Boy Meets Girl

Helen Berhane, 27, saw her husband only three times before she married him in April.

Two of those times, they crammed in quick conversations at Islamic conferences in busy hotel lobbies, places public enough to make their face-to-face meeting an acceptable one in the eyes of Allah. Jibril Hough, spokesman for the Islamic Society of Charlotte and perhaps Charlotte’s best-known Muslim, saw his wife just twice before they were married in 1999 — and the second time, he proposed.

The two Muslim couples got to know each other instead by talking for hours on the phone in the months, or in Hough’s case, weeks before they were married. That they talked on the phone at all before marriage puts them in the liberal minority among the Muslim couples Creative Loafing talked to for this article.

Among most devout Muslims, the subject of the phone isn’t even up for debate. A couple can talk on the phone only after they are considered by the Muslim community to be married, says Imam Bassam Obeid of the Islamic Center of Charlotte.

“I think knowing each other before you marry is overrated,” adds Shamu Shamudeen, a sheik (or Islamic religious scholar) from Ghana who is also with the Islamic Center. But a younger generation of devout Muslims puts a bit more of a premium on it.

Ali, a 21-year-old Jordanian-American electrical engineering student from Charlotte, has been known to send 50 text messages in a day when he’s interested in a woman. But he’d never actually call her on the phone, he says. If he were seriously interested in her — and by that he means seriously interested in marrying her — he’d call her parents and arrange meetings between his family and hers. They’d eventually decide as a group if it’s OK for the two to talk and get to know each other better — in a chaperoned environment, of course. And that’s if she was also interested in him, which she might not be.

When a Muslim man gets rejected, it’s usually not just by a woman but by her entire family. That’s why it’s best to do a little ground work before proceeding. The challenge is to find out as much information as possible about the woman without getting the families involved, Ali says. Hence the text messaging.

“If you are talking to someone, it is not as a disposable relationship but because you have the intention of getting married,” says Ali. “You have to have the commitment first before you even enter the relationship.”

And even then, you can’t be alone together. So goes the sacred and socially complex etiquette of Muslim dating.

But don’t call it dating. That makes Muslim leaders cringe. Dating is what Westerners and the non-devout do, and it almost always leads to something sinful. They’d prefer you didn’t use the term “arranged marriage,” either. Though much of the process is definitely arranged by the couple’s parents, according to Islamic law, the woman can refuse a man who pursues her, they say.

Shamudeen says a devout Muslim couple probably wouldn’t touch before marriage, even to shake hands. But even Shamudeen calls the arranged marriages that are common in some cultures “way extreme.”

“I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that,” he says, laughing. “That is not Islam.”

But the courtship process described above is how it’s done in Islam. The people described here aren’t radicals. Reference any standard “about Islam” Web site and the marriage process is laid out in black and white. The devout follow it, Muslims CL interviewed from three different local Islamic communities agreed. Those who don’t strictly follow the tradition may come from a Muslim heritage, they say, but they are no longer practicing Islam.

“If you are a practicing Muslim — by practicing I mean you are doing your prayers and you are dressing properly and you are not drinking, all the things you are supposed to do and all the things you are supposed to avoid and that’s part of your life — there’s really not a lot of room for interaction at the romantic level for unmarried couples,” says D.I. von Briesen, a program chair and database instructor at CPCC.

In a few years, Shamudeen says, when the oldest of his four daughters is looking to marry, he’ll supervise the process.

“If I think that this is a possible prospect that is a promising young man, somebody who would be good for my girl, I would let her see him from afar,” Shamudeen says. “I’d say, ‘Do you have any interest?’ The father stands in between as a guardian, a protector for the girl and also the mother. Then they would meet at festive occasions like weddings, but they would not go in private.”

Shamudeen says that what the community thinks of a girl is important.

“In Islam, the reputation of the girl is perhaps her most important commodity,” he says. And that leaves no room for sex, particularly for women.

“It’s not really to be draconian like, ‘I want a virgin,'” says von Briesen. “It’s that it’s your religion and if you violated that sanctity that dramatically, then what does that say for the rest of your life together if you are serving God? It’s not unlike you are in SPCA and you donate money to SPCA and you volunteer with SPCA and you meet someone who kicked a dog to death.

“That person may have changed their ways and may now be volunteering with the SPCA, too, but it just doesn’t line up right,” says von Briesen. His friend Ali agrees. Ali, a devout Muslim, says he hasn’t slept around, and he wants a woman who hasn’t, either.

In the marriage process among devout Muslims, the concept of Western-style love takes a backseat to compatibility, in particular religious compatibility. If the couple falls in love before the marriage, that’s a bonus. But the belief is that Allah will grow love in the hearts of husbands and wives for each other over time, so having it up front is not that important.

Charlotte’s Muslim leaders don’t just defend the courtship process. They claim the Islamic way of doing things is better.

“If dating was to work, I think our rate of divorce would not be as great as it is in this country,” says Shamudeen. “If dating were the solution to lasting marriage, perhaps we would not have as much divorce. We date a lot and we divorce a lot, so it shows that the two are not necessarily mutually inclusive. What is lacking is respect. If you go back to the 1940s when women came out in large forces, I bet things were different back then, the whole dating process, marriage and divorce.”

Shamudeen believes that Western women would feel more honored if men did things the way they do in his religion.

“Wouldn’t a girl feel honored and dignified for a man to show real interest in marrying her, not wanting to mess with her for a period of time, satisfy himself and then go on to graze somewhere else?” Shamudeen says. “That to me is an excellent thing.”

To Shamudeen, a network engineer who lives in Charlotte, this isn’t just theory. He actually tried it out on a non-Muslim American woman in 1990 after he met her and decided he wanted to marry her.

“I got to know her a little bit and when I proposed to her, her parents and grandparents were just blown,” he says. “They didn’t understand. You are asking for a girl when you haven’t done what everybody normally does? How can you want to marry her? I said, ‘There is no way it can happen except by marriage.'”

She eventually converted to Islam, Shamudeen says, and they are still married today, happily he claims.

“It’s a shock for this culture, but I think girls, they feel honored,” says Shamudeen.

But no one is making any claims that it’s easy. Sex is everywhere in American culture, and so is Western-style romantic love — the eye-locking, heart-pounding stuff of romance novels and movies that is foreign to many Islamic cultures.

“Sometimes it’s hard not to go with your feelings,” says Suzanne Hamid, 18, a recent graduate of East Mecklenburg High School and a student at UNCC. Hamid’s parents, who are of South American and Palestinian origin, gave Hamid a choice growing up. She didn’t have to wear the veil, didn’t even have to embrace Islam. But she chose to wear the hijab anyway, even though she was the only kid in her middle school who did.

All around Hamid, her college peers are dating. It’s a dimension of Western culture that’s almost entirely absent from her day-to-day life, though she’s a second generation American. For others, a football game means a good time and maybe a chance to meet someone. But because she doesn’t plan to marry for a few more years, perhaps after college, men aren’t on her radar screen.

“A lot of people aren’t looking because they know when the time is right, someone will be there,” says Hamid of her Muslim friends. “They aren’t actively looking for wives or husbands because everyone else is looking for them and there is not a need. There is so much less stress about that.”

She has both Muslim and non-Muslim friends, she says, and when her non-Muslim friends talk about their boyfriends, she just doesn’t say anything. Her Muslim friends are critical to keeping her committed to her way of life, she says.

Hamid hopes to find love in her marriage relationship one day, but for her it’s not a deal-breaker.

“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.

One woman who asked to be called “Sarah” met her husband through an online matrimonial advertisement — a recent rage in the Muslim community. Both described themselves as liberal in the ad, though their Pakistani parents aren’t, she says. By the time he contacted her parents, Sarah and her future husband had e-mailed for months, spoken a few times on the phone and secretly met once in Virginia. Both had dated other people in college and both drank socially, facts they mutually agreed to keep from their parents.

“I always wanted to marry a Muslim man,” Sarah says. “I want to raise my children in a marriage that my parents approve of. I want to be an accepted part of my family. But I want a man who can function in American culture, who can be comfortable with my non-Muslim friends. If you grow up here, it becomes a part of you. You can’t help that. I was lucky to find my husband. Not many men from my culture are like that.”

Ironically, Sarah says she’s become deeply religious since her marriage.

“Before, it was a set of rules that sometimes got in the way,” she says. “Now it is a relationship with God that demands certain things of me.”

Berhane’s experience with marriage was very different. A native of Eretria, she moved here when she was just four. She was a devout Christian who drove her sisters to church every Sunday while her parents stayed home. She took a long, slow path toward Islam after a friend converted. For Berhane, the distance between the sexes in courtship wasn’t alien at all because she’d always been deeply religious. Though she saw her husband just three times before she married him, she says she fell in love over the phone and that they weren’t intimate until they were married. She glows when she talks about her five-month marriage, what for her was a smooth transition from single life to living with her husband.

But Vera Hough, a native of Indonesia, admits that there were no fireworks the first time she met her husband. They were, however, compatible, she says, and their relationship quickly grew over the phone. Seven years after marrying her husband, after knowing him for less than three months, Vera, 32, and her husband Jibril, 39, insist they are happy, too.

“Marriage is about commitment,” Jibril says. “Love is about emotions. They rise, they go up, they come down. If you have the commitment, that will take you through. If you don’t have the love from the storybooks, eventually I think you will get what you need.”

This article appears in Oct 18-24, 2006.