Shelina Zahra Janmohamed grew up in a world where it was not uncommon for buxom aunties to make rules about marriage. Among other things, these women decreed that the girl should always be younger than the boy, less educated and shorter. However, as the London-based Janmohamed writes in Love in a Headscarf, her recently published memoir about finding 'the one', the aunties did not mind if the boy gelled his hair to appear taller. Apart from aunties, the cast of characters that populate Janmohamed's book include potential bridegrooms, at least one of whom use "struck by lightning" as an excuse for failing to respond to her e-mails. But while Love in a Headscarf is replete with this and similar hilarious encounters, and comes packaged in a pretty pink cover, it would be a mistake to slot it as just another addition to the 'chick lit' genre.
In the book, Janmohamed attempts to dispel stereotypical notions about Muslim women, who are often seen – particularly in the West – as oppressed creatures forced into marriage, without a mind to call their own. In contrast, her account is that of a Muslim woman who finds her religion to be "positive" and "uplifting", and her quest for the perfect man is in many ways also a spiritual journey. "This seemed a perfect way to make people understand what it was like to be a Muslim woman, through the most universal of stories, which is about love," Janmohamed said during a recent interview at a café in North London. After all, "everybody loves a good story about love." Her search for a husband spanned over a decade, beginning when she was a 19-year-old student at Oxford University, on a "Good Headscarf Day" as she calls it.
The daughter of parents who emigrated from Tanzania during the 1960s (her great-grandparents moved across the Arabian Sea to Tanzania from Kutch in the mid-1850s), Janmohamed seems to straddle her various identities – British, Muslim, Southasian – with ease. When she was young, however, she behaved differently in different settings: at the girls-only school where she studied, the mosque, her home. "I felt very comfortable with various parts of my life," she says. "What I couldn't work out was how to integrate them, so I could be the same person in all aspects of my life. And it took me many years, as I think it does many people, to find an answer to that."
Janmohamed knew she would have an arranged marriage, a concept many in the West consider strange and exotic. "I find that people are really curious about arranged marriage," she says. "But when it's explained properly, they feel a bit jealous. Because as far as I am concerned, an arranged marriage is one where your family and friends are actively looking for a potential boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband – so, frankly, isn't that a great thing?" Therefore, though she grew up swooning over John Travolta in the film Grease and dreamed of marrying him, she was quite happy with the idea that her parents would be introducing her to potential husbands.