Miss Overtly Charming Barza Muslim Sister

Aishwary Rai in the movie “Devdas”

I am verily going to create a human being from fermented clay dried tingling hard: And when I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, bow before him in homage -Qur’an 15:28, 29

By Tarnima Andalib

Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister sat on a wooden armchair with a cherry finish. “Assalamu Alaikum!”, she said. Is that not the over-generalized, watered down Arabic phrase Muslims utter to wish “peace” upon each other? No, it was perfectly applicable at the hotel ballroom, where no one seems to be at peace--at least not with the sight of her. She had noticed me struggling with her relatives and friends to take her picture. We can’t see the light particles escaping from her excited figure, but we still tried to capture them with our cameras. We did this because we all wanted a paper copy of her radiant childlike image, which resembled that of the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai. Like Rai, she was also a celebrity--a local one who beamed for her fan’s flashing cameras, next to an equally attractive “Mister Middle Eastern Looking Muslim Brother.” At the moment, I was more a fan of her dress than her. It was this embroidered creme lehnga draping the whole body, and revealing no skin except the parts declared lawful for Muslim women by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi:

1. The Face (an oval frame, to hang an embroidered veil and reddish brown curly vines of hair)
   
2. The Hands (slender sienna elbows which extend gold rimmed, scalloped sleeves and flower shaped gold bangles).

The fact that the dress is creme instead of traditional blood red indicates that she is: (a) a child of Amreekan patriarchy obsessed with symbolic representations of bridal virginity, (b) a member of a superficial Bollywood consumer culture that seeks to defy tradition through edgy couture, Or (c) simply an individual who prefers the color creme over red

Was this an "arranged marriage?" Yes. This was an extra special arranged marriage. The bride and her network of American Muslim peers arranged it very carefully so that the groom and his family matched the exact socio-economic, religio-cultural arrangement of her first generation immigrant parents.

When my mother and I arrived a few hours ago, draped in South Asian silk sari wraps (mine was this light blue and maroon one which no longer fit my mother), the ballroom was almost empty. We only saw the few South Asian members of the bride‘s immediate family, or the Muslim emcees that coordinated the event on the microphone. Ammu talked to a Bangladeshi friend while I waited for the couple (in my case smiling nervously while a 40-something South Asian married man gave me knowing glances and said scary things like “you’re next you know!”).

The room had begun to fill up with more elaborately dressed South Asian and Arab women, and their equally drab male counterparts. Suddenly, one emcee announced the arrival of the groom, who not only looked “middle eastern” but had grown up in a middle eastern country as well--the kind of person the INS would have a field day with after 9/11. The emcee introduced the groom as Mr. (insert random Urdu name I don’t remember here) but when it came time for the bride to arrive, said something like this:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you for the first time Mrs. (insert an elegant Urdu name replaced by whatever her husband’s name is)!

As amazed as I was by the swan-like entrance, I could not help but feel appalled by this substitution of names. Growing up with family members who had their own unique first and last names, the only thing that came to mind was some fancy rant like, “What a horrible patriarchal scheme to dissolve a woman’s identity!”

Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister, however, did not seem so bothered by the sexist introduction, and gracefully proceeded to her cherry tinted chair without a word, her diaphanous floral veil cascading from her forehead, and her doe eyes trained to the floor. I use the words “cascading” and “doe” because that is what I saw in it--a raging waterfall in some forest. I realized that for her, the veil merely served an aesthetic role. But someone like Irena Dunn might see oppressed written all over it. Then I, like a wicked mimic, would probably have said, “This oppressed South Asian woman needs that Middle Eastern man’s name like a fish needs a bicycle!“

Alas, I knew her better than Dunn or any orientalist veiled by stereotypes of Muslim women. I had observed this Muslim woman, since the age of 13, and only at the age of 22, fully understood how she worked and advanced within a patriarchal system. Even if that system was a murky and unjust maze, she was busy adapting to it while I wasted my time questioning its existence and taking apart my sanity along with it.

Currently the emcees are speaking of her background, introducing her family members as well as their educational backgrounds. My mind is wandering through all these obscure details of her life. What I recall is that when we were in our teens, she was the domestic one tirelessly washing every dish in the mosque. In doing so, she had not only done something charitable for the Muslims in her community but also spared herself some disturbing information in pamphlets designed for Muslim women. These gynophobic goodies were spread across the a table she had helped set up, that the 15-year-old with the spongy mind, had absorbed with complete fascination:

Some Signs of yawm al-qiyamah (Judgment Day):

1. Women will conspire against men.
   
2. Women will outnumber men.
   
3. Women will dress like men.

Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister used to paint her toenails a shiny brick red. At a dinner party at her house she curiously inquired why I painted one set aqua, another mauve, and put contrasting polka dots on them for good measure (Eh! These days I stick to the tried and true color fuchsia!). “Look at Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister,” my Bangladeshi mother would say at every Muslim or South Asian event, before using her as a standard for model behavior.

As irritated as I was by the constant comparisons, even I could not deny that she was the model minority, the crème brulee of South Asian Muslim youth to all eyes in our local community. Despite being born and brought up in the United States, she spoke perfect Urdu with the Pakistani Aunties in our neighborhood. She’d also graduated from high school an extra year early, finished with honors and a perfect 4.0 GPA from a nearby university to pursue what else but the stereotypical South Asian American Dream of a medical career.

Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister, a minority in a western society, did not face any discrimination when it came to matters of romance. Men of multiple ethnicities and religions formed a pluralist alliance to pursue her. She had to resist their collective advances for a very important reason. She wanted more marshmallows! A famous research study regarding emotional intelligence involved a man asking a group of four-year-olds if they would rather have two marshmallows now, or wait until another man came in to give them five. Years later, the study showed that the children who had waited for marshmallows were more successful in long term relationships than those who did not wait. But only a nerd would explain her behavior with psychological research terms, you say. That’s true. My mother told me that Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister actually had a more simple answer for people who tactlessly asked about her lack of a love life in college: “Who has the time to do that stuff?”

Perhaps she figured that she had better things to do than get sucked into casual relationships which would not get her the approval she wanted from her parents anyway. Then again, you’d think that someone who looks like Aishwarya Rai would get a lot of marriage offers! She did. She, however, was no Aishwarya Rai (at least not the architecture major that made her debut to the world as the green-eyed Indian beauty in the Pepsi commercial!) and refused to sell out into marriages that did not meet her personal expectations. When she (Miss Overtly Charming Muslim Sister) did find the person she, as well her parents, wanted as her life partner, she stipulated during her Nikah, the marriage contract, that he needed to share household chores with her.

I am staring at that picture of her that I struggled to take almost a year ago. I learned that last bit about the contract from my mother recently and see her differently now. I perceive her today as a barza woman.

Lisan al-‘Arab dictionary: barza - adj. unveiled. A woman who does not hide her face and does not lower her head; A woman possessing sound judgment.

Instead of a famous Indian actress, she now reminds me of a largely forgotten but spunky Arab woman named Sukayna Bint Hussein. She was the great granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, states that Sukayna was “celebrated for her beauty, for what the Arabs call beauty--an explosive mixture of physical attractiveness, critical intelligence, and caustic wit” (192). Sukayna, a traditional Muslim woman, according to Fatima Mernissi, had stated on her marriage contract that “she would not obey her husband and that her husband did not have the right to practice polygyny”(193).

Back to the wedding, to a moment I never took a picture of. I was trying to eat this strange mixture of lentils and collard greens, wondering why someone had bothered to cook up such a bitter tasting dish. My culinary thoughts were interrupted by a sudden squeal of delight from the bride (a child had stolen her husband’s shoes, and held them ransom in what can be called a very traditional Punjabi Wedding custom).

I was startled by the vital force that is the ruh, which resonated from her and spread throughout the glittering ballroom.

I realize that Miss Overtly Charming Barza Muslim Sister, with her slender sienna hands, had shaped and kneaded the malleable clay structure that was patriarchy, and breathed into it the very same spirit sprayed into her upon creation.

List of Sources
Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam