I am currently 35 years old and still unmarried because our family tradition holds that forming a relationship outside the family is a lowly act. When the elders of the family gather, they proudly declare that for seven generations, we have never formed a relationship outside the family.
I have reached the age of 35, and no proposal has come from within the family for me, even though several proposals from outside the family have been received. However, neither my parents nor my brothers have accepted any of them.
My heartfelt emotions sometimes reach a point where I scream at the heavens in the night, begging my parents to arrange my marriage, even if it means to someone undesirable, but my modesty and shame hold me back.
Inside, I have become a living corpse, suffocating in grief.
When I see my peers laughing and smiling with their husbands at weddings and events, my heart aches. Oh God, do not give such uneducated yet knowledgeable parents to anyone who would ruin their children’s lives by clinging to family traditions.
Sometimes I think of running away from home, blackening my face, and standing before my parents to show them how to uphold their traditions.
Other times, I consider running away and asking someone to make me their wife, but then I worry about ending up with a bad person and what might happen to me.
Even the mosque’s cleric does not address my pain in his Friday sermons. O cleric, listen to me. At night, when my father and mother sleep in one room and my brothers rest in their rooms with their wives, only I know what I endure.
O ruler of the time, listen to this: During the time of Farooq-e-Azam, when a woman recited verses expressing her pain—meaning that if it were not for the fear of God and the Day of Judgment, she would be restless in bed with someone—Farooq-e-Azam was moved and issued an order to all husbands that no husband should be away from his wife for more than three months.
O ruler of the time, O my father, O my country’s grand mufti, O the imam of my neighborhood mosque, O the spiritual leader of my city, where should I find someone to understand my suffering?
My 35 years have passed, but my father still insists that he will never arrange my marriage outside the family.
O God, bear witness that although You have sent many good proposals for me, my family rejected them all. In a few years, my father will hold his prayer beads and say that my destiny was like this.
O people, tell me: if someone refuses to eat prepared food and says it is their destiny, are they mad or wise? Did Allah not place sustenance in their mouth?
Consider this example: just as Allah has sent good proposals for me and others like me, but our parents or some have rejected them, now they wander about saying it was destined.
Have mercy on your daughters. I have seen many families with disabled children born from repeated marriages.
Abandon such customs that have no relation to our Islam.
