Love in a Headscarf (29 page)

AUNTIE AITCH
: “Yes, yes, that’s it! Mahbub!”

AUNTIE JEE
: “But he is almost fifty years old! Much too old! And previously divorced with three children who live with him.
No, no, no!
Not
suitable. And you know there were terrible rumors about why his wife left him. Girlfriends, affairs,
drinking.”

AUNTIE AITCH
: “She can’t be too picky you know, at her age, and having turned down so many very good boys. Fussy is as fussy gets. You know what they say about the fussy crow?”

Auntie Jee emits a weary sigh of knowledge.

AUNTIE AITCH
: “The fussy crow turns his nose up at the rich pickings and ends up sitting on the pile of dung.”

ANGER

Wherever I went I was looked at with sadness. The community couldn’t understand why I had not been snapped up. In my head I played back the conversations I would like to have had with them.

“You said I was too educated to make a good wife …”

“You said that the boys wanted a younger girl …”

“You said I was too religious …”

“You said I wasn’t religious enough …”

I felt angry and let down. To make matters worse, I was not the only woman on the shelf. It was a veritable riot up at this height.

The community had finally started to recognize that there were problems and that it was harder for people to find a suitable match. Although there were plenty of young unmarried women, there was still a mysterious lack of young men. Some really had disappeared. Others were continuing to go “back home” to marry. This was their prerogative of course; the choice of a partner is an entirely personal matter. The consequence of their decision, though, was that the gaps they would have filled in making wonderful matches for women like me, based on compatibility, life experience, identity, and our new British Muslim values and culture, remained vacant. Why did the men not feel the same way about what a good match we would make for them?

It seemed to me that the answer was that women had been forced to redefine themselves through the opportunities and experiences they had lived through. Femininity had changed and been updated by the challenges we had faced, and the outcome was stronger and more centered women. What appeared to be missing was the challenge to men to trigger them to update their own notions of masculinity. Instead of rising to the challenge, some of them now felt at worst threatened by the lively, energetic women who wanted a proactive spiritual and material life, or at best uninterested in them.

What we needed was a collective reassessment of what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman, a new gender reconstruction going back to the very roots of Islam, where men and women were partners and companions rather than disjointed and dysfunctional. After all, as the Qur’an said, men and women were created in pairs. The gender constructs that we needed to operate as a fully functioning society—and that was within my own small community, as well as in wider society—had become blurred, or even lost, and that meant we had lost the ability to love each other for who we were.

Was the social pressure and pain that I and my friends had endured the price of being a pioneer and creating change? We had had no one to point to as role models or leaders, but had to break the mold ourselves. Even some of the mosques and Imams needed changes: not only did young women need to be taught about relationships and marriage, but men, too, in order to redress the asymmetry of marriage and the search for a partner. What good was berating women for being single or for the growing divorce rate if men were not ready or did not have the skills to deal with being married?

The community leaders got together to discuss the issue. They agreed that there were huge problems around arranging suitable marriages and keeping them together. They agreed that they must get together again and discuss the problems. They reconvened and discussed that the problems were growing and that solving them was a community priority. After all, a community is made up from the building blocks of solid families. They planned out a series of seminars to brainstorm ideas and engage the community. The community duly held the meetings and agreed that the problem was now of significant magnitude and that Something Must Be Done. They concluded that it was important that young people should get married. They would discuss further with experts. The experts agreed that the situation was dire and that doing nothing was Not An Option. If nothing was done then things would go from bad to worse. Action was demanded. They would reconvene to discuss the matter.

SADNESS

My parents visited a number of local mosques to recruit help from the Imams, Shaikhs, and Maulanas. In one of them, the gentle Shaikh pulled out a large tome from under the desk. It was an enormous binder, which he turned to face toward my parents, who were sitting on the opposite side of the desk. Each page contained a piece of A4 paper inside a clear plastic holder and listed the details of someone who was looking fervently enough for a partner to place an advertisement in the Big Book. It showed a photograph and then listed their biodata.

There were pages and pages of young men and women who were looking for a partner to complete themselves and their faith. It was a postmodern journal of community woe that captured both collective failure to secure happy marriages and individual angst in finding the One. The Shaikh suggested to my parents that I should create my own one-pager with a photo and then come into the mosque to review the binder with him, as he was custodian of the
Best of the Singles
book. I couldn’t face the thought of putting an advertisement with a photo in the marriage catalog for all to see. Should I have deprioritized my pride in favor of finding a man? I realized from my reaction to the book that I still hadn’t acknowledged in my heart that admitting that you were looking for a partner was perfectly acceptable.

Singledom was growing around me as well—women across wider society seemed to be suffering. We moped collectively at work. Emma was single. So were Elaine and Nicola. The men, peculiarly, were all married or in long-term relationships. Why suddenly this universal explosion of female singleness?

To revel in our womanhood we would buy glossy women’s magazines at lunchtime and share the headlines, laughing at their larger than life claims and mourning at how they subtly pitied our status as single women.

Emma picked one up. “We have to love ourselves before anyone else can love us,” she read out.

Elaine responded, “So that means if we’re single then we are
unloved
, and that means we are not even
ready
to be loved.” She paused. “That’s
awful.
I should just give up now.”

Nicola read out a whole series of commands from another magazine: “Who needs a man?” “Independent is best!” “Live your own life!” “If he isn’t the one then move onto the next!”

“This is crazy, you ridiculous magazines,” I ranted at the glossy publications, “we tried being single and we’ve decided we
do
want a man! We
can
be independent
and
in a relationship. What if there is no such thing as the One? Maybe we have to turn him
into
the One?”

I had always noticed that married men seemed more attractive to single women because they were more balanced, well-rounded, and able to relate to women. Maybe this was precisely because they were married and had spent time with a woman in their lives? Maybe we should pick men who had potential and hope that simply being married to us would turn them into Mr. Right? As the Aunties said, it was like a river and the riverbed molding into each other over time to become a perfect fit.

Maybe my father, too, had been right all along. He had said to pick out a man with four out of the six qualities and then work on perfecting the rest later. It meant accepting that no one is perfect, not even me.

“Maybe I’m being cynical,” began Emma, “but perhaps the advertisers in the magazines want us to be single so that we spend our money on keeping ourselves all primped up because that is what the elusive Mr. Right is looking for. But I have spent all my money and I still don’t have a man!” Emma was letting her depression run amok.

Emma had had a good solid Germanic upbringing. “Maybe they want to distract us away from being homely wives and we’ve fallen for it! Maybe they should be teaching us the old-fashioned habits of wifely budgeting and spending our pennies wisely on Tupperware and jam?”

We all giggled at the idea of attending Tupperware parties. “I suppose they are not
quite
as glamorous and attractive as designer clothes,” Emma added.

Perhaps there was a happy medium the magazines hadn’t recognized or didn’t want to admit—that on the one hand we could be happily married to Mr. Nearly Perfect, knowing that we were not perfect either, but at the same time we could also be stylish and glamorous. Most importantly, the magazines didn’t offer us the possibility or aspiration to be content. No wonder we felt constantly under pressure.

Emma turned the conversation to her failures at the weekend: “I was a bridesmaid at a wedding and everyone was all loved up in couples. Apart from me. Even the best man was taken! What is
wrong
with me?”

Jackie responded, “The only single men are the sleazy ones who have been dumped more times than a trash bin.” It was an awful analogy but we let it go—she looked too distraught. “They all look like George from
Seinfeld.
”

We shuddered collectively in disgust and sympathy.

Elaine turned to me jealously: “At least you have people trying to find someone for you.”

“It’s true,” I agreed. “It’s hard enough trying to find a man when you have the world and their matchmaker-wife looking out for you and arranging meetings, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be on your own.”

I turned my head away and blinked back tears. While it was the case that my family had asked many people to help find a match for me, the introductions these days were rare. There was much nodding when we asked for help but little action, and the few suggestions were wildly unsuitable. I was forced to consider them because it seemed imperative to be grateful.

I met Arif, who had been living in Hungary on his own for the last ten years. He was now back to recruit a wife. He was in his early forties and had been ordered by his long-suffering mother that he was not permitted to remain single any longer and must marry and multiply
tout de suite.
He had struggled to get a job in the UK and instead had found a post as the financial director in a small investment firm based outside Budapest, in one of its outlying suburbs. Despite his decade of residence there he recounted proudly that he kept to himself and had no friends, had no idea where the local mosque or community was, and didn’t feel the need to spend time participating in Hungarian life or getting to know the locals. He saw himself living there long-term and thought his wife would be happy to slot into his one-bedroom apartment. Learning Hungarian, working, or having a social life were not important factors in Arif’s consideration of his wife’s comforts.

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

I visited the Web site, 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.