Shelina Janmohamed

by Love in a Headscarf

  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 a family friend of 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 our mutual friend’s daughter. She was wearing a pink sequined 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 toward Mecca. I stood this way every day many times, somber 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, practicing 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 his 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 f
ell 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; his cheesy lyrics and wailing 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 done anything about this 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 and 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 agonizing but gradually diminishing pain. In return he explained slowly and in detail the spiritual quest of the seeker. I had already realized 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 toward Love. I had never felt as energized and moved as I did in those conversations. I felt like a human spirit, rather than just a brain and a body. It was not him that I was mesmerized 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. Instead of thinking too hard with my head, I felt and understood with my heart. It was as though I was able to relate to the world around me in a new way, not just through rules and information, but in spirit, sensation, and awe. Because book knowledge was no longer enough, it was hard to find words to describe it.

  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 woolen 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 among those within mainstream Islam, who saw them as giving the mystical experience more importance than the day-to-day rules of behavior and actions like salat, prayers.

  He laughed wisely, his eyes crinkling with affection. “The name is not important in the search. We are all too obsessed with words, names, labels. In order to avoid all these complications, I prefer to call it irfan, which means spiritual knowledge. The ultimate goal of irfan is to gain ma’arifah, knowledge of the Divine. Irfan and ma’arifah come from the same meaning of ‘knowing.’” As soon as he said the words, I was surprised to realize how obvious it was that my long search for love hid a deeper quest for the knowledge of who I was, and my place in the universe. What was this connection between knowing and loving?

  Mohamed explained that knowledge was of three kinds. The weakest form of knowledge was what people told you, and its credibility was based on the authority of the person telling you. A stronger form of knowledge was seeing with your own eyes, and this was how most of us constructed our world.

  “The ultimate level of certainty,” he went on, “is the knowledge that you have tasted for yourself. No one can ever persuade you away from something you have experienced yourself. Someone who speaks from experience creates a resonance that someone who speaks only from book knowledge will never achieve.”

  “Practice what you preach,” I echoed. “That is the only way to have an impact.”

  “Exactly!” He threw his fist up passionately into a small air punch. “And that is why the Prophet Muhammad caused such a stir with his words. When he explained the importance of good manners, kindness, and etiquette, people listened because he practiced it himself. His behavior was so exquisite, we’re still listening today. More importantly, if you want to achieve ma’arifah, real knowledge of Love, then the Prophet’s words have the greatest impact because he had seen the Divine for himself.” Seeing was not with the eyes, but the heart. That is why love underpinned all our experiences.

  “In fact he had tasted it. He had experienced Love in its purest form himself, and that is the final stage of knowledge.”

  I gazed intently at him, slowly realizing that simply knowing was not enough. That was far away from understanding the secrets of the universe—the secrets of Love that I had been searching for. I wanted to “taste” it myself.

  “If you reach the truest heights of experience, you can be utterly lost in it. That is when you will reach fanaa, the place that the ‘I’ that you are, or the ‘I’ that I am, is completely annihilated. After this you reach baqaa, the eternal remaining. That is the immortality that we all yearn for.” The elixir that so many myths had been written about to meet that human longing to live forever was right at our fingertips. But to get there, the journey that Mohamed was describing—the journey that unknowingly I was already engaged in—was at once passionate and perilous.

  The explanation echoed the statement that a person speaks when they declare that they want to become a Muslim. First, “There is no god.” This is the nothing “except the Divine.” This is the everything that remains after the material world we see around us.

  Mohamed continued to speak passionately. “The arrogance of the ‘I’ separates you from the Divine and puts veils between you. The bigger your ego—the more we all talk about our superiority as human beings—the further we recede from the secrets of the Divine and the universe. You have t
o remove the barriers between your heart and the Divine. Be nothing in order to be reborn into everything.”

  So I asked the question that critics of the mystical path raise: “What about the rules?” I inquired. “What of the limits, guidance, laws, and rituals embedded in Islam? You can’t just abandon those for this goal of annihilation.”

  “The inner is meaningless on its own,” he responded. “In order to reach the point of ‘knowing,’ you have to be able to live in the physical world around you. You have to be in harmony with the environment and with other human beings. That is what is meant by being a balanced human being. To do that you need to follow rules of behavior and laws, otherwise how can you live peacefully with other people?”

  I nodded in agreement: by interacting with others, you learned how to be a better person.

  “You need three paths: law, compassion, and love.”

  “The first is shari’ah, a word thrown around in all discussions about Islam but without people really understanding what it means. Shari’ah is not something vulgar that means chopping off hands and locking up women.”

  The word shari’ah was used lazily as verbal shorthand for “backward” Islam. In day-to-day parlance shari’ah was used to refer to the legal code that was used in local law and which jurists spent many years studying, just as they might study British law in universities and at the bar. Such local law varied across the Muslim world due to the different interpretations that scholars placed on the sources of law, as well as the different perspectives and needs that their cultures required.

  “On the big picture scale, shar’iah means the principles on which the universe is organized, the Divine code. It’s how the whole amazing world around us works, and the physical as well as spiritual laws that make it all hang together.”