Shelina Janmohamed

by Love in a Headscarf

  What we needed was a collective reassessment of what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman, a new gender reconstruction going back to the very roots of Islam, where men and women were partners and companions rather than disjointed and dysfunctional. After all, as the Qur’an said, men and women were created in pairs. The gender constructs that we needed to operate as a fully functioning society—and that was within my own small community, as well as in wider society—had become blurred, or even lost, and that meant we had lost the ability to love each other for who we were.

  Was the social pressure and pain that I and my friends had endured the price of being a pioneer and creating change? We had had no one to point to as role models or leaders, but had to break the mold ourselves. Even some of the mosques and Imams needed changes: not only did young women need to be taught about relationships and marriage, but men, too, in order to redress the asymmetry of marriage and the search for a partner. What good was berating women for being single or for the growing divorce rate if men were not ready or did not have the skills to deal with being married?

  The community leaders got together to discuss the issue. They agreed that there were huge problems around arranging suitable marriages and keeping them together. They agreed that they must get together again and discuss the problems. They reconvened and discussed that the problems were growing and that solving them was a community priority. After all, a community is made up from the building blocks of solid families. They planned out a series of seminars to brainstorm ideas and engage the community. The community duly held the meetings and agreed that the problem was now of significant magnitude and that Something Must Be Done. They concluded that it was important that young people should get married. They would discuss further with experts. The experts agreed that the situation was dire and that doing nothing was Not An Option. If nothing was done then things would go from bad to worse. Action was demanded. They would reconvene to discuss the matter.

  SADNESS

  My parents visited a number of local mosques to recruit help from the Imams, Shaikhs, and Maulanas. In one of them, the gentle Shaikh pulled out a large tome from under the desk. It was an enormous binder, which he turned to face toward my parents, who were sitting on the opposite side of the desk. Each page contained a piece of A4 paper inside a clear plastic holder and listed the details of someone who was looking fervently enough for a partner to place an advertisement in the Big Book. It showed a photograph and then listed their biodata.

  There were pages and pages of young men and women who were looking for a partner to complete themselves and their faith. It was a postmodern journal of community woe that captured both collective failure to secure happy marriages and individual angst in finding the One. The Shaikh suggested to my parents that I should create my own one-pager with a photo and then come into the mosque to review the binder with him, as he was custodian of the Best of the Singles book. I couldn’t face the thought of putting an advertisement with a photo in the marriage catalog for all to see. Should I have deprioritized my pride in favor of finding a man? I realized from my reaction to the book that I still hadn’t acknowledged in my heart that admitting that you were looking for a partner was perfectly acceptable.

  Singledom was growing around me as well—women across wider society seemed to be suffering. We moped collectively at work. Emma was single. So were Elaine and Nicola. The men, peculiarly, were all married or in long-term relationships. Why suddenly this universal explosion of female singleness?

  To revel in our womanhood we would buy glossy women’s magazines at lunchtime and share the headlines, laughing at their larger than life claims and mourning at how they subtly pitied our status as single women.

  Emma picked one up. “We have to love ourselves before anyone else can love us,” she read out.

  Elaine responded, “So that means if we’re single then we are unloved, and that means we are not even ready to be loved.” She paused. “That’s awful. I should just give up now.”

  Nicola read out a whole series of commands from another magazine: “Who needs a man?” “Independent is best!” “Live your own life!” “If he isn’t the one then move onto the next!”

  “This is crazy, you ridiculous magazines,” I ranted at the glossy publications, “we tried being single and we’ve decided we do want a man! We can be independent and in a relationship. What if there is no such thing as the One? Maybe we have to turn him into the One?”

  I had always noticed that married men seemed more attractive to single women because they were more balanced, well-rounded, and able to relate to women. Maybe this was precisely because they were married and had spent time with a woman in their lives? Maybe we should pick men who had potential and hope that simply being married to us would turn them into Mr. Right? As the Aunties said, it was like a river and the riverbed molding into each other over time to become a perfect fit.

  Maybe my father, too, had been right all along. He had said to pick out a man with four out of the six qualities and then work on perfecting the rest later. It meant accepting that no one is perfect, not even me.

  “Maybe I’m being cynical,” began Emma, “but perhaps the advertisers in the magazines want us to be single so that we spend our money on keeping ourselves all primped up because that is what the elusive Mr. Right is looking for. But I have spent all my money and I still don’t have a man!” Emma was letting her depression run amok.

  Emma had had a good solid Germanic upbringing. “Maybe they want to distract us away from being homely wives and we’ve fallen for it! Maybe they should be teaching us the old-fashioned habits of wifely budgeting and spending our pennies wisely on Tupperware and jam?”

  We all giggled at the idea of attending Tupperware parties. “I suppose they are not quite as glamorous and attractive as designer clothes,” Emma added.

  Perhaps there was a happy medium the magazines hadn’t recognized or didn’t want to admit—that on the one hand we could be happily married to Mr. Nearly Perfect, knowing that we were not perfect either, but at the same time we could also be stylish and glamorous. Most importantly, the magazines didn’t offer us the possibility or aspiration to be content. No wonder we felt constantly under pressure.

  Emma turned the conversation to her failures at the weekend: “I was a bridesmaid at a wedding and everyone was all loved up in couples. Apart from me. Even the best man was taken! What is wrong with me?”

  Jackie responded, “The only single men are the sleazy ones who have been dumped more times than a trash bin.” It was an awful analogy but we let it go—she looked too distraught. “They all look like George from Seinfeld.”

  We shuddered collectively in disgust and sympathy.

  Elaine turned to me jealously: “At least you have people trying to find someone for you.”

  “It’s true,” I agreed. “It’s hard enough trying to find a man when you have the world and their matchmaker-wife looking out for you and arranging meetings, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be on your own.”

  I turned my head away and blinked back tears. While it was the case that my family had asked many people to help find a match for me, the introductions these days were rare. There was much nodding when we asked for help but little action, and the few suggestions were wildly unsuitable. I was forced to consider them because it seemed imperative to be grateful.

  I met Arif, who had been living in Hungary on his own for the last ten years. He was now back to recruit a wife. He was in his early forties and had been ordered by his long-suffering mother that he was not permitted to remain single any longer and must marry and multiply tout de suite. He had struggled to get a job in the UK and instead had found a post as the financial director in a small investment firm based outside Budapest, in one of its outlying suburbs. Despite his decade of residence there he recounted proudly that he kept to himself and had no friends, had no idea where the local mosque or community was, and didn’t feel the need to spend time participating in Hungarian
life or getting to know the locals. He saw himself living there long-term and thought his wife would be happy to slot into his one-bedroom apartment. Learning Hungarian, working, or having a social life were not important factors in Arif’s consideration of his wife’s comforts.

  At least Arif had all his own papers and citizenship. Nabeel was visiting from a small community in Kuwait in order to trade in his current passport for a British one. I was advised that this was advantageous for me—he wanted to meet someone and arrange a wedding quickly in order to secure his papers, which meant that I would not have to wait too much longer to secure my own visa into Marriedsville.

  Asgar, Sadik, and Jabir followed soon after, all un-visaed, un-jobbed, and unsuitable. Their expectations of a woman and wife—and of marriage—were completely different from mine. They had been brought up with a “traditional” model of marriage from “back home,” and hadn’t shared the strains of the new culture and challenges I had faced, leading to different expectations of social and family life. A wife was a wife and marriage was marriage as far as they were concerned, and the nature of the relationship and the expectations would be the same whatever the geography and culture. It’s just that this one would have the advantage of a British passport.

  I had never thought my best feature would be British citizenship. I wondered if my biodata had been reduced to single female passport holder.

  SHAME

  One of the kindly uncles slipped a piece of torn-off paper into my father’s jacket after Friday prayers. He was discreet, checking that no one was watching. It was important that no one should see him passing on this information, nor see my father receiving it. “Tell Shelina to have a look at it,” he whispered elusively to my father. “We all want the best for her,” he added, and then swept out of the prayer hall and never turned to look back.

  I unfurled the rough-edged scrap with my father in the privacy of our home. It had a Web site address on it. But this was no ordinary Web site; it was the address of a marriage Web site. At that time the Internet was relatively new, untested, and untrusted. There was general hysteria about the Internet itself, and so a marriage Web site unreasonably carried a double shame. The uncle was a reliable source and had great stature in the community. This new cyberoption therefore came with authority and credibility, and my parents backed the idea of searching for a partner through the Internet.

  I visited the Web site, which listed over a thousand profiles. There were no names, only numbers. There was a huge amount of detail, an online biodata bank. You could search by age, country, city, even height, although the latter was still a very sore point. Then there was a freeform section to describe yourself and a further section to describe the person you were looking for.

  I decided to conduct a search. I selected “female looking for male.” I then picked a wide age bracket, as I wanted to see what was out there. It was possible if I limited my parameters too strictly I might miss out on someone who was just one tiny step outside the boundaries of perfect. I chose “United Kingdom” under country, leaving the city blank, and deliberately avoided choosing a height option.

  The search returned a few hundred results. I should have felt elated at the pool of potential husbands who were just waiting for a cyberbride. Instead I wilted beneath the weight of the profiles that I would have to trawl through one by one to see if they were a good match. I steeled myself for a long, arduous marathon facing the computer screen.

  Reading through the profiles was surprisingly addictive. I read one, and then another, one more, just one more, and then just one more. I experienced a “lightbulb moment”: here was a captive pool of single Muslim men! But what kind of men were they? Was there something wrong with them if they were searching online? If I was about to put my own details onto the matrimonial site there were only two possibilities: I was normal, therefore they were normal too; or they were very strange and something was wrong with them, and with me. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt and assumed we were all normal. It was also the most logical analysis in response to my doubt.

  Some of the men had left the space for their descriptions completely blank. It seemed that they were not bothered enough to spend the time describing themselves or what they were looking for. I dismissed them immediately, as they weren’t taking this process seriously. Others had written long essays. I studied these carefully. Some were prescriptive, some arrogant, some downright ludicrous. They reminded me of the wildly unrealistic and unbalanced matrimonial advertisements we used to listen to on Sunrise Radio when I was a child. Sometimes the advertisements were posted by the parents of the boy.

  Every so often there would be a profile that looked appealing, both sensitive and sensible, and that reached out from the screen and touched me with its intelligence, humor, and spirituality. I would clip the advertisement and add it to my list, but I was still hesitant to take things further and fully commit to cybersearching.

  Even at this point I felt that the Internet search was a shameful secret. If I proceeded, I would need to expose myself and share some details. I would be anonymous but I would still be committed. I would need to share information about myself, and I fully expected people to deduce who I was and then propagate the knowledge that I was searching through the InterShame to find a man. Perhaps I felt that my urgent desire to be married had reduced my dignity and I wanted to hold on to as much of it as I could.

  For a few weeks I watched proceedings from the sidelines. One day, one of the profiles caught my eye and I decided to take the plunge. He was about my age, lived in London, and wrote an engaging description of himself that showed he was committed to finding someone but was not self-centered or arrogant. In order to send him a message I had to post my own profile, which I finally decided to do.

  It was biodata hell all over again. This time I had the opportunity to capture my aspirations and myself in as many paragraphs as I wanted, and send it directly to the people out there who might be interested. I was also able to describe in more detail the kind of person I was looking for. It would help him to decide if he resonated with my ideas. I spent a few anguished hours carefully crafting my words, and then hit the “submit” button. There I was, officially looking for marriage in public on the Internet.

  The search became more and more addictive. Apart from the obvious fact that there were so many potential suitors online, I saw profiles of men across the country and even the world, and I started to learn about what else was happening in places I’d never previously had insight or access to. It was a new universe, populated entirely with people in the same situation as me. Reading profiles, sending the odd e-mail, scrutinizing each word for meaning and nuance to see if the owner of the profile could hold the key to something special—the process became all absorbing. There were no introductions at all through the “old” channels, and yet here I was swamped for choice, ranging from ghastly to full of potential.

  I spent many hours each week reviewing several different marriage sites, reading through new profiles, rereading old ones, and then submitting my requests or responding to requests from other people. Every so often there would be a two-way match and then an initial e-mail, and if that went well, a period of frenetic e-mail exchange. The usual shyness of meeting in person, of not knowing if the person is looking to marry, and whether they could be interested in you, were all gone.

  Occasionally I exchanged an introduction with a prospect who had either been rejected or not suggested in the traditional channels by a third party who was busy interfering. We cyberlaughed, sharing an understanding of the flawed matchmaking process. It was remarkably heartening to be able finally to share the trials and emotions of the search so openly. The detachment and anonymity created by the Internet were remarkably cathartic. I felt I was not alone.

  There were profiles from the Middle East, Canada, America, Australia, in fact any country you could imagine. I exchanged e-mails across time zones and found out that Muslim men in small-town America felt isolated and abandoned in
their faith. In their parents’ struggles for a better life, they had been separated from their communities. In the Middle East, young men told me that there were no jobs for them, and no prospects. In South Asia, some men wanted to maintain traditional marital relations (with men dominating and women submissive), whereas others aspired to “Western” ideas of equality in a relationship with women responsible for earning money too. Despite our different political, social, and economic challenges I came to one simple, obvious conclusion: that we were all looking for the same thing. We all had a strong desire for a partner and the desire finally to find someone to love, and we pursued this with enormous gusto. The global connections opened up a whole new world for me and for the Muslims that I was in touch with. I learned about new places and new experiences, and found far-flung cyber–pen pals. The globalization and easy access to people all around the world changed all the parameters. I had met men from abroad before who had traveled to the UK to meet prospective wives, but this was the first time that I could proactively choose to introduce myself to a man from almost anywhere on earth. It marked a general change in the world, and in the Muslim community, that we were so easily and quickly connected to anyone, anywhere.

  As my confidence and sense of self kept growing stronger, I found this global connectivity very liberating and exciting. I could go anywhere and talk to anyone in any location. It melded with my sensibilities as a global citizen. And it enhanced my sense of faith because the language and values that I used as my currency were cross-border and cross-cultural. The worldwide connectivity reflected a change in the wider Muslim community, too. Cheaper phone calls, widespread Internet, and the sharing of news tightened connections between the already existing multitudes of Muslim diasporas. It also reflected the general trend of globalization and creation of cross-territory communities. No longer were national borders a defining factor; instead it was about interests, faith, extracurricular activities. News, events, trends, humor were all shared across the global village. One of those villages was SingleMuslimsville, which I was inhabiting, temporarily I hoped.