It’s been three years since Leila Ahmad-Steven escaped her arranged marriage in Pakistan. Engaged at 15, Ahmad-Steven knew she had to lie to her parents and secure an education 8,000 miles away. She doesn’t miss Lahore. As a young girl, she saw the favoritism exhibited toward her younger brother. She lived a “jobless and sheltered life” dictated by her military father, and she was sexually abused by a family member.
“It’s not the best place to be a woman,” she said.
The 21-year-old senior economics and business management major celebrated three months as a U.S. permanent resident in October. However, her immigration hasn’t been easy. One month after arriving to Southern Miss’ Hattiesburg campus, she called her parents and broke her three-year engagement, causing her mother to have a heart attack and the rest of her family to stop speaking to her for weeks.
The Pakistani anticipated her family’s reaction, but she didn’t expect to meet xenophobic classmates who wanted to make America great again or marry an American before graduation.
Despite her struggles, she still says, “Alhamdulillah,” meaning “Praise to Allah.”
Ahmad-Steven applied to 20 U.S. colleges and was accepted into all 20. She chose Southern Miss because it was the only school to offer a presidential scholarship. Using “High School Musical” as her study guide, she thought she was prepared for American college life.
However, she soon realized her thick, Southeast Asian accent served as a communication barrier between her and her southern peers. Unacccustomed to hearing their accents, she wished her peers came with subtitles.
Political differences soon emerged. The night President Donald Trump won the presidency, she heard xenophobic comments from two Honors College students.
“It’s a good thing Trump got elected. Now we can get rid of all the Muslims,” they said.
Ahmad-Steven approached them and asked if they knew she was a Muslim. “Yeah, but you’re one of the good ones,” they replied.
Before coming to Southern Miss, Ahmad-Steven had not studied U.S. politics. However, after these experiences, she was sure that Trump had legitimized racists. When Trump’s Muslim travel ban went into effect in January 2017, one classmate wanted to add Pakistan to the list of banned countries. Later, she bought a shotgun after her husband’s car was keyed in an attack she believes was racially motivated.
Junior sociology and public relations major Tarikat Habib said she instantly clicked with Ahmad-Steven once she emigrated from Pakistan. Habib understands Ahmad-Steven’s struggle to build close friendships with Americans.
“They have been really great and have made me comfortable around them, but I don't have very close friends because I feel like it's hard for me to have a best friend from the USA because of our cultural and familial differences,” Habib said. “It's hard for them to relate to my story and vice versa.”
Although Ahmad-Steven didn’t blame Americans for their negative views of Muslims, she suffered from imposter syndrome during her freshman year. She considered dropping out until she met former Southern Miss business communications professor Marcus Coleman, Ph.D.
“I was like, ‘I don’t belong in the Honors College or even this country,’ but Dr. Coleman made me feel like, ‘No, you do actually know stuff. You’re good at speaking. You just need to have that confidence in yourself,’” she said.
One night while Ahmad-Steven was asleep, a friend signed her up for Tinder. She woke up to dozens of matches and eventually matched with her now-husband Andy Steven, senior marketing major and former sergeant in the Marine Corps.
“On the first date, she was very easy to talk to, which is hard for an introvert such as myself, and we really connected,” Steven said.
On a December night in 2016, the two met at T-Bones for dinner and watched Ahmad-Steven’s first “Star Wars” film, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” Wanting to know more about the previous movies, Ahmad-Steven accepted Steven’s invitation to a “Star Wars” marathon at his apartment.
As Steven drove them there, Ahmad-Steven frantically texted her friend and feared that “this white boy” wanted to be physical with her.
“I don’t like physical interaction with men. It’s an Islamic and cultural thing,” Ahmad-Steven said. “No one else knew. If I’m dating college men here, most of them don’t care about physical boundaries, but Andy was super different.”
To her surprise, Steven used popcorn as the divider on his three-seater couch and didn’t touch her. The couple watched “Star Wars” until 6 a.m. and ended their hours-long date by watching the sunrise in Petal.
The couple began dating a month later in January 2017 and held hands as they walked across Lake Byron’s bridge. Exactly a year later, they returned to the bridge, and Steven proposed in Urdu, Ahmad-Steven’s native language.
“The proposal was perfect and everything I wanted since I was a kid,” Ahmad-Steven said. “That’s what always happens in the TV shows. In Pakistan, that doesn’t happen. Your parents do everything, and you get married.”
Although she was happily in love, guilt plagued her. Ahmad-Steven hid her engagement from her parents for weeks and cried almost every night until she told them.
When the couple finally sent a video to her parents explaining their love story with a few white lies, e.g., how they met, Ahmad-Steven’s family blocked her on social media.
Fearing God would judge him for denying his daughter the right to choose her spouse, her father accepted the couple after a month. On March 23, 2018, they married in the Auburn Islamic Center. Ahmad-Steven’s father attended over Skype; however, her mother refused to attend and didn’t talk to her daughter for weeks.
When they finally reconciled, her mother slowly became acquainted with Steven through conversations translated by her daughter. Now, she sends the couple matching Pakistani clothes and is learning how to prepare non-spicy foods just for Steven.
Steven will meet his in-laws on graduation day on May 15 and then embark on a vacation to Pakistan. In the meantime, he’s still learning Urdu—unfortunately, Duolingo doesn’t offer the language— and the best way to cover his tattoo of a half-naked female sailor.
Ahmad-Steven has already planned her next escape. This time, the journey will be 500 miles to Dallas, Texas, the fifth most popular home for Pakistanis in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
After interacting with Muslims in Dallas through Facebook groups, she believes she’ll find other interracial couples and more liberal, open-minded Muslims in the city.
She also hopes Steven will learn more about Islam.
“My husband’s a new Muslim, and in Hattiesburg there’s no resources for him to learn. It’s just the internet,” she said. “You can only learn so much from the internet. In Dallas, there’s this whole Islamic institute that has courses for new Muslims … so I just think my husband will feel much more spiritually at peace when we get there.”
In two years, she’ll apply for citizenship. A few years later, she’ll run for the Texas House of Representatives. After that, she will help her parents apply for green cards.
She hopes Americans will strive to understand immigrants.
“I feel like people should know that because of the internet, the differences aren’t as extreme as we try to make them be,” Ahmad-Steven said. “If you can Google the latest sneaker release, you can Google something about a different country. People just need to make conscious efforts to understand other people.”
Editor's Note: Names have been changed.
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