Wedding in Pakistan Pt. 1- Mehndi

So I am going to do a series of posts about our wedding in Pakistan and the different ceremonies, etc.  We got married in August of 2006, and we didn't have the full-out traditional Pakistani wedding with all the multitude of different ceremonies.  Basically we had three, a combination mehndi/dolkhi, a nikkah, and what we called a "reception" which I guess was some hybrid valima/rukh satti thing. 

The first thing that happened was the mehndi/dolkhi, the night before the nikkah (the actual religious ceremony).  The day of the mehndi, I went to this salon near M's house to have my mehndi (henna designs) done on my hands and feet.  One of the interesting things about a lot of salons in Pakistan is that they are in people's houses, instead of in a strip mall like here, which was the case with this salon.  I had quite a few pre-wedding beauty treatments at this place, as well as being my first experience with threading, ouch!  Back to my wedding mehndi, the designs were quite elaborate, and reached all the way up to my elbows.  When the lady doing my henna found out that I had not shaved my arms and did not want to shave my arms, she was not happy with me at all.  I have blonde hair and have never shaved my arms, and wasn't about to start, so I decided she was just going to have to deal with it.  (It's not like I'm really hairy or anything anyways!)  I had to sit pretty still for about 4 hours while my henna was done and I couldn't put my arms down because if the henna gets smeared when its wet, then you mess it up.  Plus my SILs left me there alone because they had a lot of errands to do before the wedding, so basically I was stuck in this room for four hours holding my arms out to my side and I couldn't even talk to the lady doing the henna (she didn't speak English and my Urdu was pretty much non-existent at that point). 

Here is what my mehndi looked like soon after getting home from the salon.

When the henna is first applied it dries black and then crusts off to leave the red designs underneath.  I was told to let it fall off naturally, because that would keep the dye sealed in longer and make the color more vibrant.  You can see places where the crust had already started to flake off before the pictures were taken.  I was also told that the darker and more vibrant the henna showed up after the black part fell off, the more auspicious it was for our wedding.  

After we were done with the mehndi, I hurried home to change into the traditional yellow shalwar kameez for my combo mehndi/dholki ceremony that night.

After the guests arrived, we all went upstairs, for the dholki, which is the name of the party and the drum that is played at it.  My sister in law took the drum and we went up stairs, and split, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other.  The girls played the drum, and sang fun songs.  I don't know what they were singing, but they seemed to really enjoy it.

You can see the dholki here in the center of our group of girls. 

At some point during the dholki, the girls began to sing songs making fun of the guys.  The guys would then have to give them money in order to get the teasing song to stop.  Some of the guys would hold out longer than others.  Some guys would try to be cheap about it, and their first offers would be rejected.  Sometimes they would try to trick the little girls, who were acting as the runners, into taking less money, and their mom's would shout, "nahin, nahin," and send them back to their husbands for more.  M's brother in law tried to get away with giving some rupees, and was rejected.  Since he lives in Chicago, they would only accept dollars from him!  With all the money they collected, the girls pooled it together to go out for a nice lunch together.  Considering I have no idea what the songs were saying, I found the whole thing rather hilarious and a lot of fun.

After the singing was over, we all went downstairs to the dining room for a nice dinner of chicken broast from a local restaurant.  I was already looking forward to the next day, and the Nikah, which will be the subject of my next post.  

Veiled Ambivalence

What is up with the obsession with hijab, niqab, and all things "covering" for Muslim women? 

Here's my disclaimer-- I'm a Muslim woman.  I don't wear hijab.  I know all the different takes, arguments, etc., so if anyone wants to read this and then criticize me for not wearing it, or post a bunch of hadith in the comments or whatever, feel free, but its really not going to change my mind, and I've probably read them all a thousand times, so, you might not want to waste your time.  I am not opposed to people wearing hijab, or think it is bad, and in fact I have a lot lot lot of respect for people that do, I'm just not at a point where I can do it. 

When I first converted, I wanted to wear hijab, really really wanted to.  But then I had a conversation with M that went something like this, M- people who see you wearing hijab will think you are oppressed, people who see me with you wearing hijab will think that I am your oppressor.  Ouch, I could see his point.  We all know that its not true, but it is what people will think.  And I can say I don't care what people think about me (true, to some extent), but I do care about what people think about M and about how what I do affects his life as well, so hijab was put on the back burner for a while. 

Meanwhile, once my hijab-obsession was quelled for a while, it freed my mind to really delve into other aspects of Islam that had been pushed aside while I had been focusing exclusively on how I dressed.  I felt more connected to Allah and more spiritual.  I began to discover what it meant to me, personally, to be a Muslim, and what I wanted my relationship with God to be.  I'm still discovering. 

Meanwhile, I keep reading current events dealing with Muslims and Islam, I am reading Muslim blogs, main stream media reports, etc.  There is so much focus on the veil, hijab and niqab, it's like an unending drumbeat through the internet.  Every cliched article on women in Islam has some title like "Going behind the Veil" or "Islam Unveiled."  It's as if we, as women in Islam, are purely defined by our veils.  Western politicians pontificate on relieving Muslim women from their oppression by banning the veil, saving us from a prison of polyester/cotton blend.  Education, health care, birth control, protection from violence, equality in legal rights are all issues tacked on as an afterthought, as if, somehow, if we could just get women to de-veil, all these problems would be solved for them.  Simultaneously, women who veil seen as more conservative, more religious, more pious, dare I say more fundamentalist, than those who don't.  Women who don't veil are seen as irreligious, presumed to disapprove of those who do, or to follow a more "modern" version of Islam. 

All these presumptions based off a little piece of fabric, about who I am, who you are, what we believe, how we feel. 

We Muslims don't help the issue of veil obsession.  We obsess about it too.  As I mentioned before, I spent a large part of my early days as a convert doing just that.  Our mosques are so obssessed with veiling and segregation that our communities become fractured, and our youth become disenchanted with the mosque as a community center.  Our mosques offer no safe space for youth to interact with members of the opposite gender in a halaal way, and to build the foundations for our young people to lead the mosques in the next generation, working together for the interests of both genders. 

Instead of discussing spirituality, prayer, introspection, tawhid, and other ideological doctrines of Islam that could provide inspiration and a foundation for the next generation of American Muslims, we continue to focus and harp on hijab and segregation. 

Overseas, Muslim insistence on the morality of society being pinned on the bodies of women and obsession with regulation of women's clothing, in my mind, must contribute to Western obsession and focus on hijab as an overriding issue for Muslim women. 

If we didn't obssess about it so much, would everyone else?

As for my own feelings, at this point, I am ambivalent.  I do not honestly believe that I can wear hijab and be successful in my chosen career.  I do believe that hijab is a beneficial act in Islam, and maybe one day I will wear it, but not yet.  And I definitely have plenty of other things I personally consider more important to get right in my own spirituality first.

Gotta do some lawyerin' and other odds and ends

I am supposed to go to trial in 2 weeks.  It is my first trial ever.  I am not going to be actually doing anything in the trial, but I will be a "support attorney" (I guess).  Which means a lot of behind the scenes grunt work.  But I'm not complaining, I'm really excited.  Our cases rarely ever go to trial, so when they do, it is a great opportunity for everyone involved.  Anyway, all of that is a long way of explaining why I haven't posted in a while and why I probably will be sporadic in my posting until November.  I want to do a series of posts on my wedding in Karachi next, and have even started writing them, but I have to go and find the right pics off one of our many hard drives full of thousands of pictures.  So hopefully I can do that soon. 

This weekend we went to the Arboretum to their Pumpkin patch and took some fall-themed pictures.  We had a lot of fun even though the weather was gloomy and M got some great shots.  I think he is a great photgrapher and have tried to encourage him to enter some contests, freelance or something.  I think maybe I will post some of his work on here and let you all see it because I am so proud of him. 

It was so cold for Dallas, already in the 50's.  It's like we skipped fall and went straight to winter (50's is winter in Dallas for all you northerners :) ).

Little D looks more and more like a little boy and less like a baby every day.  Where does the time go?