A Tale of Muslim Courtship

Sarah Jukaku and Abdul El-Sayed met as undergrads at the University of Michigan. They were married in May, 2006.

Most people are familiar with American dating rituals. You like someone, you ask them out, maybe go to a movie, have dinner. But for University of Michigan students Sarah Jukaku and Abdul El-Sayed, their dating story is a little different.

As part of weeklong series, Muslims in Michigan, Michigan Radio’s Jennifer Guerra met up with the couple at a cafe on campus to hear how their courtship unfolded.

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“In a writing class my senior year, they asked us to describe one of the happiest moments of my life,” says Abdulrahman (Abdul) El-Sayed, and “for me that was the first time I got to hold my wife’s hand. And people just couldn’t get that. They’re like, what are you talking about? Do you even remember that? I’m like yeah, see, at the end of the day all of our courting didn’t involve any touching at all, and so in my interpretation of Islamic law, I wasn’t allowed to touch her until after we were married.”

Jukaku remembers holding El-Sayed’s hand for the first time, too. “Yeah,” she says, “it was like sweaty and awkward and long!”

“Well I guess it wasn’t all that important to her!” jokes El-Sayed.

El-Sayed and Jukaku met on the University of Michigan Diag during Islam Awareness week in the fall of the 2005-06 school year.

“We hadn’t gotten to know each other until early winter of 2006,” explains El-Sayed. “We happened to work together on several different initiatives the MSA had been planning. And at that point I was like, oh she’s a really cool girl. I’m really interested in getting to know her better.”

That was January. By February he had asked Jukaku’s sister what to do.

“I didn’t feel comfortable going right to Sarah and saying I’m interested in getting to know you for purposes of marriage; I thought that might be too forward,” says El-Sayed. “I felt like it might be a little bit more modest to go have her sister tell her, and then her sister asked her what she thought.”

“First of all I was just shocked in general that he was interested in me for the purposes of marriage,” says Jukaku. “I didn’t really catch on, but I guess that’s part of growing up in a religious, Muslim context. If you’re not used to having serious relationships with guys, maybe you don’t know when they’re trying to initiate one! So when my sister told me, I was shocked and basically talked it over with my parents.”

After Jukaku talked it over with her parents, they decided to invite El-Sayed and his family over for dinner.

“And at that point we’re technically engaged,” says El-Sayed. “It’s not like the kind of get on my knee and ask her to marry me kind of thing. It’s kind of a lot less romantic than that! It’s very technical. It’s like: Ok, now you’re engaged. Good. Done and done.”

“At the same time we had also agreed that we weren’t going to actually go on dates, go out together to eat or anything like that unless we had a quote unquote chaperone while we were engaged,” says Jukakau. “We kind of just hung out in the library and stuff together.”

“Basically,” says Jukaku, “the way we did it because we were both young and in college, (despite what people might think we were young for Muslims as well), so what we decided to do was we had our religious marriage in 2006 and our legal marriage, but culturally we decided not to consummate our marriage for a year and then we had a reception a year later, which is when we moved in.”

“So we didn’t consummate, and we didn’t live with each other. It was like very serious dating,” says El-Sayed.

“The way that we interpreted our religion happened to be similar,” he explains, “and happened to be a little bit more traditional relative the American traditional way of courting and marrying somebody, but I would feel uncomfortable pinning my understanding of Islam on everybody.”

Jukaku agrees. “Different things work for different people. And I’m glad we did it this way. For me, it kind of showed the fact that we were serious about this without having any kind of physical relationship, really showed me at least that this was something that he was really passionate about and cared about and was willing to wait. Especially given that we got married and we chose not to consummate for a year. So I’m glad we did it that way, and I think my husband is, too.”

That was Sarah Jakaku and Abdul El-Sayed. They’ll celebrate their 4th anniversary next month.

Joining me now is Zeba Iqbal, she’s Executive Director of the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals (CAMP), and she’s written numerous articles about Muslim dating.

Zeba, the story we just heard, is that typical of most Muslim courtship stories?

“Generally and broadly many of us say Muslims don’t date quote unquote. There’s a saying of the prophet that is often repeated, and that is that when you have a man and a woman alone together, the third person is the devil. You know, so that’s one thing that we’ve all heard growing up. And the second thing I think Islam is very, very clear about premarital sex In that you don’t have it? You don’t have it, right. And so, I think there’s a lot of cultural infill. And you know I don’t think that everybody doesn’t touch or doesn’t go out on their own, a lot of people think it’s okay to go out in public settings without a chaperone. So I mean, there’s religion but there’s also culture, and I think there’s a lot of cultural overtones to certain decisions that people make about dating, mating and marriage.”

Is it acceptable for Muslims to date non-Muslims?

“I think there’s an interpretation again there. With men it’s very clear in the Koran that Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women of the book. And based on interpretation, many believe that Muslim women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim men. So, some people say that that’s not true, both Muslim women and Muslim men can marry non-Muslims and some people say no. But again we’re facing somewhat of a crisis right now, I would say. There are a lot of Muslim women who are over 30 and over 35 as I’ve written about who are not married, and at that point you ask yourself: Well, what do you do? Do you keep looking at, looking for Muslim men, or do you try to look outside the community and see how you can make it work?”

Muslims in Michigan is presented by Michigan Radio and the UM Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies with support from the Social Science Research Council.

To hear more of Jennifer’s conversation with Zeba Iqbal, click here.

Contact Jennifer Guerra at guerraj@umich.edu.