It was Nasser Rida’s favorite time of day. The sun had set hours ago, and the moon and stars lit up the sky. A sweet-scented breeze cooled the evening air. All around him houselights were clicking off, one by one. The silence of the dark was replacing the buzz of the day. It was the perfect time to take a long walk, the perfect time to be alone with his thoughts.

Lately, Nasser had a lot on his mind. Next month his son Ayad would return home to Beirut, a proud graduate of a fine American college. Already, Ayad’s mother and grandmothers were talking about whom he should marry, about which girls to introduce him to. Nasser smiled as he imagined a comic scene. Ayad steps off the airplane and, after passing through customs inspection, he notices 20 girls lined up in a row and then he sees his family. His mother and grandmothers rush at him, and kiss and hug him so hard that he nearly faints. As soon as the kissing and hugging are over, they point to the line of girls and say, “Ayad, which one do you choose to be your wife?”

In real life, it would not happen this way. And yet, to Nasser, it felt emotionally closer to the truth than not. The process of choosing a partner for the rest of your life could be, in his world, almost that abrupt, that pushy, that arbitrary.

If Nasser was worried about Ayad and his future happiness, he was even more worried about his younger children – his three daughters Salma the scholar, Iman the promising artist, and little Alia the jolly one. The years were passing swiftly. It would soon be time to think about husbands for Salma and Iman.

He loved them all so much and wished it were possible to guarantee their happiness. With his heart full of this feeling, he strolled farther into the night. The sounds of an intense quarrel coming from one of the houses suddenly drove his thoughts 40 years back into the past. When he was a child, his parents argued like that often. They were almost complete opposites in personality, beliefs, likes, and dislikes. Their quarrels were loud and full of cruel words. Afterwards, they did not speak to each other for days.

Nasser remembered, even as a child, he did not find one parent right and the other wrong. The problem was that they were so different, so mismatched in every way, that constant disagreement was inevitable. Even more strongly, he recalled the deep pain he and his brother and sister felt from the arguments and the long silences that followed.

The marriages of his uncles, aunts, grandparents, and older cousins were not much better. The young Nasser sensed the tension, dissatisfaction, and disappointment in all these marriages. He grew up believing this was normal, this was what to expect, this was what marriage was – until, that is, he found himself in college in America.

During his first year away from home, Nasser shared a room in the college dormitory with another student. The small space and lack of privacy were hard on him. On many nights, his roommate’s noisy friends kept him from sleeping.

By the end of this year, Nasser learned that rooms were available in private homes near the campus for the same money as the dormitory rent. After convincing his father to let him try living in a private room, he began searching through the ads in the school newspaper. And that is how he met the Moores, an elderly American couple with grown children and an empty room for rent.

Nasser grinned at the memory of the Moores being “elderly.” He guessed now that they may have each been around 60 years of age or less, but, to his 19 year old eyes, they seemed almost ancient. It was at the Moore home that a small revolution occurred in Nasser’s mind. For the first time he had met real people who were truly compatible and happy together. The Moores enjoyed the same activities and liked to do things together. They laughed at the same jokes. They spoke respectfully to each other, but also knew how to tease with good nature.

To Nasser, this was so strange at first that he wondered if the Moores had come from another planet. Or maybe they were senile. Or on drugs.

After he and the Moores became better acquainted, they chatted with him about their single years. He learned they had dated a lot and had romances with other people. Mr. Moore had nearly married someone else. They finally met each other on a long line for buying movie tickets. They talked, exchanged phone numbers, had a lunch date, and then another and another. They dated happily for six months, after which they decided to move in together. Two years later Mr. Moore proposed marriage, according to Mrs. Moore. Mr. Moore claimed this was untrue, that Mrs. Moore had proposed. It was one of their many “fun” arguments. Nasser was amazed to learn that arguing could be fun.

As time passed, Nasser made many friends at college. They went together to cafes and ballgames and theaters. Because of the Moores, Nasser found himself listening and talking to his friends with only half his brain while observing the couples around him with the other half. He saw couples, young and old, in love and not in love, attentive and inattentive, compatible and incompatible. He was invited to spend holidays in friends’ homes, where he met divorced parents, miserable parents like his own who, in his opinion, should get a divorce, wonderful couples like the Moores, and just about everything in between.

Nasser now realized the Moores and those resembling them were not from outer space, senile, or addicted to drugs. They were merely happy. They had chosen a lifelong partner carefully and wisely and had also known how to treat each other after marriage.

Nasser’s fascination with watching couples led him away from studying engineering, as his father wanted, and toward studying psychology and sociology. He took his bachelor’s degree and spent two more years in obtaining a master’s degree. He wrote his thesis on the psychology of argument in marriage. His intention was to teach at a university back home and also offer relationship counseling to couples before and after marriage. In his society, this was a very unusual plan.

The longing for something to chew on drew Nasser back into the present. He checked his pockets, found a few hard candies, and popped them into his mouth. He looked around and realized that he had reached a park at the edge of the city. Walking always tired him, so he sat down on a park bench. He needed the solitude. He had much to think about.

Nasser was now remembering his return from America 25 years ago. Coming home to Lebanon made him feel like he was traveling from the future back into the past. This was in some ways good and in some ways not. The good was the closeness of families, the food and the communal meals, and the feeling of his religion being all around him. Before his years in America, he had taken religion for granted. Despite finding much to admire in America, he also often felt like a fish out of water in a non-Muslim country.

What he preferred in America was the work ethic, the acceptance of the social sciences, the freedom and rights that women enjoyed, and especially the way men and women got acquainted and chose whom to marry. There was no way in his society that he and a young woman could copy the Moores and remain respectable.

After returning home, his first aim was to find a job teaching at a good university. He succeeded easily in this, and, as the years passed, gained many academic honors, including being appointed assistant director at his university’s Center for Sociological Research. A year after he began teaching, he opened a private office for relationship counseling. Years passed before this counseling service attracted enough couples to pay for itself.

As soon as Nasser had secured a good job, his mother and sister went to work on finding him a wife. Nasser was very nervous at this time, but he had a pleasant surprise. He liked and agreed to marry the first young girl who he was introduced to and she also agreed to marry him. In his view, the marriage had been successful. It was not perfect, but nothing human is. He was not perfect, his wife was not perfect, but they were understanding and kind to each other and they were raising four bright children together.

Nasser believed he had been lucky. He did not really know the shy girl he was marrying. In some ways, even after 24 years of marriage, he was still learning more about her. The main thing was that it had turned out well and he would choose her again if he had to. He hoped she felt the same.

Nasser credited his successful marriage to three reasons. The first reason scared him for he knew his mother and sister had chosen well by accident. They could just as easily have picked the wrong person for him and how would he have known she was the wrong one when pre-marital acquaintance was so limited by custom?

The second reason was all the years he had spent under the Moores’ roof. He had learned there that marriage could be fun and fulfilling. Marriage could build people up instead of tearing them down. He had witnessed the value of a happy marriage and had promised himself that he would aim for this in his own life.

The third reason was the self-awareness that his psychology and sociology studies had given him. He had learned to recognize his father’s behavior inside himself and to suppress his first impulse to raise his voice and start an argument, a destructive argument, when he had had a bad day at work or something displeased him at home or he was feeling ill. Nasser had become an adult mentally as well as physically. Nasser had learned how to treat a wife.

In practicing his profession as counselor, Nasser tried hard to help couples achieve the kind of healthy marriage that he and his wife enjoyed. Though he felt that he had assisted some couples in solving minor problems, mostly he knew he had failed. The couples were too incompatible to be helped. They never should have married.

Nasser became so expert at his job that he could with much accuracy predict, when he met young couples, whether they would still be married 15 years later. He needed to observe them together for only five minutes to judge their level of compatibility.

He followed the statistics and saw the divorce rate climb and climb to be one out of every three marriages. Knowing all the misery that came with divorce saddened him, especially when he considered the effect on a couple’s children. He also knew that staying together despite an unhappy marriage could harm the couple and their children.

His thoughts now shifted to his own children as he sat on the park bench on that cool spring night. Because he loved his children so much, he wanted them all to be as happy as the Moores. He did not want his son Ayad and his three daughters to marry by chance, find themselves in bad marriages, raise sad and troubled children, or get divorces. He knew success in marriage cannot be guaranteed, but he also wondered if there was a better way to help young people find the right partner.

“This is the most important decision of your life,” he said to himself. “How can you leave it to chance or to the opinions of others?”

And, so, as he stared up at the stars in the sky, the exact question to ask formed itself in his mind: How, on the one hand, can you be a good Muslim and follow the Qur’an and, on the other hand, also have the freedom to choose your marriage partner yourself and to choose one who is not a stranger?

He now had the question, but not the answer. He sighed and admitted to himself that finding the answer would not be simple. He resolved to think about it intensely and to do research in the library by studying the religious literature. After he learned more, he might contact an old acquaintance, a revered Seyyid, to see if he had similar concerns or feelings. Yes, this was the direction to travel in. And, yes, this research might take much time – months or perhaps years. He was confident, if the effort were made, the answer was almost certain to be found.

This thought considerably lightened the weight on Nasser’s mind. Hidden by the darkness, he did a few stretching exercises. This helped him to feel less tired and less restless. It was now very late at night and time to leave the park and go home to bed.

The way home seemed shorter than the way to the park. Nasser smiled as he walked.

Nasser found his wife Latifah in bed, not asleep but reading a book. Latifah was educated, though with not as much formal schooling as her husband. She had attended a local university and, despite never having been to America or Britain, she spoke English even better than Nasser. She loved reading, in Arabic and in English.

Latifah was accustomed to Nasser’s long evening walks. She trusted him and never asked with suspicion where he went or whom he saw. But, being an educated person, she was always interested in his ideas and willing to share her own.

Tonight she greeted him with the same question she had asked many times before. “So, did you solve the world’s problems?” Nasser had to admit he had not.

Instead, he described how Ayad’s impending return had made him confront his anxieties about their children’s future. How could they best insure their children’s happiness in adulthood? How could they help prevent their children from marrying the wrong person?

Latifah replied that they must examine the marriage candidates very closely and look into their backgrounds thoroughly. With Nasser’s training, it should not be hard to recognize a person who has serious problems or who is insincere or inconsiderate.

Nasser was less sure of his or any “expert’s” ability to uncover insincerity and other character flaws that a marriage candidate would try hard to hide. He explained that her solution was still the same old custom of not choosing for yourself. And it is the person getting married who should best know whether the right partner has been found. Young people should be taught how to judge who has decent character and who has enough similar interests to make a good companion for life. He added that, given the lowly position of women in their society, his anxiety was the greatest for their three daughters. He had been remembering his student days in America and wondering if some of the answers would come from studying and applying the better parts of Western culture, where there was much to admire when strong family ties and values were present.

Latifah pointed out that the divorce rate in the West was very high. Nasser agreed that this was a human problem everywhere and that much improvement was needed in Western society too. However, he was not ready to tackle the problems of the West. His immediate concern was his family and the society they lived in. But there were a few things he had esteemed when living in America. When the two right people finally found each other, the happy life they led together was enviable. And, he believed, this happiness was due in part to the equality or near equality that women had with men.

By this time, they had both grown sleepy. Latifah was eager to hear more, but it could wait for tomorrow.

The next day Latifah had a story waiting when Nasser returned home from work. Her cousin Amal, who lived in Kuwait, was getting a divorce. Nasser, who had lunched that afternoon with his divorced friend Mustafa Naqib, felt sorry to see himself being proved right yet again about the sorry state of marriages in today’s world.

Nasser knew Amal’s history. That she would want to divorce was not surprising. The surprise was more in why it took so long to happen. And yet, at the first news of a divorce among people he knew, Nasser always experienced a little shock.

Amal was from the side of Latifah’s family who had settled in rural Lebanon. They were well off and owned a large farm. When Amal was 16 years old, her family married her to Ahmed, a very religious man of 24. Amal saw Ahmed for the first time a few days before their wedding day. By the time Amal reached 22 years of age, she had a daughter and two sons.

Amal now insisted on returning to school and there was no stopping her. She was an amazing student and won a top scholarship to the best university in Kuwait. She earned a Master’s degree in economics and was one of the first women to be offered a managerial job in banking in Kuwait City. She accepted and Ahmed and the children then joined her there, where Amal became the main wage earner in the family. Amal was ambitious. Her husband was not.

Amal liked living in Kuwait and adapted easily to modern Kuwaiti urban society, while Ahmed clung to the old ways. Only the densest person could overlook their incompatibility. Amal was not happily married, but she found fulfillment in her children and in her employment.

Amal and Ahmed rarely argued and had a proper Muslim marriage till a crisis occurred. When their daughter Nura was 16, she wanted to have dinner with her girl friends at a restaurant. Boys might be there too. Ahmed forbad it. There was a big fight between Ahmed and Nura, but she could not convince her father to let her go. Nura spent a miserable evening at home. The next day she disappeared.

Amal was out of her mind. She called the police. She called all Nura’s friends. She walked through the streets of Kuwait City for miles, not because she knew where to search but because she could not sit still. Ahmed refused to search.

On the fifth day, the police found Nura hiding at the home of a friend. She had been there the entire time and the friend had lied when Amal had phoned.

Those four days had been the most terrible of Amal’s life. She never forgave Ahmed for not helping to search for Nura and their marriage became a marriage in name only. This was what Nasser knew.

“Why a divorce now?” he asked Latifah. “The mess with Nura occurred eight years ago. If that did not cause a breakup, what would?”

“The cause was,” said Latifah, “on the surface a small matter, though not so small to Amal. It was apparently the last straw. A few weeks ago, Amal had a bad case of the flu. She was lying in bed and burning up with a high fever. She felt dizzy and her throat was so dry that she could hardly swallow. She asked Ahmed to make her a cup of tea. He replied that he was tired and that it was the woman’s duty to serve a man and not the other way around.

“Amal told me that she made her way from the bed to the kitchen by holding on to the walls. She was so dizzy that she nearly fell. As she was doing this, she made herself a promise. When she recovered from the flu, she would get a divorce. And that is what she is doing.”

Nasser whistled in astonishment. It took a minute for it all to sink into his mind, and then he erupted in anger, “A man does not serve a woman, even if she is ill? This is not what our religion is about! From where did he take that idea? Ahmed is a fool. He will be lost without Amal.”

“They are like oil and water,” concluded Latifah. “These two never should have married.”

“That is exactly my point,” said Nasser. “If it were left up to them, these two would not have chosen each other. And, to arrange a marriage for a 16 year old defies common sense.”

“So,” asked Latifah, “what is the next step? What is to be done?”