Love, InshAllah

by Nura Maznavi

  At the beginning of December 2010, I left my job to focus on graduate school; Yasser lost his job the same week. In the midst of writing final papers to finish my semester, I tried my best to be available and supportive. “Allah has written even more beautiful things for you. I believe this,” I wrote. “May you have all the strength, optimism, and patience you need. And may your next job, and next adventure, be even more fulfilling and inspiring, inshAllah. It will be beautiful,” I repeated over and over. Soon, it became my personal mantra for our relationship. Whenever I was exasperated by our disagreements or aggravated at the geographical distance between us, I would repeat: It will be beautiful.

  Later that month, we met again—this time with Lemon. She and I had spoken on the phone a few times after her father’s November visit, so she now knew of me, although the intricacies of our association were—I thought—lost on her. I was just another friend of her father’s, and she remembered me from his photographs (“You guys went to the beach!”).

  The first evening we met, she smiled at me guilelessly and exclaimed, “You look so pretty today!” I was immediately charmed. She was seven years old and tall for her age, with gorgeous, glossy hair, enough confidence to fill an entire room, and more perception than I had given her credit for. The first night, as we walked into a room together, she said casually, “People think you’re my mother!”

  “Which people?” I asked, stunned. “The people at the restaurant earlier? Or in the elevator?”

  “Just people!” she said. I realized that she knew how she and I together must appear to outsiders. The exchange made me feel closer to this little girl who so clearly needed a mother, but it also served as a reminder to tread carefully.

  We went back to the beach, this time with Lemon. She found a bamboo stick and scribbled our collective initials across the sand, complete with plus-symbols and hearts to tie all our names together. I was touched. My heart cracked open to love her at the point when she wrote, “I love you, Ya-Ya!”

  During the rest of the weekend, we played UNO together, went hiking, and watched my favorite movie, The Princess Bride. Yasser held my hand during the movie, and I felt such overwhelming emotion, I didn’t know whether to smile or burst into tears.

  At the airport, I gave them both long hugs good-bye, not wanting to let go. “My hands are already homesick for yours,” I wrote to him. Lemon now became a much more active part of the relationship, in a way that I found delightful. I would often leave class to find I had a voicemail from her. One night, she said, “I hope we move to California and go to the beach and hang out with you, ’cause you’re so smart.” I laughed. Another voicemail demanded, “Could you please call my dad so I can talk to you?”

  Finally, one day, Yasser asked her how she would feel if he were to marry me. “You belong together,” she said confidently, “because you talk to each other so much.” I had constantly worried about what his daughter would think of me, and whether she would be able to accept and love me. And here she was, saying we belonged together. It was a beautiful gift, and the relief of it lifted a burden I had carried for almost a year.

  I turned thirty in March 2011, and our added closeness made the milestone birthday even more special than I had anticipated. “I think your wall has been reduced to a knee-high fence,” Yasser wrote to me at one point. “I can see your heart.” A few weeks after my birthday, my sister and brother-in-law invited me to their home for dinner. I walked in—only to find Yasser hiding behind the door and Lemon dashing in from the kitchen! “Where did you come from?!” I exclaimed to them both, laughing.

  “Did we surprise you?” Lemon asked.

  “Best surprise ever!” I assured her, returning her hug as she squeezed her arms around my waist.

  She handed me a colorful drawing containing lyrics to a cartoon theme song, interspersed with original lines: “I wish you can live with me and my family,” and “u r the only 1” and “I love and miss u with all my heart.” I was moved. The feeling was mutual.

  The entire weekend reassured me that our relationship could work. Lemon was as charmed by San Francisco as her father had been, and I smiled to see how she took the beauty and uniqueness of the city in stride while remaining curious about everything we came across. From time to time, Lemon would throw her arms around me in a tight hug and I would hug her back, resting my chin on her glossy, thick hair that I couldn’t keep my hands off. This little girl needed a mother. Although I had never been one myself, I knew enough to understand that it involved patience and love, and I felt I possessed enough of both. Motherhood was not something I could prepare for, but rather something I would have to throw myself into, with a simple prayer that the end result would be good, beautiful, and blessed.

  Recognizing that my heart was already large enough to envelop Lemon into my life, and seeing how much she trusted me, brought me a sense of joy I had never known. There were innumerable moments when Yasser and I would exchange glances over Lemon’s head, smiling at each other. We already felt like a family.

  Yasser once wrote to me, “There is no way I can envision my future without you in it. We’re beautiful together.”

  I wrote back, “We are indeed beautiful together. We have beautiful dreams for a beautiful life, and I truly believe that, inshAllah, God will work with us to make them all happen.” The words signified our optimism, our tenderness with each other, our collective dreams for our shared future. Our mantra—It will be beautiful—denoted our absolute certainty that Yasser and I were the ones for each other, and our unshakeable faith that this story would continue unfolding in a blessed way.

  What I have now is a relationship that, in some ways, defies the idea of the relationship I always thought I would have and yet, in other ways, fits everything for which I had ever prayed. Even with the analytical mind I inherited from my accountant father, I cannot—as I did with previous men—distill this relationship into Excel columns and lines of pros and cons.

  There are still times when I wonder how we will make this work, and what this year will bring for us. Then Lemon calls me from her father’s cell phone, chattering about her day, interspersing her stories with a simple “I miss you” or “I love you; I wish I can see you soon” or a giggling “You’re funny!” And that’s when I remember that even the best mathematical formulas cannot align the data on a spreadsheet if the numbers do not balance. But hearts align and balance instinctively, widening infinitely to encompass the world.

  This is not just a love story about a man and a woman. It is also a love story about a little girl. It is not a story I would have had the imagination to write for myself, nor a story I would have believed I’d have the openness and capacity to live. This is a story only God could have written. And it is already beautiful.

  Glossary

  Abaya: “cloak”; long overgarment; robelike dress for women

  Adhan: call to prayer

  Alhamdulillah: “Praise be to God,” an expression of gratitude Allahu akbar: “God is greater”

  Allahu alim: “God is the knower of all”; used colloquially as “God knows best”

  Al-Talaq: decree of divorce

  Asr: late-afternoon ritual prayer

  As-salaam-alaikum (or “salaam”): “Peace be upon you”; used colloquially as a greeting or hello

  Astaghfirullah: “I seek forgiveness from God”; used colloquially as “God forbid”

  Ayah(s): verse(s) of the Qur’an

  Baraka: spiritual blessing

  Beta: term for daughter/son; also used as a term of endearment

  Bismillahi rahmani rahim (bismillah): “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful”

  Burqa: a loose full-body and head covering for women

  Chador: a full-body-length semicircle of fabric that is split open down the front, with an opening at the top worn by women

  Choli: blouse

  Dajjal: the Antichrist

  Dawah: “issuing a summons” or “making an invitation”; usually denotes th
e proselytization of Islam

  Dawood basha: Lebanese meatballs

  Deen: “way of life” or “faith”

  Desi: “one from our country”; usually refers to people from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

  Dhikr: remembrance of God

  Dua: personal supplication to God

  Eid (Eid-al-Fitr): Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting

  Fajr: predawn ritual prayer

  Farangi: Westerner, foreigner

  Gori/a: white person

  Habibti (hababa): “sweetheart”; term of endearment

  Hadith: saying of the Prophet Muhammad

  Halal: religiously permissible

  Halaqa: religious-study circle

  Haram: religiously proscribed

  Hijab: headscarf

  Hijrah: migration

  Iddat: three-month waiting period for women after the decree of divorce

  Iftar: meal to break fast

  Imam: minister; person who leads prayer

  InshAllah: God willing

  Isha: nighttime ritual prayer

  Istikharah: special prayer for guidance

  Jaanu (jaan, maman jaan): “darling”; term of endearment

  Jamah: congregation

  Jilbab: long, loose outer coat or garment for women

  Jumma: Friday congregational prayer

  Kali/a: dark-skinned or black

  Katb kitab: marriage ceremony

  Khimar: head scarf

  Khutbas: religious sermon

  Kibbeh: an Arab dish made of bulgur or rice and chopped meat

  Kom el Shoqafa: historical archaeological catacombs in Alexandria, Egypt

  Korma: South Asian dish, usually considered a type of curry

  Kufi: skullcap

  Kurta: tunic

  Maghrib: evening ritual prayer

  mashAllah: “whatever God wills”; expresses appreciation, joy, praise, or thankfulness for an event or person just mentioned

  Masjid: mosque

  Mehndi: henna

  Muezzin: one who performs the call to prayer

  Mumin: believer

  Musallah: prayer space

  Mutah: fixed-term marriage contract

  Namaz/j: Urdu and Bengali for one of the five daily ritual prayers

  Naseeha: wisdom or advice

  Nikah: Islamic legal marriage contract

  Niqab(i): face veil, or a woman who wears one

  Raita: South Asian condiment made from yogurt and herbs

  Rakat: one complete cycle of the ritual prayer

  Ramadan: sacred month of fasting

  Ras: syrup

  Rishta: marriage proposal

  Sajdah: prostration during ritual prayer

  Salafi: a follower of an Islamic movement; in contemporary times, “Salafiyyah” has been associated with literalist approaches to Islamic theology

  Salat: one of the five ritual daily prayer or additional prayers

  Sayyid: a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him

  Shahada: declaration of faith

  Shaikha: female religious teacher

  Shalwar kamiz: traditional long tunic and pants worn in the Indian subcontinent by men and women

  Shami: Syrian

  Shami kebobs: Indian or Pakistani kebo

  Shariah: “way” or “path”; code of conduct or body of Islamic law

  Shaytan: Satan

  Shi’a: follower of Shiite Islam

  Subhan’Allah: “Glory be to God”; expression of gratitude or praise upon seeing or hearing something beautiful

  Sunna: actions of the Prophet Muhammad

  Sunni: follower of Sunni Islam, the largest branch of Islam

  Surah: chapter of the Qur’an

  Surah al-Fatiha: the opening chapter of the Qur’an

  Tahajjud: night prayer

  Tawaf: circumambulating around the kabah

  Taqwa: God consciousness

  Tasbih: prayer beads

  Thobe(s): ankle-length garment, usually with long sleeves, like a robe; worn by men in the Middle East and East Africa

  Ummah: “community” or “nation”; often refers to worldwide community of Muslims

  Umrah: religious pilgrimage to Mecca at any time of the year aside from Hajj, the annual pilgrimage

  Wali: legal guardian or representative

  Wudu: ablution before prayer

  Zabiha: ritually slaughtered meat

  Zina: sexual intercourse outside of marriage

  Contributors

  TOLU ADIBA (pen name) is an American Muslim who from time to time peeks outside of the closet. She currently resides on the East Coast.

  TANZILA “TAZ” AHMED is a writer, community organizer, and policy researcher based in Northern California. She founded South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY) and is a contributing blogger at SepiaMutiny.com, where she writes about pop, music, politics, and anything tied to a desi identity. Her writing has been featured in TheNation.com, Left Turn magazine, Angry Asian Man, MTV Iggy, Taqwacore Webzine, Wire Tap magazine, AlterNet, and PopandPolitics.com and has been published in the books Mirror on America and Storming the Polls. She also has two self-published chapbooks of poetry, Secret Confessions and Diamond in the Rough. She is currently working on a memoir about her journey to find purpose, love, poetry, and familial revolutionary history.

  HUDA AL-MARASHI is an Iraqi American at work on a memoir about the impact of dual-identity on her marriage. Excerpts from this memoir are forthcoming in the anthologies Becoming and In Her Place. Her poem TV Terror is part of a touring exhibit commemorating the Mutanabbi Street Bombing in Baghdad. She holds a B.A. from Santa Clara University and a M.Ed. from Framingham State College. She is a 2012 Creative Workforce Fellow, and she lives in Ohio with her husband and three children.

  INSIYA ANSARI (pen name) is a writer who was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  MOLLY ELIAN CARLSON converted to Islam in 2005 and then converted to marriage in 2007, to the man of her dreams, literally. She was born in Minnesota but has lived in many other places, including Cairo, Egypt. She, her husband, and the Egyptian street cat she took in moved back to Minnesota in 2009 and live there currently. She loves to read and to write, and hopes to one day publish that novel that has been sitting in the back of her head for years.

  PATRICIA M. G. DUNN received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she currently teaches creative writing. She was managing editor of Muslim Wakeup!, America’s most popular Muslim online magazine, with over two hundred thousand monthly readers, from 2003 to 2008. Her fiction has appeared in Global City Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the Village Voice, the Nation, and L.A. Weekly and on Salon.com and Women’s eNews, among other publications. Her work is anthologized in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, published by Kent State University Press.

  NOUR GAMAL (pen name) is a global nomad who was raised across the eastern United States and the Arabian Gulf. After failing to realize the Egyptian American dream of becoming an engineer or a doctor, she earned a BA in Middle Eastern studies and an LLM in human rights law instead. She is employed as a part-time freelance translator and a full-time bleeding heart and lives with her farangi husband and their four adorable computers in the UK.

  ASIILA IMANI converted to Islam over thirty years ago and has followed the Jafari madhab for the last twenty. She has a BA in communications and sociology and did some graduate work in linguistics. She is a strong proponent of polygyny, viewing it as extended family ideally for the benefit of women. She writes about and counsels women on this topic. Asiila is a doula and home-birth midwife. She homeschooled her sons, twenty-seven and fifteen, and teaches language arts to other homeschooled children. She is currently studying the healing arts of homeopathy and reflexology.

  LENA HASSAN (pen name) has been happily married to her husband for sixteen years, thanks to God and the veil of cyberspace. They have three children and currently live in Damascus, Syria, though the
Internet allows her to keep a perpetual foot in her home country of America. Lena has worked as a software engineer, served as an administrative volunteer for an Islamic school in the United States, homeschooled her children, and edited an online literary journal. She is an aspiring fiction writer and recently published her first short story in a national magazine.

  LEILA N. KHAN (pen name) lives and works in Northern California. She enjoys Italian films, classical music, and spending time in her kitchen. Her favorite places in the world are Strasbourg, Dubrovnik, and Maui.

  YASMINE M. KHAN was born in Berkeley and has lived all over Northern California and in Barazai, Pakistan. She is a writer and photographer whose favorite things include gelato, high fives, and practicing terrible cartwheels with Lemon. She dreams not so secretly of traveling the world, learning how to swim, and making the perfect homemade strawberry shortcake. Her professional background lies in cultural competency training and fund development for nonprofit organizations and institutions of higher education. Yasmine studied human development at the University of California, Davis, and educational leadership at Mills College. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  S.E. JIHAD LEVINE (Safiyyah) is a Muslim prison chaplain and is on the executive committee of the Pennsylvania Prison Chaplains Association in the United States. Safiyyah is also a freelance writer and has been published in magazines, journals, anthologies, and online venues. She is currently writing a series of booklets for the benefit of incarcerated Muslims, and enjoys indoor and outdoor gardening, photography, digital art, and jewelry making. She is also a principal and teacher at the Sunbury Islamic Center weekend school and is dedicated to masjid interfaith activities. She maintains a website at www.Shaalom2Salaam.com.