Love, InshAllah

by Nura Maznavi

  My family had recently begun attending the Friday night study circle at the mosque. At first, I would put my ear against the sheet and listen to them talk about exciting, serious stuff, like the first Gulf War, the Oklahoma City bombings, and the arrest of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh.” These crises always seemed to be someone else’s fault, our own community always innocent and helpless.

  After I’d been eavesdropping for a few months, nothing had changed. So I rejoined the women huddled together, trading recipes and childcare tips. Elderly Umm Hamza would tell jokes and, to our shock, occasionally light up a cigarette. Fatima, a friendly Moroccan, teased me that she wanted to be invited to a wedding. Newly opened, the mosque hadn’t yet attracted many undergraduates, and I was one of the few single women who attended.

  Over time, our mosque ceased being an exclusively Arab enclave, and more and more American-born Muslims discovered it as a convenient place to pray between classes, hold study circles, or even take a nap. These young men and women were less eager to use partitions to divide the community. Interacting with the young brothers wasn’t quite so awkward as it was with the immigrant men. Still, I never went out of my way to talk to them. I did run into them in class, show up silently for the mixed-gender study circle we held at the mosque, and return the salaams they offered me. Then I’d come home and make flippant remarks to my mother about marrying a convert or a Pakistani American.

  But none of them was a real possibility. Maybe these men were too close to me in age, more like kid brothers than romance prospects. Or maybe I took my mother’s consternation more seriously than I cared to admit. I knew the type of man my parents expected me to marry: the Arab kind, silhouetted mysteriously against the thin partition of those early years at our mosque.

  In 1994, few people outside the computer industry and academia had heard of the Internet. It was before Web pages prevailed, when you memorized arcane key combinations to navigate your cursor in a world of white text on black. But what really excited me was the people you could meet behind the computer screen. It was another sort of partition, yet one that made communication possible with people thousands of miles beyond my sheltered suburban life.

  The Internet was magic to someone like me, shy and burdened, with crippling self-consciousness. All through grade school, I’d suffered the bald and ignorant curiosity, and sometimes outright hostility, that being the only practicing Muslim in my grade generated. Lacking confidence to face the constant judgments, I’d chosen to hide. But I didn’t have to hide on the Internet. Online, I forgot that I had a thing so unruly and potentially embarrassing as a tongue or a body. There, I could weigh each word a dozen times before sending it off to its recipient.

  Paradoxically, in this world divided by barriers and buffers, I opened myself to people and they opened themselves to me. To my family’s eyes, I was hard at work in front of my computer, writing code for my school assignments. In reality, I was crossing swords with Asian men while playing the role of magician in a MultiUser Dungeon. I discovered many interesting people on a pen pal forum: a philosophical Catholic, a suicidal Persian, a Greek trapped in a marriage as arranged as any from the East. They were almost all men; back then, women were newcomers to the Internet. We delved into life philosophies and compared cultures.

  In real life, I’d often feared that people judged me as a hijab-wearing Muslim woman before giving me a chance to speak. Online, I presented myself at my own pace, on my own terms. The Internet freed my new friends and me from being intimidated by each other.

  Occasionally, late at night as I drifted off to sleep, I imagined that someone out there, still unknown to me in the vast Internet, might capture my heart as well as my mind. But it was never a conscious hope. If I had a goal in my newfound social playground, it wasn’t romance, but rather the joy of connecting with other minds.

  The previous year, we had visited a downtown mosque and made the acquaintance of a lady from the Syrian city of Aleppo. Her eyes grew round when she saw me, a tall, young, Syrian American girl, and she drew my mother aside to talk. I was hardly aware that an appointment was being set up; apparently, receiving suitors was a matter of course for a young woman my age, and I was notified without being expected to approve.

  So the very next day, the Aleppan woman dragged her nephew over to our house for a courtship visit. He was a member of the conservative Tablighi movement and sported a full beard. The aunt requested that the women meet in a separate room. Once we were there, she pulled down my scarf, removed my glasses, and peered into my eyes. Apparently satisfied, she stood up promptly and led us back to where the men were sitting. There, she whispered loudly to her nephew, “Look at her! Did you see her?” He ignored her, whether out of mortification or zealous modesty, I didn’t know.

  His family proposed the next day.

  “Do we decide on marriage after only one visit?” I asked my mother.

  “Well, sometimes two,” she said, as if admitting an uncomfortable secret.

  But my parents and I unanimously agreed to give the Aleppan family a no.

  I was too young then to understand that what I had just experienced was closer to a cattle market than to courtship. If my parents recognized the horror of it, they understood it as a clumsily executed variant of a perfectly acceptable ritual—family-facilitated courtship à la Syria. They had married each other in the same way, and, when they discussed marriage at all, presented the ritual to us children as the only way that we might meet our future spouses.

  My mother acknowledged that it was a terrifying leap of faith. Years later, my aunt was more blunt. “Marriage is like buying a watermelon,” she said. “You don’t know what you get until you open it.”

  I refused to gamble the rest of my life on someone I barely knew. But I had no desire to challenge my parents, either. My solution was to put all thoughts of marriage out of my mind.

  The next summer, I began to haunt the Usenet forum soc.culture. arabic, with a sudden interest in all things Arab. College allowed you room to be different, and I was discovering and stretching my cultural muscles. My mother was in Syria until September. From the computer at my summer job, I posted a notice looking for pen pals to practice my written Arabic with. “I am not looking for marriage,” I said. Inevitably, most of my respondents misunderstood. One man sent photographs of himself. Another complained of how his correspondence with another woman “hadn’t worked out.” I threw all their letters away.

  One pen pal remained, a man named Adnan. He was a doctoral student in information systems and an authentic Shami from the heart of Damascus, though now living on the East Coast. More important, he showed interest solely in correspondence, not in what it might get him.

  I took out paper, pen, and a dictionary, and struggled to find the right rhythm for my Arabic words. “Brother Adnan,” I addressed him. In two painstaking letters I described myself, my family, and the cast of regulars at our mosque. Spurred by his encouraging responses, I wanted to say more, but my Arabic was too clunky for my impassioned opinions, my urgent questions. So we dove into English—gloriously refreshing!—and continued to correspond through email and an early Unix-based chat program.

  Not counting relatives, I had never really talked to an Arab man before. At the mosque, they’d made it easy by turning their backs after one look, in a gruff sort of bashfulness. I wanted to know what they were really like. Did they all think the same? Were they like the men in my family?

  One morning while dropping me off at work, my father had made a comment about my plastic lunch bag, whose handle was torn. No respectable woman would carry such a thing, he said. I griped to Adnan that I could walk down my college’s main drag wearing rainbow colors and nobody would blink an eye. Why couldn’t people look at my spirit, instead of my outward appearance? He gently explained to me how my father’s standards made sense in the close-knit world of Damascene society, but Adnan refused to hold me to those principles. He agreed: What sense would they make to an American woman?r />
  Adnan was also looking for self-revelation, to see his innermost thoughts spelled out on the computer screen. Against the advice of his parents and his friends, he had completed a degree in philosophy. He was out to make sense of the world, not just to land a well-paying job, so he respected softer forms of reasoning. “Women are lucky,” he said. “They never learn that it’s wrong to cry.” In between our discussions on culture, we traded recipes for dawood basha and hummus.

  If anyone had called my relationship with Adnan a “romance,” I would have protested angrily. I was not sending him love letters. I did not tell him that I saw him in my dreams, or that I couldn’t live without him. I was cautious and pragmatic, and considered myself above throwing myself at any man.

  But what was growing between us was love, if a particularly cerebral sort of love. A love that found joy in sharing our truest thoughts with each other, one that brought us to ecstasy when we discovered an opinion we held in common. Physical proximity was unnecessary; institutions like marriage, country, and family belonged to another realm. Our souls were electron clouds, dancing together in the unbound ether.

  On some level, I must have known we’d have to hit the ground sooner or later, that if our relationship did not fizzle out, it would have to enter our real-world lives. We’d have to consider the M-word at last. But for now, I refused to think about it.

  So I passed the summer in front of my computer screen, debugging astronomical data analysis software in one window while in another, Adnan and I kept up a constant flow of conversation.

  From: Lena H.

  To: adnan@eastcoastcollege.edu (Adnan T.)

  Subject: Re: you’re quiet today . . .

  Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 11:28:50-0700 (PDT)

  > I am not hearing much from you . . .hope you are being productive!

  I suppose so. I dunno, maybe. I’m also thinking . . .oh, how different I feel here, why don’t I just go and be a shepherdess and compose poetry to the wind. I wasn’t made for companies, ambition, excitement. But I’m too romantic to allow myself to not have a dream at all, it just has to be a quiet one. No fame or ambition for me. If I can’t be a shepherdess—well, I can sit in front of my computer in my little corner each day, quiet and unassuming and working steadily, and at NIGHT I will fuse my intense, hazy thoughts into words on paper (or into my computer). I think so far, I’ve only got the daytime part, and even that’s not down perfect.

  Are you taking me seriously? :) You should.

  Lena

  From: Adnan T.

  To: lena@westcoastcollege.edu

  Subject: Re: you’re quiet today . . .

  Date: Tue, 19 Jul 94 15:22:18-0400

  YES, I AM! And very much so!

  But if my perception of you is correct (and I surely could be wrong—we haven’t even seen each other), I don’t think you’d be completely content to be (only) a shepherdess and compose poetry to the wind. I think a person as idealistic and conscientious as you are will not feel satisfied unless they feel they have made some, just some, difference, in their usual quiet, unassuming style, of course, to the “real” world. Lena, there is *so much* that needs to be done; we can’t afford to let the wind have all your poetry; we need our share too!

  Your brother,

  Adnan

  From: Lena H.

  To: adnan@eastcoastcollege.edu (Adnan T.)

  Subject: Re: you’re quiet today . . .

  Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 13:13:35-0700 (PDT)

  OK, let me think about that. *sigh* Life’s too hard. So, what do I do?

  Lena

  From: Adnan T.

  To: lena@westcoastcollege.edu

  Subject: Re: you’re quiet today . . .

  Date: Tue, 19 Jul 94 16:18:31-0400

  Balance, my friend, balance. “Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.”—Robert Fulghum

  —Adnan

  He proposed to me one evening on chat, while my sister and father were in the very next room. “I have a question. Um . . . gee . . . well . . . I’m really nervous!” So a man could even stammer online! He finally confessed that he was “interested” in me. I could only type what I felt: “*blush*.”

  Somehow, I managed to indicate that I welcomed the idea of marrying him, so long as my parents approved, and gave him my phone number so he could call my father. At the end of our chat, he asked if he had surprised me.

  “I knew what you were going to ask as soon as you said ‘um,’” I wrote.

  “Evil!” he cried. I laughed, and I knew he was laughing with me behind his computer screen. For both of us, it was joy as well as relief.

  It was the end of summer. My mother and siblings had just returned from a trip to Syria to visit relatives. A fellow from Detroit was coming soon to court my sister, his mother having checked her out in Damascus and presumably approved. The two bickered over my sister’s behavior while the rest of us hollered and prepared back-to-school shopping lists. Adnan had not called yet, and I was completely off my mother’s radar. Or so I thought.

  Through the din, she turned to me and narrowed her eyes. Was it true I was corresponding with a man? Adnan had mentioned our exchanges to his mother, who, it turned out, knew my aunt, who must have talked. I wished Adnan had kept quiet. My stomach clenched and I mumbled a vague affirmation. “If your father knew . . . ” my mother said, before the demands of my younger siblings whirled her off.

  I was in unknown territory. It was terrifying. I had only two friends who were married. One had fallen in love with her classmate at fifteen; he’d agreed to convert and marry her. My other friend’s parents had arranged her marriage without consulting her, and she had gone along with it in her confusion.

  I knew my parents fell somewhere in the middle regarding their plans for us, but it was hard to make out where they drew their lines. (Now I realize they must have been terrified, too. They had never married off a daughter before.) I was a quiet and sensitive girl who had survived adolescence by secluding myself in a corner of the guest room, scrawling anguished thoughts in my journal and hoping no one would notice me. I detested confrontation and avoided it at all costs. I hoped that my parents would agree to the marriage, and prayed that the experience would not be painful, whatever the outcome.

  Soon afterward, Adnan called my parents and asked to visit. He made no mention of our correspondence. Relatives and friends often referred suitors to us, so it wasn’t unusual for a man to call out of the blue. The day arrived; my parents greeted him first, as was custom, before I made my entrance.

  I had painted an image of Adnan in my head, one that was snuffed out the moment I set eyes on him. His voice was higher-pitched, his hair lighter, and he was padded with a few more pounds. But what dragged me stumbling out of my imagination and into the real world was his physicality, the solidity of his body, the unmistakable male resonance of his voice.

  My father engaged Adnan in expansive conversation while I sat on a chair with clenched fingers, struggling to muster enough guts to speak to him now that he was only a few yards away.From: Lena H.

  To: adnan@eastcoastcollege.edu (Adnan T.)

  Subject: Re: :)

  Date: Fri, 26 Aug 1994 12:21:25-0700 (PDT)

  Salaam . . .

  I didn’t respond to this last night. And we’re both looking at each other waiting for each other to say something, so I guess I’ll start, since you don’t appear to be on.

  So, you want to know what my reaction to you is…well, you are pretty much as I imagined. :) I was not surprised very much, so I don’t have much to say, though I have to repeat what my sister said when she first heard your voice: “He’s so Syrian!” I knew that, but it’s weird talking with you in English, not just language-wise, but in the forms and meanings used—and then all of a sudden having to talk in Arabic and tr
ying to remember the right words and not make any mistakes in speech or manners. I’m having trouble saying it, because I don’t know what it means, if anything. Well, you *are* Syrian. It doesn’t matter at all, but it’s just—interesting. In ways, it’s hard to believe that that man sitting across from me yesterday is you. I’m sure that would have disappeared soon if we could have talked freely and “connected” with all the stuff that we have talked about in the past. But for now, the dichotomy is there.

  Let’s see, what else is there to say…well, I was a lot shyer than I imagined. And I know I made a few mistakes, though I didn’t know that serving coffee the way I did was one of them—hey, I bet you didn’t notice, though you saw my mom trying to catch my attention, huh? I heard you laughing! :)

  > I’d say the same. Your mother is a sweetheart, btw.

  Oh, she *is*. And I think she likes you. And my dad is cautious, so I don’t know.

  > so as far as the “mechanics” of it, i think it went pretty well and i

  > am satisfied. I was nervous at the beginning, but towards the end it