[Songbird]

The women entered the ballroom first and were instructed to sit in groups of five at the neatly arranged circular tables. The men were next, also in groups of five. We filled the empty seats between the women as we joined them.

At the far end of the ballroom, rows of chairs were lined up for the accompanying chaperones. Almost all mothers or sisters, they had been given strict orders not to interfere or further coach their charges until the last hour, when they were free to meet and pass judgment on whomsoever their child or sibling had decided to spend time with. They sat at the back of the room like jurors at a trial.

I chose to go alone to the banquet, although my mother had offered to come. "I'll just sit in the back. I won't say a thing," she promised.

Once we were all seated, we were given simple instructions over the loudspeakers. We would be given five minutes to introduce ourselves, after which the men were to move to the next table and begin the process again. The women were to remain seated. If someone at the table interested us, we could take notes or ask for an e-mail address or phone number, or more decorously, seek them out during dinner.

Typically, US speed dating is a one-on-one, five- to seven-minute "get-to-know-you" session. The origins of the ritual, which took off in the late 1990s, are usually credited to Yaacov Deyo, an orthodox Los Angeles rabbi who was looking for a way to help Jewish singles meet and marry.

As a group affair, the Matrimonial Banquet mimics the way that most Muslim boys and girls socialise, in self-selected, often gender-segregated, cliques. These groups prevent intimate interactions with unrelated members of the opposite sex, which is generally taboo among conservative Muslims. Even if the Chicago banquets appeared different, the goal of Muslim speed dating was distinctly in line with Rabbi Deyo's original system.
The tables we sat at were themselves bare, save for a white tablecloth, a handful of Hershey's Kisses chocolates and a lime green flyer from the organisers, thanking us for letting them be a part of "the biggest and most important step in [our] life". No pressure then.

I had entered the ballroom with four other men - an architect, a bank information technology manager, a software engineer and a school assistant principal - and we got to know each other well as we travelled from table to table.

They were dressed as I was: not formal, not quite casual, but all in western clothes. Some were clean-cut with sharp features and deep-set eyes, others with trim beards and bushy black hair.

At the first table, the women gave us their condensed biographies. There was a Nasa engineer, an ophthalmologist, a schoolteacher, a dentist, and someone who had once portrayed Princess Jasmine from Aladdin at Disneyland. Like us, they were mainly Indian and Pakistani, Egyptian and Saudi, but many more were dressed in non-western garments - sequins trailed from prismatic headscarves that occasionally shimmered in the ballroom's overhead lights.

Over the next two hours, I met nearly 100 women, averaging about a woman a minute. The faces of the first five are among the few that I remember well, not only because the Nasa engineer had some sort of bouffant squirrel's nest for hair but also because Princess Jasmine, who looked nothing like the character she had played, was one of the more engaging women I met that Saturday, witty and sarcastic with mischievous eyes.

You might have thought that a table of over-30s would have a relatively easy time conversing. That was not the case. If I added up the moments of uncomfortable silence at the 20 or so tables I visited, I could easily have made the time to meet another 50 women. Not that that would have helped conversation.

In our allotted five minutes at each table, four were spent introducing ourselves to the group. Over the course of two hours, these became pared down to a few relevant nouns: "Farooq, writer, Brooklyn, 32." Many women asked the men about their age but, out of politeness, few men asked the women.

How you used the remaining minute relied on a quick calculation: which of the two women seated next to you seemed most interesting based solely on her appearance and the four words she used to described herself.

I realised that I could increase my chance of success if I scouted ahead, jockeying for position as we switched tables. Often, this technique paid off. I met an assistant professor of pharmacology from New Mexico with whom I shared an interest in experiencing Chicago's nightlife.


As we switched tables, I found the "resumes" of my competitors lying around, several printed on expensive linen paper, watermarked with complex floral arrangements. Almost all were from foreign-born software professionals. One e-mail username, no doubt customised for the event, read: greatcompanion. For once in my life, I was glad that I'd come relatively unprepared.

The suitors described themselves in categories that included education, profession and religion, but also languages (English and Urdu); sect (Shi'a or Sunni); family values ("moderate"); religiosity ("I do observe prayers regularly and fast during Ramadan"); family background ("We are five brothers and one sister"); and "about you" sections. One specified that a future wife should be able to "laugh at my lame jokes", which I think should be mandatory for all spouses, regardless of religion, religiosity, sect, family values - or even gender.

When the rotations finally came to an end in the early evening, between the late afternoon (Asr) and evening (Maghrib) prayers, a sense of relief swept through the ballroom. We lined up for our buffet-style dinner of pasta, fruit salad and apple pie. This time, the elders went first.

Somewhat to my surprise, a quarter of the attendees re-segregated into male and female groups during dinner, perhaps exhausted by the constant barrage from members of the opposite sex.

Carrying a plateful of lukewarm pasta, I searched for Princess Jasmine and a writer/filmmaker that I had met towards the end of the rotations. We had discovered that the writer lived in Brooklyn and had attended the West Coast version of my East Coast alma mater. During the earlier table-hopping portion of the evening, we had been about to exchange phone numbers when time was called.

When I finally spotted them, both Princess Jasmine and the writer had men queuing up on either side as if they were minor celebrities signing autographs. The pharmacology professor had already left for the evening - the lights of downtown Chicago beckoned.
I met up again with Usman, the psychiatrist. He was sitting across the ballroom at a table of young men. At 30, he was one of the oldest in his group. Despite his sleek attire, he hadn't fared any better than he had at last year's event.

For those with the energy, the Matrimonial Banquet went on for another day and in the same format with, I suspected, a lot of the same faces. Usman had registered and paid for both Saturday and Sunday and would return, he said, to keep trying to find wife number two.

As much as I admired his perseverance, I flew back early the next day. Although the banquet proved that there are many attractive, intelligent Muslim women and men seeking alternative ways to meet and, eventually, marry, I came away thinking that, for me, there were better ways to find a match - that is to say, ways that were less supervised or structured.

But, at the very least, I had returned to Brooklyn with a few promising telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, instead of a handful of warm baklava, like I had the last time.