Adnan's Story Read online

  This was a function of both trying to be respectful to the folks, and, just as important, not wanting to get your butt kicked. Looking back, there was only so much a parent could do to a teenager who was breaking all the rules, but at the time the feared Pakistani parental discipline options ranged from the infamous chappal, a rubber slipper and household staple that sometimes found its way to the backside of a child, to being shipped off to the motherland and betrothed to an unknown cousin eagerly awaiting his or her American visa.

  These things weren’t common, but they also weren’t unheard of. It really depended on the gravity of the offense itself.

  Living in the dorms at a prestigious college, a friend of mine fell in love her freshman year; he was her first boyfriend and first physical relationship. One weekend, while she was out with friends, her parents decided to pay her a surprise visit. The RA let them into her dorm to wait for her, where her mother, as Pakistani mothers are programmed to do, began poking around. By the time my friend returned to campus, her parents had found solid evidence of her hanky-panky. Her belongings were promptly packed and she was immediately yanked out of school and driven, sobbing and in shock, back to her hometown many hours away. A couple of years later, when she attempted to move out of the house so she could attend another university, her mother (a wonderful, loving woman) draped herself across the hood of my friend’s car to block her from driving away. My friend slowly reversed out, making her mom gently slip off the front of the car, and drove away.

  To people not raised by parents or in communities with strong cultural and religious traditions that make a lot of things off-limits (the “haram,” a.k.a. prohibited, factor as known by Muslims), this can all sound crazy. Controlling and abusive even. But our parents were doing the best they could to save us from things they thought would hurt us. For our parents, preventing us from sinning was not about control, it was about love.

  Because the trouble wasn’t the sin itself, it was what that could lead to. And of all sins, the one they most worried about was getting involved in a relationship before marriage. It was love. And it was sex.

  * * *

  There are more than fifty words describing various kinds of love in the Arabic language, according to the famous 14th-century Muslim scholar, theologian, and jurist Ibn Qayyim al Jawziyya. From “syaghaf,” love that resides painfully but silently deep in the recesses of the heart, to “ishq,” an extreme and even obsessive manifestation of love with lustful connotations, to “hub,” a pure, clean, unadulterated love, the sound of which appropriately rises like a sigh from the chest and ends with lips pressed tenderly together and released—the Arabs had no aversion to this affliction of the heart. But it was definitely considered an affliction.

  “Love—may God exalt you!—” the frequently lovesick Ibn Hazm writes, “is in truth a baffling ailment, and its remedy is in strict accord with the degree to which it is treated; it is a delightful malady, a most desirable sickness. Whoever is free of it likes not to be immune, and whoever is struck down by it yearns not to recover.”

  Boy, was Ibn Hazm right.

  My adolescence stands as testimony to the desirability of this ailment as I serial-crushed my way through high school, where I was the newspaper editor and photographer-at-large.

  I’d run around school during and after hours, at sporting events, plays, meetings, with my trusty Nikon around my neck. I was intrepid, empowered; I got to go anywhere with my self-made press pass.

  Even more importantly, I had an excuse to take pictures of every boy I crushed on, an honor I bestowed on almost every boy I went to school with for at least a few days each, sometimes simultaneously.

  Once in a while I was joined in the crimson development cave by a student banished to it, forced to learn how to develop pictures to get at least partial credit from Ms. Buzzard, the photography teacher. One day it was the co-captain of the football team, Dave.

  My short, plump body was literally on fire as he hovered behind me, looking over my shoulder into the pans of developer and stop fluid.

  Once the prints were rinsed off and ready to be hung, Dave realized he had a chance to ask me a burning question.

  “So, Rabia, what’s the deal? You’re pretty cute. How come you don’t have a boyfriend?”

  After the shock of being told for the first time in my life by a male specimen that I was not bad to look at, I got my wits together and stammered a response.

  “Well. I’m Muslim. And Muslims, well … Muslims don’t date.”

  * * *

  The more accurate thing to say would have been, “Muslims aren’t supposed to date.” And to be clear, THIS Muslim didn’t. At least not until college, when I met my future ex-husband.

  You cannot lump together the cultural expectations and restrictions of all Muslim Americans or immigrant parents or communities; after all, we are one of the most diverse religious groups in the United States. Still, there are common threads, and they don’t just apply to Muslims. By and large, “eastern” cultures, including “far eastern” cultures, have traditionally been highly conservative on the issues of dating, sex, and marriage.

  Many such cultures traditionally skip right over the dating part and get right to marriage, with sex meant to be strictly within nuptial confines. Arranged marriages have not only been the lot of Middle Easterners and “desis,” they are part of Asian culture writ large. From China to Japan, Korea, Thailand, and other parts of this region, sex segregation and arranged marriages were the custom until just a few decades ago.

  For the children of immigrants in the United States and other Western nations, old ways often stick around longer than they do back in the “homeland.” Parents and grandparents bring and cling to the cultural rules they were raised with, unaware that back home people have moved on, modernized, and, shockingly, changed.

  A prime example of this was the time my father told me in high school that when his sisters and nieces were my age, they all wore their hair well-oiled and in two braids and I should too. He was remembering Lahore in the 1960s. We were in the 1990s, when my female relatives in Pakistan were sporting short Princess Diana cuts.

  Boys, sex, and marriage were unmentionables in our house. We didn’t even use the word “pregnant” because we all knew how women got that way. Well, sort of.

  If Bollywood movies, our only source of romance and escapism, were to be believed, people fell head-first in love through silent but frequently exchanged glances, barely touching but breathless and bothered. If ever the “hero” reached out to try and touch his beloved, she would fake protest, blush, and turn away even as her bosom heaved. Eventually the would-be lovers would beat the odds (meaning their parents), get married, hug for the first time, and the next frame would show them happily prancing around a baby.

  For most of my childhood I thought hugging was how you made babies.

  This eventually was corrected when my mother reluctantly gave signed permission for me to attend a sex-ed class in fifth grade, on the condition of NEVER, EVER discussing what I learned there with anyone. Especially not my younger sister and brother. If ever there was a shock to my system, fifth-grade sex ed was it. I refused to believe for at least another three years that my parents would do any of that, and I refused to believe I’d ever do any of that for at least the next six years.

  The day before my parents dropped me off at college, my mother had a little talk with me. I was going to live in a dorm against her wishes, having managed to snag enough grants and student loans to pay for it myself.

  I was the first kid to go away, I knew this was not going to be easy on my parents, and a part of me didn’t believe it was actually going to happen.

  That’s why, when I sat next to my mother, a pit grew harder and larger in my stomach as I waited for her to say something. Not believing in overt affection or anything less than a strict parent-child dynamic, my mom had never had a heart-to-heart with me before.

  In her gentlest voice she said, “Look, you’re going t
o college and will be in a mixed, co-ed setting and there may be boys who are interested in you. And that’s ok. It’s ok if a boy is interested in you. And it’s ok if you’re interested in him. After all, you have to get married at some point. So don’t be scared to tell us. Come tell me if there’s anyone. It’s ok if you tell me. Also, better if it’s a white boy. White boys will easily convert, and they don’t have all the baggage of large, desi in-law families.”

  It was never made clear how I could entice a non-Muslim white boy to convert and marry me without actually dating one, or letting one touch me, but heck, at least I now had permission.

  Except it wasn’t really permission. It was a trap.

  A year and change later, after I had met and fallen in love with a Pakistani international student who wanted to get married, I went running happily to my mother to break the news. It did not go well.

  Just because she told me it was ok to “meet” someone, code for dating-without-touching-but-with-the-goal-of-marriage, didn’t mean it was. The verbal and emotional smack-down blindsided me. How dare I be involved with a man? How dare I vocalize my desire to get married?! Where was my shame? Since when did girls talk to parents of their own marriage?! Not in 1995 they didn’t, not in the Chaudry house.

  But I was definitely much more old-school than the kids in our communities. By kids I mean people more than five years my junior who operated with more abandon, and started much sooner, when it came to dating.

  My younger siblings were no exception. I knew this intuitively, but also because I saw little signs here and there, heard whispers and allusions to their romantic activities. But I never knew for sure.

  This was another cultural rule—when you know someone is doing something they shouldn’t, you look the other way.

  * * *

  Hiding your sins and the sins of others is not just a cultural norm, it’s a religious mandate in Islam.

  Whoever fulfills the needs of his brother, Allah will fulfill his needs; whoever removes the troubles of his brother, Allah will remove one of his troubles on the Day of Judgment; and whoever covers up the fault of a Muslim, Allah will cover up his fault on the Day of Judgment.

  —Prophet Muhammad (Sahih Bukhari)

  Covering the faults of another essentially boils down to not gossiping and spreading someone’s business. It also means not prying, not spying, leaving people to their personal business. A sin is supposed to be strictly between the sinner and God.

  There is a story about a man who came to the Prophet Muhammad (and these stories, collectively known as hadith, form a large part of the foundation of Islamic belief and practices) and confessed he was sleeping with a woman he wasn’t married to. He felt guilty and thought he should be punished. An important early Muslim, Umar ibn Khattab, who would later become one of the Caliphs of Islam after the Prophet died, heard his confession. He said to the confessor, “Allah kept your secret, so why did not you keep your secret?”

  To be clear, this applies to personal sins only. It doesn’t apply to any instances in which the life, liberty, or property of another has been infringed on or damaged. Those are not just sins, they’re crimes, and they have to be reported, accounted for, and the wronged person made whole.

  But teenagers drinking, smoking pot, dating, sleeping around—all the things that happened in the Baltimore Muslim community (and I dare say most communities, religious and irreligious) despite parental strictness—were off the table. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” were, and are, the rules in South Asian communities when it comes to personal indiscretions.

  The Islamic Society of Baltimore, and all the families connected with it, was no exception. Which is why part of the trauma for the community was that Adnan’s personal life was cracked wide open and made public.

  * * *

  “How did you find out Adnan had a girlfriend?”

  I had never asked Aunty Shamim this before—asking potentially embarrassing questions, prying, we didn’t do this. But now, sixteen years after Adnan was arrested, it seems like enough time has passed to broach the subject.

  Aunty smiles to herself and shifts, blinks rapidly, her eyes down. Even after all this time, she’s not fully comfortable. But she’s also not apologetic.

  Dating was not permissible, not then, and not now. Not for any of her children. The first time she suspected something was when Adnan was dropped off at home by a young woman—she couldn’t see her face, but could see that it was a girl, a girl who quickly drove away. She asked Adnan about her.

  “Just a friend,” was Adnan’s response, but his mother knew something was up. Soon after she caught him up, late at night, on the phone. She heard him speaking in a low voice and knew it couldn’t be with another guy, not at that hour, not in that tone. So she carefully picked up a receiver in another room and caught him red-handed.

  After that came the arguments between mother and son. Adnan’s father stayed out of it; he was completely unconcerned. All he knew was that Adnan was a good student, went with him to the mosque, was polite, and would soon be off to college.

  Aunty is young for a grandmother. She is slight, with clear, fair skin, bright eyes, and frizzy hair that can never seem to stay within the confines of a scarf or a hair tie.

  She was only sixteen when the family of Syed Rahman came around, seeking a suitable bride for him. He was forty-one, had a good life in the United States, and his father had a friend who had a niece they heard was lovely. Her name was Shamim but she didn’t come from Turu, the same small village as Syed’s family. Shamim lived with her parents and six sisters in Mardan, the “city of hospitality” in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. She was a student, and a bit too young to be married off just yet. But two years later her parents consented.

  Aunty Shamim was eighteen when she married her forty-three-year-old husband, a man she didn’t know who lived in the United States. Two weeks after the wedding in Pakistan, she found herself in Baltimore.

  She was less nervous than her family about marrying a man more than twice her age and then moving halfway across the world. Her fortitude in that stressful situation is no surprise to me. Since Adnan’s arrest she has been a pillar of strength, putting on an outward appearance of resolve, sometimes even cheer, when in public.

  But while she was able to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of America, opening and running her own home daycare center as she raised three boys, her cultural expectations and traditions remained relatively firm. At least when it came to dating.

  Pakistan, some may be surprised to know, is much more diverse in its range of conservatism to liberalism than are most countries in the Western hemisphere. Some of this diversity is a function of local tradition, some a function of local development, and some a function of family custom.

  In large cities like Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi, you’ll find young women filling universities and workplaces, hair fashionably coiffed, showing off trendy clothing. And I don’t mean just now. My mother recalls being at the university in Lahore in the 1960s when some of her classmates decided to join the sexual revolution and dispense with wearing bras. At the same time my mother had decided, on her own, to start wearing a burka to cover up everything, including her face. She didn’t come from a family where that was the norm. Her own mother was a college graduate at a time when not many women made it that far in education, and my “Nani” (maternal grandmother) and her sisters thought nothing of wearing sleeveless sari blouses, hair piled into beehives or bouffants. My burka’d mother, however, ran a girls’ college while Nani never worked outside of the home.

  It wasn’t odd then, or now, to find families in the city where some women worked, others didn’t get past grade school, some preferred burkas, and others skin-tight sleeveless kurtas (longish shirts). Out in the villages, you may find less diversity in what is socially acceptable; it usually depends on regional ethnicity and local tradition.

  My parents’ families are from the Punjab region, where women are stereotyped as forward and confide
nt. I’ve heard this is linked to the strong agricultural tradition of the area, in which women historically worked the fields instead of staying confined to the house, or to Punjabi culture itself, which is infamous for being boisterous and unfiltered.

  Adnan’s family comes from a region of Pakistan that many Punjabis find as foreign as China.

  Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (“KPK”), previously known as the NWFP or North-West Frontier Province, is one of four provincial regions in Pakistan. KPK is the northernmost province in the country, bordered by Afghanistan to the west and north, and by Azad Kashmir to the east. Geographically, it is one of the most stunning regions in Pakistan.

  Snowcapped peaks and deep green valleys invite a lot of Pakistani tourists, honeymooners, global adventure seekers, and mountain climbers. Ancient Buddhist and Hindu ruins dot the landscape.

  The Pashtuns are known to be immensely hospitable, loyal, and have a deep sense of traditional values in which the honor of family and guests is paramount. Pashtuns are also the butt of many jokes, chided for being simple-minded, with little common sense and zero street smarts. But while other Pakistanis may find their “simplicity” amusing, the Pashtun’s immovable sense of family and tribal affiliation, which are both key to the Pashtun identity and sacred institutions, is duly admired. It could not have been easy for Aunty Shamim and Uncle Syed to have left their families and migrate halfway across the world, but the promise of a better life for their future family compelled them.

  Adnan’s parents put down roots in the Catonsville area. They had no other family in the entire country, much less in Maryland, but they had the mosque. And this would be the mosque Adnan and his brothers would be raised in; this would be the community that was their family.