Book Review: Love in a Headscarf

Love in a Headscarf
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed
285 pages
Rs 295

Scarves were once about fashion. Today they’re all about politics. The headscarf is fiercely contested territory with diametrically opposite meanings ranging from ‘oppressive’ to ‘liberating’ depending on who is standing on the soapbox.

Which is why Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s chick-lit cum memoir, Love In A Headscarf is more provocative at second glance.

It has earned the author the title of a Muslim Bridget Jones. And one can see why. It is a touching and occasionally tongue-in-cheek account as a teenage Shelina embarks on an ambitious, community-driven search for the romantic hero she can spend the rest of her life with, via the arranged marriage system. There is plenty of room for irony here, and she offers tribute to Jane Austen when she opens a chapter with “It is a universally acknowledged truth that all Asian parents want their children to get married and settle down.” Buxom aunties, prospective mothers-in-law and mosque imams leave little room for hesitation as elaborate tea-and-samosa rituals unfold, their sole purpose being, to introduce boy to girl.

This isn’t the kind of Muslim chick-lit that made Girls Of Riyadh such a phenomenon. For one thing, the heroine wears her religion and her hijab spiritedly.

And for another, it doesn’t point an accusing finger at the Imams and doyens of religion and culture. On the contrary, it serves as a Dummy’s Guide to Islam at a time when Muslims have more than their share of bad press, explaining with engaging ease how the spiritual life of a Muslim revolves around the rituals of worship.

Its wholesome worldview cuts through the hullabaloo around the hijab issue by presenting the simple testimony of one woman’s faith in modern Britain. “It’s just a little piece of cloth… it’s not the end of civilisation as we know it.”

This novel gives you 50 hilarious first-dates as Shelina struggles to find ‘The One’. But it runs out of steam towards the climax. The reader may be sold on how marriage is a culmination of man’s divine love, but Janmohamed is shy about sharing the juicy details.