I think it’s all too tempting to whitewash what Muslims really get up to; I certainly can’t claim to have been a ‘nice Islamic girl’ when I was younger. I grew up in the UK, a white girl with hippie Sufi parents living in an area where you couldn’t find other Muslims for love nor money.

It’s not something I’m particularly proud of but I had boyfriends before I got married, and virtually all of the other Muslims I grew up with did the same.

For one thing, we didn’t have a strong, non-Western culture that impressed upon us that pre-marital sex was a definite ticket to Hell. Our parents were all converts – what hadn’t they done in their pre-Islam years? Why should they expect us to be saints when they hadn’t been themselves?

These are, of course, facile, juvenile arguments – but ones which hold a lot of sway for a teenager in the West, desperate for peer approval and lacking a strong Muslim support network.

In the course of my romantic helter-skelter I had more than a few heartbreaks, some I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but others which probably taught me a lot about my expectations of men and relationships in general.

Furthermore, the alternative – marrying young to someone I didn’t know very well – presented a lot of unpleasant examples for me. I spent a year in Tanzania where young Muslims complained to me about their friends marrying young ‘because they were so keen to lose their virginities!’ and then spending the rest of their lives with people whose incompatibility they had overlooked in their love/lust blindness.

I know it sounds controversial to many Muslims, but I believe that rather than imposing a standard which so many of us fall short of, we should accept ALL Muslims as they are. Bandying about the promise of hellfire, in my experience, only pushes those who already feel marginal to the main fold of Islam further away. And in any case, who are we to judge when only Allah really knows?

Best,

Medina Tenour Whiteman