Love in a Headscarf

Love.
Amour, ishq, hubb, amor, pyar. All these are words
in my lexicon to describe something delicious and
mundane, irresistible and sublime. Love inspires great
actions, absurd choices and inexplicable consequences. It
directs lives and it makes or breaks hearts. It can arbitrate
between life and death, and it can connect the body to the
soul and join them with lightning. It is the essence of the
human condition.
 
Civilisations do not clash over whether love exists or
not. They may differ about what or who should be the
object of love. They fight over the same lover. They
disagree about how love should be conducted. But love,
Love with a capital L, lies deep within every psyche and
culture, and fills books with laments and odes in
languages and paradigms from the beginning of time. In
this modern day when only what we see is allowed to have
certainty, and when scientific data seems to hold the
trump card for truth, when only what can be measured
exists, love defies all of these strictures and dances
joyfully before the eyes of human beings and teases them
with the promise of the unknown.
 
Love has been lost to our generation, diluted to
ravishing and romance. We ask it to sustain us on a
constant high and we feel betrayed and rejected when the
adrenaline rush subsides into comfortable companionable
love. We have shackled love by limiting its reign to
the arena of candlelit meals and moonlit walks. When we
talk of love in public, we have now diminished it. I wish
for us to reclaim love for our society as a conscious and
connected virtue of vast expanse and immense greatness.
We each know inside us that love relates to friends,
advisors, parents and those we live amongst. It takes
patience, dedication, and selflessness. Some, like me, may
also feel that it connects them to the Divine, the Creator
who has no shape, place or time, but who simply is.
The likelihood of a Muslim talking about Love in
public is small. But like most societies and cultures,
Muslims are obsessed with it. In fact, Muslim men and
women spend a large proportion of their time wondering
where on earth to find a partner. Finding that special
someone is so critical to the fabric of Muslim existence,
that almost everyone is involved – parents, siblings, aunts,
uncles, Imams, even neighbours.
 
Beneath the translucent veils of Muslim women lie
beating hearts, dreams of love, imaginations replete with
fairy tales and princes, of happily ever after. Hidden
behind the often misleading headlines of terror and
destruction that are said to be in the name of Islam are
Muslims: ordinary normal people who share that one
thing that exalts human beings and connects the sublime
within us to our mundane lives – that thing called Love.
Muslim women have many stories to tell. Some of
these are horrific. The suffering, oppression and abuse
that some women face in the name of religion, but which 
in reality is driven by culture and power, must never be
forgotten and has to be stopped. I feel a double distress,
sharing their pain as sisters in faith but also seeing the
beauty of my religion misappropriated, misrepresented
and abused to serve inhumane ends.
 
Stories like mine have remained unheard, as they do
not fit neatly with prevailing stereotypes which tell tales of
Islam’s oppression or of those rejecting Islam. Nonetheless,
such stories are just as crucial to our understanding
of what it means to be a Muslim woman. Not every
Muslim woman is subjected to a forced marriage,
kidnapping or imprisonment. We are not one-dimensional
creatures hidden behind black veils. Many Muslim
women, like me, find Islam to be a positive, liberating and
uplifting experience. We love our lives all the more for it.
My account is dedicated to all Muslim women, so that
humour, hope and humanity can once again become part
of our story.
 
Muslim women come in many shapes, colours and
flavours, and my story is simply the tale of one woman’s
experience. Hidden within my story are the human
passions and hopes of many Muslims, both men and
women, and of human beings of other faiths and no faith
at all, all of whose own searches for love may have been as
perilous, heartbreaking and entertaining as mine.
 
The search for love is a journey to find many different
things. It is the search for a partner and companion, for
the excitement of romance. It is also the search for a
Cherisher, for someone to nurture or someone to be
nurtured by. It is a search for meaning, for the knowledge
that you have achieved something, for a momentary
acknowledgement or for immortality of your name. Love
can be the name of the escape from the physical into the
spiritual or from the mental into the carnal. The search
for love is a resolute journey: to find out what it means to
be human, and to share that humanity.