Love, InshAllah

by Nura Maznavi

  It is all too much. I finish my mocha, place the cup with the dirty dishes, mumble a good-bye to my parents, and try to make it to my car before the relief makes my mascara run.

  The Hybrid Dance

  Chinyere Obimba

  I’m sitting in an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at my friend Melody’s birthday party. I’m chewing absently on a piece of naan after a huge meal and imagining preparing a feast of similar proportions for Sadiq. Back when the two of us were in college, I had it all figured out: I would appease his mother by being her apprentice. I would spend hours in her kitchen, learning how to make her son’s favorite dishes. I’m not desi, but at least I could fake being a desi cook.

  But that never happened. I look over at Melody and I don’t get that normal twinge of loneliness as she and her fiancé make eyes at each other. She just turned thirty-two and has waited so long to marry the man she loves. Meanwhile, I’m almost twenty-three, single, and still in love with an apparition.

  I’m taking a night off from studying epidemiology to hang with a bunch of my medical school classmates—and to exchange furtive glances with James, who, like everyone else at the table, is non-Muslim. I glance at him just in time to see him gazing at me. I avert my eyes, but I cannot hide my smirk. I wasn’t sure before, but I now know that he likes me.

  I met James while we were both applying to medical school. I didn’t pay that much attention to him until we became classmates. He lived down the hall from me, and I soon discovered that we shared a love of Latin American culture.

  “What did you think?” I asked him one evening, after a bunch of my friends had gathered in the dorm lounge to watch my favorite movie, Black Orpheus.

  “I liked it,” he answered, a little more enthusiastically than usual. “Thanks for letting me watch it. It was really good.” He smiled as we walked down the hall.

  And that’s how it all started. James was kind of cute, but that wasn’t why I was attracted to him. Not really. He had beautiful, smooth chocolate skin, but he had a small head. I liked him because he was brilliant but modest. He wasn’t a loner but was happy by himself. He was content to travel the world alone, and I found that admirable.

  So I started to like James, and he likes me, too. Attraction seems so simple for him. It has never been so simple for me.

  My parents’ story is a transcontinental boy-meets-girl tale: Igbo Nigerian Christian boy meets African American Muslim convert girl. As their daughter, I am black, American, Igbo, and Muslim, and sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself.

  I remember a nature show I watched when I was eight. The narrator described the mating dance of two related, but different, species of birds. In one species, the male birds puffed their chests and hopped about; in the other, they flapped their wings and shimmied along the ground. At some point, the mating signals got crossed and one of the shimmying birds was attracted to a hopping bird, and the two crossed lovers birthed a chick. When this chick grew up and it came time to mate, the poor thing stood alone in the clearing, caught between puffing and shimmying, and none of the other birds came near it. This chick was not an attractive mate.

  Watch me as I do my hybrid dance.

  I was almost nineteen, a freshman, and barely Muslim when I met Sadiq. At least, I felt barely Muslim. After assimilating into the agnostic masses in high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I started practicing Islam again at the beginning of college. My foundation was the Islam I learned from my mother, a few of my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, all of whom had converted to Islam years earlier, after being members of the Nation of Islam. As I learned more about my religion, I was attracted to its multicultural nature, as exemplified in the last sermon of the Prophet, peace be upon him. I fell in love with a faith that demanded that we transcend the limits of race and ethnicity.

  I didn’t want to hide my faith any longer. I wanted to tell anyone who inquired that I was Muslim, but I was self-conscious about the fact that I did not have two Muslim parents and did not come from a “Muslim” culture. Even after I began rereading the Qur’an and started to resume the five daily prayers, I still didn’t feel Muslim enough in the company of the members of my college’s Muslim Student Association (MSA).

  As if trying to negotiate my newfound spiritual identity during my first year in college wasn’t hard enough, I was also a competitive premed student trying to stand out in a school from which six hundred medical school hopefuls graduated every year.

  I really started noticing Sadiq one day when I presented a project with my group members in front of our Organic Chemistry discussion section. A few people chuckled as we hand-waved our way through the organometallic mechanism that was central to our project. Against the backdrop of our mechanism, as I scribbled on the chalkboard, my hands covered in chalk dust, I looked nervously at Sadiq. He was one of the smartest people in class. I cared only about what he thought.

  “Do you get help when you work, or do you find most of your information yourself?” Sadiq asked me, as I sat behind him at the end of our presentation. I was kind of surprised, because he hadn’t really spoken to me before. Why was he asking? Had our presentation been bad?

  I shrugged. “I usually like to find information myself.”

  He nodded and I wondered, Is he just now realizing that I’m smart, too? Does he realize that I’m competing against him in this class?

  Sadiq was a sophomore, a little less brown than I was, and about a foot taller. At the time, I thought he was Indian and didn’t realize he was Muslim. He had a loud voice and a wide mouth, and all of my classmates seemed to think he was the funniest person ever. I didn’t like him at first—I found him to be arrogant. He always shouted out the answers to problems before anyone else had the chance, and beamed proudly when he got the answer right. Which he always did. But over the course of the semester, he started to grow on me. He was different from most other guys I’d met before, in a way that I couldn’t quite place. He’d started asking me questions about myself, kind of offhandedly, like he was interested in me. And then I found out he was Pakistani and Muslim, the latter being more important to me, as a burgeoning Muslimah, than any other guy’s being interested in me.

  A couple of days after our presentation, Sadiq sat next to me during lecture, something he had not done before. I glanced at him to say good morning, and he greeted me with dialogue from Chappelle’s Show.

  “Did you catch the episode last night?”

  I told him that I hadn’t; I’d actually never seen an entire episode of the show.

  “Aw, girl, you have to see it!”

  He’d probably called me “girl” because he couldn’t pronounce “Chinyere,” if he knew my name at all.

  “And have you heard Kanye West’s new album?”

  I shook my head. Dave Chappelle, Kanye West—apparently, these were all people that I should have been familiar with. Had he never talked to a black girl before? You don’t have to sound black and talk about “black” things to talk to a black person.

  As the lecture began, Sadiq leaned in closer to me. He smelled like soap.

  “Hey, I missed the last couple minutes of lecture last time. Can you catch me up?”

  I grinned at him. That was more like it—a conversation I could actually participate in.

  Over the course of the semester, I started to find it endearing that Sadiq felt he could identify with me on the level of Kanye’s lyrics. I also started to become attracted to his outlandish personality. I knew few other guys who could pull off wearing a purple-and-pink T-shirt, like he did to class one day.

  I started telling my best friend about him, and she thought he sounded crazy. She called him “crazy boy” and called him out for his characteristic gelled hairstyle. “Who are you talking about? You mean that boy with the spiky hair?”

  By the end of the semester, I officially liked him.

  After class ended, Sadiq and I made a point to hang out with each other. It took us about a month to get it togeth
er. His first suggestion—to talk about our families over bubble tea—turned into lunch, then dinner and a movie. I looked up the movie he mentioned. It was a romantic foreign film that seemed highly inappropriate for two Muslims going out on a not-date. I assumed it was a not-date because he seemed to be a serious enough Muslim that he wouldn’t date. Good Muslims weren’t supposed to date, I’d learned, even when sex wasn’t involved. There was a lot more to Islam than I’d known about when I was growing up and it was just my mom teaching me. I knew premarital sex was bad, but the good and the bad had now become the halal and the haram, the lawful and the forbidden.

  He wanted us to meet up for burritos at a place not too far from my old dorm. “Hey, Chi!” he called to me, standing up from a bench in front of the restaurant. That’s what he had started calling me after he’d finally pronounced my name right. He was the only one I let call me that. I waved and walked up to him, but didn’t hug him. Some Muslims didn’t seem to mind touching between the sexes, but I knew others believed even handshakes were inappropriate. I didn’t yet know where he stood.

  “So, what do you do on weekends?” he asked me when my mouth was full. I wanted to seem interesting to him, but then I blurted out, “Oh, I mainly hang out with my family. I have a lot of cousins and stuff. My grandmother’s sick now, so we go up to visit her most weekends.” As I said this, I realized that it was probably the antithesis of intriguing.

  He smiled at me. “I think it’s cool that you’re so close to your family. So am I.”

  Over the course of the not-date, I discovered that Sadiq loved family and loved kids. He also wasn’t what I expected from a Muslim boy. He seemed to be okay going out with girls and going to parties. He was definitely a social butterfly. He didn’t eat only halal meat, which I discovered after he ordered his steak burrito. Knowing this made me more comfortable around him. I didn’t feel like I was going to be judged by him, that he wouldn’t think I wasn’t Muslim enough.

  Being with him that day also made me feel like there was a whole world that I’d been insulated from. I hadn’t even known this burrito place was down the street. I had stopped listening to music I liked because my high school friends thought hip-hop was stupid. Through Sadiq, I was discovering that it was okay to be me, because he seemed to like me for who I was.

  I was comfortable around him and could have talked for hours more, but the movie was supposed to start at seven o’clock. I was relieved when the romantic film wasn’t playing and we decided to see a comedy instead. When we entered the theater, the movie had already started. I accidentally touched Sadiq’s leg, and we both adjusted ourselves. He was shivering the whole time, just as he had shivered on the last day of Organic Chemistry, when he’d sat next to me and told me he was going to miss me. I had laughed in his face then, because I hadn’t known what to say. I still didn’t know exactly how to act around this Muslim boy. It was a dance I hadn’t learned the steps to yet.

  During the summer, Sadiq was very attentive. He cheered me up with corny jokes and compliments. He told me that I amazed him, with my love for family, my dedication to my premedical coursework, and my love of language. He sometimes teased me with bad Spanish, knowing that I was going to be a Spanish major. But then he offhandedly told me that his sister wanted him to meet Pakistani girls. We went out only a couple of times after that. By the time school was back in session and I’d begun my sophomore year in college, he’d disappeared. He never wanted to hang out anymore. Maybe he didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. Maybe he had never liked me. I felt like a fool.

  I began the semester crying on the floor of my best friend’s dorm room. My eyes were bloodshot when Sadiq poked his head into the room and told me that he’d heard my voice from down the hall. This caught me by surprise, because he didn’t even live in my friend’s dorm building. He asked if I was okay, and I felt like an even bigger fool. Had he just heard me crying over him? I told him that I had gotten upset from watching a sad movie, but wasn’t sure if he bought it.

  “I was wondering if I had done something wrong,” he told me the following week, at the first MSA meeting of the semester. I assured him he hadn’t. We stood there, smiling awkwardly at each other, before he returned to the brothers’ side of the room. I hung close to my best friend, on the sisters’ side, because I didn’t know anyone else there. He didn’t know I’d been crying over him, but I still felt embarrassed. Had I been foolish all along to think that someone like him, a born Muslim and Pakistani American, could like someone like me, a Muslimah Nigerian American? Or was I just the black girl he thought he could talk with about hip-hop?

  As my sophomore year wore on, I saw Sadiq less and less. But the less I saw him, the more my memory of him became distorted. In my mind, I morphed him into a man who could look at my bronze skin, my kinky hair, and the way I wrapped my large lips around my words and see who I was on the inside. I imagined a man who embodied the multicultural spirit that drew me to Islam initially, transcending the limits of race and ethnicity. This man recognized that we were just two Muslim young adults trying to navigate faith, college, and future careers in medicine. Music was our second common language, and Sadiq the apparition, through his love of hip-hop, understood the challenges of being a black man in society and the synergistic marginalization of black women. By extension, he could understand the difficulty of being a black Muslim woman, triply marginalized.

  For the rest of the year, I couldn’t help but grin widely every time I saw the real Sadiq on campus and hope that he suddenly, miraculously, would become the man that I’d created in my head. But he never did.

  We’re leaving the restaurant after Melody’s birthday dinner, where I’ve spent the entire meal alternately thinking about Sadiq and trying not to flirt with James. It’s been three years, but Sadiq was the last guy I really liked. On the one hand, I feel like I’m getting too old to be as hesitant around men, like I am around James. On the other hand, I feel brazen. He’s non-Muslim. What outcome am I hoping for?

  We’re walking to the M2 shuttle back to the medical campus. James is walking beside me. I glance at him and see him staring at his feet. I’m generally uncomfortable with silences, so I start talking.

  “How did you like your food?” I asked. I’m smiling too much, just like I used to do with Sadiq. I try to relax. I don’t want to flirt openly, but at the same time I want to let him know . . . something. That I’m open, that I’m interested, that I care about him?

  “It was good. I had the chicken tikka,” he answered. His smile is more engaging than his conversation. I’m not used to his kind—the silent, nonbrooding type.

  Even so, I think I want him.

  Astaghfirullah, God forgive me, but I do. I usually ignore such feelings, because I feel they are haram and counterproductive, especially when the object of attraction is non-Muslim. Maybe I should ignore what I feel right now.

  I’m looking at James in his ironed collared shirt, his dark-wash jeans, and his cap. I want to say that he looks nice, but I know it’s going to sound flirtatious, so I don’t. I’m trying to keep my interactions halal with a man who doesn’t know what “halal” means. What matters so much to me matters little to him. In terms of my dealings with men, I still don’t really know where I stand.

  This is the hybrid dance I first learned in my dealings with Sadiq. I want to hop over and talk to a man, but as soon as I open my mouth, I shimmy back, because isn’t it haram to be too familiar with men? But then I hop forward because, no, I think this man is interesting, that’s all. Interest in a man, if it begins on platonic terms, should be halal, permissible. Plus, how else will a relationship begin? But in the midst of hopping forward, I pause and shimmy backward again because I’m well aware of where romantic relationships can lead: to sex. Premarital sex, fornication, one of the biggest sins in Islam. Hellfire! But is an act that may end in sin a sin when it begins? Is forming a relationship with a man whom I admire a sin if I never sleep with him? I hop and I shimmy, and the man is gone bef
ore I decide whether I’m coming or going.

  It was bad enough with Sadiq. We were both Muslim, and even then I didn’t know how to let him know that I liked him and still be a good Muslim girl. It’s worse with James because he’s not Muslim. My non-Muslim friends would say, “So what?” I’m usually so liberal that it would seem odd for me to draw such a hard line on whom I would consider as a mate. But if they saw me scurry from the dorm bathroom to my room with damp feet and arms after performing wudu, throw my prayer rug onto the floor, and pray, then maybe my difference would make sense to them. Maybe then they would understand why I might prefer a Muslim man, someone who could join me in my five daily prayers, over a non-Muslim who may not understand why I pray.

  I’m not sure if James knows what he’s getting into.

  Our conversation on the way to the shuttle has grown uncomfortably silent. Thankfully, James breaks the silence. “There’s this international bookstore around here . . . ” James points, but I have no idea what street we’re on. That’s okay. It’s the perfect excuse to have him show me later. “I was thinking of checking it out. They have both books and movies there, plenty of things in Spanish.”

  I shrug. “Well, that’s cool. There’s this movie I’ve been looking for forever, Las Cartas de Alou . . . ”

  “Oh, yeah, I saw that,” he answers. I chuckle, because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what movie I’m talking about. His was a nervous answer. I recognize it from many years of run-ins with Sadiq, in the research building or on the street. A nervous answer is a lie that escapes your lips when you are talking to someone you like.