Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  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 website address on it. But this was no ordinary website, it was the address of a marriage website. At that time the internet was relatively new, untested and untrusted. There was general hysteria about the internet itself, and so a marriage website unreasonably carried a double shame. The uncle was a reliable source and had great stature in the community. This new cyber-option therefore came with authority and credibility, and my parents backed the idea of searching for a partner through the internet.

  I visited the website, 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 cyber-bride. 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 ‘light-bulb 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 so was I. 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 adverts we used to listen to on Sunrise Radio when I was a child. Sometimes the adverts 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, humour and spirituality. I would clip the advert and add it to my list, but I was still hesitant to take things further and fully commit to cyber-searching.

  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 onto 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-centred 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, scrutinising 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, re-reading 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 cyber-laughed, 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 learnt what was happening around the world, and 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 learnt a
bout new places and new experiences, and found far-flung cyber-pen pals. The globalisation and easy access to people all around the world changed all the parameters. I had met men from abroad before who had travelled 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 globalisation and creation of cross-territory communities. No longer were national borders a defining factor; instead it was about interests, faith, extra-curricular activities. News, events, trends, humour were all shared across the global village. One of those villages was SingleMuslimsville, which I was inhabiting, temporarily I hoped.

  The internet also opened up opportunities for Muslims like me who had grown up in Britain or other Western countries to explore the new multifaceted identities which we had been developing in private without knowing who to share them with. Newsgroups, bulletin boards and blogs exploded onto the cyberscene with an exponential growth of activity, writing and opinion. If I had once felt lonely with my British Asian Muslim Woman multiversal identity, I knew now that there were other people out there who felt the same.

  It was extremely exciting to find messages from different places in the world, respectful and direct approaches from men who were searching and who found your profile interesting. They were usually polite and conscious of the context of the marriage search. No longer was there the need to go through a third party; instead you could get to know someone directly. Messages would tell you unexpected things, from people who were interested in getting to know you. The sweetness and charm of receiving a message sometime in the middle of the working day are exquisite, and at some point, after the volume of e-mails exceeded a certain threshold, there came the moment of seeing a picture of that person or picking up the phone to hear their voice.

  I tried not to decide too rapidly upon seeing a picture – photos were deceptive. Speaking on the phone was more revelatory. I never gave my number to anyone but asked them for theirs and then had a brief conversation. I learnt that e-mails were misleading. It was too easy to read into them what you wanted to read. Even on the phone you lacked their physical presence and non-verbal cues to really know if the person had genuine potential.

  Talking to someone unknown on the phone or meeting an unknown in person were skills I had already honed through the introduction process. But I felt a greater need to be cautious. These were people who had not been vetted and who I had no background information about. On the rare occasion that I finally arranged a meeting in person, I was careful to ensure that my safety was paramount. I would always have someone with me or be in a public space, and, of course, have the fail-safe of all blind dates, a get-out excuse.

  GUILT

  After several months, I came across Tayyab’s profile. He was American, about my age, working in the technology industry. He showed healthy humour about the online marriage process and his description made me laugh out loud. He didn’t take himself too seriously but sounded sensitive and interesting. I submitted a request to be put in contact with him and he accepted, so we began exchanging e-mails. He lived in Houston, by all accounts a cosmopolitan city with a large Muslim population. At first we just shared facts and opinions, and then slowly we talked about our hopes and dreams about getting married.

  Tayyab was of Indian origin, born and brought up in the USA and very much an active member of one of the more progressive mosques in Houston. He played sports, loved writing and wanted to make the world a better place. And he wanted someone to share it with. He had reached his late twenties and he wanted a companion, a wife. He had discovered that he was lonely. He had some interesting political and social opinions. He loved watching the news and was clued up about what was happening around the world. We exchanged ideas about the US presidency, modern science, Islamic jurisprudence, emotional intelligence. I was stimulated and challenged. And I was totally hooked. I really believed that he might be the one.

  We spoke on the phone, and he was everything I imagined him to be during our e-mail exchange. He was funny, sensitive, emotional, warm and intelligent. He sent me a photo where he was a small speck in a dark night sky. He looked like a normal twenty-something. The only thing that worried him was that he was only five foot five tall. He was small, only a couple of inches taller than me apparently, but I reassured him that was fine. I had already faced height discrimination and was not about to do the same.

  ‘I’m going to come and visit you in London,’ he told me in an e-mail one day. This was big, this was huge, this was momentous. Tayyab had never been outside America. Despite the fact that I had received several suitors who had visited London from abroad on their bride-finding tours, no-one from the internet had yet done so.

  It took Tayyab some time to organise his travel arrangements. He had to get himself a passport and arrange with work to take some time off. He grew more and more excited, and I grew more and more nervous. Deep inside me was a mounting trepidation. Even though my parents had conducted some preliminary research about Tayyab and his family, we didn’t know a great deal about his background. My parents were therefore just as concerned as I was but encouraged me to give it a try. This was uncharted territory for them as well.

  When he arrived he was introduced to my parents, and each day he would meet them, just as he met me, so that we could all get to know him together. His persona was sharper and more angular than when we had spoken on the phone. The mystery of absence had vanished, and instead I saw his own expressions face to face. The biggest challenge was to get to know him almost as a totally new person, because he was different from the character I had created for him when we spoke on the phone. I had experienced this with other people I had met, but with the epic travel across the Atlantic, and his certainty that our meeting in person was just a formality before getting engaged, the contrast between Internet-Tayyab and In-Person-Tayyab was heightened. He was also much more short-tempered than on the phone; the distance and our intermittent interactions had hidden this from me, but in person it was constantly evident, and this is what eventually signalled the end of any potential.

  He started to annoy me: he seemed more excited about being in the UK as a tourist than meeting me. He jumped up and down about how our number plates were different, how we drove on a different side of the road, how everyone spoke with cute accents, how our houses were smaller, our cars were tinier, our streets were narrower. Most of all, though, he started by trying to make a show of being well paid. I was more than happy to contribute or even cover our shared expenses, especially in light of the fact he had paid to travel across the world to London. He insisted on paying but then very quickly began complaining about how expensive our coffee was, how expensive our food was, how expensive everything was! And soon his offers to pay, or even share, were deliberately and pointedly withdrawn, despite his initial showmanship about his financial liquidity and his own chivalrous qualities. It was the dentist all over again. This did not bode well for married life.

  It was Tayyab’s unpredictable temper that finally sealed the decision for me. I felt enormously guilty that he had travelled so far to see me, but I told myself that I had no reason to feel guilty. I had not forced him to come. Every individual did what they had to do to find a partner. And Tayyab had taken a calculated decision to make this journey, knowi
ng that things might not work out.

  Was it my fault that it didn’t work? Should I have tried harder? After all, everything else seemed to fit so well and my parents were already tracing further references. I ought not to feel guilt – after all I had been the catalyst for Tayyab to do something he had never done before and might not have done if the prospect of marriage had not enticed him. I ought to have felt satisfied with my contribution.

  Instead, everything I did made me feel guilty. And it wasn’t just about Tayyab, it was with my family too. They wanted so much for me to be married and live happily that I felt guilty I was unable to fulfil their wishes. It would have made them overjoyed if I had got married, and it was almost worth getting married to anyone who seemed broadly suitable just to see the happiness they would have felt. Not to give them that made me feel guilty. But if I had married any old Mr Mediocre, they would have known that I had compromised my hopes and ideals, and in that process compromised the hopes of my family, too. They had supported me in my search through the difficulties, the heartbreak and the loneliness, and if I gave up now, I would also feel guilt.

  After so many years of my parents supporting me to make my own choices, it was only fair that I kept up the search. So many Muslim women were denied the free choice and support that I had been offered by my family, which they gave me based on their Islamic principles that every person has the free choice to marry whom they wish and not be forced to marry against their will. I tried to uphold those values, and yet a bitter voice inside sent droplets of guilt running through my veins. Was it all my fault? Had I deluded myself with dreams of Prince Charming and Happily Ever After? Had I put myself and my whole family through this misery for nothing? Had I missed out on any opportunities? The answer was clear: no. Regret was definitely not on my shelf menu.