Muslim Matchmakers : Islamic Leaders Adhere to Strict Religious Traditions in Helping to Bring Together Couples Far From Home

It was a traditional Muslim wedding in Walnut.

There was Lebanese music, lots of dancing and singing, spicy dishes representing cuisines from Libya to Pakistan. The bride and groom sat side by side, her head tightly wrapped with white silk. The groom, in a crisp dark suit, bent close and whispered something in her ear. She smiled shyly, then whispered something back.

Women in attendance nodded their heads in approval at this small sign of affection. After all, the two were virtual strangers until several months ago, when relatives introduced them, arranged the wedding and asked them to sign the shahada nikad, or Islamic marriage certificate.

They didn’t date before they were engaged. Even holding hands was taboo.

“No kissing, no hugging, no touching. Love, real love, will come later,” assures Wafaa Selim, 50, a bubbly Egyptian-born woman.

Selim says this with unwavering conviction. She should know. She’s a Muslim matchmaker.

She doesn’t run a glitzy Beverly Hills-based dating service or charge thousands of dollars for 10-minute videotapes, handwriting analyses or state-of-the-art computer networks.

What she and other local Islamic leaders offer is free, and, they believe, a sacred part of their religious and cultural commitment to thousands of Muslims in the San Gabriel Valley.

Although Selim had no role in bringing together the Walnut newlyweds, she takes credit for making about 75 Muslim weddings possible.

She holds court in a modest, green stucco mosque near the railroad tracks in Rowland Heights. The mosque is home of the 9-year-old Islamic Center of San Gabriel Valley, and Selim can often be found there, dispensing wisdom about matrimonial do’s and don’ts. In a religion that frowns on casual intermingling of the sexes and strictly forbids dating, let alone sex, before marriage, she is the go-between for young, eligible men and women.

Matchmaking, of course, is traditional among people of various religions, including Orthodox Judaism and Hinduism, as well as Islam. For young Muslims spread across the San Gabriel Valley, sometimes thousands of miles from home, it may be the only way to meet members of the opposite sex.

Telephone calls, letters and marriage applications arrive at Selim’s home at the rate of 20 per week. Selim, a Los Angeles County social worker, and her husband, Maher Selim, a psychologist, marriage counselor, and president of the Islamic Center, said they bring together two couples each week. And they’re not the only matchmakers, by any means. Ahmad Sakr, a respected Islamic scholar who is serving as a consultant at the center, is now recruiting other local Muslims to arrange introductions.

Sometimes parents seek the Selims’ help. More often, men come on their own and fill out forms, listing profession, ethnic background, skin color, educational level, citizenship status, family background, and traits they’re seeking in a bride. Rarely do young females contact the Selims; it’s considered shameful for a Muslim woman to make herself available without an intermediary, Wafaa Selim said.

But Selim resists being called a “matchmaker,” because the bride, groom and their parents make the final decision. “I introduce the families and that’s it,” she said. “I wash my hands.”

Selim says she uses common sense, input from relatives and friends, and years of experience as a social worker before encouraging a man to contact a woman’s parents and visit their home--first for an hour or two, and then, if the prospective mates like each other, maybe for dinner.

“If you have a very educated engineer, you can’t introduce him to a girl without a high school degree. That’s never going to work.”

Neither does she match recent immigrants with American-born or assimilated Muslims. “There’s a big chance of divorce,” she warns. “The mentalities are different. They can’t communicate.”

Siddiki Ali has dozens of photographs of smiling, dark-haired women and letters from India and Pakistan scattered over the kitchen table in his Covina home. These were sent to him from a friend in New Delhi who placed an advertisement on his behalf in Indian newspapers. The ad invited correspondence from families of young eligible brides for Ali, who came to the United States from Calcutta in 1982.

Ali (not his real name) opens one of the letters:

Dear Mr. ------:

This letter is in response to your advertisement dated 10th Dec. 89. I am looking for a suitable groom for my youngest sister whose particulars are as follows:

Age: 30 yrs

Ht: 150 cm

Complexion: wheatish

Qualifications: 1) BS Engineering (electronics)

2) MS Engineering (electronics and communication)

She is smart, convent educated and well versed in all household matters. Currently she is working as a lecturer in a reputed institution. We belong to S----- S--- family of India. If you find the above information sufficient then you can correspond on the following address furnishing all the details of the person . . .

Ali, 30, who also has mailed matrimonial applications to mosques in San Gabriel, Chicago, New York and London, as well as Canada, says he’d rather find a wife from his native country. “If I marry someone from India, I’ll bring her here and she’ll be under my control,” he says matter-of-factly. “She’ll have no choice to divorce me. Girls here (in the United States) have jobs and don’t need someone to take care of them.”

And they’re more demanding, he adds. He fishes through the pile of letters and pulls out one with a Texas postmark. It is a 27-year-old woman’s matrimonial application passed on to Ali by the Islamic Center of North America in Queens, N.Y. In neat, block letters, the woman has listed what she is looking for in a husband: “First Choice Doctor (Medicine), Second Choice Engineer, Third Choice Ph.D. or a degree in computers.”

Ali sighs and puts the letter away and along with it any thoughts of pursuing the woman from Texas. He’s neither a doctor nor an engineer nor a computer scientist. He makes $30,000 a year working in a laboratory and running a gift shop.

Ali’s desire to marry a submissive wife--and the belief that he can find one back home--is typical among “99% of the men,” Selim said.

“It bothers me,” she said. “Of course it bothers me. The women cook for them, they clean for them, they even go to work and bring money home.” And, she added, Muslim women new to this country probably won’t think twice about a common provision in Islamic marriage licenses that says a wife owns only one-eighth of her husband’s property, one-sixth if she has children.

(Such provisions, by the way, usually don’t hold up under California’s community property law, said attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who said he has handled several high-profile Muslim divorces.)

But times are changing, Selim said. “These women, they learn so fast after being exposed to American culture.”

Still, marriage is such a sensitive, private subject that couples shy away from talking about it with strangers. “Even if a woman wants to talk, she needs her husband’s permission,” Selim said.

Marital problems, likewise, are kept within the family. Even though he is a marriage counselor, Selim’s husband said he advises Muslim couples to go to parents or uncles and aunts first before coming to him.

Unmarried Muslim men face another problem in America: a scattered, ethnically diverse religious community where eligible males clearly outnumber females because male students and professionals are immigrating in larger numbers than women, said Nisar Hai, administrator of the 250-member Masjid Gibrael, or San Gabriel mosque. As religious leader there, he also introduces unmarried men and women.

The gender imbalance, the social taboos preventing Muslim women from publicizing their single status, and the desire to match people from the same country and province (Islam spans much of the Middle Eastern world), sometimes make Hai’s job an exercise in frustration. He currently has matchmaking requests from three Arab women and four Indo-Pakistani men, but probably will never introduce them to each other.

“I have already been blamed for introducing people from different backgrounds,” says Hai, a bespectacled man who speaks quickly and methodically. “When the marriages broke up, rumors spread that Nisar did not do the job right.”

Hai, who moved to Wisconsin from his native Bombay in 1963, broke from tradition both out of personal choice and necessity. When he found his first engineering job in San Francisco and was ready to settle down, there were virtually no Indian Muslim women around. Through friends, he met a fair-skinned French-Irish woman, Renee Dutreaux, and married her two months later. Renee, who now calls herself Rehana, converted to Islam shortly before their wedding.

Rehana Hai, wearing a red gauze hijab, or head covering, joins her husband at the dining table. Although they’re happily married, the two say they’d rather their five children do things the old-fashioned way.

Their comments to a visitor spark a spirited debate between father and son Sajid, a 20-year-old Pasadena City College student who has just returned from class.

“I’m not getting an arranged marriage,” Sajid says defiantly. Then he turns to the visitor. “I don’t tell him about me dating. I dated one girl in Northridge. She was very Americanized. She was born here. I wouldn’t mind marrying her.”

Hai raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t know about that. I will not allow him to date alone like that. If there’s a young man and woman and they’re dating, there’s a devil between them. The tradition of the prophet Mohammed says if a boy reaches puberty and is doing immoral things with girls, the sin of that action goes to the father.”

Then Hai shakes his head, recognizing the inevitable:

“Westernization is creeping into every society, every culture, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”