Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

I was nineteen and he was the first man I had ever been introduced to, the first candidate I had considered spending the whole of my life with. It had been a constrained and artificial setting, and the signals, emotions and chemistry couldn’t work their usual magic.

  I was not aware that the artificiality of the meeting place had sucked away any instinctive attraction. In my ignorance of this fact, I did not understand that this was the reason why ‘that feeling’ was absent. I had set myself the wrong litmus test to find a partner. The ease with which I rejected such a high-calibre suitor was naive. All that I had been looking for was ‘that feeling’. At nineteen I had high hopes of Finding the One. I look back and think that Ali probably would have made quite a good husband. In fact, he did go on to marry, and his wife always looks happy and radiant. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had married him.

  My family took their Islamic responsibilities very seriously. I had to agree to my future partner willingly and happily. What they were offering was an arranged marriage – something very different from a forced marriage.

  As part of an arranged marriage, their job was to provide potential matches and offer advice, support and wisdom in choosing one. If I didn’t like someone they presented to me, then so be it. My choice was the determining factor. In adhering to their faith as Muslims, it was quite clear to my parents that there was to be no coercion of any sort in my selection of a husband. Besides, they could never have forced me to do anything against my will: they were too respectful of me as a human being in my own right. On top of all this, if they had used force in sealing the marriage, then it would not be valid anyway. But there was nothing sinister in them helping to ‘arrange’ men to come my way. Who would object to help in finding the love of one’s life? And they would also be on hand to help during the agreement process. Having someone to support the relationship as it became more serious was just as important as helping to find that special someone in the first place.

  My parents were also learning through this experience. I was their first marriage experience with a daughter, and the rules seemed to be completely different for girls. Had they also known the complexity of the path that I was choosing to pursue, they might have encouraged me more vigorously to consider Ali, but I think they, too, believed that the perfect prince existed. How would they settle for anything less for their princess?

  ‘Shelina should meet him again. It’s always so hard to tell the first time, the poor little thing. He must have been nervous, she was nervous. They weren’t really themselves,’ twittered the matchmaker.

  My mother wanted what mothers always want for their daughters: happiness and love. Whatever the positive experiences of their own lives, mothers want something even better for their daughters. So my mum fell back on a thoroughly modern phrase: ‘She says that she just didn’t feel the “click”.’

  I looked at my mum with adoring respect. She believed in the ‘click’. This should have come as no surprise. One of her favourite stories from the Qur’an was that of Safura and Moses. Moses, a strong and handsome young man, has arrived in town and is watering his sheep at a well along with the local shepherds. Safura is waiting with her sister to water her flock but the other shepherds make it difficult for them because they are women. The chivalrous stranger intervenes and assists with their sheep. After Safura’s encounter with Moses she returns home and recounts this incident of the strange man to her father. Her father has a business and she advises him that Moses would make an excellent employee because of his strength and good character. As a result of their conversation, her father dispatches her to invite him to dinner.

  I often wonder if she tells her father of this Johnny-come-lately because she has taken a shine to him. It seems she was open with her family and that in such a setting there was no embarrassment in a daughter suggesting to a father that she has a special interest in a particular man. Perhaps Safura conveys her ‘click’ to her father. Moses is invited round to meet her family so he can be properly evaluated. Fast forward, and Safura and Moses are married.

  My mother as well as my father had taken the analogy very much to heart. Despite the notion of ‘click’ being absent in cultural norms of marriage, they were open and conscious of exploring this concept as a result of what their faith described to them. They constantly wanted to learn from the stories of the Qur’an and the Prophets in Islamic history. Having the family involved was also no bad thing. It wasn’t considered interfering: it was thought of as advice and support, and it was very welcome. Love and relationships were everyone’s business because they affected everyone. Besides, parents had more experience and wisdom from life, which was helpful in making such huge choices.

  In the process of making a decision to turn down one suitor, I had set in motion a greater journey: to look for the love of my life. The precedent was set: Finding the One was my mission, and in looking for love, I would find myself, my faith and Divine Love along the way.

  I had declared the Search officially open.

  TWO

  Hyphenated

  Innocence

  At the age of thirteen I knew I was destined to marry John Travolta. One day he would arrive on my north London doorstep, fall madly in love with me and ask me to marry him. Then he would convert to Islam and become a devoted Muslim.

  My school-friends had similar reveries, apart from the converting to Islam bit. I was a teenage girl with typical adolescent fantasies. Except for the matter of religion. Whoever was destined to be my Milk Tray man would certainly become a Muslim before any romance. This would lead directly to marriage, and it would be a short path between the two. There was to be no frolicking before the nuptials. Through my youthful eyes, I was sure that I was such an appealing prospect that conversion to Islam would be an obvious, uncomplicated and an easy choice for the lucky man.

  I was told by the Buxom Aunties that I was an unattractive teenager, skinny, and with one curse considered by Asians to be worse than death: I was considered ‘dark’. Asians are notoriously colour-conscious: to be fair is to be beautiful, to be dark is to be ugly. Being pale of skin is a sign of status and a hugely desirable quality in a future daughter-in-law.

  It is most often the hero’s mother that makes the selection as to who should be introduced to her son to consider for marriage. Mothers-in-law preferred to show off pale-skinned brides. I grew up believing I was unappealing and unattractive. When desperately searching for compliments, the Aunties would comment about ‘how charming she is’ or ask, ‘Aren’t her features unusual?’ When faced with pale-skinned girls they would coo, ‘My goodness, she’s so fair and beautiful!’

  As a child I had been both fair and adorable. I had thick glossy hair and rosy chubby cheeks. ‘All the better to pinch you,’ squealed the grown ups. I was extremely alert and very contented, happily playing for hours on my own.

  My greatest distinction was being a diligent student, even from a young age. I loved going to school and doing my homework. Each evening I was questioned by my father as to whether I had completed my schoolwork, and often I would do more class exercises than necessary. In my childhood memories, my mother and father are both constantly present, spending as much time with me as they could. I basked in their love and grew up very much a golden child.

  I was permitted to stay awake until eight in the evenings to watch television. It was only rarely that I saw those reflecting my skin colour and background on the small black window that stood in the corner of our living room. I was raised in the dark ages before the advent of the remote control. As the child in the family, it was I who was forced to jump between sofa and television to change channels at the whim of the adults. There were only four channels at the time, a very primitive situation. It was programmes like Mind Your Language, In Sickness and In Health and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, with their limited number of ethnic characters who had boot-polish painted faces and caricatured catchphrases that gave a window onto how Britain viewed the Asian and black immigrants they had once colon
ised and who were now slowly becoming part of British culture. We, too, were swept away by the rarity and simplicity of the portrayals, happy to see ourselves on television at all. At least the characters representing us in these comedies appeared human and humorous, not barbaric, oppressed or rebellious. ‘You Pakistani poppadom!’ we would chuckle to each other. ‘You Indian chappati!’ we chortled. ‘A thousand apologies,’ we waggled our heads without irony.

  Even rarer were the occasional programmes about Muslims. After much turning of the pages of the newspaper TV listings, there would be a network of telephone calls to and from friends and relations to stay at home in the evening to watch a particular programme. This would be followed by a thorough post-programming analysis. We would gather in front of the screen and view each scene meticulously. Once we had a video recorder, each show would be captured for posterity. Mostly these programmes were inaccurate, plain and simply wrong about the tenets of Islam, showing shoddy research and a poor treatment of the subject matter. I remember vividly a series entitled The Sword of Islam, which depicted a besworded group of warriors thundering across Arabia and Asia, painted as all but a horde of vampires sucking blood from the necks of children. My parents were horrified that Islam was being portrayed in such an alien and stereotyped manner. We weren’t converted by the sword, I reflected. Our family had been merchants who found Islam on their business travels. Even I knew that the sword story was a myth, and I was only a child. I concluded that the TV people really didn’t know their stuff.

  When I first started school, the question I found most difficult was: ‘Where do you come from?’ This was not a question to do with babies, whose origins were simple: they just appeared. They popped out of belly buttons and you knew their gender by looking at their faces. I was shocked at a conversation between my mother and her sister after her first baby had just been born. ‘Why don’t you have another child? You should try for a second,’ said my mother to my aunt. I was puzzled. How could my aunt cause a child to happen? You couldn’t just ‘have’ a baby. It was quite straightforward: children came only because God sent them, when God chose to send them.

  It was my own origins that were much more complicated: a British East-African Asian Muslim girl in the bubbling ethnic mix of North London in the context of 1980s Anglo-Saxon monoculture made it hard for me to articulate succinctly my origins.

  At the age of six, if you are asked, ‘Where are you from?’, the location of the house you live in is the obvious answer. It is the answer that anyone who does not look different would proffer. But you know they want more. They want to know why your skin isn’t peaches and cream if you’re from North London. They want to know why you wear those brightly coloured, strange-shaped clothes. Why your food smells strange and why you eat with your fingers rather than with cutlery like civilised people. Why, sometimes, you have strange brown tattoos on your hands. The questions were never verbalised directly at me in real life, as they were in the mouths of comic racist characters like Alf Garnett. But they sat accusingly, demeaningly, disparagingly, tucked between lips and teeth. It was always easier to hide, to deny, to keep things separate. As long as the worlds never overlapped, there was never any danger, but the fear of collision was constant.

  I never revealed that we ate curry at home. I never prayed in front of my friends. I didn’t tell them about going to the mosque. How to explain all this, when the students at my nice middle-class independent school all came from well-heeled, well-settled families with a professional father and a stay-at-home mother, the two of whom met at university, got married, bought houses in leafy Winchmore Hill, multiplied immediately and sent their children to relive their circle of life? Only later, as the world became smaller, as people’s eyes widened at the complexities of global cultures, and as my confidence in my own faith and culture grew, were my answers delivered with edgy attitude about fusion style, tasty spicy cuisine and fashionable henna art; and about my faith and the belief that it had something strong to offer.

  My great-grandparents had travelled from Gujarat in India to settle in East Africa in the late nineteenth century. They were part of a great wave of Indians moving from the British Empire’s Sub-continental colony to its developing East African territories. The British encouraged many men to participate in the migration in order to provide labour to build the East African railways and start developing the region. Women undertook the migration soon after. Some went because famine was ravaging areas like the Gujarat and the Punjab. Others went to seek economic improvement. The Asian migrants spread to the tip of South Africa and as far west as the stylised ‘Heart of Darkness’ in the centre of the vast uncharted continent. That there were people already settled there who lived untouched lives with their own histories and customs was overlooked by the British. The Sub-continental Asians settled fast, turning areas like today’s Nairobi, now capital of Kenya, from an undeveloped area, first into a vast tented metropolis, and then into a city, almost overnight.

  The Asians joined a swirling mass of ethnicities. East Africa was occupied by both the British and the Germans. The French and Portuguese also held territories in the neighbouring Congo and Mozambique. The coastal areas had long been ruled by Oman, a great seafaring nation on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula that had grown rich through the frankincense it exported. Only on the south coast of Oman did these amazing trees grow with their dazzlingly hypnotic fragrant sap that was turned into perfume and sold at high prices around the world. They used their wealth and sea skills to expand their empire, stretching, in particular, southwards along the eastern seaboard of Africa. They named the now capital of Tanzania, where my parents spent the first years of their marriage, ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, the land of peace and safety, a name which persists today. The Omanis also called the coasts ‘Sawaahil’, according to the Arabic word, and the language that was created on fusing with the local dialects has come to be known as ‘Swahili’, the language of the coast. Today it is spoken as the official language in several countries, including Tanzania, the home of my parents and grandparents.

  In the mid-1850s, before my great-grandparents had sailed from Gujarat to what was then Tanganyika, their small Hindu community had converted to Islam. Family histories point to people who embraced Islam with passion and simplicity, trying to create lives built around their new-found faith. The stories reveal a sense of innocent desire for spirituality and a bright-eyed recognition of truth. There was, of course, no internet, no high-speed delivery, no flying around the world to teach and learn. Instead such communities were sent teachers from the historic Muslim heartlands of the Middle East. The scholars who arrived from the traditional seminaries would then learn the local languages.

  Books, including the Qur’an itself, were slowly translated from Arabic, Persian and even Urdu into Gujarati. The Qur’an lay at the very core of Islamic belief: 114 chapters which Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad received by divine revelation in small sections through the latter years of his life. It lays out the principal beliefs of Islam and guidance on how to be a good Muslim. It was preserved in writing soon after Muhammad died and the text has remained unchanged since then. Since the words are believed to be divine and each one carries a special meaning with multiple layers, the Arabic text is considered paramount. Translations in most languages have appeared, but these are only considered as helpful aides towards understanding the original text.

  At that time individuals rarely learnt to read Arabic. My great-grandmother, even though she grew to a respectable old age, would rely on others, including her daughter, to read out loud any text in Arabic, never having learnt it herself. Slowly this changed, as reading in the original language became standard community practice, and many of the men learnt to speak both Arabic and Persian – the latter being the administrative language of India even into the twentieth century.

  Within the context of a millennium and a half of Islamic history, my family and my community were relative newcomers to the faith. Even today, our youthful Islam is
fresh and hungry. It stretches back for only a handful of generations and is seen through the eyes of India, Africa and now Britain.

  My parents grew up in Tanzania, just as their parents had done. Their communities were mainly Indian, but from across the religious spectrum – Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh. They lived happily as neighbours, sharing values and cultures, supporting each other in their religious practices. In my mother’s family, educating the young women was important. In order to help my mother travel to school, her father purchased a bicycle for her, and she was the first woman in her town to ride to class. It was unheard of and deeply shocking. My grandfather insisted that it was important for her to attend school and that she should be safely transported there and back. Education was part of religion, and one of the great Islamic sayings from Muhammad was ‘Educate yourself, even if you have to travel to China.’ Back then, China was a distant and mysterious empire on the other side of the world. My grandfather’s insistence that religion took priority over cultural expectations had a strong impact on my mother’s faith, because setting faith over tradition still informed her approach to life.

  Soon after my parents were married, Tanzania declared independence. My father’s family had long been British Overseas Subjects. The new political situation forced him to choose between Tanzania and Britain. In the late 1960s, at a time of huge global and social change, he had to make a choice between the excitement of a newly independent state that he had grown up in and where his family lived, and a onetime-only offer to uproot himself with his young family and move to Britain, an unknown distant country, which held an unknowable future. Being a British subject, this country had been in his family’s blood for many decades, and young, energetic and optimistic, he took the risk. They arrived on the shores of England with two suitcases and £75.