According to the most sacred rules of Islam, the man is supposed to be the head of the household and the woman is supposed to be submissive to him. Well, that's not how it plays out in real life. Sometimes, the woman in the relationship is stronger than the man, and it is my belief that if she is worthy of the mantle of leadership, then she should be the leader. Muslims the world over will disagree with me for saying this, but I don't give a damn. This is what I believe.
The name is Omar Abdullahi and I'm a Somali brother living in the City of Calgary, Alberta. A year ago, I met my first love ( and biggest heartache ) while living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario. First, though, a little about me. I was born in the City of Red Deer, Alberta, to a Somali immigrant father and white Canadian mother. My father Yousef Abdullahi returned to his hometown of Mogadishu, Somalia, when I was only a few months old, so I never really knew him. He never came back to Canada either. To this day we don't know what happened to him. I was raised by my mother, Odessa Winthrop, and her family, especially her older brother, my uncle Bob. I love them both dearly.
As you can imagine, I was pretty white-washed. I grew up to be a six-foot-one, lean and athletic brother with light brown skin, curly black hair and pale green eyes. It wasn't easy for my mother and I in the City of Red Deer, one of the most bigoted places in all of Canada. The locals aren't fond of foreigners, especially Muslims, and they don't hide it. Even though my mother is an atheist, I had a Muslim-sounding name, so I caught flak for it at school. I couldn't wait to leave Alberta, man. I yearned to get the fuck out of redneck country and move someplace more diverse, like Ontario. That's how I ended up in metropolitan Ottawa.
I enrolled at the University of Ottawa, and got myself a small apartment near campus. I was fascinated by the G.T.A. to be honest with you. The place was so vibrant and racially diverse. I saw lots of girls wearing hijab. Arab girls, Somali girls and Turkish girls. We don't really have a lot of visible minorities in provincial Alberta. For the most part, white Canadians and the Aboriginal peoples form the dominant demographics in that region of Canada. Things are changing across the vastness of Alberta, but very slowly. A Muslim guy got elected Mayor of Calgary, and some people are still up in arms about that. In Alberta, they tend to fear those who don't look like them.
In the City of Ottawa, I saw lots of people who looked like me, and people whose ethnicities I could only guess at. Moreover, at U of T, I ran into my fellow Somalis. I mean, they were everywhere on the university campus, damn. How I felt about the Somali presence on the University of Ottawa campus, now that's a complicated question. On the one hand, I felt happy to be around my father's people. On the other hand, I didn't speak the guttural Somali language, and I didn't identify as Muslim.
To be honest, I was raised in a secular household. My mother was raised Catholic but she'd stopped going to church long before she met my father. I'd visited churches, synagogues and mosques while in Alberta. To me, the concept of organized religion is both funny and dangerous. Nothing wrong with belief in a higher power, but once people surrender their will to that of a leader who claims to speak for the higher power in question, you've got a recipe for disaster. That's what I believed, until I met the lovely and headstrong Nabiha Hanaffi.
At the time Nabiha and I met, I'd been living in the City of Ottawa for a couple of months, going to class and also working as a security guard on weekends to pay the bills. It's not easy working as a security guard in Ottawa, man. There's a lot of creeps in this place and some of them are actually armed. You've got to be really careful. I was working in this office building, doing overnight shifts, and I was required to patrol this empty building on the evenings. One night, I came out of the elevator and into the sixth floor lobby. That's when I noticed a thick, fantastic-looking ass bent over. The ass in question belonged to a tall and fine-looking Somali sister in a long skirt, long-sleeved shirt and hijab. The gal was tying her shoe. Catching me doing the booty gawking thing, she glared at me and asked me what I was doing there.
Hello ma'am I am Omar, I blurted out, mesmerized by the woman's sheer presence. Tall, dark-skinned and curvy, she looked majestic in her dark blue skirt, light blue shirt and dark blue hijab. Good to meet you Omar I am called Nabiha, the woman said in a clipped Somali accent. I smiled at her and told her I was new to the building. The woman returned my smile, and wished me a warm welcome to the building. I nodded and thanked her. Before she disappeared down a corridor, Nabiha looked at me coyly, and told me to stop looking at her ass. Man, I turned beet red when she said those words to me. In spite of myself, I couldn't take my eyes off that ass of hers practically sashaying from side to side as she walked into a room and disappeared from view. What a woman, I thought wistfully.
Thus began my fascination with Nabiha Hanaffi, the strange, beautiful older Somali woman I saw in the office building that night. When my relief came the next morning, I asked the site supervisor about her. The old Jamaican man smiled and told me that Nabiha was a cleaner. Oh, was all I could say. The following night, I looked for her throughout the building and finally found her in the basement. Hello again, Nabiha said coyly. I smiled at her, and pretended to be just on a routine patrol. Apparently she bought it, for she relaxed and we made small talk.
I learned quite a bit from Nabiha that night. The Somali gal was new to Ontario, indeed, she'd only been in Canada for about three years. Oh, and she was taking classes at Algonquin College. Good for her. I work hard for what I want, Nabiha said. I nodded at that, and told her a bit about me. Basically I gave her the rundown about my parents, my old life in Alberta and why I had to leave, my studies at University of Ottawa and my new life in this great town. Good to see a Somali brother who has ambition, Nabiha said, admiration in her tone. I nodded gracefully. Thank you sister, I said with a grin.
