The sun rose over the City of Paris, France, bathing the City of Lights in its golden haze. Salwa "Sal" Taher stretched luxuriously on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom of her rented townhouse in the plush Neuilly-Sur-Seine neighborhood. The young woman yawned, and then got up, and stood in front of the mirror, wearing only a coy smile on her lovely face. Pure satisfaction was etched on her features, and with good reason.
After a night of passion during which Sal got very little rest, there were dark circles under her eyes. Sal felt pleasurably sore all over, her curvy body still tingly from all the fun and wicked things she'd done with her lover. Thankfully, she only had one afternoon class at the Sorbonne campus of the University of Paris. Morning classes quite simply weren't her style. Sal liked to wake up for Fajr prayer, and then she went right back to snoozing. Nothing else was waking up early for...
Sal glanced outside the nearby window, and admired la belle cite. The City of Paris was covered in a fine sheen of snow, and Sal, who hailed from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, land of the burning sands, shivered inwardly. As much as she loved living in Europe, she'd never get used to the snow. The cold seemed unnatural to her, a woman who was native to a land that had never known frost in the past ten thousand years...
Sal closed her eyes briefly, remembering life in her homeland, which had its own beauty in spite of the social restrictions that both men and women faced, due to the strictest interpretations of Islam's rules. Sal missed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its simplicity and beauty, the sturdy but decent, honest people. In Paris, France, things were different. She had far more freedom in this place, sure, but like women the world over, she had to seek opportunity while weary of pitfalls...
Sal remembered her early days in Paris, which seemed like a different world compared to Saudi Arabia. The people, the weather, the way Frenchmen and women mingled freely, and the absence of the Mutaween or religious police, enforcer of rigid gender-based apartheid, all this seemed strange yet wonderful to her. Paris seemed like a dream come true, and then she learned better...
Like all cities, Paris is home to all kinds of souls, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Sal met many fellow Muslims there, people from places like Somalia, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, and so on. She attended school at U of P and also went to meetings of the local Muslim Scholars Association. At school, Sal made friends, and enemies. Some of the French students were openly hostile to her, simply for being a Hijab-wearing Muslim woman from the Middle East. Others were so friendly, they seemed almost heavenly. Paris was a mix of the angelic and the devilish, and Sal hastily learned to discern between the two. Loneliness continued to plague her, until a certain young man came into her life, three years ago...
