When my father saw my condition, he discussed with the rest of the family and then he decided this is the right time for my marriage. So, he selected a guy for me and arranged a date for our marriage. My father never asked me for my opinion whether I want to marry him or not. When I protested about his decision, he replied to me that my religion gave him the right to select a husband for me.
In Islam, women don’t have any rights to protest against their parents’ decisions. I got married and live in my in-laws’ house. The consequence of this type of arrangement for me would be anyone’s guess. The result was we were really a mismatched couple. After few months later, I realized that I could be spending a miserable life with my husband. He cheated my family about his academic qualifications and before married, he only lived off his family. Even though I offered to find him a job or helped him to start a business, he refused to do anything. Thus, I decided to seek divorce from him. My whole family was shocked when they heard about my decision. My father and my uncle threatened me that if I persisted with the divorce, they would not consider me as part of the family and Allah would surely punish me. Only my elder brother supported me and helped me to get a divorce from my husband. When I returned to my father’s house, everyone behaved rudely towards me, and at that time I felt that I had committed a big sin by disobeying my father. I faced their bad treatment for a few months which was a miserable experience for me so that was why I decided to move to another country. I requested my elder brother to help me. He refused to help me because he said it had never happened before in our family that a girl travelled alone to another country without her husband or family. He said my decision was wrong because all my family and relatives already were against me. However, I still insisted and remained firm with my decision such that I managed to make him agree with me. After struggling for a long time, I was finally able to move to another country. Now after a long time I felt free and took a sigh of relief.
In this new place, I was not away from my religion as I still offered my five- time prayers as well as reading the Quran daily. It was just like a routine work for me or I just wanted to make my family happy but deep down in my heart I was not satisfied with my religion. I lodged with a Muslim’s couple, the husband was a Pakistani while his wife was a local. I trusted both of them because they were very religious and always talked about religion. My father was also very happy that I lived with religious Muslims and they helped me to become a serious Muslim too.
After working as an employee for almost three years, I decided to start my own business by using my father’s money. The Muslim couple were also interested to start a partnership with me. Running my own business was neither easy nor pleasant. My lack of experience in trade made success difficult and made easy for my so-called religious business partners to cheat me. They swindled me out of my whole investment, I was left with nothing. After losing all my money, I lost faith in my religion. Why did Muslims who seemed religious and pious on the outside, who never missed any salaahs and always uttered Insha’Allah so easily succumbed to the evil ways, for instance, to greed, to the temptation of money like this Muslim couple that cheated me? There seem to be a stark contrast between the apparent piousness and the actual behaviour exhibited by some Muslims when they face temptation of the world. Somehow, the seeming religiosity, piousness which is ‘thought’ as equivalent to true spirituality has become a sham to cover the true sinful self of some Muslims in order to deceive people. What exactly is the problem here? Why the word of Allah never seems to be able to change the hearts of these Muslims? Can they be regarded as those who are ‘successful’, as those who are saved in the last days? Are they not wretched of all people, thinking that they are saved but are still lost in sin?
I again became restless and depressed. My plan was to disappear until I could recover. Through my experience at work and my first business venture, I was able to learn what no school or university can teach. I learned about the reality of society and life. The failure of my first experience in business brought me a lot of damage and grief. However, it also impacted me positively at least in one area. It pushed me to move to a new experience and to explore the world in a wider view.