Then he knelt down in front of me and, gazing up into my eyes, said, "I love you. On Valentine's Day, we climbed over the boulders leading to Sky Rock, one of the highest peaks in my hometown of Morgantown. The bluegrass music hit a chord with the West Virginia girl in me. One night, he played me "When Love Is New" by Dolly Parton and Emmy Rossum. Could I love him? Marry him? He gave me red roses, love letters, scarves in pink (my favorite color). He had traveled along the Ganges River in India and through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan-but he was born and bred in Tennessee. Army officer specializing in Islam and South Asia, he knew the religion better than many born into the faith-but he wasn't Muslim. I had met a wonderful man in Washington, D.C., where I now live. This year, my convictions were put to the test. To me, that's a good thing for the Muslim world, because I believe a society's ability to accept marriages that cross racial and religious lines is a direct expression of its tolerance. Today, thankfully, some women and clerics are challenging the practice. Over the years, as I grew to become an activist in the Muslim world, I understood that one of the most fundamental ways Islamic legal traditions control women is through love, with a ban on marrying men who aren't Muslim. Then I realized-I had loved with prejudice, basing my affections not on inner compatibility, but on external markers like race, religion, ethnicity. He called me one day to announce, "It's over." Later at my office, I got a piece of mail, which my husband had signed with the three words " Talaq, talaq, talaq," meaning "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you." According to traditional interpretation, a Muslim man has to simply utter this word three times to divorce his wife. His father is the one who ended the relationship. When I began to talk with him about our problems, he literally bolted, jumping over the steel railing of the outdoor patio where we'd been sitting. My father said, "We want to save you, not the marriage."Īfter a couple of weeks, I returned to meet my husband at a Houlihan's restaurant. I feared their wrath-after all, they'd had an arranged marriage and made it work-but they saw the gloom on my face, and understood. Depressed, I retreated to my parents' home to regain my equilibrium. Our conversations became increasingly disconnected. To avoid the growing tensions, I started working late at my newspaper job instead of hurrying home to see him. He had been raised in a family where it's just not the sort of thing you discuss. When I would try to gently talk with him about it, he'd cut me off. I had naively thought this would change over time. We would have rather passionless, perfunctory sex, and then he'd roll over, turn his back to me, and fall asleep. My husband, charming with friends by day, would simply shut down at night. Some 300 guests came, most of them strangers to me.Īs my wedding flowed into my honey-moon in Paris and the first few weeks of marriage, some issues I'd ignored throughout our brief romance started to haunt me. That night, my husband and I were married, although I didn't stand beside him to say my vows we were wed in separate rooms, per tradition. "Now we wax your arms and bleach your face," the hairdresser told me. The day of our wedding, I sat in a chair at the Mee Lee Beauty Parlour in Islamabad, run by a Chinese immigrant, Mrs. Sure, I had doubts, but I felt I was finally meeting the expectations that my religion, my culture, and my family had for me. Nine months later, I boarded a Pakistan International Airlines flight to our wedding in his hometown. My senior year at Morgantown High, standing by my red locker, I politely refused the class president when he invited me to the prom. As a girl, I had learned to live by the hudood, or sacred boundaries, of traditional Muslim society: I never dated, and I never went to the junior high school dances. To me, abiding by the dictates of my culture and religion meant finding a love that would be halal, or legal, according to Islamic law. I believed I had to marry a Muslim-better yet, a man with South Asian roots. I went to school in Morgantown, WV, and did modern things like run cross-country, but lived by traditional Islamic rules regarding love and marriage. When I was 4, I boarded a TWA flight headed for America, where my family and I would start a new life while my dad pursued his Ph.D. There's a photo of me as a toddler, my sullen face peeking out from layers of bridal finery-part of a tradition that sets Muslim girls on the path to marriage. The journey had begun when I was a little girl, growing up in a Muslim family in the city of Hyderabad in southern India.
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