[Songbird]

FT.com site : 'You don't have to meet someone but it'd be nice'.
Farooq Ahmed

21 September 2007

Finding a date is hard enough but for many modern Muslims in the west it's even tougher. Meeting in bars is prohibitively difficult due to Islamic temperance laws. A similar injunction against unmarried Muslim men and women canoodling, or even spending unchaperoned time together, rules out many other forms of dating. And thus, young Muslims find themselves torn between the values of their immigrant parents, who champion semi-arranged or assisted marriages, and the dominant western culture, which prizes "love marriages", usually preceded by some form of casual dating.

Five years ago, however, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) held its first "Matrimonial Banquet" and as a result a form of Muslim speed dating was born.

The banquet is part of a long-running annual convention organised by ISNA, an umbrella organisation for Muslim groups in the US and Canada, similar to the Muslim Council of Britain. Young Muslims, the organisers realised, were already using the event to meet and mingle. Now all that was needed was a little structure and supervision. The banquet followed a matrimonial referral service that had been provided by ISNA. Under the old system, a Middle Eastern Muslim woman living in the Pacific North-west, for example, could comb through folders, sorted by age and geographical location, to obtain the contact information of a 25-year-old, Egyptian engineering student with dark hair and dark eyes, of moderate religiosity, who lived in Seattle. Whether the two would ever meet was entirely up to them.

Ghazala Yasmeen, the director of this year's Matrimonial Banquet, who is in her 40s and had an arranged marriage in Karachi 18 years ago, says the switch to the event's current format was made because "People wanted to see each other, face-to-face, not just as slips of paper."

I am a first-generation south Asian-American Muslim and grew up near Kansas City, Missouri. As I am constantly reminded by my younger sister, I am, at the age of 32, one of the few from my peer group to remain unwed. Our parents raised us in homes that bridged cultures: tacos were as common as chicken curry for dinner. Though observant of Islamic traditions, my parents are by no means dogmatic or conservative. My mother and sister choose not to observe hijab or wear a headscarf, except to enter mosques, where it's mandatory.

Fourteen years ago, I left the Midwest for the East Coast, at first to attend college. Like many writers, I eventually found my way to Brooklyn.

But this year, over Labor Day weekend at the end of August, I travelled to Chicago to attend the 44th Annual ISNA convention, "Upholding Faith, Serving Humanity", to check out the Matrimonial Banquet. The conference took place in a massive convention centre and hotel complex near O'Hare airport, bringing tens of thousands of Muslims to the city. (And, I suspect, a number of federal law enforcement agents.)

The convention attracts mainly Sunnis from India and Pakistan but also draws Shi'as, such as myself, Sufis, African, African-American, Arab, and east-Asian Muslims, who come to attend sessions on topics affecting the ummah - the community - such as "Ending US Sponsored Torture", "Addressing the Root Causes of Terrorism" and "Re-Inventing the Mosque for our Children".

I last attended the convention more than a decade ago and don't have pleasant memories. Some friends and I were lured into a subterranean kitchen with the promise of gainful employment. We were paid meagre wages but assured a hefty bonus at the end. We washed dishes, sliced open gallon drums of tomato sauce, and refilled tray-after-tray of halal kebabs, aromatic biryanis and colourful curries.

When the conference finished, we approached our overlord in chef's whites for our reward. He led us into a backroom that was filled with trays of baklava, honey oozing like sap between layers of crisp filo dough. "Take as much as you want," he said. I hadn't been back to the convention since that experience.

But it was then that I found out about the Matrimonial Banquet. The morning of this year's banquet found me trimming my beard, spiking my hair, slipping on a striped brown, button-down shirt and dark jeans, and exchanging my Adidas trainers for a pair of maroon fake alligator-skin dress shoes. I was going for the Muslim hipster look.

As I entered the lobby of the O'Hare Hyatt, chic low-slung, mid-century modern furniture everywhere, a session had just concluded for the Muslim Youth of North America, a group that provides a forum for Muslim teenagers. The hotel's cafes and bars were the place to hang out. Alcohol, in deference to sharia, Islamic law, was safely locked up. Bottles of Grey Goose glistened behind glass cabinets, while flocks of boys with feathery facial hair alighted on bar stools and attempted to flirt with girls on the other side of the lobby.
Outside the ballroom, I joined a swelling crowd of professional-looking men and women. Some exchanged business cards and scrawled phone numbers on scraps of paper, getting a jump on the competition. Others stood along the wall, being coached by their mothers; we were told we could bring one chaperone with us, and many had. Among the advice being dispensed, I heard: "Remember, you don't have to find someone but it would be nice if you did." "Tell them about your degrees and your family, that is very important, but don't mention your father's glaucoma."

Nearly all 400 of us, an equal number of men and women, had registered online and paid $65 to spend the next four hours with one another. We are to speed-date for two hours, then with the following two hours left for mingling over a pasta meal.

At the check-in desk where I went to pick up my name-tag, stood a line of aunties. "Auntie" is used throughout south Asia as a term of endearment, referring to an older woman who may or may not be a blood relative. Aunties are often stern, judgmental and have an uncanny ability to unman a potential suitor by placing emphasis on a single word. A typical utterance would be: "Yes, yes, he went to graduate college but, dear, he is a writer."

An auntie had just handed me my baby-blue name tag - the women's were pink - when I ran into a friend, whom I will call Usman. He was a psychiatrist from the mid-sized Midwestern town where we grew up. Sharply dressed in a dark suit, he had returned to the banquet for a second consecutive year and was one of a handful of participants who had arrived armed with someone else's success story - inevitably, a neighbour's cousin or cousin's neighbour had found his wife at this event a few years ago. Usman himself was looking for his second wife. The first had fled back to Pakistan under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

"Is that what you're wearing?" he asked in an awkward attempt to be helpful. I joined the queue to enter the ballroom feeling somewhat deflated. As we waited to meet our potential future spouses, Yasmeen's assistants segregated us by gender, directing the women to one set of doors and the men to another. While this did seem somewhat inauspicious - only moments before we had been socialising as one loud, nervous and confused group - what followed was measurably worse. The assistants began to subdivide each gender by age: 20- to 30-year-olds on one side, 31 and up on another.

I graduated to the latter group a few years ago and reluctantly joined this line of men, most of them significantly older and taller than me.