The Scope of Permissibility, page 2
2
Abida
Marriage was a dull and inherently patriarchal institution, but Abida viewed it in the same way as she viewed vaccinations or seatbelts: unpleasant, necessary protections against greater evils. Sara had laughed at this pronouncement and labelled her cynical, but it was true. It was for this reason that she had resolved some time ago to marry someone her parents had sanctioned. It would have to be someone Muslim and Bangladeshi and educated to university level. She anticipated it would be quick and expeditious, avoiding much of the messiness that choosing a partner based on finite feelings entailed. She prided herself on her lack of sentimentality.
‘Sometimes I think I’m never going to get married, you know what I mean? It’s just so hard to find a good guy.’ Ahlam spoke as she arranged leaflets around the table, placing a stack on Islam and women’s rights under its front leg to stabilise where it wobbled. The wind blew their hijabs into their faces and blew the leaflets onto the lawn outside the library until they weighed them down with various objects: the wrapped chewy lollies they distributed to fellow students, Ahlam’s car keys, a hefty pebble given to them by a sympathetic dreadlocked white boy who was passing by. They had endeavoured to give the stall a professional look, having unfurled the MSA banner stand and placed it adjacent to them, but it had toppled over twice already and knocked Abida’s collarbone as it did. Abida stood in front of the table, took a photo and sent it to Sara with the caption, Can’t believe you chose mechanics of solids over this, before turning back to Ahlam to reply.
‘I honestly don’t think about marriage that much. It’ll happen when it happens, right? It’s all naseeb, fate, all of that jazz.’
‘It’s different for you, though.’ Ahlam smoothed the left flank of her hijab, which was propped up by a concave pearl brooch, smiling over at a lanky girl in overalls on a bicycle as she pedalled at speed through the crowd.
Abida did not ask Ahlam to elaborate. They both understood that there were those for whom marriage and parenthood were aspirations, and then there were those who would get married and have children because that was just what you did when you reached a certain age. Abida would probably get married and have a child or two, but she would not be defined by the enterprise. She had observed the alternative and thought it distasteful; having six children had subsumed the entirety of her parents’ lives, much like a tumour. Whether it was malignant or benign, her parents seemed reconciled to it, content with whatever bounties Allah bestowed or withheld from them. They were weary and poor, but not angry. She had absorbed the rage they had long jettisoned.
A boy approached the table, oversized headphones over ears, neon blue singlet and shorts on despite the fierceness of the wind. Wahid had been rostered on for this shift at the da’wah stall, but he had not yet arrived. The MSA attempted to ensure that there was an even mix of boys and girls manning their fortnightly information stall. Instinctively, Abida knew why this was: the girls were there to field all the questions on hijabs and burqas and oppression, the boys to demonstrate that they were unthreatening and not a source of the girls’ oppression. They were there to prove a point, or disprove one, chafing against impressions that had been long solidified. She leaned on the table as the boy in the singlet picked up a leaflet entitled ‘Islam: spread by the sword?’, turned it over and examined it.
‘Do you want to ask us anything? We have heaps of leaflets on all sorts of topics,’ Ahlam said, grinning with all of her teeth in what she deemed to be a welcoming manner. Abida hated her then, hated how she tried so hard to be liked. But the boy gave no indication of hearing them through his headphones, putting down the leaflet and walking off.
Ahlam turned back to her.
‘Anyway, Abida, I’ve been meaning to ask your opinion on something relating to marriage. It’s –’
‘It’s Ziad, isn’t it?’
‘Ummm . . . well, yes. I was thinking about it after the meeting last week and wanted to see what your thoughts were. Do you think we have potential as a couple?’ Ahlam shuffled a pile of leaflets on Islam’s stance on human rights and looked across to the lawn, where they watched a boy in a tricolour pullover remove a strand of grass from his female companion’s hair, their backpacks and notes scattered in front of them.
‘Sure, I don’t see why not,’ Abida said immediately.
‘The thing is, I’ve seen him looking at me but he’s so shy, he’d never say anything to me about it. He’s just not that kind of guy. I think the only way something would happen is if someone else sets it up, but of course I wouldn’t want him to know that I’ve noticed, he’d be so embarrassed. Whoever suggested it to him would have to make it seem like it was their idea.’
Abida was unconvinced by this annotated account of events, and she did not suppose Ahlam expected otherwise. The real conversation lay in what was being omitted and talked around, the harsh truths that decorum would not permit them to acknowledge. At the age of twenty-two and nearing the end of her primary teaching degree, Ahlam was astute enough to appreciate the paucity of suitable candidates and had assessed Ziad as an achievable target. Abida thought it plausible that Ahlam was in love with him, but love in their world did not so much erode common sense as shadow it. There were several points to recommend Ziad: their shared Lebanese heritage, his computer science degree and convivial disposition. That he was slow on the uptake was of little consequence. As it was, Abida approved of Ahlam’s pragmatism. A girl could do far worse than a well-intentioned fool.
‘I’m happy to talk to him for you. I could mention it to him sometime and see what he thinks.’
‘Are you sure you’d be cool with that?’
Abida nodded and smiled. She was pleased at being entrusted with such confidences. It felt adult, weighty.
‘Just leave it with me. But make sure to pray istikhara and see how you feel before jumping into anything. In the end, it’s all with Allah, right?’
‘Of course.’ Ahlam nodded with fervour. She believed in the power of istikhara to steer a course of action, as they all had been instructed to. But Abida was sometimes unsure if she referenced Him with real feeling or because the situation seemed to necessitate it. She said inshaAllah when making any statement pertaining to a future event, mashaAllah whenever cooing at someone’s baby or sharing a photo of a sunset online and alhamdulillah for any crisis averted, no matter how minute. This was what she believed in, but it was also what a girl in an abaya did. She had chosen to dress this way, and with this choice came expectations of behaviour. She could swear and laugh and rage, she could be inappropriate and wild, but to the world she would still be defined by this cloak, this fabric.
Wahid’s arrival prevented any further tête-à-têtes. He wore a maroon t-shirt and black jeans, tiny droplets of water dripping from the gelled bouffant of his hair onto his forehead and down his neck.
‘You’re late, bro. And you’re dripping water onto the table.’ Abida spoke in what she hoped was a suitably austere manner. She refused to be counted among the many MSA girls who lusted after Wahid, their eyes downcast, their thoughts occupied with how best to induce interest without appearing immodest.
‘Sorry, I had to go pray after class. I just made wudu and rushed off here.’
‘You had hours to do that, bro. If we can manage to be on time, so can you.’
Wahid smiled and placed his hands in his front pockets, chunky thumbs protruding. Abida could not penetrate his reserve, the implacable distance he maintained from girls. She knew that many of the MSA boys were afraid of girls and women. It showed in their inability to conduct a conversation with any modicum of civility. A small handful, like their president, Mustafa, were able to convey both respect and commonplace cordiality. But Abida did not believe Wahid was fearful. She did not trust good-looking people who feigned disinterest in the opposite sex. How could they be, when members of the opposite sex were so obvious in their interest in them?
‘Sisters, I may have some news. I have it on good authority that Mustafa is looking to step down as president in the not too distant future,’ Wahid said.
‘Why would he want to do that? He’s such a great president, mashaAllah,’ Ahlam said.
‘He’s been offered a full-time marketing job, so he’s going to be dropping to part-time study soon, and the president needs to be around full-time,’ Wahid replied.
‘Is that an actual rule, or one you just made up?’ Abida felt her acerbity in Ahlam’s exaggerated performance of shuffling the leaflets on the table, Wahid’s foot tapping against the cobblestone ground. She did not know how other people negotiated the boundaries between warmth and reserve, between being assertive but not peculiar or offensive. She seemed to either bore people or piss them off; there was little in between.
‘Being the MSA president is a big commitment, sis. We’re the representatives of Islam on this campus, especially with Islamic Awareness Week coming up. Nothing less than one hundred per cent will do,’ Wahid said.
‘Well, let’s wait to hear it from Mustafa, I guess,’ Ahlam said. ‘Ziad will probably step up for it if Mustafa goes.’ She glanced at Abida, and Abida wondered at the competing impulses of people in love, noisily proclaiming the need for discretion when they exposed themselves at every turn.
‘Have we finalised the schedule for Islamic Awareness week yet?’ Abida steered the conversation away from the topic of the presidency as though it was of little significance. She did not wish Wahid to detect her interest just yet.
‘Yeah, I think we have a first draft at least. Let me open it up and we can run through it now.’ Wahid reached for his phone.
‘So we have the talk on colonialism and the Muslim world on Monday, the pizza night and film screening of the First Nations Muslims documentary on Tuesday, the Islam and conquest debate on Wednesday.’ Wahid was scrolling through his phone. ‘Then there’s a break from the theme with try-on-a-hijab Thursday –’
‘I really don’t think we should go ahead with that,’ Abida cut in. ‘I told Mustafa that when it first came up on the group chat. It’s totally demeaning.’
‘It’s popular, and attracts crowds, and it’s good da’wah. We can’t always be crusading against everything all at once. Sometimes it has to be enough for us just to be here, you know?’
Abida shook her head, resolute. She saw the merit in Wahid’s argument; people possessed a finite capacity to agitate. Back in Bangladesh, her father had fought in the Liberation War of 1971 against the marauding Pakistani forces. He had fought with his hands and on his belly in the lowlands where the mud melded clothing to skin, only to abandon the country he had bled for in search of the abstract notion of a better life. Now all that lingered was the fight to pay the rent on their modest fibro house in Sydney’s far south-west, to prevent Hamina and Farah from pulling each other’s hair out because there was insufficient space or attention for them all, and even those were tepid exertions. But Abida would not surrender to her parents’ brand of fatalism, not yet.
‘I’ll get the girls together to discuss it. It’s us who’d be running the thing, we should decide if it’s going ahead,’ she said.
Wahid was about to reply, just as a boy with cropped sandy hair accompanied by a taller boy in tatty khaki shorts walked towards the stall. The boy with the sandy hair crossed his arms across his chest and furrowed his brow, as though his body was tightening up at the very sight of them. Abida was certain that if she could have seen his toes inside his boots, they’d be crossed too.
‘Hi, what can we help you with today?’ Ahlam repositioned the bowl in which the lollies were placed, shaking it until they settled into a more attractive formation. The lollies were cast-offs from the corner shop Ahlam’s father owned, their ingredients listed in Arabic and Polish but not in English.
‘Yeah, can you guys help me? I’m in need of real help.’ The sandy-haired boy raised his hands as if to plead with them, while the other boy sniggered.
‘Is there anything in particular we can help you with?’ Wahid tilted his chin, looking only at the boy who was speaking. Although she would not have admitted it, Abida was glad for Wahid’s conspicuous muscles then, the bulkiness of his frame. She wished Sara was here too, so that they could look at each other – the two of them against the brutalities of the world, as it had always been.
‘Well, the thing is, I need help understanding something. Why is it that a strapping lad like you walks around in a t-shirt yet you have these two all covered up from head to toe?’
The boy in the shorts sniggered again and reached for a lolly, unwrapping the layers of plastic with exaggerated zeal before placing it in the centre of his tongue.
‘What a lot of people don’t know is –’
‘What a lot of people don’t know is,’ the boy mimicked Wahid. ‘Why don’t you let the ladies speak for themselves?’
‘There are rules for men’s clothing and there are rules for women’s clothing,’ Ahlam said. ‘The rules are just different, that’s all. Men and women aren’t the same, and while both are equal in the eyes of God, He recognises that difference and has devised a system in which these differences are catered for and honoured.’
Ahlam’s response was regurgitated from a training session the MSA had run in the previous semester entitled ‘How to do da’wah in one minute or less’, and while Abida had enjoyed the role-playing exercises in which common questions about Islam were posed and answered, Ahlam’s answer now appeared to dance around the essential truth: that Wahid was allowed to style and display his hair and they were not. Abida would have preferred to tell everyone to suck it up, that not every religious dictate could be distilled into a palatable aphorism. She was not troubled by having to obscure all but her face and hands. Sonia Gupta at school had been upskirted in the stairwell and the boy who had done it stated that it was because her skirt was short, but he had tried to do it to Abida in her floor-length pleated skirt too, this time citing a thirst for a challenge. The world was one place for women and another for men, of this Abida was certain.
‘Right. Okay then,’ the sandy-haired boy said. ‘You keep on believing that. Whatever floats your boat. You’re not bad though, hit me up if you ever change your mind about this Islam thing. I think we could have some real fun together.’
The boy in the shorts, who had still not spoken, bit into his peach lolly and it exploded with a loud crunch, while the sandy-haired boy picked up a leaflet on the true meaning of jihad and winked at Ahlam before turning around and walking away. Abida exhaled. Her armpits were sweaty, she could smell the stink of it.
‘I don’t know how some people get into university,’ Ahlam said, pursing her lips into a bow.
Abida leaned against the stone wall. Its warmth calmed her, a buffer against the crowd. The sandy-haired boy had echoed the axiom of people their age. They all proclaimed how much they did not care what anyone did, how everyone should just do what made them feel good and that no one could tell you what or who you were. It was as untrue as it was banal. In every discussion, in every debate she had seen on Islam and Muslims and hijab and niqab, people only supported your right to choose until that choice diverged from what they deemed explicable, and from that point on you were deemed brainwashed or stupid or both. She felt the familiar tug of anger at the injustice of it, the presumption that she was being crushed under the boot of some tyrannical male and required liberation.
‘Who cares anyway?’ Wahid said. ‘We’ve had much worse. People threw rubbish and spat at our Prophet, so who are we to complain about a few harmless idiots? Just forget it.’ He began scrolling through his social media feeds. Abida watched his phone screen as he clicked on the app which featured Quranic verses of the day. Today’s verse related to breastfeeding, stipulating that mothers could do so up until their child’s second year of life but not beyond it. Wahid scrolled away from it and onto TikTok instead.
Abida wanted to escape from them both and depart for the long journey home. She picked up her bag and began to tuck a stray hair back into her hijab, then decided against it, yanking the hair right out of its root, feeling her scalp smart.
‘I’ve gotta go, guys. Catch you soon, inshaAllah.’
‘Are you sure you have to go now? Text me later, inshaAllah. Salam!’ Ahlam kissed Abida’s cheek as she departed, leaving the sticky residue of gloss where her lips had been.
All MSA members knew they were not supposed to leave a boy and girl alone at the da’wah stall, even if it was in the middle of the university campus. Ahlam would not linger for much longer. She would mutter some excuse and Wahid would nod and wave, both relieved to be extricated from the awkwardness of the situation.
Abida pictured this scene as she walked through the curved sandstone archway beyond the library and onto the main walkway, where a boy swerved past her on a skateboard, the cord of his red headphones snaking from his head into the pocket of his low-slung jeans. A girl in a double denim combination of skirt and jacket was handing out flyers about veganism, her nose ring reminding Abida of the photos she had seen of her parents’ wedding, her mother’s heavy gold tikka and nose ring obscuring most of her unsmiling face in profile. Abida accepted the flyer and thanked the girl, thinking of how she had transformed into yet another face in the student crowd when minutes ago she too had been spearheading a cause.
It was essential to possess a cause. A life without some form of focal point was not a life, merely a series of fragmented, random events. If you did not steer your course towards your own target, you would be steered towards someone else’s. There was so little time to leave a mark, so little time to affect change. She had said this to Sara when they were still at high school and envisaging all the things they would do when they started university. They had both concluded that once people finished university it was already too late: they would have solidified into the people they would always be. It was these years in between which would determine everything.
