Love, InshAllah by Nura Maznavi

Author:Nura Maznavi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2012-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Even Muslim Girls Get the Blues

Deonna Kelli Sayed

When I first decided I was ready to get married, a Pakistani friend said, “You’ll have too many men wanting to marry you. Go to the mosque. Some will look in one of your eyes and see American dollars. In the other, they will see a green card. Everyone will tell you that you are beautiful.”

I wasn’t your typical Muslim girl: I was a twenty-six-year-old, blonde American who had embraced Islam five years earlier, after hearing scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr suggest that faith is a thinking woman’s realm that requires both intellect and the heart. Faith is not a passive space for either gender.

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.

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