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Boy Meets Girl
Looking for love in the Muslim world
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"It will mostly be about compatibility, but hopefully there will be aspects of love involved," says Hamid. "I'd like to think that love would play the biggest part, but I know in the back of my mind that compatibility is truly the key aspect. I have friends who think that there will be a love at first sight kind of thing and then I have friends that say well, 'Is he financially stable?' 'Do you think he would be compatible religiously with me or personality-wise with me?' It just depends on the person."
But von Briesen, a 37-year-old father of four, struggles with what his religion will ask of his children in terms of celibacy during their adolescent and college years. The common wisdom in modern American Islam is that a man shouldn't marry until he has finished school and can support his wife. Most families want their daughters to finish school too and wouldn't even consider a man who didn't have the earning power of someone in his early to mid-30s.
"By the time I was halfway through college, I was at the point where people ought to be with a partner, but I didn't have a job, I was deeply in debt, and I was just like, 'What do you do?'" von Briesen says.
He'd become Muslim in his early teens after his mother and stepfather converted, and since Caucasian Muslims are extremely rare in the Islamic community, he'd never even seen a Caucasian Muslim woman his age before.
Typically, the matrimonial ads he'd read in a magazine called Islamic Horizons were of two varieties.
"One variety was, "Brother of slim Ivy League educated Urdu speaking Sunni Muslim seeking medical doctor or engineer 25 to 35 and the woman would be 18 or 22," he says. "The other variety was something like, 47-year-old sincere Muslim woman with two kids seeking non-polygamous husband, and that was typically what you would get out of the African-American community. Neither of those fit me at all. I was 18 or 19, no money, not even pursing a fancy degree and certainly no ethnic or language background to speak of that would compare to where most of them were coming from."
Eventually, von Briesen stumbled across an ad for an 18-year-old woman seeking a husband with no other details. He wrote her a 12-page letter and was shocked when a Polaroid spilled out of her response letter showing a clearly American woman in Muslim garb. She too had converted in her teens. They wrote letters, and married by the time his wife, Munira, turned 20.
"The majority opinion is that (the husband) has got to have a job and be established," says von Briesen. "That's something I'm vehemently opposed to because I think it leads to people having sex outside of marriage. It leads to young men missing their sexual prime."
He says he'd be willing to set up a basement apartment for his daughter if she wants to marry early and help take care of the couple financially.
"If my daughter is 16 and ready to get married, I'll take care of it and let him move in because I would rather they be taken care of early than have to deal with all that crap through high school and college," says von Briesen.
There is a real naiveté among Muslim immigrant parents about what life is really like for their kids, he says.
"The immigrant community doesn't have a good grasp at all on what their kids are up to and their kids are up to no good from a religious standpoint," von Briesen says. "The parents grew up in Muslim countries and so even though not everybody was religious and even though not everybody was practicing, the culture was religious. They come over here and do their best to assimilate the kids so they feel their kids belong, and they somehow assume the kids will have the same sense of Islam that they had, not realizing that nothing is on TV relating to Islam, nothing is in school relating to Islam. The kids are so far away from where their parents think they are, it's scary."
Ali agrees. A lot of people are hiding a lot of things from their parents, including that they are dating, he says.
"Muslims who partake in that stuff, they kind of do it on the low," says Ali. "They don't tell anybody about it. They try to keep it a secret. There's a lot of everything going on."
That only compounds the struggle for those like Ali who are deeply religious and searching for those like them -- and for those who aren't.
It's not unusual for those who have dated on the sly in high school and college to return to the fold, leaving the dating they did in college behind as they transition back into their communities.
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