An excerpt from Muslim-Australian author Zeynab Gamieldien’s debut novel, ‘The Scope of Permissibility’

“Naeem’s name was already on the adjoining side of the page below Wahid Faridi and Ziad Allouche. Naeem Kazi. For Sara, names held weight.”

She would not look at Naeem, she simply would not. Sara had made the same resolution before, but today it would stick. She sat in a chair alongside the other girls and placed her hands in her lap. Around the room, she heard the low rumble of voices, smelled the sharp chemical whiff of deodorant that signalled the arrival of the boys.

She kept her head lowered. Naeem would have arrived by now, would be seated on the other side of the table where the boys maintained an appropriate distance from the girls. But she had to focus. It was the first Muslim Students’ Association meeting of the university semester and there was so much to discuss.

A sheet of paper was passed around the table. When it was placed in front of her, Sara scanned the names on the list before adding her own next to Ahlam Dib. Naeem’s name was already on the adjoining side of the page below Wahid Faridi and Ziad Allouche. Naeem Kazi. For Sara, names held weight.

She knew that Ahlam, for instance, would be forever marked by the inability of Australian English to cater for the deep-throated ‘h’ sound, which would have skimmed over the tongue in Arabic. Ahlam would have learned from her early years to spot the furrowed brow of the teacher as they arrived at her name on the classroom roll, trained her ears to recognise the approximation of her name they conjured into being.

Naeem would not have experienced this difficulty, his name being phonetic and orderly, while her own name could not be of interest to anyone except to wonder how it was that Sara Andrews was born to two Muslim parents. Sara passed the paper on to Abida, the last person to mark their name. Three boys, three girls, a tiny subset of the much larger MSA cohort on campus.

There were the hundreds who came to pray at the musallah but who were uninvolved in the MSA, the dozens who drifted in and out of their events, and then there were the dedicated few who made events happen. More recently Sara had found herself in the latter category. She noted the liberal application of pink blush across Ahlam’s high cheekbones, the nascent wisps of hair on Abida’s chin jutting out from under her hijab.

There was no one else to look at now, not unless she chanced a glance across the empty space demarcating male from female. Instead, she examined the thin carpeted floorings of the musallah, a former science classroom the university had allocated to its Muslim students for prayer.

It was shabby, hidden down an obscure corridor at the edge of campus, but it was theirs. Sara leaned over to Abida, intending to whisper something about going to the cafeteria for a meal afterwards, but just as she did Ziad rapped his knuckles against the table and began to speak.

“Assalamu alaykum, all, and thanks for coming to the first meeting of the Muslim Students’ Association for this year. We don’t have a big turnout today and our president, Mustafa, sends his apologies, so it should be a quick one. Does anyone want to write on the board as we go through the agenda?”

Abida would volunteer, she was noisy and impassioned, but it was Naeem who reached for the marker and walked towards the whiteboard at the front of the room, standing alongside it with his arms folded. His beard did not sprout beyond his chin, indicating that he was still in that transitional phase approaching manhood, but his height and pressed dark denim jeans suggested to Sara that he was some way along.

She twisted about in her seat, wondering if she could reposition her chair so that her view of him was unobstructed. Already, she was faltering. She was so seldom afforded a pretext to observe him.

“The first item on the agenda is Islamic Awareness Week. Although it’s still a while away, there’s so much to do that we really need to start planning the theme and events now. This is our biggest opportunity to really get the message of Islam out to all the students here on campus, so if anyone has an idea for a theme, let’s hear it,” Ziad said.

“I was thinking it would be nice to do something about Islam and its contribution to arts and literature. Everyone loves Rumi poetry and apparently Leonardo DiCaprio is going to be playing him in a movie soon, so there’s bound to be a lot of interest,” Ahlam said.

Someone clicked their tongue on the boys’ side of the table. The sound was too immediate for it to have emanated from Naeem, and she did not think Ziad would have been so unkind. This eliminated everyone except Wahid, who now leaned forward in his chair.

“No offence, sis, but you’re not going to get anyone coming if you make Islamic Awareness Week all about things like that,” he said. “People come to our events for hard-hitting topical discussions on Islam and contemporary issues, not fluff.”

“I would hardly call Rumi fluff.” Ahlam addressed Wahid’s vicinity without seeking to meet his eye. Sara had learned that this imprecision of manner was expected in the MSA when a boy spoke to a girl and vice versa. Elsewhere on campus, flirtation was obsolete, a relic from a pre-Tinder age, but she thought it touching that the spectre of it was still alive in here, colouring even the most innocuous of gestures.

Wahid shrugged and ran his hand through his backcombed hair. Afghan and burly, he was the most handsome boy Sara had encountered in the MSA, his shirt fitted to the precise contours of his upper arms. But she turned now to Naeem, who had written the words ‘Islam’ and ‘culture’ on the board in capitals.

His fingers were long and slim with trimmed nails. As her gaze travelled up the planes of his neck and towards his eyes, Sara realised that he too was looking at her, and they both looked down at the floor.

This is an edited extract from Zeynab Gamieldien’s debut novel, The Scope of Permissibility, out now through Ultimo Press. You can order your copy here.