Love, InshAllah Read online

  My friend’s words were a warning, veiled in humor. Perhaps his certainty came from the fact that he had already found his perfect match—a Pakistani-Scottish woman with solid Punjabi family credentials. Another friend was in pursuit of a “wheat-colored” desi girl. Nobody told me that I was beautiful or even desirable, despite my green eyes or green-card access; all the well-educated, open-minded practicing Muslims I knew were looking for girls from “back home”—girls from good families in their respective cultures. There were actual print catalogs of available women circulating among certain immigrant communities, and few, if any, of those girls were white Americans.

  I knew a few secular Muslim men from abroad who had married non-Muslim American women and had subsequently become more red, white, and blue than their spouses. I had also witnessed American-apple-pie women come into the faith, only to disappear behind an abaya, a hijab, and an Arab name.

  No, thank you, I said. That is not the story I want to tell; that story is not mine.

  Adopting Palestinian activism and socializing mostly with Muslims in college was a departure from my intended path. I grew up in the rural South as a Southern Baptist, and any global awareness I had came from Holy Land pictures in the Bible. “Those people”—the Orientalist version of the “exotic other”—fascinated me, as the Holy Land is a spiritual compass for so many Americans.

  First, let me make something clear: I did not get into all “this” by dating a Muslim man. Many people assume that any white woman who stumbles into Islam does so through a man. I was intrigued by cultural hybridity before I had learned the phrase in a social-theory class. Let me also say that I was not a casual observer regarding the intricate intersections of immigrant, American, and Muslim identities, but experienced them personally. My best friends in college were Muslim women from VIP Arab families. I taught my Lebanese friend, pursuing her PhD in English at the time, how to drive after her American husband died unexpectedly. She had kept her marriage hidden from her relatives in Lebanon for fourteen years, for fear of their reaction. I cruised shisha joints in New York City with another friend, a Syrian-Canadian fashion designer, as she bemoaned the complexities of dating post-divorce from her white, American husband.

  My friends lamented the challenges of finding a good Muslim man who appreciated smart women. These were beautiful girls with refined tastes from respectable, upper-class families who could not find husbands, in spite of their affiliations with cultural institutions and worldwide networks. My fashion-designer friend summed it up while we were waiting at the 110th Street subway: “We aren’t considered good Muslim girls.”

  I sighed. “I don’t understand. We don’t sleep around, don’t drink; we’re smart, intellectually invested, and interested in Islam. Why aren’t we good Muslim girls?”

  The subway train approached, and her black hair bellowed in the tepid breeze as she explained, “We aren’t in hijab. It’s 11:00 PM, and we are out on the town. We aren’t quiet. We have desires and goals. We are too complicated.” Most of my Muslim girlfriends echoed her sentiments.

  I had no serious prospects. I was effervescently white, with ample, fertile hips. I was a practicing, educated, intellectually curious American Muslim woman. I wanted a man who was the same, but probably not the average American. After years of spending time with Muslim girls, I had a taste for ethnic food, crossbred ideologies, and complicated expectations. I wanted a man who knew something about crossing boundaries. I was an American, but not just.

  Being a Muslim can do that to a girl. Your faith connects you to the world in mysterious ways. When you live between cultures and boundaries, invisible appendages take root. Tandoori chicken with macaroni and cheese is more than fusion food—it is the zoom lens with which one experiences the world. There are pauses and uncertainties from this vantage point as a new culture emerges.

  I didn’t know all of that yet, and I was still searching for a co-conspirator, a fellow traveler, in my boundary crossing. Someone suggested I put an ad in the magazine published by the Islamic Society of North America, Islamic Horizons, which has a matrimonial page. I considered the idea, but the only advertisements I saw from women were from middle-aged American Muslims. Even more intimidating were the ads placed by parents inviting “correspondence” for their doctor/lawyer/engineer son from “slim, fair, beautiful, highly educated girl of [fill in the blank] heritage, age 21–30.” In those days, I never saw anything suggesting that someone like me would be seriously entertained as a spousal possibility.

  I hate to perpetuate stereotypes, but a few Muslim men did want to marry me for a green card. One offered to pay $20,000 to be married just long enough to become a resident, and then we could divorce. It was an act of desperation on his part, not a lack of ethics. I understood that, but I was not interested in such an offer.

  I met Sayed in a church and thanks to bombs. This is not a joke. Muslims do not joke about such things.

  I was working at the General Board of Global Ministries for the United Methodist Church (GBGM), headquartered across from Columbia University on Riverside Drive. Manhattan was not the glamorous Sex in the City experience for a single, Muslim, twenty-six-year-old woman in 1999. Sayed, based in Washington, D.C., at the time, was an internationally recognized land mine expert—a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to be precise—who had accepted the award in 1997 on behalf of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He also had five children—an overwhelming number to me at the time—from a previous marriage.

  Oh, my.

  I met him over dinner the night before an official Methodist Church meeting on land mine awareness. I first noticed his long legs as he emerged from the cab. I did not like the blue of the shirt he was wearing. I thought a man so accomplished would be much older, but he was just nine years my senior. He was nice, but did not take hold in my mind. He spoke of his children in Pakistan and ongoing issues related to the Taliban. Other Afghan men were present, so I retracted from the conversation. I went to bed and thought nothing more of him.

  Until, that is, I awoke to catch a Metro North train to Connecticut for our meeting the next day. Sometime during my slumber, fate had cracked open an alternative dimension and thrust a new probability into my life. He was all I thought about in the limo to Grand Central and on the train to Stamford. To this day, the sudden force with which he occupied my mind remains a mystery.

  During the meeting, I noticed the extraordinary length of his eyelashes. He did not look at me beyond formal, polite exchanges. Had he not called me later that day to discuss Afghan politics, I would have returned from whatever parallel universe I had woken into that morning.

  We kept in touch, and I moved to Washington, D.C., a few months later. I did not pry into his private life, but I intuitively understood that something was amiss. We talked often and met occasionally to have dinner. He was shariah-compliant in his demeanor—gentlemanly, that is––and I was soon smitten by his attention and his respectful manner. Oh, but my being smitten was not pretty. I had horrible indigestion because of the potential outcome of my secret infatuation. Here was a kind, handsome man, honorable and accomplished, who appeared to enjoy spending time with me. I had never experienced such a dynamic. Surely, I thought, there was no way such a person would ever have feelings for me. But I needed to be loved. It was time to take a chance.

  My luck with relationships was pitiful, and I assumed this one would meet a similar fate. So I figured, He’s leaving the country––tell him how you feel, and then you’ll have his three weeks away to mourn the loss.

  The conversation started in the car on Sixteenth Street as we made our way out of D.C. into Maryland.

  “You know,” I said, “I don’t just hang out with guys.”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And I know that you don’t just hang out with women,” I said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So,” I continued, “what is going on here?”

  “Um, I don’t kno
w,’ he said. But he was smiling, and it was nice.

  The conversation expanded over tea in his apartment. What the hell, I thought, and stated simply, “I want to marry you.”

  He informed me that he was not looking for a cheap relationship, nor did he desire an American woman just to pass the time with.

  That was when he told me that he was looking for a wife. I wanted it to be me.

  Risking my emotional well-being to tell Sayed of my love was one of the most important decisions I ever made in my life. The lack of male attention I had gotten before Sayed had me convinced that I was a metaphysical mistake. Being overweight did not counteract that assumption. I felt that I was not good enough for thinness-obsessed American men, or, it appeared, for anybody else. After multiple experiences of not being accepted by someone I had feelings for, it was unthinkable that my affections for an accomplished, kind man would be reciprocated. But I had a decision to make: I could live in fear of rejection and the not-ever-knowing, or I could go ahead and get rejected and then move on.

  So I took that grand leap and proposed. It was not easy. I was a twenty-seven-year-old, smart, fat, insecure American woman. Sayed was a land mine expert from Afghanistan, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the father of five children, aged five to nine. But he was already in line for a green card for “extraordinary skills,” and when he looked into my green eyes, he saw a partner.

  We dated over the next few months. There was a trip to Delaware. There were strenuous hours of conversation. He cooked a full Afghan meal for me at his apartment. We were alone together, but did not consummate our relationship before marriage. About the marriage, he had reservations. He was responsible for a large extended family, as well as for his children. “What if,” he wondered in an email to me one day, “we have to move to a village in Afghanistan?”

  “Not likely,” I mused, “because the political situation in Afghanistan is going to suck for a long time.”

  I was too naive to fully understand the momentous nature of this decision. In truth, I had no solid career plans at that point in my life. I was emotionally exhausted and ready for marriage, and here was a very kind man who was willing to take a chance with me. I sensed I was at a point in my life that made me vulnerable to less-than-stellar options, and I knew this choice was far better than anything else I might bump up against even in the best of circumstances.

  No one knew how this cross-cultural, mixed-family arrangement would work. My mother was worried about many things—the demons and misconceptions that plague so many American minds regarding Muslims. She feared that that Sayed would take me “over there” and I’d never be seen again. She was afraid that I’d turn into Sally Field in Not Without My Daughter. She worried that Sayed would make me walk behind him in public.

  “Of course she will walk behind me,” he said, smiling, “if we should ever stroll in a minefield.”

  Sayed then told my mother that he had traveled all over the world and had not met anyone he felt comfortable with until he found me. The largeness of his life—and his love—loomed before me with a promise that calmed my mother’s apprehensions.

  We married in November 2000. We had three ceremonies. The first, outside Washington, D.C., involved the nikah, the Islamic wedding contract. He wanted me to learn a Qur’anic verse in Arabic by heart before we consummated the marriage, as a blessing on the start of our life together. And while that was a meaningful gesture, I felt the consummation part was the more pressing issue at the time.

  A few months later we had a larger ceremony, at an Afghan restaurant in Washington, D.C. My divorced parents attended, as well as some relatives and well-established members of the American Muslim community. Some of my relatives hadn’t known I was Muslim until that moment. My accomplished husband softened the blow a little––he wasn’t their stereotypical convenience-store-owning Muslim.

  A few months later, we went to Pakistan, where we married for a third time. I wore a purple dress and way too much makeup. The Afghan girls at the salon in Islamabad took my picture—it was rare for an American woman to come in for a bridal updo. Before I got into the car, Sayed’s relatives threw a chador over my entire head to help me avoid the prying eyes of curious onlookers. I couldn’t see where I was going, and promptly fell on my face en route to the car. Looking back, I realize that moment was a great metaphor for marriage: You can’t really see what lies ahead. You know that you are going to fall—many times—but you just stand up again, get your ass in gear, and run forward.

  Shortly after our nuptials, my husband joined the United Nations and became a diplomat. With varying combinations of children, we traveled in Maryland, then central Asia (where I gave birth to a son), the Middle East, and finally back to America.

  No one prepared me for this matrimonial journey.The children, three ceremonies, the moving back and forth around the world with what were now six kids—it all became a delirium. Few wives are flexible enough to fluctuate with such dramatic, global family dynamics, and I became an unimpressive, obese housewife.

  The turning point in our marriage and for me came when we moved to Bahrain. Sayed became the UN’s resident representative for the country, and I was “Her Excellency,” surrounded by drivers and live-in maids and having tea with the royal family. As an ambassador’s wife, I organized luncheons for the shaikhas, helped form a creative-arts group and writing workshops, and started writing for local English-language magazines. In one, I launched a very public weight-loss column. I arrived on the tiny island as my husband’s appendage, and I left as an emerging writer who was fifty pounds thinner.

  Together we decided that I would return to the United States with all six children to settle the older ones into high school. I went from being a diplomat’s wife to being a single parent with six children, including three teenagers who could not drive. By this point, I was eight years into the marriage and we had moved five times, three of those relocations international. A psychologist friend told me that—in terms of stress—the issues I was dealing with were off the charts. For the first time in my marriage, the role of woman-wife completely disappeared as the demands of being only-a-mother took over.

  I have not been the wife or mother I wanted to be. After six kids and moving every few years, I have realized that mothering is more emotionally exhausting than anything else. It took me years to realize it is something that I do not do exceptionally well.

  My husband, bless him, has been patient.

  I’m older now, almost forty. I married with no substantial career and am now an emerging writer. I have pondered what it would be like to be back in culturally familiar territory. To be married to a non-Muslim American would mean experiencing a sort of certainty I grew up with: traditional Friday-night high school football games, family reunions at the river, and Christmas traditions (yes, I do miss those). In my imagination, the rules and expectations would be very clear, the boundaries neatly drawn. In reality, I know that all marriages are wildly complex.

  But through my love for Sayed, I’ve confirmed that I am American, but not just. There are parts of me that fit only in a cross-cultural relationship, from food to faith. I may not know how to be a stereotypically American wife, but I do know how to be a complicated, fee wasat—“in the middle”—wife. Being a world citizen is the America of the future, something I understand well, as my marriage, spirituality, and identity have all been negotiated at global intersections.

  So, this story is mine; this is the one I tell.

  Rerouting

  Leila N. Khan

  I crossed off the last few items on my to-do list. I had given my landlord notice, canceled my utilities, scheduled movers, and booked my flight to Luxembourg. I sat back in my chair and surveyed my apartment: stacks of cardboard boxes, neatly taped up and labeled, my favorite rugs from Pakistan and Bosnia rolled up and standing in a corner, my bubble-wrapped paintings leaning against the wall, and my bare shelves. There wasn’t much left to pack. Everything was falling into place.

&nbs
p; After nearly three years of having a long-distance relationship, Luca and I would finally be living in the same city together. We first met in Strasbourg, France. I was there on a yearlong fellowship, researching human rights and refugee law at the European Court of Human Rights, and Luca was interning in the court’s Italian section.

  We met in the court cafeteria and connected immediately over our field experience in the former Yugoslavia. Slim and stylish in his tailored gray suit, with wavy dark hair, large hazel eyes, and dimples when he smiled, Luca radiated a warm but serious energy. He had come to the court after spending nearly two years in Kosovo for the United Nations, and I had spent a summer in Sarajevo, also with the UN. We stayed in the cafeteria all afternoon, discussing the fate of the Balkans, the work of the UN, and democracy in East Timor over espressos and cigarettes.

  We started dating less than two weeks after we first met. Within a month, Luca invited me to a family wedding in the south of Italy, where several of his relatives lived. Communication was stilted, as most of his relatives did not speak English and I did not speak much Italian. But we all smiled a lot, nodded frequently—“Sì, ah, sì. Sì, sì!”—and pointed to Luca as a common reference. At the end of the weekend, Luca’s mother hugged me closely and invited me to Milan, where she and Luca’s father lived. I beamed as I deciphered her invitation, basking in her approval.

  As Luca’s three-month internship neared its end, he sought to obtain employment at the court in Strasbourg, but did not succeed. We glumly accepted that he would return to Milan and I would stay in Strasbourg.

  “Amore, I’m willing to take the train every weekend to see you,” he said softly. I turned to him, tears in my eyes. I had prepared myself for the relationship to fade when Luca left. I absorbed the intensity of his offer, feeling the love shining from him.