Creative Representations of Muslim Voices

STORY:

Muna sat in a corner, tapping her feet to the rhythm of the ululations that careened around the room. The singing and drumming had been going on for hours now, and still the wedding party was in full swing. She surveyed the room. Remnants of a feast lay scattered on tables, and the smell of spices rose through the air, mingling with the scent of perfume. A sea of bodies swayed on the dance floor, their feet flashing in the light, while off to the side she could see the Imam intoning the benefits of religious scholarship to a few disinterested guests. But at the center of it all was Zein.

Zein. The village’s darling. That strange man who was always ‘slain by love,’ always surrounded by desperate mothers and the mysterious ascetic Haneen. The one they say has God’s grace upon him, who has the power to reveal a girl’s beauty and attract her a husband almost instantaneously. There he was, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, laughing with that bizarre, donkey-like laugh of his, surrounded by a ring of girls and adoring mothers. The women showered him with flattery, complimented his charm and abilities, invited him for tea, pulled him like a rope in different directions toward their dancing daughters. From her vantage point, Muna could hear snippets of their overtures: “My Laila is the most beautiful, the most virtuous,” “My daughter has a voice like honey,” “Have you seen my Mariam’s lovely eyes?” And the girls batted their eyelashes and twirled suggestively, and Muna’s stomach twisted into knots.

She rose with the intention of making a stealthy exit, but her movement caught the eye of her mother, who rushed over from the throng of Zein’s admirers before Muna could escape. Her heart sunk. Her mother’s face bore the look of shame mingled with exasperation that Muna knew so well.

“Muna, why aren’t you dancing with the other girls? Why must you always insist upon being a wallflower?” Her mother chastised her angrily, glancing around as she did so as if embarrassed to be associated with such a failure of a daughter. “Don’t you want a husband? Stop sulking and come talk to Zein, for the sake of your future!”

Before Muna could respond, her mother had grabbed her by the arm and was dragging her over towards Zein, pulling her through the sea of mothers and daughters right up to the legend himself. “Zein, this is my habibi Muna. Isn’t she lovely? I assure you she is as gentle as a lamb, the sweetest girl in this village.”

Muna, cringing at the desperation in her mother’s voice, looked up at Zein. She had never been this close to him. She noticed for this first time his small, bloodshot eyes, and just how long and lopsided his face appeared, and wondered how this crazy-looking man had acquired so much power in deciding a girl’s fate. It was this nearly-toothless man who had been responsible for the marriages of her cousin Azza, her Bedouin friend Haleema, and her neighbor Alawiyya; once they had unwittingly ‘slain’ him, Zein had taken Muna’s friends away from her one by one. She was the last one standing.

She stood there and said nothing as Zein paused and looked her up and down briefly before turning back to the crowd and resuming his banter. Muna exhaled, a sense of profound relief washing over her. Her slaying powers had clearly not risen to the occasion. She could sense her mother’s palpable disappointment radiating from behind her, but before her mother could catch her eye, Muna turned and ran for the door, bursting into the dark night.

Outside, the fresh night air folded over her like a cloak, and she felt she could breathe for the first time that evening.  She could still hear the muffled beat of drums as she looked up at the sky. She’d always found comfort in the stars, in their ever-present, shining distance, a reminder that the universe was bigger and more meaningful than her village and its politics and oddities and endless string of weddings. It was here, looking up at the stars, that Muna felt most in touch with God. Here he was not the Imam’s God of law and ritual, nor Haneen’s God of mystical prophecy, but her God – one who comforted her and listened to her, who knew that she was more than just a pretty face. As she gazed at the stars, the drumbeats faded away into nothingness, and she prayed to her God to be left in peace for just a little while longer.

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EXPLANATION:

For this piece, I wrote a short story that re-tells parts of “The Wedding of Zein” from the perspective of a girl living in Zein’s village. The subservient status of women is a recurring theme in “The Wedding of Zein,” in which girls are viewed as simply beautiful objects to be married off, without any say in deciding their own futures or identities. Because the village where the story takes place views girls in this way, their voices are absent from “The Wedding of Zein”; it is a story told mainly through the eyes of men, and only occasionally through older women (Amna and Saadiya), who seem to have acquired voices and identities through their status as wives. Girls are left voiceless, spoken about and for by men in the story, just as they are in society.

I decided to invert this, and give girls a voice. My protagonist, Muna, is a village girl whose mother is desperate to attract Zein’s attention and use Zein (as all the mothers try to do) to marry her off. Muna has no interest in marriage; she is still a young girl trying to develop her sense of self, despite living in an environment that places no value on female identity. The story takes place at a wedding, since weddings were a central part of “The Wedding of Zein.” Muna dislikes the attention paid to girl’s physical beauty, and feels uncomfortable watching the girls dancing to display their beauty to Zein and their mothers pointing out their physical attributes, all in the effort to win Zein’s approval. Muna ultimately rejects her mother’s attempts to do the same, escaping the villagers and the pressures of marriage temporarily to seek solace in the stars and God.

My aim was to highlight how difficult it is to be a girl in a world like the one in “The Wedding of Zein,”in which most girls have no control over their destinies, and are valued for their physical beauty and ability to attract a husband. In such a world, girls must feel enormous pressure from family and the society at large to bend to these societal norms, all while going through the turbulent time that is adolescence and struggling to make sense of religion and what it demands of them (this was the purpose behind Muna’s talk of her God, versus the religious perspectives of the Imam and Haneen, at the end of my story).

In terms of the language used in the story itself, I tried to borrow imagery and diction from “The Wedding of Zein” — such as the “ululations” at the wedding, descriptions of Zein’s appearance, and references to the Imam and Haneen – in order to stay true to Zein’s world and make it a re-telling (versus a completely different story). By mirroring the original story’s language, while communicating a very different narrative, I hope I have succeeded in throwing a critical light upon the problematic view of girls that “The Wedding of Zein” perpetuates.