Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  I had been searching to find a partner to love and had been trying to learn about Divine love. In front of me now I realised that there was one more kind of love that was essential: the love for other human beings. Each of the men I had encountered was just as much part of that human diversity as the crowds I saw before me. I had to love, accept and learn from each of them, whether I liked them or not. The saying that I had heard before that ‘Islam is to serve the Creator and to serve Creation’ rang true, because love for other human beings was a fundamental part of Love for the Divine.

  Right next to the Kaba is the grave of Hagar, the wife of Abraham and the mother of Ishmael. As the pilgrims circle the Kaba to complete their pilgrimage, they must walk round the area designated as the place where Hagar is buried. Hagar was a slave before she married Abraham, which in the eyes of chauvinists the world over would relegate her to the lowest of low positions. And yet those same chauvinists would have to include her as part of their worship, as a symbol of high status in the eyes of God. I smiled at the deliciousness of the irony. In fact I laughed. There was no man included in this way in the rites of hajj.

  After circling the Kaba, the pilgrims proceeded to a nearby plain about half a kilometre long between two small hills, called Safa and Marwa. On the command of God, Abraham left Hagar in this place with their young child Ishmael, asking them to wait until he returned. Hagar, needing to find water for the boy, ran backwards and forwards between the two hills to see if she could see a spring or river. As part of the hajj, the pilgrims walk between the same two hills to emphasise that looking after your worldly needs is just as much a part of getting close to the Creator as acts such as prayer. The whole event of the hajj, including this part of emulating Hagar’s run between the two hills, is one of the pinnacles of spiritual devotion for a Muslim.

  How had the fact that it was in a woman’s footsteps that Muslims had to follow been overlooked in giving Muslim women their rightful elevated status? The cultures of many Muslims chose to ignore the obvious facts and pretend that Muslim women should be weak, subservient and oppressed. Here, right in front of our eyes, around the Kaba and walking between Safa and Marwa, it was most obvious that women were of the highest ranking. What had gone wrong?

  As well as the clear message that women had an extraordinarily high spiritual status, Hagar inspired something specific in me that I had found hard to balance: an understanding that looking for food and shelter were just as much a part of worship as prayer. Circulating round the Kaba established that the Divine was the focus of being a Muslim, round and round each day as the sun rose and the sun set. The universe was a repetition of cycles, each one following its set orbit and finding its place in the Divine order. But Hagar’s run, backwards and forwards, was the day-to-day rat race, to work, from work, to work, from work, literally mapping out my life. The two parts balanced each other perfectly and I realised that both the sublime and the mundane fitted together.

  Despite the fact that the pilgrims came from far and near for a spiritual journey, it was, of course, a wonderful opportunity to meet other potential suitors. Wasn’t that the case in every situation where new people might be present? The wise Aunties pointed out that marriage was a spiritual act, and that finding a suitable partner was even more apt if he was presented to you at the footsteps of the House of God. It was a compelling argument. And with everyone dressed down, make-up stripped to the minimum and the swagger of daily life removed, it was an opportunity to meet and get to know someone for who they really were. Some couples came after getting engaged, trying to maintain a respectful distance so that no-one could accuse them of too much smiling! Others came with the hope that they would go home having completed their hajj with the additional gift of a fiancé.

  Fatima and Abdu were one such couple who found each other during the hajj. The Aunties on the trip were always prepared for any opportunity. I did not know when this meeting between them, or the proposal, had happened. I had been too busy spiritualising to plug myself into the hurly burly of marriage matches at this special time. I simply wanted to enjoy finding my place and experiencing this amazing whirlwind of global togetherness.

  I also wanted to fall to my knees and into prostration and weep. For the joy of being at the focus of Muslim life, and at a place where the Creator had said we are as pure and innocent as young children, I wanted to demand that the pain of loneliness and desperation be put to an end. I refused to relinquish hope, but I had run out of places to look for Mr Right. John Travolta had not come to my door. The Milk Tray Man had most likely eaten all his own chocolates by now. Even the most mediocre of men I had met seemed to have got married. Humbled at how small a speck I was in this huge sea of human beings, I hoped that my pride had been crushed, leaving only a lonely soul waiting to connect to another. I added another emotion to the list of experiences on the shelf: patience.

  In my Yin

  There is one thing that a state of extreme endurance gives you the freedom to do: to consider possibilities that you may otherwise have dismissed. It forces you to re-evaluate the potential of a situation that at first glance you thought had no merit. To be blunt, I was open to consider anyone. But my experiences in hajj had softened me as well, pushing me to look beyond my initial assessment to the deeper soul of the person. Each individual I met, whether in an introduction or in day-to-day life, I looked at differently, exploring the human spark that might lie underneath.

  For men I might have normally dismissed through irritation or personal dislike, I wondered what hidden universes lay underneath. Was he a Mohamed Habib, hiding mysteries of the universe for me to discover? Did a quiet, ordinary-looking man hold secrets of the Divine, with contentment and love lurking beneath his calm unprovocative exterior? Or if he was at a different place in his journey from me, was he heading in the same direction at least? If I wasn’t attracted to him physically to start with, would the connection of ethics, personality and time together reveal an attraction that would run deeper and more passionately? As the Prophet had alluded, physical beauty may be present now, but it only heads in one direction with age – away. Inner beauty was the key search criterion (if only the online marriage sites offered a grading on this point), for that only grew with time.

  I started to take an interest in people simply for who they were. I was more reflective, gentler, more inquisitive and open in my demeanour. What made this person tick? Each person was a delicious moment to be savoured with respect for their humanity. There was no need to assess them as a potential suitor; instead I was more interested in seeing them as a window to a new world. I enjoyed getting to know people as human beings.

  I realised that my bumpy ride across hills and potholes to look for love had allowed me to understand the universe around me in the most effective and enlightening way – through getting an insight into the microcosms that lay inside each unique and amazing human being. If the Divine could not be contained by the universe but was to be found in the heart of the human being, wasn’t that the place to look for the Divine spark? Each person represented a path to God that I could not have seen on my own individual journey.

  The ecstasy of the spiritual discoveries I had made created a glow on my face that somehow should have been eradicated by my arrival at Desperation Stations. Instead I felt more contented than ever and shone with an inner happiness that I had not felt before. I enjoyed my life, and a husband would be a partner in an ongoing exciting chapter towards further self-discovery and fulfilment.

  And so you would expect me to say that love struck at the moment I least expected it. The glossy magazines would diagnose that I had learned to love myself and I was now ready for someone to love me. However, I had always loved, always been ready, but now I had a different insight. I had enjoyed living my life and was happy being myself, but I could not help but think that had I got married younger, shown more interest in Ali at the very start – and I realised that he did have all the qualities to make a wonderful husband – then I would have had
a very happy life on that path too. I didn’t agree that I ‘wouldn’t have changed a thing’ in the journey I had taken. It was a meaningless statement. If I had lived a different life, I might have discovered different things that I hadn’t found on this path, and I might have been just as happy, perhaps happier. I would never know the answer to that question.

  Waiting for love to strike ‘when you least expect it’ is a wonderfully fatalistic cliché, which allows you to relinquish control over the most important part of your life: who you spend it with.

  Hollywood and Bollywood rom-coms would write into my script an unexpected fairytale ending with Prince Charming arriving to sweep me off my feet. Or, in a more cerebral genre of film, the story would wind down and I would accept that I was not to find love. I would submit to my destiny and move on towards productive spinsterhood. I would reflect wisely on the wonderful path I had trodden and all the people I had met. I would end my story with the cathartic analysis that it was the taking part and not the winning that was important. I would realise that ‘finding the one’ had been the wrong prize, for living life was the prize.

  I had learnt so much. I had sat at the sharp point of British culture, Islamic faith and Asian culture. Through my journey, the sharp point had turned into a vantage point, where I could observe, enjoy and share the multiverses that I was part of. And this experience had revealed one very simple truth – that love comes in multiple layers, from the carnal, through a partner, and parents, through community and society and all the way to the underpinning universal Love of the Divine.

  My journey for my own Mr Right had revealed that in an era of abundance, extravagance and hedonism, the very intangible search for love was the thing that bound us all together. When science and the need to prove everything through fact alone dictated our social mores, it was most incredible that the least tangible, manageable or definable quality – Love – was the thing that created most tension, most excitement and most human togetherness.

  We were exposed to so many heritages and traditions driving towards love. The god of Romance was all-dominating on one side, the weight of tradition dragged heavily on the other, and the principles of faith hidden beneath cultures and geographies on a third side, if such a discussion can have three sides. The awkward point where they collided had always poked me uncomfortably, causing a confusing pain. But this prodding and these tensions revealed what could not be discovered elsewhere. It threw up a new confidence in the multi-layering of love. It could allow both men and women to ask previously taboo questions, and there were so many vital questions that needed to be asked. Should tradition dictate how a partner is chosen? Should an individual be solely responsible for finding a mate or should the community step in? What were the priorities and criteria for selecting a partner, and had modernity got it wrong? If not, why were more and more people single, and why were divorce rates rising, while we were all still desperate for love and companionship? How were romance, companionship and relationships interrelated and which should be prioritised? Were we being short-changed by the fashion to eschew long-term companionship in return for high adrenaline, short-term romantic excitement?

  Why did we need to be constantly at the height of the adrenaline rush? What was wrong with simply hanging out and being contented and happy with a partner who could fulfil you? Adrenaline meant instability – breaking relationships off before the beginning of the End, picking bad boys, having affairs because they were exciting. Why not make stability and contentment fashionable again? Traditions and faith cropped up uncomfortably to remind people that these values could actually make us happier. But that wasn’t a sexy message, and being sexy was very important. There was a cultural insistence that everything, especially women, had to be constantly and utterly sexy.

  You had to be sexy in the public domain to be accepted. If you were interested in love, then it had to be a beautiful, glamorous, sexy kind of love. That was difficult to reconcile as a practising Muslim woman wearing hijab. That is also why a Muslim woman talking about love is such an incongruous idea. It jars with our notion that love is only romance or love only means sexuality. ‘Sexiness’ in public is fundamentally opposed to hijab and the headscarf, because the headscarf is about being sexy only in private. ‘Being sexy’ was definitely an essential part of being a woman, but it is part of her mystique, to be retained in her control to reveal as part of the companionship and journey of love with a partner. For me, love for a companion was not a shared public experience and neither was sexuality. Like other Muslim women, I was interested in love, but not the kind that forced me to define love only and exclusively as being sexy. My mission was to understand love in all its facets and to define it on my own terms.

  People ask me, how did you find him? Did you do anything special? Or was it fate just stepping in, in which case, they say, we can do nothing and we must just hope for the best. It didn’t happen for me when I least expected it. I was waiting, ready.

  There are some that say that once you are confident and complete in yourself, when you stop being needy, then your partner will find you. I was in need. I did want a partner. I hadn’t resigned myself to ‘least expect it’. It was still my priority to find a companion and to learn what love really is through the reality of living with someone.

  Living life to the full allows you to discover uncharted territories at the tops of mountains or in the valleys of long-forgotten civilisations. It allows you to find the Divine, whether it is in the great gatherings of people like hajj or in the hearts of the human beings we meet in our lives like the Karims, Khalils and Mohamed Habibs, or our friends, fathers and mothers. Above all, life allows you to gather experience to find and know love – that thing that eludes our modern gods of science and yet still dominates human existence entirely and completely.

  Love brings compassion, justice and an understanding of the self and of others. You can only ever be complete when you’ve seen yourself through someone else’s eyes. Then only can you truly know yourself. Love brings contentment because it means understanding and accepting yourself, and understanding and accepting others, because love can blind you to their imperfections. In our rush to find perfect fairytale love, we seem to have forgotten that kind of gentle, unhurried love that grows over time and requires careful nurturing. Love reduced to romance is flighty and unfulfilling, and it has left us insecure, un-nourished and un-whole. It only feeds our surface needs, not the inner hunger for a long-term, stable, fulfilling love. Romance is high calorie, quick fix, low nutritional value.

  The more that people told me he would turn up when I least expected it, the more I became annoyed. There was no moment when I did not expect to meet him. I expected it all the time.

  That’s why I chose a Coco Chanel-style dress to wear that day. I wanted to be prepared, just in case. It was a good thing I did wear a dress that he liked. He commented later that he was drawn to the fact that it was different, quirky. It was a simple, stylish number, carefully tailored in black with a cream border at the bottom, which finished just above the knee. It was a cute dress, feminine and confident. I complemented it with some elegant cream silk trousers and a matching black and cream headscarf. I added some height with black platform shoes and finished the look with a quick dash of almost imperceptible lipstick.

  I had planned to attend a Muslim charity conference being organised by a group of friends. I hadn’t seen them for some time and it was the perfect way to say hello. And of course there was the possibility of meeting a suitor there. I arrived in the large auditorium when the speeches were already in full swing and the hall was packed almost to capacity. The lights were dimmed and I scanned my eyes across row upon row of bearded uncles, thoughtfully stroking their facial hair whilst listening to the speaker who sat on stage with his co-panelists. I looked again and realised happily that he was accompanied by several female peers. The men had occupied the first fifty rows, and at the back on the right-hand side were ten rows laid out for the handful of women who had chosen to
attend. I was disappointed that there were so few of them.

  There were several empty chairs, and after a few minutes evaluating if there was anyone I knew who I could speak to, I decided to sit down and try to locate them during the interval. I sat at the end of the row, next to some Aunties I did not recognise, and started looking around. I tucked a few wisps of wayward hair back underneath my headscarf. After a few minutes I saw a colleague of mine, Abdullah, with whom I had worked on a charity project recently. We had some follow-up work to engage in, so I stepped carefully over to where he was sitting. He, too, was at the end of a row, close to mine.

  SATURDAY, 21 MAY, 2.31 P.M.

  And there he was, sitting next to Abdullah, a young man with thick dark hair and a small, neatly kept beard. He was dressed in a dark suit, and even at a distance I could see that he had an endearing dimple in his right cheek. I felt like I knew him yet I was certain that we had never met. I stared at him, watching him whispering earnestly to Abdullah. As he spoke he ran his fingers through his hair in a thoughtful way. His face looked intelligent and warm, full of character. I was mesmerised. As I walked over to talk to Abdullah, I was hoping to have a chance to speak with this mysterious stranger, not realising the huge impact these steps would make. Fortunately, when I arrived he was still there. I greeted them both with a shy smile. The tall dark handsome stranger pulled out a chair for me.

  Almost imperceptibly Abdullah slipped away. Whether that was coincidental or deliberate I will never know. He claims that he already had the match in mind and that we were meant to cross paths that day, and he had arranged our meeting deliberately. Abdullah would go on to offer a glowing reference for him.