Abla was the baby of the family, much beloved, inheriting the family’s blond hair and blue eyes and its playful nature. She was fun and funny, magic and magnetic—and almost like a best friend or a sister. Abla slept in my parents’ bedroom, a space I typically only saw in the yellow light before school. Many women in Jordan viewed the burka as an import from more oppressive societies like Saudi Arabia and Iran. She hated fancy clothes and makeup and dressed as she pleased in jeans and T-shirts (still managing to outshine every woman in the room).
The story of a young woman and a young man in the U.S. is being told to stop by the author of a book. The author says the story is a story of her own life. She says she and her friends were always happy to share their stories with the world’s most famous people. The story is true, she says, but it’s not about the story of the young man and his friends. The book was published in 1998, and she says it’s a great story of life in the world.
In Arab culture, matchmaking is handled by the women of the bride-to-be in Arab culture. People think that arranged marriages are loveless, but they’re all about love, actually, familial love. When you marry, you don’t just marry the person, you’re married to your family, and they marry yours. Who you marry becomes part of your extended family and they have to fit neatly into it. This is why, during the match-making process, every member of the family voices their opinion.
Most children trust their mothers with this task to find someone who will complement and care for them. The matchmaking process typically ends not in a daughter being forced into marriage, but in her approval—and her peace of mind. When Abla agreed to marry Yousef, I was stunned. Out of the many men she could have chosen, I didn’t understand why it was him. He was seven years older, the dark hair around his crown was beginning to thin. Unlike Kareem, yousef wore a thick mustache that concealed his mouth and his moods. There was nothing special about him.
Inshallah, they always said, if Allah wills it, they can’t get their way, they say, inshallah. And yet Allah did not will so many things that he should have, author says. He says he began to see it everywhere, the way adults used Allah’s name to get things he didn’t want. He asks: If I were Allah, Syria’s brutal dictator, Hafez al-Assad, would have been the one paralyzed, in a wheelchair, not being able to feed himself. Why didn’t the Palestinian children I had played soccer with in the mukhayam have a home and school?
When I was a child, I loved watching the wedding and dancing with my family. My favorite dance was the dabke, when everyone got in on the dance. It is too much of everything: food, music, dancing, and cotton candy, and it is the most joy and extravagance you will ever see in one room, she says. She says her family was never happier than when she was in the middle of the night, when she and her family were in the midst of the party. She asks: “What do you think? What do we think? Please go to see if you want to help.”.
The bride and her family were dancing at the end of the night at a hotel in New York City. They sang a song about the moment the bride lost her virginity. The wedding was the most private moment of her life, she says. She says she wished she hadn’t been in the room at the time but had been in a different part of the dance floor at the beginning of the evening. The event was the first time she had been invited to a party in her native New York, New York.