Love in a Headscarf by Shelina Janmohamed Read Free Book Online

well-heeled, well-settled families with a professional father and a stay-at-home mother, the two of whom met at university, got married, bought houses in leafy Winchmore Hill, multiplied immediately, and sent their children to relive their circle of life? Only later, as the world became smaller, as people’s eyes widened at the complexities of global cultures, and as my confidence in my own faith and culture grew, were my answers delivered with edgy attitude about fusion style, tasty spicy cuisine, and fashionable henna art; and about my faith and the belief that it had something strong to offer.
    My great-grandparents had traveled from Gujarat in India to settle in East Africa in the late nineteenth century. They were part of a great wave of Indians moving from the British Empire’s subcontinental colony to its developing East African territories. The British encouraged many men to participate in the migration in order to provide labor to build the East African railways and start developing the region. Women undertook the migration soon after. Some went because famine was ravaging areas like the Gujarat and the Punjab. Others went to seek economic improvement. The Asian migrants spread to the tip of South Africa and as far west as the stylized “Heart of Darkness” in the center of the vast uncharted continent. That there were people already settled there who lived untouched lives with their own histories and customs was overlooked by the British. The subcontinental Asians settled fast, turning areas like today’s Nairobi, now capital of Kenya, from an undeveloped area, first into a vast tented metropolis, and then into a city, almost overnight.
    The Asians joined a swirling mass of ethnicities. East Africa was occupied by both the British and the Germans. The French and Portuguese also held territories in the neighboring Congo and Mozambique. The coastal areas had long been ruled by Oman, a great seafaring nation on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula that had grown rich through the frankincense it exported. Only on the south coast of Oman did these amazing trees grow with their dazzlingly hypnotic fragrant sap that was turned into perfume and sold at high prices around the world. They used their wealth and sea skills to expand their empire, stretching, in particular, southward along the eastern seaboard of Africa. They named the now capital of Tanzania, where my parents spent the first years of their marriage, Dar-es-Salaam, the land of peace and safety, a name which persists today. The Omanis also called the coasts Sawaahil, according to the Arabic word, and the language that was created on fusing with the local dialects has come to be known as Swahili, the language of the coast. Today it is spoken as the official language in several countries, including Tanzania, the home of my parents and grandparents.
    In the mid-1850s, before my great-grandparents had sailed from Gujarat to what was then Tanganyika, their small Hindu community had converted to Islam. Family histories point to people who embraced Islam with passion and simplicity, trying to create lives built around their newfound faith. The stories reveal a sense of innocent desire for spirituality and a bright-eyed recognition of truth. There was, of course, no Internet, no high-speed delivery, no flying around the world to teach and learn. Instead such communities were sent teachers from the historic Muslim heartlands of the Middle East. The scholars who arrived from the traditional seminaries would then learn the local languages.
    Books, including the Qur’an itself, were slowly translated from Arabic, Persian, and even Urdu into Gujarati. The Qur’an lay at the very core of Islamic belief: 114 chapters that Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad received by divine revelation in small sections through the latter years of his life. It lays out the principal beliefs of Islam and guidance on how to be a good Muslim. It was preserved in writing soon after