Love in a Headscarf (25 page)

“You won’t find any way out of Petra at this time,” they told us. “You can stay here if you like, and then leave in the morning.”

Tourists were not permitted to stay in Petra. The locals knew this. At their invitation, though, we could enjoy something that no other visitors could experience. A moonlit night in Petra sounded adventurous and romantic!

“Try these pastries,” they said. “Do you want some tea?”

We shook our heads, deep in discussion about whether to take up this exciting one-time-only offer. We kept our voices low for privacy, but those serving the tourist industry are remarkably adept and seemed to be able to follow conversations in all languages, even when whispered or mumbled. Their faces changed expressions each time we raised a new idea about the merits of staying. This will be an extraordinary experience, said Sara, and it will save us the trouble of finding transport to our next destination at this time of night. Noreen added, Petra is too far from any town to be able to find a taxi or bus. I was so enraptured with the idea that I simply nodded. We all turned abruptly back to face them and said, “
Okay!
”

There was a look of astonishment on the men’s faces. Since all three of us wore headscarves, we were a group of women who were obviously Muslim. And we had agreed to spend the night in Petra. Big smiles spread over their faces and they licked their lips.

“Well then,” they grinned, “we will certainly enjoy ourselves tonight.” They burst out laughing.

At that moment we knew what we had to do. It was one thing to be adventurous, independent, and daring, another to be reckless of our safety. The three of us turned to look at each other and then swiveled back to face the men. “No, thanks!” We reversed our decision in chorus, and then turned on our heels, running out of the gates and up the hill.

The next morning, we piled into the back of a pickup truck for a tour of the Jordanian desert. We sat out in the open under the increasingly fiery sun. Sara and I sat opposite two English boys and a French girl. The two pasty-faced boys were at the start of a pan-Arabian tour. They wore baseball caps, loose T-shirts, and baggy shorts to protect their as yet untanned skin. The French girl was also about our age, wearing shorts and a low-cut vest. Sara and I wore our usual linen trousers, long sleeved shirts, and white scarves. There wasn’t much conversation as the truck bumped through the desert, stopping every so often so we could look at the bizarre rock formations. We took numerous photos and then oohed and aahed at these incredible alien creations of the endless dunes and seas of sand.

The French girl, Anne, eventually spoke. “Aren’t you hot wearing those scarves on your heads?”

“It’s better to wear them in this heat than not, you’ll get sunstroke without one,” said Sara, pointing to the two boys whose baseball caps were covering their heads and casting shade over their faces. “Besides, it’s our choice.”

Anne got cross. Choice was not something that Muslim women were supposed to exercise. “You Muslims are always proselytizing.”

I’d never heard the word before but luckily Sara stepped in. “We’re not asking anyone else to cover up.”

Both Sara and I had to bite our tongues. It seemed futile to point out that in a country where modest clothing was prevalent as part of the culture, and also a requirement to protect yourself from the heat, that revealing attire was bound to attract attention.

“You people are backward, living in the Middle Ages, with a religion of ignorant Arabs. You should get educated and learn some proper values like we have developed in Europe.”

I smiled at her barefaced emotion, impressed that she had cut to the chase so speedily. At least she wasn’t hiding her true, pernicious feelings.

“Sara”—I turned to face her—“did you not study ‘enlightened’ European teachings while you were at Oxford? I thought you won a first for your essay on the rationalist thinkers?”

Sara switched into perfect French to carry on the conversation and I followed her lead. “I’m not an Arab, are you, Shelina?” she teased me.

I switched back into a posh English accent. “I’m a European, aren’t you, Sara? I was born in London and have lived there all my life.” I paused. “Apart from when I studied at Oxford.” While I had deliberately hidden this information from suitors who I did not want to judge me, I used it for precisely that purpose in this case.

Anne was not to be outmaneuvered. “You Muslim women are oppressed, forced to cover up and not express yourselves. You have to stay at home and men run everything.”

I pulled out my cell phone. “Sara, could you call your husband… oh no, that’s right, you don’t have a husband. Let’s call mine. Oh! I don’t have one either.”

“Let’s call your dad,” she countered. She held the phone to her ear. “Is that Shelina’s father? Yes, yes. She is oppressed, isn’t she? Yes, yes, understand. You forced her to suggest that she goes traveling on her own to show her how repressed and subjugated she is. Yes, yes, it makes complete sense. And, yes, of course you insisted that she should be unaccompanied.”

My intertangled insecurities still reared their head at times like this. I fumed defiantly beneath the scorching sun. How dare she suggest we were oppressed: we were educated at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, we spoke probably ten languages between us, had read a wide variety of literature from numerous cultures and languages, and had also traveled through many countries. Here we were, right in front of Anne, traveling unaccompanied in the Middle East, of our own choice. Surely no one could count us as oppressed? She looked at us as though we were duck droppings. “You only think you are free but they are still controlling you women. Stop kidding yourselves. Muslims are evil and Islam is a religion of barbaric people.”

Muslims would typically respond to someone like Anne with the statement: “Muslims were discovering the laws of alchemy and algebra and laying the foundations of modern science and philosophy and the European renaissance while your ancestors were still in the dark ages, wearing loincloths.” But we could no longer be bothered to point this out to her, nor highlight the absurdity of her passion to travel through the Middle East if she thought it had nothing to offer and was only full of barbarians. She was obviously not in the mood for listening.

Sara and I drifted into thought about whether people like Anne would ever really hear what Muslims said, even when faced with real Muslims who could converse directly with them and wanted to engage, discuss, create connections, and perhaps agree to disagree. We discovered that Anne had never met a European Muslim before and her views were based entirely on what she read in the papers and saw on television.

It had never occurred to her that we had
chosen
to be Muslim. Yes, we had been born into Muslim families. Yes, we might never know the answer to the question, “Would you have become a Muslim if you weren’t born one?” because that was an existential question that was impossible to answer. We had made a conscious decision to be practicing Muslims. Many others who were born Muslims had not done so, and saw being Muslim only as part of their culture and heritage.

We felt our free will choice was a response to the needs of our subconscious and gave us a clearer understanding of our conscience. We believed Islam held simple answers to the big questions of being a human being. It started from a very basic premise: that there was no god. Nothing. Except one unified divine entity. Some called it Nirvana. Some called it Enlightenment. Some named it Truth, or Justice, Yahweh, God, or Love. As a Muslim, the Divine Being had all these names but was most commonly called Allah
.

Finding the divine inside ourselves was the journey we all had to go on. That meant connecting to the Creator. It also meant making the world a better place for the people who lived in it by working toward what all human beings cherished: freedom, equality, justice, love, harmony. We believed that Islam outlined a strong way to reach those universal goals. We had chosen Islam because we felt it made us free as human beings. We had chosen to be Muslims, not blindly, but because to us it made sense.

The desert in Jordan was a haunt of Lawrence of Arabia’s. The strange rock formations that we had seen scattered through the harsh golden sands created an eerie, indomitable vastness that seemed to stretch to infinity. The land was mirrored by the most expansive sky I had ever seen. We spent the hot nights there camping in the open air beneath the sparkling stars. I would like to claim to have chosen to sleep
al fresco
, but as a beautifully turned-out city girl this was not something I did by choice. All the beds were booked up. Camping it was.

I reconciled myself to this hardship by imagining I was an Arabian princess. I sketched out my character: dark, windswept hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, hidden in my little curtain-covered camel-top seat. I smiled at how nineteenth-century European depictions of Arabian beauties had endured so strongly over time and had even seeped into my own imagination. I could be Princess Jasmine for a few days, I told myself. I wondered where my Aladdin was. My princess fantasy was short-lived.

“Make sure you are properly covered,” cautioned the receptionist. “There are a lot of mosquitoes out there.” She was pointing out into the dark horizon but there wasn’t anything there to see. I squinted in confusion in the indicated direction. After a moment’s silence on my part, she cackled.

“
Habibti
, my dear, you have to just sleep in the middle of the desert, wherever you want,” she scoffed.

“Just check there are no nasty insects. Better to pick a place with less rocks in the ground, saves on the back pain in the morning.” She arched her body out and then stretched her arms to emphasize her words. “Don’t worry, take it easy. At least it’s free to sleep here.”

Sara and I grabbed our rucksacks and walked back toward the open expanse. In the distance I could hear a bass beat.
Dum, dum, doof, doof.
We were drawn to the sound, and walked over, mesmerized by the pounding rhythm radiating invisibly out of the blackness.

Sara fell about laughing, pointing at an enormous luminous rectangle that had just come into view. Here, in the quiet Arab desert, where our urban lives with their constant saturation of light, sound, and people were a distant memory, was a colossal screen playing a blockbuster Bollywood movie. Despite our Arabian setting, all the songs and conversation were in Hindi with Arabic subtitles. When the dancing sequences appeared, the shoulders and hands of the engrossed audience twitched up and down, synchronized with the movements of the actors.

We walked on and eventually found some open space at a good distance from others who had already set up camp for the night. We pulled out our mosquito nets and the multipurpose sheets we always carried with us. These were useful as picnic cloths, to sleep on, in, or under; we used them as prayer mats or for wrapping ourselves up in when it got cold; in desperate times they even served as towels. We created individual cocoons, protecting ourselves from the infectious flying beasts that were out to suck our blood. And then, exhausted from the day, we lay back in silence.

Instead of closing my eyes, I opened them. There, in the beautiful midnight sapphire sky, sparkled a kaleidoscope of stars. I had never in my life seen so very many twinkling lights, shining in their glory, undimmed by competition. There was no urban light for an unimaginable distance around, and even the nearest city was the relatively tiny city of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The moon sat at a different angle from that which I was used to. The British crescent rested at an angle facing diagonally upward. Here the moon hung like a smug silver smile, with its complementary star like a kitten’s nose. The horizontal moon and star were the symbol of Islam. They had adorned countless books, political movements, flags, Web sites, Eid cards, and posters. Seeing them with my own eyes was a reality I had never experienced before.

For an hour, all I did was stare. Stare and stare. The stars were not scattered erratically as they seemed to be in London, but they were thick, dense, palpable. Not something out of fairy tales, and distant dreams, but present, here, part of our lives. The way the stars dominated the desert night, it did not surprise me that Muslims had been the first to invent instruments for navigation and astronomy. The history of medieval life, travel, and destiny being governed by the stars suddenly felt meaningful and real.