dark brown, ruffled haphazardly with the hands of a quiet genius. His small goatee beard framed his face along with metal-rimmed glasses that he took off every so often to expose his chocolate-brown eyes. They revealed his thoughtfulness and offered the perfect setting for his rare but infectious smile.

  His dress sense was stylish but understated, hard to describe in detail, as each garment blended into the other, underlining his good looks but not outstripping them. He had studied engineering at Cambridge; he ‘put his head down and got on with it’ as he had described it, in order to get a first. He was good friends with a family friend, existing discreetly and anonymously all this time in our extended social circle. He was hugely passionate about Islam, devouring books on philosophy, meditation, prayer, wisdom, dialectic. He reflected, pondered, smiled. His name was Mohamed, the chosen one, Habib, the beloved.

  We met at the fifth birthday party of a family friend’s daughter. She was wearing a pink sequinned dress with three frills, her face painted like a butterfly. I saw him early on. He oozed charm and gentility. He was engaged in discussion with another man with similar dark hair and glasses. They sat facing each other on the corner of a dining table, tête-à-tête, eye to eye, their hands clutching heavyweight Denby mugs filled with philosophical black coffee, a plate of raspberry frosted cake untouched in front of them. They were discussing sayr wa suluk and pondering on the spiritual trajectory of the wayfarer on the path of the Divine. Whoosh! Past the end of my nose and skimming over the top of my headscarf. I had never heard the word ‘wayfarer’ before.

  ‘I have been studying the inner meaning of the qiyam at the beginning of prayer for the last three months. The more I study, the more is revealed, the more questions I have,’ said the other to Mohamed. Each ritual prayer begins with the standing position of qiyam, straight and still, facing the direction of qiblah towards Mecca. I stood this way every day many times, sombre and completely still, before bowing and prostrating. What was there about this action that could take three months to ponder?

  ‘I’m still studying the first lines of the adhaan,’ responded Mohamed Habib. Adhaan is the call to prayer, which could be sung out to call a group of people to prayer or for an individual alone to engage in their daily ritual of prayer, the salat. What was there to study in a single line?

  I wondered what layers of meaning hid beneath the simple and straightforward opening words of the adhaan, ‘God is Greater, Allah is Greater’. I wanted to interject in their conversation and ask what was concealed underneath the apparent meaning of this phrase.

  I had always been given a simple and compelling explanation for this most central of Islamic statements, ‘God is Greater’. I could still hear the voice of the Imam explaining it: ‘God
is Greater than anything you can imagine. The Divine is All-Present, All-Eternal, All-Existing, All-Merciful, All-Just. Imagine anything and Allah is Greater, because anything you can imagine is imaginable only within the limits of your mind. God created mind. The Divine created your imagination.’

  Up to this point, there was an echo with St Anselm’s proof of God. Anselm had suggested that God must exist because God was perfect, and a quality of perfection is existence so, piff paff pooff! God must exist. I liked this proof of God because of its logical neatness. Its elegance always made me laugh. I wasn’t sure I should laugh about a proof of God’s existence.

  Despite the graceful rhetoric of this proof, it was too limited, because even imagining the Sublime in this way was limited. The word ‘God’ also felt too narrow, because the word itself was so loaded with meaning already.

  ‘You cannot understand the “how” of God, because God created “howness”. You cannot comprehend “what” about God, because God created “whatness”. You cannot understand “why” of God, because God created “whyness”.’ These were the words of the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whose spiritual insights left an enormous heritage in Islam for mystical experience and wisdom. God was not limited and could not be comprehended within the constraints of the mind. But at the same time Islamic wisdom stated the following: ‘God cannot be contained anywhere in the universe, except in the heart of the believer.’

  Simply overhearing this conversation about unwrapping layers of hidden meaning started to challenge my assumptions that I was a knowledgeable, practising Muslim.

  At that moment, the parents of the birthday girl appeared and introduced me to the two men whom I had been pretending not to listen to. I smiled nervously as I was told that their names were Mohamed and Yasir. Yasir wore a wedding band. Mohamed did not. We exchanged platitudes about jobs, universities, birthday parties, and compared our acquaintances and families along the way. Mohamed was an accountant, having concluded that despite its reputation for tedium, accountancy had better long-term prospects for career and pay than if he had continued with the engineering he had studied at university.

  ‘It allows me to concentrate on more stimulating and important things,’ he said, more to Yasir than to me. He looked over at Yasir, encouraging him to rekindle their conversation. Mohamed was pleasant and polite but he looked thirstily again and again at Yasir as all of us continued to chat. I was called to cut the birthday cake, and the two of them resumed their conversation, intent and lost.

  I forgot about Mohamed and I forgot about the conversation. Forgetting what is important can be easy.

  *

  I met Mohamed again a few months later, at an adult’s birthday party. He was sitting alone as the group conversed, laughed and sipped tea. He looked absent, his shoulders hunched, a darkness in his eyes. He began by telling me that he had always been very focused on his studies, his job and most of all on his spiritual journey. Mohamed was the first man I had met whose career was a means to an end for him – to make sure he was well provided for so he could pursue his spiritual quest. Others spoke of balancing deen, religion, with dunya, the world we live in. Most people we knew saw deen and dunya as something that needed to be given equal value, and celebrated those who appeared to have reached an equilibrium.

  Mohamed’s words and actions seemed to reject striking a trade-off between the material and the spiritual life. They were not two separate things to him, rather material living was part of spiritual living, and he was bent on integrating the two so very tightly that they became the same thing.

  Mohamed had been brought up on a teaching of Islam that was formal, traditional and well studied. Living the life of a good Muslim as explained at the mosques and by the Imams was his entire universe. It had held him in good stead and fashioned him into a good human being of whom his family and community could be proud. ‘Upstanding citizen’ would have been an apt description of him. Up to this point, I was very similar to him.

  Then he had discovered that there was something more, something deeper hidden underneath what he had been taught. A new door had opened for him. Beneath the rules and founding principles of Islam that he knew, and the solid scholarship that had formed the basis of his knowledge and understanding, he had discovered a new layer of meaning. He explained that what he had found was built on the foundations he already had, but created a new paradigm: ‘Like moving from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s quantum theory.’

  He changed topic abruptly. His expression became weary as he told me that in the last few months he had met a woman and had been swept away by her. ‘I didn’t expect it to happen, didn’t think it could happen. I’ve been brought up very sensibly and I have lived a very sensible and moderate life. I had never felt the emotions that she made me feel. I wasn’t supposed to have all those strong feelings. So quickly, so very quickly we knew that we were meant for each other. I proposed within weeks and she said “yes”.’ He didn’t even lift his head, just stirred his tea mournfully. I wondered what could have gone wrong.

  ‘I had already met her parents and she had met mine. We had done everything by the book. She was the perfect match, right family, right background, and I felt so much for her.’ His stirring paused.

  ‘And then one day she simply said that she wasn’t interested anymore.’ He looked at me haggard, like Majnoun roving the desert to find his beloved.

  Majnoun was the man in the classic Eastern love story of Layla and Majnoun, an equivalent to Romeo and Juliet or Orpheus and Eurydice. His name was Qays, and as a child he fell in love with a girl at his school, Layla. They were from different tribes and were prevented from marrying by their families. He spent his whole life absorbed in his longing for her, and roamed the arid desert in despair at being separated from the one he loved. A wise man advised him to declare war on Layla’s tribe in order to secure her, but her father arranged her marriage to another man. This pushed Qays further into madness, so he was given the name Majnoun, mad man, because to everyone else his commitment to Love was utterly crazy. When Layla’s husband died, Majnoun was advised this time to pretend he was sane in order to secure her hand in marriage.

  He replied, ‘How can one who is in love, pretend not to be in love?’

  Layla and Majnoun were only united in death when they were buried together.

  Majnoun’s story is the perilous tale of a lover who is utterly consumed by his search for love. He is devoted to Love itself. Is Layla the beloved of the story or is there a deeper meaning about Divine Love? Majnoun’s love is the unattainable love for the Divine, which can only be reached when no longer held back by the body. Eric Clapton was just as moved as I was when he read the myth of Layla and Majnoun. He wrote his song ‘Layla’ about her. I wish he hadn’t; it ruined the story for me.

  Mohamed carried on talking about his heartbreak. ‘She just said she didn’t care anymore. How could that be? How could she have turned my life upside down by taking me out of my safe, solid existence, and then suddenly just walk away? She ripped out my whole being and for what? Why?’

  He looked so vulnerable. Here he was heartbroken, like a child. He had experienced emotions that he had not known he could feel, and this had opened his eyes to dimensions of the universe that he had been unaware of. He was a Muslim who had been trying to walk the difficult path of being a moral spiritual person, which he called ‘Islam’; and on this journey he had seen the possibility of someone completing him and allowing him to fly.

  He was a good man, on a spiritual quest. Why had I not seen this so obviously before? His emotions touched me deeply. Despite all the chatter around us, a shrill voice inside my head demanded to know why I had been blind to the possibility of considering him as a suitor when I had first met him. I had noted his intelligence, his faith, his spirituality and, of course, his good looks, and yet I had walked away unmotivated to find out more about him. I could easily have asked my family to find out if there was a possibility of securing a meeting, a match. Safura an
d Moses popped into my head again, and how Safura had grabbed her opportunity and was confident enough to create a meeting herself. Instead, I’d only noticed Mohamed when he was already heartbroken and when all he wanted was a listener to hear his painful story.

  Every so often, Mohamed and I would speak a few words to each other at the weddings and get-togethers of friends and family. I listened to his agonising but gradually diminishing pain. In return he explained slowly and in detail the spiritual quest of the seeker. I had already realised as I lay beneath the starry skies in Jordan that my pursuit of love was one significant part of my ultimate goal to find Love itself. I was the seeker, and I was determined to pursue this quest.

  I stood firmly on that path as he described the journey towards Love. I had never felt as energised and moved as I did in those conversations. I felt free to be the very kernel of a human being that I always wanted to be. It was not him that I was mesmerised by, but the fact that all the information and book knowledge I had about Islam suddenly felt like it truly meant something in my real journey as a human being living in this world of ours.

  He told me that some called this journey he was describing ‘the path of tasawwuf ’.

  I asked him, ‘Is that like being a Sufi?’

  He smiled. ‘It’s very fashionable these days to be a Sufi. No-one is quite sure about the origin of this word. Some think it refers to the woollen clothes Sufis used to wear, some say it is about their dedication to purity.’

  He paused to chuckle to himself. ‘People think being a Sufi is all cool, hip mysticism, chilled out, easy-going, no rules.’ He leaned forward. ‘Sufis are the people who change the world. They understand how the journey of the spirit makes you live a life that is dedicated to making the world a better place.’

  I was wide-eyed. ‘Are you a Sufi?’ I asked with surprise. Sufis did not always have a very good reputation amongst those within mainstream Islam, who saw them as giving the mystical experience more importance than the day-to-day rules of behaviour and actions like salat, prayers.