THE SECRET LIVES OF ‘NAUGHTY’ MUSLIMS
And what it’s doing to their mental health
THE SECRET LIFE OF A 'NAUGHTY' MUSLIM
i’ve just got in. The oven clock flashes 1.03am. I fill a glass with water while simultaneously taking off the highheeled boots I’ve had on since 7.30am yesterday. My mouth has the stale tang of several tequila shots and half a packet of Marlboro Lights. I knock the water back greedily. From out of the early-morning gloaming I see my phone light up – a WhatsApp from someone I halfremember meeting last night. My eyes flick over the preview message: “Come over,” it says. I consider it. Then I remember… it’s only Wednesday.
To many, this might sound like a standard Tuesday night for a 26-yearold woman, especially if you work in London, as I do. For me, however, every drag of a cigarette, every slam of a shot, every line of cocaine I’ve experimented with in dimly lit bathrooms, and every unsuitable boy I’ve drunkenly kissed at the end of the night, holds heavy consequences. That’s because my family are Muslim, which means they strongly disapprove of 99% of the life choices I have made tonight. So strongly, in fact, that if they ever found out, I may as well be dead to them. They would most likely cease all contact with me.
I am what you might call Muslimish. That is to say I am a Muslim woman who lives, for the most part, by western standards. And that’s problematic for everyone – the men I date, the friendships I keep and, most of all, the family I love more than anything.
It also means I live my life in a perpetual state of fracture, caught between two cultural expectations,
the psychological consequences of which can be immense for the thousands of young Muslim-ish women and men just like me.
Feeling different
I was raised in a sleepy Yorkshire town just outside Leeds city centre in the early ’90s. Though Leeds was hugely multicultural even back then, in the cobbled town where I grew up I was one of only three brown faces at school (the second being my own brother). Still, I didn’t realise I was any different to the other children until one day a young boy refused to sit next to me at primary school. I was a “Paki”, he said, as though that explained everything. As a six-year-old, I didn’t fully understand what that meant, other than it meant I was different. After that, difference, or I should say my difference, started to appear everywhere. From the thick, regimented plaits my parents insisted I wear at school to the curry-stained fingertips I tried so desperately to hide. Like most kids, I just wanted to be “normal”. I would have given anything to fit in.
My dad moved to the UK from India in the ’80s to work in the NHS. He met and married my mum not long after, and though I suspect both would have liked to have returned to the heat and loving familiarity of India, instead they stayed in Britain – their desire to give their children a life filled with all the opportunities the UK offered greater than their need to be back home. And so Dad did what all good immigrants did – he toiled. And toiled. I remember him walking to work in the snow late at night. He deliberately worked nights so that he could have breakfast with us each morning and catch up with us each evening after school. Every day Dad had to deal with the sting of racist comments – from those in the street to the very patients he helped each day, but he carried on regardless. He wanted his hardworking, good Muslim daughter to have the exact same chances every other child in England had. Racism was a small price to pay.
And so to my parents, and my extended family who live halfway across the world, I am that: a hardworking, serious media professional waiting to meet my Nice Muslim Prince. To them, I am a credit to my parents. I am the shiny product of what hard work and sacrifice can bring. Except, of course… I am not.
Which is hard. Because by western standards I am, in fact, all of these things. By Muslim standards, if the truth were ever known, I am not. The reason I am single is not because I haven’t found a Nice Muslim Boy to settle down with. It is because I can’t imagine my life with one. How does that make me feel? Guilty, yes. But it’s more than that. It’s a deep, stinging shame. And the problem with shame is that sometimes the more you hide it, the more you step deeper into it…
Finding the real-ish me
Double lives are not unusual for the offspring of immigrant parents, particularly those in the Muslim community. I have friends who have only ever had sex in discreetly parked cars as their parents are too strict to let them spend the night away from home. Then there are others who regularly indulge in anal sex because… well… technically it means they are still virgins with their hymens intact.
I know hijabi sisters who smoke weed non-stop, to take the edge off
“I live my life in a state of perpetual fracture”