Love, InshAllah

by Nura Maznavi

“I’m sorry, sir. We only have one room available. But it’s a suite with two beds. Would you like to see it?” the clerk asked.

  Marcelo looked at me with exhausted eyes, waiting for my approval.

  The suite was enormous. It had two rooms—a living room and a bedroom with two beds—floor-to-ceiling French doors leading onto a balcony, and a bathroom half the size of my apartment back home.

  “I get the bed by the window,” I exclaimed, to gloss over the awkwardness of the situation.

  Despite our exhaustion, we lay in our separate beds and talked about life after death and the feeling that we are not alone, that there are others around us. As we talked more, we felt less and less alone and were very grateful to have each other’s company. It was comforting to have a companion and to be able to talk about topics typically reserved for lifelong friends. After all, we had only a few hours to catch up on the lives we’d lived before we had finally met.

  Morning arrived, and we finally slept. After we ate a late breakfast and visited a nearby Internet café to retrieve the address where my girlfriend was staying, the thought of parting began to weigh me down. By midday, we had no choice but to reenter our separate lives. We held hands tightly, afraid to let go, as the taxi teetered over the cobblestones of the historic district and arrived at the address where my friend awaited me. Marcelo was like my better half—balanced and comforting. How was I going to let go?

  “Here is my card. But I need more than just your nonoperative number in Argentina,” Marcelo said, smiling.

  “Oh, of course.” I quickly wrote down my California phone number and email address for him.

  “I will see you again Angela, in-sha-Allah,” he said, carefully enunciating the word I had taught him just the night before. “I love you. You are very special.”

  My eyes filled with tears upon hearing those words. If we tried to be together, a difficult path lay in front of us. How would we integrate two lives in different countries, and different religious beliefs, languages, customs, and professional obligations? I held back what I was feeling so I wouldn’t fall to pieces in front of him. I felt the same way about Marcelo but wanted to reserve those words for someone who shared my beliefs in God. If God willed, someday I would say them to Marcelo.

  Marcelo embraced me, kissed my forehead, and brushed his hand across my cheek. I waited a moment, until it felt impossible to hold back tears, and then aggressively opened the taxi door. I blew Marcelo a kiss good-bye as the taxi hurried off toward the airport. Once he was out of sight, I collapsed and wept uncontrollably in the street.

  Finally, I wiped away my tears and went hesitantly inside the hotel, where my friend Coral was waiting. When I asked to check into her room, the receptionist handed me a note from her.

  It read: “I decided not to stay at this hotel. There’s this great place on the other side of town. Go to 11 Lindon Street. I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow morning.—Coral.”

  I panicked; 11 Lindon Street was the mansion I had stayed in with Marcelo! Did Coral know? How could I face my fellow Muslim sister if she did?

  As the taxi drove me back to the hotel I had just left half an hour before, I prayed that my friend would understand my intentions and know that Marcelo and I had no other option. She was waiting for me out front with a huge smile, by which it was evident that she hadn’t seen me in Marcelo’s company.

  I decided not to speak to her about the experience. After meeting Marcelo, I was terrified to reenter my old life. Would my community judge me harshly if they found out about this? Would they be able to understand the complexity of my experience? And if they could, would they defend me against those who were quick to judge anyone, especially a woman in my position?

  I swallowed my fears and hugged my friend as she shared what she had planned for us to do that day.

  I had lost his business card.

  I realized it on the shuttle from the Los Angeles airport to my apartment in Orange County. Agony set in. Perhaps I would have an email from him waiting for me at home? But when I logged on to my computer, there was no message. I truly believed he was sincere. Had he changed his mind?

  With just two weeks to get registration in order for the parents, students, and teachers, I poured all my energy into starting the new school year. My job provided my only comfort in light of the possibility that Marcelo had realized the complexity of our lives and had decided first that there would be no way to grow our relationship.

  But when I returned home from work three days later, I had a message from an unidentified caller.

  “Hi, Angela, this is Marcelo. I hope you enjoyed your trip with your girlfriend and that you made it back safely. Listen, I can’t stop thinking of you, and I can’t concentrate on anything but you. I have to know if you feel the same way. If you don’t return my call, I will understand that I don’t fit into your life back home. I hope you call, because I am sure I love you. Call me.”

  He didn’t leave his number.

  I was unable to breathe and felt panic overcome me.

  I began searching for the name of the bank he worked for, but I couldn’t find his contact information online.

  I couldn’t lose the only man I had ever met who was compatible with me in every way, and who had the potential to know Islam free from the misperceptions that many Americans had post-9/11.

  I lightly washed my face, arms, head, and feet with water in the ritual Islamic ablution, to prepare for prayer. After a heartfelt Maghrib prayer, I begged God for His guidance and help.

  “Ya Allah. If we are meant for one another in this life and will become closer to You in the end, please, Allah, encourage him to contact me again. Please, Allah, have him come to know You through Islam. I believe that I could and will be the best wife for him. Please, Allah, if this is Your plan, ease our longing and facilitate our union. I need Your help; I am nothing without Your guidance. Amen.”

  Two hours later, I received an email from Marcelo in my inbox. I read it with tears rolling down my cheeks. My prayer had been answered.

  He wrote: “I just want you to know that I really enjoyed spending time with you. Despite the short time we spent together, I developed strong feelings for you. You mean so much more to me than you can possibly think. (Maybe I should have not written that.)”

  “No, Marcelo, you definitely should have written that,” I said out loud as I clicked Reply.

  Three months later, on Eid of November 2006, after being inspired by the just nature of Islam, Marcelo took his shahada and declared belief in One God and all of his prophets, from Adam to Muhammad.

  In January 2007, we were married at my mosque in Orange County. My entire community came together in support to witness our miraculous union.

  Latin America decided it wasn’t finished with us as a couple just yet. Soon after our second wedding that took place in Brazil the country adopted us and has been our home since 2007. It was in Latin America that our marriage blossomed from a couple destined to meet under the rarest of circumstances into a loving family of four. Our two sons Gabriel and Ryan remind me every day that those in search of love can find their happiness through faith.

  Last Night on the Island

  Nura Maznavi

  I so wanted to kiss him.

  I could think of nothing else as I stood in Rohan’s sparsely furnished, one-room bachelor flat in a beachfront neighborhood of Colombo. Rohan––sweet, ridiculously good-looking Rohan––was standing just inches away from me, patiently, expectantly. Everything within me wanted to lunge, grab his face, and kiss, kiss, kiss!

  The cab downstairs honked.

  Great, I thought, momentarily distracted from the man in front of me. I’m spending my last night in Sri Lanka, after a year as a Fulbright scholar, in the apartment of my hot Catholic personal trainer, who happens to also be a model, and I’m slinking out the door like a hooker at two in the morning.

  Was this really fitting of a good Muslim girl?

  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way—n
ot in Sri Lanka, of all places. I had always been completely straitlaced, though I’m not sure why. I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles in a Sri Lankan American Muslim family, but my parents were never strict. I’d like to say that God was my primary motivation for staying on the straight and narrow, but the truth is that He was merely a member of the audience I assumed was watching––and judging––my life. I was much more concerned with what everyone else thought about me––my family, my friends, and the sprawling South Asian immigrant Muslim community in which I was raised. I wasn’t going to be one of those girls––the girls who snuck around behind their parents’ backs, dating and hooking up. The kind of girls whom everyone talked about.

  That wasn’t me. I was going to marry a Muslim man, and until then I was saving myself––saving everything. No sex, no kissing, no holding hands––my lips, my hands, and all my other body parts were left untouched. Admittedly, this got harder as I got older (the decision not to have romantic, physical contact with men until marriage didn’t make me like them any less). But the community I grew up in made it a bit easier—I was dark-skinned, which meant that the South Asian men I met (Indians, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans) didn’t like me.

  Sri Lanka, of course, was the safest place in the world—the men there liked “fair” women, and as a hijab-wearing American Muslim woman with a Southern California accent, I was much more of a curiosity than a serious marital prospect. When I moved there on my Fulbright scholarship after law school, I never imagined that Sri Lanka would present me with my first serious test. I never imagined Rohan.

  I met him halfway through my year there. He was a personal trainer at Colombo’s most exclusive gym, where I started working out––alongside fancy Sri Lankan aunties and the overpaid, foreign staff of international NGOs––after outgrowing all the clothes I had brought with me to the island, thanks to the piles of food my relatives heaped on my plate at every meal.

  He was standing behind the front desk the first time I walked in. Rohan was everything I was not: light-skinned, Catholic . . . and incredibly fit. His perfectly tanned and chiseled biceps were the kind you wanted to see on a trainer, and his sculpted face and chocolate brown eyes were perfect for his part-time job as a model for one of Sri Lanka’s largest cell phone companies. Between the billboards that lined Colombo’s congested streets and the time we spent together, in and out of the gym, I came to know that face well.

  But when we first met, he was just a guy trying to get a new client. “I’m available for training,” he offered, before the yelps of a ruddy German expat, struggling to control runaway dumbbells, summoned him into the weight room.

  He didn’t have to try too hard. I signed up for a session that afternoon.

  He was a patient but tough trainer, smiling sympathetically when I whined about the oppressive heat of Sri Lanka’s premonsoon season while simultaneously turning up the speed of the treadmill. I chattered on endlessly as he guided me through lunges, squats, and crunches, silenced only when he let out an exasperated sigh: “If you don’t concentrate on this next set, I’m going to make you do an additional thirty minutes on the bike.”

  He turned out to be one of the closest friends I made during my year in Sri Lanka. He offered to show me around town on his days off, and we were soon spending all of our free time together. He was the friend I called when I got tired of being on my best behavior in front of my relatives and wanted to curse with reckless abandon, and the only person I let visit me the day I spent puking up the street food that my coworkers had warned me about eating.

  I was amused by the looks we elicited when we went out, particularly at Colombo’s hot spots, where he was well known among the children of the Sri Lankan elite who were his clientele. Is this dark, scarf-wearing woman with a funny accent Rohan’s new girl? they seemed to be wondering, as they greeted him and looked me up and down.

  Because he was Sri Lankan, it never crossed my mind that he might be interested in me. Coupled with the fact that he wasn’t Muslim––and therefore not a marital prospect––I felt at ease around him, comfortable with being just friends without the pressure of anything more.

  But for a man used to women constantly preening in front of him, he found my lack of interest––made obvious by my unrestrained speech and often disheveled appearance––refreshing. And, apparently, alluring.

  While we were eating lunch on the terrace of his favorite café one afternoon, he unexpectedly said, “I really like you.”

  I stopped midbite, taken off guard by his confession. “Thanks,” I said, eyebrows raised. “Why?”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” he smiled. “You’re fun and you’re pretty.”

  “You’re pretty, too,” I replied reflexively, cringing as the words passed my lips.

  He roared with laughter as I sat there, lunch forgotten, flustered and confused.

  “But don’t you think my skin is too dark?”

  “No, I think it’s beautiful.”

  A Sri Lankan man thinks I’m pretty and my skin is beautiful? This was a first.

  I suddenly felt too shy to look at him, but couldn’t seem to find a place to rest my eyes other than on his pecs, nicely outlined by his snug, navy polo. I became painfully aware of the ratty T-shirt I hadn’t bothered to change out of after our morning workout.

  I was flattered, but I told myself, and Rohan, that we would have to remain friends. He wasn’t Muslim, so the relationship wasn’t going anywhere––after all, I wasn’t the kind of girl to hook up with a guy I had no intention of marrying. Absolutely nothing physical would happen, even as the attraction between us grew and my days on the island drew to a close.

  But then I ended up spending my last night in Sri Lanka at his apartment.

  I’d spent the day packing up my place while relatives stopped by to wish me well on my trip home. The last of them left past midnight, promising to be back early the next morning to take me to the airport. Rohan arrived shortly thereafter to bid me farewell, only to find a mountain of stuff by my front door that I couldn’t fit into my already overflowing suitcases. “You need any of this?” I asked hopefully, gesturing to a random assortment of pots and pans, electronic gadgets, and clothes. He looked at the pile and shook his head. “Not really, but I can get rid of it for you.”

  We hauled the stuff back to his apartment, dumping it by his front door and filling up his already small living space. As I looked at him surveying my discarded junk, I realized how much I would miss him. He’d been such a good friend over these past months. And I swear he had added a couple more packs to his already well-defined abs.

  It was late, we were alone, and it was the last time I’d ever see him. I was standing less than a foot away from the only South Asian man who had ever liked me. And suddenly, all I could think about was how much I wanted to kiss him. He looked up at me expectantly, and I didn’t look away. One little kiss––no one would ever know.

  But I would.

  It was just a kiss, but I had built up this moment in my mind for years. It was supposed to happen with my future husband––it couldn’t happen now. I had to get out of his apartment. Quickly. Before I lunged.

  I asked him to call me a cab and, while he did, moved to the other side of the room and busied myself with the mechanics of the small glass vase on his coffee table.

  As we waited for the cab to arrive––I’d now moved on to studying the coffee table itself (Was it oak? Or bamboo?)––he told me that he couldn’t believe I was leaving and made me promise that we would keep in touch. He said some other stuff, too, that I can’t remember––I was too busy panicking as he made his way across the room until we were face-to-face.

  Oh God. I balled up my fists to keep them from grabbing him.

  There was a honk outside.

  My heart was pounding as he leaned his face close to mine. I managed to hold up a shaky hand when he was just an inch away.

  “Stop. Don’t kiss me.”

  He sighed and straightened up.
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  I gave him a quick hug, grabbed my bag, and ran downstairs, into the backseat of the waiting cab. With a disapproving glance in the rearview mirror––it was not appropriate for a woman to be leaving an apartment alone so late at night––the cabbie backed out of the driveway just as Rohan came out onto his balcony to watch me leave. I didn’t turn around as we drove away. I was exhausted––it was hard work fending off the advances of a hot man.

  As the cab took me back to my barren apartment, I believed I had done the right thing. I had maintained my chastity and preserved my reputation, even though no one was around to appreciate the extent of my sacrifice. I had succeeded in saving everything for the perfect Muslim man whom I would someday marry. But if there’s one thing I should have learned from Rohan––the Catholic, Sri Lankan personal trainer with a crush on a dark-skinned, hijab-wearing, sweaty American––it is that we can never be certain what the future holds. As the years passed and I remained single into my thirties, with no Muslim man in sight––my lips, hands, and other body parts also alone––I would come to look back on my last night on the island with regret.

  I can’t believe I passed up the chance to make out with a model.

  Even Muslim Girls Get the Blues

  Deonna Kelli Sayed

  When I first decided I was ready to get married, a Pakistani friend said, “You’ll have too many men wanting to marry you. Go to the mosque. Some will look in one of your eyes and see American dollars. In the other, they will see a green card. Everyone will tell you that you are beautiful.”

  I wasn’t your typical Muslim girl: I was a twenty-six-year-old, blonde American who had embraced Islam five years earlier, after hearing scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr suggest that faith is a thinking woman’s realm that requires both intellect and the heart. Faith is not a passive space for either gender.