by Ali Eteraz
A few days later I went to an MSA meeting in the prayer hall. The brothers—sincere, severe, serious—sat in a semicircle facing the window, with me at one end. The sisters—soft secretive silhouettes—made a semicircle on the opposite side. The brothers actively looked away from the sisters so that everyone could see how hard they were trying to avoid getting tempted and ending up in hell. The sisters adjusted their hijabs to cover as much of them as possible so that everyone could see how hard they were trying to make sure they didn’t inadvertently send brothers to the fire.
Just as the meeting began, the door was flung open and in walked Kara. She didn’t have on a chador or a scarf. In fact, she was wearing tight jeans and a tank top. Her breasts were prominent, the cleavage at least as deep as the Prophet’s trench around Medina. She walked over and sat down on the floor next to me.
“Hey, you,” she said, bumping shoulders and smiling.
I was filled with dread. I scrunched away as if she were diseased. Her presence and her close proximity were reprehensible. I knew that the MSA sisters would look at us and assign her immodesty to me. The brothers, meanwhile, would act like nothing had happened, which was worse.
For a few tense minutes I tried to remain composed. Then, unable to bear the weight of eyes that consciously averted themselves, I asked Kara to step outside with me.
“You coming here was a very bad idea,” I said, once we’d escaped into the hallway.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to see you.”
“You need to go,” I ordered, punching the down button on the elevator to expedite her departure.
When the summoned car arrived, she stepped inside and the steel doors closed between us, while I went back to the meeting, took my seat, and remained very quiet. I knew—as did everyone around me—that I didn’t deserve to be included. Feeling ashamed, I left the meeting early and went back to my dorm.
Locked in my room, I stood beside the window and looked out at the rowdy couples on the street flirting on a Friday night. With a mixture of fear and disgust, I watched people going in and out of a pub across the way—some staggering out drunk. There was a group of scantily clad women going into a Thai restaurant, followed by a young man with his hand on the small of a girl’s back. All of these immodest sights and sounds seemed to be purposefully joined in a conspiracy against my faith. I could see what I had always suspected: behind everyday life in America lay temptation, lay the demonic beckoning of freedom; it curled out of the sewers, splashed down from the skies, and infused itself into each human body. I was witnessing the slow but steady imperialism of secular life. It was insidious because it wrapped itself in sex. I was being chased by women now the way Moosa Farid had been chased by homosexuals when he first got to campus. It was horrible.
I sat on my bed and cursed Kara. She had been irresponsible, coming into the meeting like that. Stupid non-Muslim girl! She didn’t understand what was at stake. Nothing less than the future of Islam! She didn’t understand what a meticulously crafted and fragile shadow this Muslim man truly was. She didn’t understand that Islam was in a war, not just for its own integrity, but on behalf of all monotheism. Why did she make me want her? It must be because she didn’t respect me, the way all of Western culture didn’t respect Muslims.
The more I thought, the drowsier I became. Willing to drown my depression in sleep, I closed my eyes. Instead of darkness, I saw Kara—and I wanted her. I could picture her in my bed. I could imagine myself in bed with her. Clutching my sheets, I moaned into my pillow. I wanted to pick up the phone and tell her that I was coming over.
Suddenly tears formed in my eyes—tears of guilt and penance. Soon I was weeping, and I couldn’t stop myself. I did what I had only read about: I cried myself to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, everything was inexplicably clear: Abu Bakr Ramaq needed a pious Muslim wife. Otherwise, he would commit fornication and no longer be worthy of serving the religion.
6
Her name was Bilqis. I met her—where else?—on AOL, in an Islam chat during a theological spat between various sects. She was bored by the vitriol and wanted to talk to someone who knew Islam at a higher level. Enter yours truly. I made a few jokes. Invoked a few famous scholars. Told her about the spiritual war between Islam and secularism. We started e-mailing. She sent me a picture. I sent her mine. I decided that she was good-looking enough to be a good wife for me.
Bilqis hadn’t been my first choice, though, because she didn’t wear hijab. In the biographical sketch that I had once painted in Moosa Farid’s company, my dream wife had to wear hijab. That’s why, before Bilqis, I had first courted a hijabi named Selena. Unfortunately, things hadn’t worked out with her. We had spent a lovely day together, sharing conversation and those ubiquitous Starbucks drinks—which she let me pay for—and then she had dropped me at my dorm when her boyfriend showed up. I had been left staring at her from my window with Moosa Farid reminding me, “You got played by a ho-jabi.”
Actually, Bilqis wasn’t my second choice either, because she lived far away, and I knew this would make it difficult to see her. In fact, after Selena but before Bilqis, I had courted a lovely, dark-haired Pakistani (who was contemplating putting on the hijab) due solely to her proximity. The problem with her was that I discovered she wrote poetry, and I—being an occasional poet myself—knew that poets were mentally unstable. I didn’t want a crazy person to become the eventual mother of my children. So she had been vetoed.
Thus Bilqis became, through the process of elimination, my soulmate. Insert here images of burgeoning flowers, rambunctious rainbows, abaya-wearing cupids shooting arrows tipped with red crescents, and an Islamic wedding procession (without music, of course).
Whenever I had enough money, I traveled to see her: we tended to meet for a couple of hours every few months at a train station midway, where we sat on benches opposite one another so that we wouldn’t feel tempted to commit zina.
“When are you going to tell your parents about us?” I asked her one day. “You need to be my wedded wife to protect my Islam.”
“I can’t tell them. My father would ship me back to the village we’re from.”
“Why?” I asked, surprised that I wouldn’t be seen as marriage material.
“We haven’t done things properly,” she explained.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that we shouldn’t have found each other.”
“How should we have met, then?”
“Through destiny.”
“Wasn’t it destiny that we were in the same chat room at the same time?” I asked, smiling.
“Destiny means that, rather than you and I choosing one another, our parents should have created the conditions for our meeting. Everything arranged.”
“Well, that’s not what happened,” I retorted. “Is there a way to solve this?”
Bilqis nodded and laid out a multi-step backup plan that would satisfy her parents and allow us to achieve our goal of marital union. It was as follows:
(a) The first goal was for us to become like strangers to one another, because if her parents became aware that we’d been in close proximity with one another, they would assume that we had fornicated. This would lead them to ship her off to a village in the old country, or to punish her (and me) by marrying her to an old and ugly cousin in Germany.
(b) I had to inform my parents that I wanted to marry a girl and get their approval. This had to be achieved without my parents learning that I’d had preexisting contact with Bilqis. The onus was on me to achieve this feat.
(c) Once I’d received approval from my parents, they—out of the blue—had to call Bilqis’s parents and have a conversation about something mundane, such as the weather. The aim of this call would be to signal to her parents that there was a family out there in the world who had heard about their daughter completely by chance and wanted to ask for her hand in marriage for their son.
(d) At this point, Bilqis and I had
to wait and pray that simply on the basis of that conversation about the weather, her family would invite my family over to their house for tea. This step required intervention from Allah because:
i. Only divine fiat would ensure that her family didn’t think the proposal was for Bilqis’s older unmarried sister or older unmarried cousin.
ii. Only divine fiat would ensure that the hearsay inquiry her parents would launch—into my character, my religiosity, my job security, my looks, my parents’ religiosity, my earning potential, my family’s gross and net income, the divorce record in my extended family, the skin color of the children born in my extended family, and the ratio of boys to girls born in my family—would produce results that would satisfy her parents.
iii. Only divine fiat would ensure that two families who didn’t live anywhere near one another would see fit to ignore geography.
(e) Finally, a look at our respective heritages would have to reveal that Bilqis and I were ethnically compatible. Due to the ravages of colonialism, with its divide-and-conquer legacy, as well as general Muslim bigotry, most Muslim races were incompatible with one another. Whether or not we would indeed be declared ethnically compatible depended on such things as her father’s mood and his prior history with other ethnicities.
I eagerly went through the checklist with Bilqis. “I think we’ve got it covered,” I concluded.
“No,” Bilqis said sadly, stuck on the final point. “I just remembered that my father hates Punjabis.”
“But I’m Punjabi,” I said, feeling as hurt as if I’d been struck.
“My father says they oppress everyone in Pakistan.”
“What does he care? He’s not even Pakistani!”
“Oh, he cares. He says that the only people who are allowed to oppress one another are pure races, and Punjabis aren’t pure.”
“But no one is racially pure anymore!”
“Maybe not, but he particularly dislikes Punjabis. He says they’re cowards for not using the nuke on Islam’s enemies.”
“What are you talking about? We produced Zia ul Haq and Nawaz Sharif. They imposed Islam on everyone.”
“Won’t work.”
“So that’s it? We’re screwed?”
She sighed. “We could have hidden and hoodwinked everything, but ethnicity…”
I could see our marriage slipping from my fingers. I could see myself calling Kara and having intercourse with her.
“There are powers greater than ethnicity,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Love!” I declared. “I’ll tell your father I love you!”
“There is no love,” she said. “Love is just when you pick one person and don’t pick anybody else afterwards.”
“What if we eloped?”
“I would be disowned,” she replied, shaking her head dismissively. “My family would refuse to acknowledge me in the community.”
“We could emotionally blackmail them—have a child as soon as possible and show up at their door with our little bundle of joy.”
“That would work only on my mother. My dad would refuse to greet the child.”
We sat in silence, hoping for inspiration. “What now?” I asked finally.
“We go our separate ways and hope that our parents will run into one another someday.”
“How can you be so callous?” I asked, offended by her suggestion. “Don’t you know that you’re my soulmate!”
“I’m not callous,” she said. “I’m hurting.”
“No. I can’t accept this,” I concluded. “There actually is something higher than love.”
“What’s that?”
“Islam! The Prophet said that Islam stands above and beyond ethnicity. I heard it from Moosa Farid. I think there’s even a verse about it in the Quran. About how God made us into tribes and stuff only for the sake of diversity.”
“So?”
I explained that I would go to Moosa and ask him to help me make a long list of scholars and citations affirming Islamic universalism. With his help, I would show that Islam was beyond race. I would raise myself to such levels of Islamic piety and leadership that Bilqis’s father would be hard-pressed to reject me. I’d become friends with all the main scholars of American Islam—Mukhtar Maghraoui, Hamza Yusuf, and Zaid Shakir—if that’s what it took. I’d take all three of them with me to talk to her father directly. “In short,” I said. “I’ll show him that xenophobia is un-Islamic.”
Bilqis smiled. She knew the persuasive power of religion. “Fine. So we are going to do things the Islamic way?”
“That’s right,” I said, puffing out my chest.
“Then that means we have to start behaving Islamically.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it means that we can’t touch one another.”
“I don’t think you’ve noticed,” I said, “but we already don’t touch.”
“I know. But that’s because we’re reluctant and shy. Now we have to not touch for the sake of Islam. Our intentions have to be Islamic.”
“Can do.”
“Wait,” she added. “It’s going to be hard to stick to this rule if we keep meeting.”
“Fine. We’ll keep in touch via phone and e-mail.”
“Thing is, if we keep hearing each other’s voice—”
“—right, we’ll become tempted to melt, like butter melts on a fire.”
“So let’s just talk on AOL.”
“All right. Just that.”
“Finally we’re doing things properly,” my soulmate said, exhaling loudly as if for emphasis. “By not staying in touch we have a shot at getting married.”
In order to find Islamic scholars that might vouch for me with Bilqis’s father, I started attending lectures around New York. One day Moosa and I went to see a prominent African teacher who was giving a lecture near Harlem titled “The Conditions of Jihad.” He was considered very pious, and I really wanted to get him on my side.
The lecture was given in an old cathedral that was full of college students and young professionals. The seats were split down the center, as you’d expect for this speaker: women on one side and men on the other. The talk itself wasn’t what I expected, though. No geopolitical jargon. Nothing about America or Israel. Just the macrocosmic relationship between striving on behalf of your religion in this life and success in the hereafter. The shaykh said that all military jihad was forbidden unless it was a defensive war waged by a government, and added that the highest form of jihad was against the temptations of the flesh.
When the lecture ended various petitioners crowded around the podium to talk with the shaykh. I got in line as well, but ahead of me was a large group of women. It turned out that in addition to classical jurisprudence and the rules of war, the shaykh was also a bit of an expert on women’s issues.
“You gotta wonder if the shaykh takes advantage of the fact that he’s surrounded by all these women all the time,” I said to Moosa as we waited.
“Are you kidding?” Moosa exclaimed. He had read about this particular shaykh, apparently. “His new wife is eighteen!”
“What do you mean new?”
“He likes to upgrade. This is his fourth. You blame him? Look at the options he’s got.”
I looked over at the group of sisters. Each one was more buxom and full-bottomed than the next.
Something didn’t compute here. Divorce was frowned upon by Islam, yet no one seemed to care that this shaykh did it often.
“Isn’t divorce a sin?” I asked.
“Well, it’s only makruh,” Moosa replied. “That means it’s neutral. God won’t like it if you do it, but he won’t penalize you. The Prophet’s grandson Hasan married and divorced seventy-one women in his life.”
“That’s hard to imagine!”
“The brother was popular. Fathers would offer their daughters. He couldn’t decline. It’s probably like that for this guy too.”
I looked at the shaykh with new admiration. His piety had to
be truly immense if he was able to get away with numerous divorces. And here I was having trouble with just one marriage! I prayed for the day to arrive when I could be as pious as he was so that I could do things that would otherwise be questioned.
As I stood in line, a sudden commotion broke out behind us. An excitable congregant was shouting that since America used satellites to send sexual images and pro-Israel propaganda into Muslim countries, this qualified as a declaration of war, and therefore it was incumbent on Muslim scholars like the shaykh to announce jihad against America. A couple of older congregants tried to shout down the bellicose man for being a fool, but the man called them apostates and continued his tirade. Eventually the matter had to be referred to the shaykh.
Which meant I had to leave without getting a reference.
Bilqis and I decided that we would give ourselves until senior year before we talked to our parents. By then I would have had a chance to spend a couple of summers at Middlebury College, where I hoped to become fluent in Arabic; and that, in turn, would raise my Islamic credentials. The three-year delay would give us enough time to garner support among New York’s Islamic intelligentsia. I also thought it would give me enough time to convince Bilqis to wear hijab.
Then something happened that caused us to accelerate our plans. His name was Yahya.
He was an older Pathan man from Bilqis’s community who’d had his sights set on Bilqis for years. He’d been planning to go to her father and get permission to marry her as soon as she reached marital age. However, when he heard rumors that Bilqis had found some guy in New York, he flipped his lid. He started sending me threatening instant messages.
“What’s up, punk?”
“Who is this?” I responded.
“Your worst nightmare.”
“Do you have a name?”
“You know me, bitch. My name is Yahya. You stole my wife-to-be. I’m about to get all pakhtunkhwa on you.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I typed honestly.