Photography by Whitney Curtis
They tried to just meet somebody and fall in love. At least, Fayaz and Mehdi did. Fayaz had a couple of mad crushes and waited hopefully, and Mehdi dated one woman for five years and another for two.
In the end, though, the relationships fizzled, and both men grudgingly returned to their parents’ pragmatic tradition—with two major caveats.
They wanted women with minds of their own. And they wanted to feel at least the possibility of love, from the start.
Fayaz Suleman came to the United States from Belgaum, India, in September 2001. Even in grad school, studying for a master’s degree in industrial engineering, he forced himself to stay practical: “There were girls from other religions I was infatuated with, but I kept myself back, because I knew this was not going to work.” In 2004, he finished his degree and started working full time for CitiMortgage. Then came the family pressure: “‘Have you met someone yet? Now that you are earning a good wage, Fayaz, it is time to settle down,’” he recalls his family saying.
Fine with him—but he hadn’t met a single woman who matched his checklist and also found him suitable. Suleman wanted his wife to be a faithful Muslim with a college education. “It doesn’t matter what field,” he told me last summer, “just so she has some goals, is driven toward something, and is intelligent. Education changes someone’s outlook.” He also wanted her to look a certain way: “Sharp features; a chiseled nose. As far as the body is concerned, she should certainly not be too heavy. But the key thing is the face.”
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Over the years, he’d narrowed his search further: He wanted a wife from the Indian subcontinent, so she’d remember Bollywood movies and like curry and understand cultural references. “That way, when you crack a joke, you don’t have to analyze it to make someone understand.”
He looked, and his family and friends looked for him. Some women were too ambitious; others, too passive. His 30th birthday came. Then his 31st. “Why does she have to have a strong personality?” his friends asked.
“Not only for me, but for the sake of our children,” he replied solemnly.
“Why do you care about her nose? You have too many criteria!” his friends told him, exasperated.
“Facial expressions are very important,” he insisted. “They reflect your nature.”
“Why do you care if she’s smart?” they asked, and he was reminded of a movie plot in which the smart people don’t get married, because they’re looking for just the right person, but the dumb people marry unthinkingly, and soon the world is full of dumb people.
Finally, he turned to Maliha Aziz (pictured above), who had set up the online Muslim Network of St. Louis Matrimonial Service in 2001 because people at the Islamic Center told her it was urgently needed.
She gently informed Fayaz that yes, he had too many criteria. Then she started sorting through her database.
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Sitting at her dining-room table, the porcelain cups of chai seeming to float just above its gleaming wood surface, Aziz introduces her daughter, Tahreem, who’s 23 and just starting med school. Together, they try to explain how different it is here, how much has changed since Maliha grew up in Karachi, Pakistan.
“There, everyone knows everyone, and everyone is Muslim,” Maliha says. “Here, it is not so easy!”
The 2008 U.S. Census figures show 70,000 Muslims in the greater St. Louis area, and the number’s growing. Still, that doesn’t mean Southeast Asian Muslims of the right age and gender will be abundant.
“And within the communities, there is a lot of cultural difference,” Maliha says. “Karachi culture, for example, has always been more cosmopolitan. We speak Urdu.”
“A lot of Punjabi people want a Punjabi person,” Tahreem explains. “Our cultures are very different.”
“We are more demure and calm,” Maliha says. “And we are very judgmental! A Punjabi person will hear music and start dancing. For us, dancing in public is not respectable. For us, manners, education, how you walk, being soft-spoken are all very important.”
Those cultural differences matter even more than they would in a typical Western marriage: “We believe that marriage is among families, not between two people,” Maliha says. “My father used to say, ‘When the two families sit together, they should be able to talk to each other.’”
When she asks an applicant’s language on her website, she means mother tongue—a clue to far more than linguistics.
She also asks for religious inclination (conservative, moderate, liberal); whether one is of the Sunni or Shia school of thought; whether a woman wears the hijab (head scarf); whether a man wants “a hijabi girl.”
“A lot of my friends wear the hijab, but they’re like me, moderate to liberal, and they don’t want somebody asking for the hijab,” inserts Tahreem. “Boys who ask for it are very, very conservative.”
There’s subtext to the question about smoking and drinking, too: “Nobody writes that they do,” says Tahreem, “but people do, which really sucks.”
Maliha tells her applicants, “Just because it says no does not mean they don’t. But if you ask directly, most will tell you if they do or not.”
Seeing me blink, she explains: “A lot of the social drinkers think that is not considered drinking. It’s considered posh to drink in Pakistan, so really rich people often drink.”
After the obvious questions—education, occupation, visa status—come physical attributes. Here, mother and daughter both admit, the process veers perilously close to online shopping. You give your own age, height, and skin color (“fair, light wheatish, medium wheatish, brown—but nobody ever puts brown,” Tahreem informs me), and then what you’re looking for in a mate.
“Complexion is big,” Maliha sighs. “Everyone is looking for a lighter complexion.”
“Which is weird,” her daughter remarks, “because Americans try to tan!”
Maliha knows that by listing physical attributes, she’s asking for trouble: “They start measuring people by inches: how much waist, how much chest, how tall. Kids here are a lot fatter; the girls who are heavy want boys who are not, and the boys who are heavy are still looking for thin girls. The tall boys are looking for tall girls, and so are the short boys, so their kids will be taller! They are not ready to compromise.”
She does a little tsking about Fayaz, wondering if that checklist of his will soften.
“The problem with kids now is, they live in a very idealistic society. Media and all the movies have shown them that there is this ideal relationship. They think there is a button somewhere, and it just clicks,” she says. She shakes her head. “There is no click. Marriage is the hardest thing a person does.”
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Dr. Mahmood Qalbani, an anesthesiologist in West County, had his marriage arranged when he was 26. He was about to leave Pakistan to do postgraduate study in England. The friend of a friend suggested a match between him and Dr. Shireen Ansari, a gynecologist who’d been at med school with him.
He didn’t even remember her. She says she noticed him—but it stopped there.
“In those days, a good girl never talked to a boy,” she explains. “The first time I saw him sitting next to me—a man—oh my God!”
They were engaged within a week, Mahmood recalls. “We met for the first time on our wedding night. We fell in love maybe a year later.”
A—year?
“We became friends first, went through the initial ups and downs. Our personalities were entirely different,” he says. “She’d lost her parents and been pampered a lot, and I was one of seven boys, so we just grew up. She wanted to be special, which I learned later on, and she learned our way of thinking.”
With an arranged marriage, it’s said, the romance comes after the ceremony, as you explore the mystery of the person to whom you’ve committed yourself. There aren’t any initial fireworks. “There was never a ‘click,’” Mahmood says, rolling his eyes at young people’s fancies. “It’s a learning process. Mehdi was our first baby, and that was a turning point; it made us very close. She, being a gynecologist, was more scared of babies than I was! I used to take care of him.”
They had two more sons, and all three are now grown into successful young professionals, quite westernized. Mahmood and Shireen are keenly aware that their boys are bicultural. They’re not traditional Muslims themselves: They aren’t especially religious, and their marriage is hardly male-dominated.
“Mahmood is so nice and understanding, he lets me do whatever I want,” Shireen giggles. “We disagree on so many things. We will sit and argue and then sit and watch a movie together. I’m not a ‘Yes sir, man’; I tell him what I think.”
Still, she’s traditional enough to want grandchildren who carry on their cultural heritage, and she figures Mehdi’s her best shot. Her second son, she suspects, will simply announce when he’s getting married, no family input allowed.
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Maliha Aziz collects data online and keeps a password-protected database, but those are merely tools. At base, she relies on a good old-fashioned social network. She controls who enters her database, and most come by personal referral, usually from parents or aunts and uncles.
“We have, like, two degrees of separation,” grins Tahreem. “If somebody’s ‘on the market,’ he’ll get the same recommendations over and over again from 10 different sources. It’s like Facebook, sort of. Your parents have friends, and they have friends, and there are families back home…”
“Back home, mothers raised their daughters a certain way,” Maliha inserts, sounding wistful.
“Have you ever read Pride and Prejudice?” Tahreem asks dryly. “That was our life.”
“We were bigger families, in my day,” Maliha says, “and from early on, you were always taught to share and give up. When my mother gave me a pencil, she expected me to use it until it was a nub, and if I lost it, I would be questioned. Here, they have buckets full of pens and pencils and crayons, and they cannot hold interest in anything for more than five minutes.
“Girls are not given any responsibility,” she continues. “I was talking to one girl’s mother, and I said, ‘This boy is really good, he keeps his house spick-and-span, you can’t even tell there’s no woman in the house,’ and she said, ‘Well, my daughter drops her clothes on the floor. How would they get along?’”
Tahreem shrugs. She says her generation’s been taught, “You make your own happiness. If you are not happy, you go do something else. There is someone out there for you.”
“Dating’s not really taboo anymore,” she adds. “Everybody does it. I went to a Muslim speed-dating thing the other day! Everyone was handing out emails.”
“The problem is, most of the attraction is physical,” Maliha inserts pointedly, “and once the curtain is lifted, there is no more attraction.”
Tahreem suddenly remembers a bit of gossip she heard: Is it true that one of her mother’s most stubborn clients just got married?
“He got married to the girl I insisted on,” Maliha says firmly. “I told him, ‘She said she’ll wear the hijab!’ He didn’t want it to be forced, just for him. I said, ‘What do you care? She’s willing! And you are 47!’”
Maliha rarely stints on advice.
“One mistake people make is looking for people exactly like themselves. You have to look for someone who is compatible but not like you, someone to balance you. If you are very easy to get angry, look for someone who is calm.”
“Although I’m sure both you and Baba had tempers,” Tahreem says mischievously.
Maliha just smiles. “You have to look for those things, not how many inches tall and wide. My mother used to say, ‘After the third day, you start looking for what is good in him, because that passion is gone. By the third day, it’s your personality that will keep you together.”
“A lot of people with arranged marriages don’t have sex on their wedding night,” Tahreem remarks suddenly.
“But most of them would,” her mother says.
“Maybe the girls who don’t know what’s coming!” Tahreem chortles.
Maliha’s advice to her own daughter? “Never lose respect. Once you do, it’s very hard to communicate. So never let your husband disrespect you or talk down to you.”
And how do you do that?
“We just stop talking. If that means one month, it means one month. We would rather not raise our voices,” she says. “We came from a culture where it is said, if you are angry, don’t take it out on me; go to your room, wash your face, sit down. You are just bruising someone’s ego by disrespecting them, and it has no substance.”
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Maliha is looking for Mehdi, too, but he doesn’t know it. His parents have asked her to keep an eye out, explaining that their firstborn son is now 34, an assistant professor of forensic psychiatry at Tulane University. And he has not found anyone to marry.
“If he meets someone and falls in love, that’s wonderful,” Shireen says, “but when you are in love, you think with your heart, not your head. And I want him to have the same culture, for grandchildren.”
She told him (unnecessarily, because he agreed): “Mehdi, you need an intellectual woman. You are so busy. If you marry, she’ll get bored. You are looking for a professional woman. Then you will both be tired at the end of the day, and you can relax together.”
Last fall, she learned of a young woman, a doctor, in California. “It’s a very good family,” Shireen told me, elated. “The mother is a professor and travels all over the world. The auntie’s a dermatologist. I told her my grandfather was the mayor of Karachi, and then she mentioned someone’s name, and I said, ‘Of course, they are my best friends!’”
And the young woman’s picture? Did it pass muster with Mehdi?
“That’s where he’s not sure yet,” she said sadly. “We told him to talk to her. The pictures don’t always reflect the person. To me, that family looks so wonderful. We are telling Mehdi, ‘When you are dating, you want the hot one, but when you are marrying…’ Last night, I said, ‘Mehdi, did you talk to her yet?’ He said, ‘Oh, I know, it is impolite, I should call.”
Ah, so he hasn’t called yet?
“No! And that is what is bothering me a lot. He wants a good-looking one, very slim. You know what the amazing thing is? What I think is beautiful—in Pakistan, we wanted light skin, blue eyes. But oh my God, the view of beauty is so different. I said, ‘Give me an example.’ He said, ‘Did you see Slumdog Millionaire?’ I said, ‘Oh my God, she is not pretty in our eyes at all!’ I showed him another physician’s daughter. She is so fair, sweet, very quiet. He said, ‘She’s boring.’ So I’m telling you, that’s where I get lost. He likes the darker skin! I saw a girl he thought was beautiful and said, ‘God, she’s so skinny and so simple looking!’ He said, ‘Mom, she’s gorgeous!’”
She heaves a sigh. “Everybody’s saying, ‘Oh my God, your sons are not married yet? Oh, you don’t have a daughter-in-law,’ and they make me feel guilty. One woman told me to quit my job and move to Chicago and find him somebody. I said, ‘He’ll go crazy, and I’ll go crazy!’ My husband says, ‘Let him be happy. Let him get married to the person he loves.’”
Does Mahmood think his son will call the lady doctor? “I doubt very much. He probably will call her one time for our sake. What I’m trying to convince him is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s not long-lasting. Character and the mind and the family are long-lasting. But beauty is very important, because he wants to have a good-looking baby. ‘I wanted that too,’ I told him, ‘but you came out anyway!’”
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At De Smet Jesuit High School, Mehdi started an Amnesty International chapter. At Saint Louis University, he majored in environmental biology and chemistry, with a minor in theology. He earned a master’s in public health, worked at the National Institutes of Health, finished med school, did a residency in psychiatry and a fellowship in forensics, and is now assistant professor of forensic psychiatry at Tulane University.
Asked about previous relationships, he hesitates. “This is the part—I’m OK with it, but I’m worried what my parents will think.” He pauses, then amends: “Really, I’m worried what their friends will think.” He draws a deep breath. “I’ve dated. I’ve had a 5-year relationship with a woman and a 2-year relationship with a woman.
“As long as we’re open with our folks, they really don’t care,” he adds quickly. “My dad has a really open attitude. To him, God plays a role regardless.”
And yet…there’s the cultural imperative. “I took a girl to a freshman dance, and my parents were saying, ‘Let’s talk about this. You are from very different backgrounds. It’s going to be difficult.’ The concern’s always there. The cultural concern.”
Still, it’s not precisely his culture everybody’s trying to preserve. “It’s the culture of my parents,” he says. “It’s my culture, too, but only through stories.” He went back to Pakistan before med school, just to see what their homeland was like. He wants to honor those roots…yet both of the women he was seriously involved with were skinny, blue-eyed blondes, one an M.D. and one a Ph.D.
“All-American girls,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s just weird to think about it. Why? Maybe because they were around? That’s the other thing: It’s easier to approach an American girl. You can read the signs. They show interest. And not to be shrinky, but we were raised to treat Pakistani girls as our sisters.”
Has he ever dated someone with a similar cultural background? “I went out with an Indian girl during med school, and we had silly little things in common. The way every Sunday morning growing up, every kid climbed into bed with the parents. And it was so easy to talk about food, and she knew how to wear shalwar kameez. Silly stuff like that.” He pauses, then admits the impulse isn’t entirely silly; it’s also a way to ease an inevitable loneliness. “There are always times you know you are not from here,” he says, concentrating on his coffee cup. “At De Smet, I was the darkest kid in my class.”
Mehdi switches the subject quickly. “One of my good friends, at 24, agreed to marry a guy her parents set her up with. At the time, I was like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ She said, ‘I trust this path.’ And they are so good together. I was closed-minded about the possibility of him being a good dude.
“Another guy had a very similar experience when his parents set them up,” he continues. “It’s not romantic. It’s not magical. But it worked out for them. And I have friends who dated all through college, and half of them are divorced and on their second marriage.”
Mehdi did eventually call the woman in California—once.
He’s sure he’ll know when it’s the right woman: “I’ll want to know everything I can about her. And when I’m not talking, I’ll be listening and asking questions. That’s a great date.”
“Date.” He’s still using that word. Is he sure he wants his marriage arranged?
“It took me a long time to be OK with it,” he admits. “My first worry was that all the girls would be super-religious, which would not work for me. I want a woman who is self-assured, liberal, has her own life, and you complement each other. All the women I’ve dated have been really smart, very open-minded, liked ideas, liked to argue.
“The other was my own insecurity: having to go ask your parents to set you up! That’s a little bit of an ego blow. But the way I’ve been doing it hasn’t worked out. Might as well let people who know me introduce me. That’s the key: thinking of it as an introduction, not an arranged marriage. Once I was able to flip that switch—this is an introduction from people who actually love me, who care about me—it became really easy.”
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Last summer, Fayaz Suleman—the guy with the checklist—was introduced to someone who seemed like…just maybe…she might be right for him. He was obviously, deliberately slowing himself down when we spoke, saying he needed to “verify a few more things about her criteria and mine.” But when I asked him how he planned to propose, his voice was warm and eager: “I am not sure yet exactly what I will say, but I have seen quite a few Bollywood movies, so that will help me! And by nature, I am a romantic myself, and that will help.”
On his application to Maliha’s service, he’d written, under athleticism, that he was average. “I’m not athletic at all,” he confides, “but I need to get into that.” And for his desired bride? “I put ‘athletic.’ Everybody has that goal, they need to stay fit, and I guess having someone who is athletic probably helps you. Skin, I put that it does not matter, and myself as ‘wheatish.’ No smoking, no drinking, for both. She doesn’t really have to be a great cook, but a cheerful person—I could not live without that. And let’s say I run into a fight: I want someone who wants to talk it through, not hold it back.
“If all goes well this time, I will maybe be married in the next three months,” he predicted. “Sometimes it takes ages to know somebody, but sometimes within a few weeks, you know, and that is what I’m seeing here. I am not sure how she feels yet, but the fact that she is open to talking with me is a good sign.”
And her nose? Is it chiseled? “For me, it is very important to like the person as a person, to fall in love,” he said firmly. “You should fall in love first, rather than going by physical attributes.”
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Yumna Ali has never dated. She is 19, majoring in biochemistry. She answered my inquiry with this email: “It does sound like you need a female voice. Most men in general don’t know romance; it’s all analytical for them. I’d love to explain how I and some of the young women I know look at arranged marriage, because this is really a very simple but amazingly pure and beautiful way to find a partner in life. Every time I hear stories about my non-Muslim friends’ boyfriend woes and heartbreaks, I’m thankful that I don’t have to deal with it. So yeah, I’ve got a lot to say about this.”
When we meet at a Barnes & Noble café, she’s wearing the hijab and carrying heavy science books. She agrees to a cupcake because, as she blithely informs me, it’s that time of the month, and she’s craving chocolate.
“Of course I had crushes,” she tells me, munching red velvet and buttercream. “‘Oh, I like this guy, maybe…’ But it’s not like I’d make a move based on that. In my religion, we grow up with the idea that there is no dating involved.” She’s watched her friends closely: “Usually the first time people get together, it’s based on what you see on the outside. Love might just be infatuation or lust. All that is blinding you to the person’s actual personality. And then you start to realize all their faults and start falling out of love with them.
“In Islam, there is no love involved at first. You are looking at compatibility. Will the personalities match? Because you are not in love yet, you learn about their shortcomings at the same time as their positive points, and it’s easier to accept whatever mistakes they make.”
Muslim scholar Hamza Yusuf once called American dating, with all of its breakups, “practice for divorce.” Ali says she doesn’t miss that experience one bit. Growing up in Islam, she says, “We are taught to lower our gaze, to not become infatuated with the opposite sex unless it’s the person you are going to marry. It’s hard in this society—half our culture is made up of sex icons! But what’s good is, you haven’t been brainwashed to want ‘tall, dark, and handsome.’”
She’s had a couple of proposals already. “One guy had a really good personality, easygoing, but when I started asking questions about lifestyle—I’m very, very conscious about eating halal foods—he said, ‘As long as it’s not pork, I’ll eat it.’” That ended that. “It’s not like we’re flirting,” she explains. “It’s more like an interview.”
She likes relying on family and friends and matchmakers, “because obviously, kids make irrational decisions,” she says. “Maybe you are going to change your views to like him, or overlook things. The first time I heard about a proposal, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’” She puts her palms to her cheeks, miming naiveté. “So the parents decide.”
Even at 19, though, Ali defines marriage coolly, as “a legally binding contract between two people. The contract provides benefit for both parties, and when you write the prenup, you write into the contract what is important to you.”
And what will she put in hers? “It depends. If I think this person might change later, based on circumstances, and demand something I wouldn’t want to do, then I’ll state that in the contract. I don’t want to be responsible for the finances. If I do work, that’s my money. Or I might put, ‘I don’t want to live with your family.’ It is advised for a couple to live away from the family or at least have a separate part of the house to themselves.”
When does she want to marry? “The sooner, the better. Seeing your friends have relationships and be happy even for a time, you want some of that, too. And it’s better to do that while you are married and do it properly. You are going to get lonely. Obviously, you can’t suppress your sexuality all your life. And how many couples in America get married while both are virgins? Virginity is a really sacred thing to us. You are saving yourself for the person you are going to love.”
As the oldest of three girls, she admits feeling a lot of pressure. In the Islamic tradition, whether a woman works for six figures or stays home, her husband is responsible for supporting her and their children. Which means that until she marries, her parents bear the financial weight of her future.
“Dad works in the pharmaceutical industry, but he got laid off,” she says. “And my mother is a breast-cancer survivor. You never know when you are going to die, Islam stresses, so always have your affairs in order, pay your debts as soon as possible, get your daughters married.
“A family friend who’s a matchmaker, she’s keeping an eye out,” Ali confides. “She has a lot of kids, and if you’ve been trying to get them married, then eventually you have a collection! You become like the switchboard operator!”
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Early this year, Ali emailed to let me know she’d become engaged. They didn’t want the details public yet, but he was exactly the kind of man she’d hoped to marry: serious, devout, intelligent.
Suleman had called me back in November to say he was marrying the young woman he was introduced to in late summer. Summayya Khan Baloch is 23. She was studying accounting and working full time in L.A. when a friend of Maliha Aziz’s passed Suleman’s number to Baloch’s sister, who lives in St. Louis.
“She’s somebody I will enjoy looking at all my life,” he told me happily. “She has very beautiful eyes, unusually big.” Her hair? “Shoulder-length. In some pictures, the hairs were straight, and in some, they were curvy. And she’s only 5–1!”
His dream girl was tall and angular. “But I was totally drawn to Summayya!” he said. “Maliha stopped by to meet her and give me her thoughts. She said she knew exactly what I wanted, and this girl was different than my dream girl, but she was good.” He paused. “Sometimes I wonder why I spent so much time looking for all that.”
A week after the wedding, he was still giddy. “There is nothing that has surprised me,” he said. “I’m so comfortable. All this time, I have been living alone, never had a roommate or anything. But I’m not feeling like she’s invading my privacy. I enjoy her company. I think she is a little naughtier than I thought! She says the past week has been the happiest days of her life. Maybe we’ll wait for a year and after that, have children. We want to take some time for ourselves and do some traveling.”
He babbled on, clearly besotted.
The time for practicality was over.
Jeannette Cooperman is St. Louis Magazine's staff writer.
