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Miss Overtly Charming Barza Muslim Sister
Tarnima Andalib
December 12, 2004
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
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:
The Face (an oval frame, to hang an embroidered veil and reddish brown curly
vines of hair)
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):
Women will conspire against men.
Women will outnumber men.
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.
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