My Arab Love

“It is your choice.”

He said it the way someone might announce a weather forecast. Flat. Final. Like he was already somewhere else in his mind, already past this conversation, past me.

“Either accept my world as it is.” A pause. “Or take khul.”

I looked up at him.

Emerald eyes. Cold as deep water. The kind of cold that doesn’t come from temperature but from depth .

He held my gaze without blinking, without shifting, without any of the thousand small movements people make when they’re uncomfortable.

He wasn’t uncomfortable.

I was.

No. Don’t.

My vision blurred at the edges. I blinked hard.

Don’t you dare.

The neurons were already firing—amygdala hijack, cortisol flooding the bloodstream, lacrimal glands doing exactly what lacrimal glands do when the body decides the brain has lost control. I knew the biology of it perfectly. I’d studied it. I could have written a paper on the biochemistry of human grief.

That did not help.

Not in front of him. Not again. Ya Allah. Please.

But the thing about salt water is it doesn’t wait for permission.

One tear. Then another.

I felt them go and hated myself for it, and then—because I am Sauda bint Faruqe and I did not come this far to dissolve in front of a man who just offered me a divorce like it was a menu option—something shifted.

Fine.

Go ahead, Mr. Zaid bin Rashid. Marry again. Twice. Three times. Fill this enormous house with gold-draped brides who understand every Arabic word and never trip on their abayas and look like they were born knowing how to arrange a headscarf. I will not accept whateverthisis. And I will not take the khul either.

Watch me.

I turned.

Carefully. Slowly. With tremendous concentration, because my eyes were full of salt water and the abaya hem had already tried to destroy my dignity twice today and I refused—refused—to fall on my face while walking away from him.

Left foot. Right foot. The marble was cold through my thin socks.

Don’t look back. Don’t stumble. Don’t you dare look back.

I made it to the doorway.

Stepped across the threshold.

Kept walking until the bend in the hallway put solid wall between me and those impossible eyes.

And then my dam broke.

Not delicately. Not cinematically. The way heroines shed tears for their heores, looking perfectly etheral.

No.

Absoultely Not.

I cried the way a dam actually breaks all at once, catastrophically, with absolutely no regard for my beauty aesthetics. I pressed my back against the wall and slid down until I hit the floor and cried like something had been torn out of me, because something had, because I was a fool, because apparently while I was busy studying enzyme catalysis and memorizing Quranic verses and learning to manage a headscarf in Riyadh heat, I had done the single most inconvenient thing a person in my situation could possibly do.

I had done the one unforgivable thing.

I had fallen in love with him.

With Sheikh Zaid bin Rashid bin Omar bin Saeed bin Muhammad bin Abdullah

bin Khalid

bin Faisal

bin Hamad

bin Nasser

bin Saud

bin Turki

al-Ansari

al-Khalidi

al-Mansuri

al-Bahrani

al-Yemeni

al-Qahtani

al-Adnani.

Ya Allah.I even remembered his full name. Every word of it. I’d asked Rahima once, half-joking, and then apparently committed it to memory like a research subject I was trying to understand.

That’swhy it hurt like this. Not the ultimatum. Not the cold voice, the colder eyes that he gives everyone. The hurt was mine, something I’d built without noticing, constructed slowly out of stolen observations—the way he read the quran in the early morning before anyone else was awake, the way he spoke to Dadajan with that particular softness he reserved for no one else, the way he’d once, only once, looked at my research notes left open on the table and said nothing, but didn’t move them either. The way he never smiled, except that one time he bought the camels wholesale, saving a few riyals, and for a fleeting nanosecond, his lips curved into a smile.

I was a molecular biology researcher. I was supposed to be smarter than this.

I don’t know how long I sat on the floor. Long enough that the marble seeped cold through my abaya. Long enough that the crying downgraded from storm to drizzle to the occasional humiliating hiccup.

Eventually, I pulled myself up.

Walked to my room. Closed the door.

Sat on the bed.

Opened my bag—not thinking, just moving, hands finding what they always found—and pulled out the Quran.

Miss Fatima’s class notes were tucked inside, her careful handwriting marking the pages. Root-word analysis. Grammatical breakdown. The exercise she’d assigned for next week, the one I was determined to finish before Karima did, because Karima had been sitting in the front row with that particular expression of effortless competence for three weeks now and it was driving me completely insane.

I flipped to the marked page.

Just another assignment, I thought.

But there it was. The verse.

Fa-inna ma’a al-’usri yusra. Inna ma’a al-’usri yusra.

For indeed, with hardship will be ease. Indeed, with hardship will be ease.

I read it once. Read it again. A third time. A fourth. The Arabic letters doing what they always did when I sat with them long enough—shifting from symbols into something felt rather than decoded, something that bypassed the analytical machinery in my brain and arrived somewhere quieter.

And then it struck me. I hadn’t just found the verse; the verse had found me. It felt less like an assignment and more like a message, delivered in the exact moment I needed it most.

With hardship. Not after.With.

I exhaled.

Picked up my pencil. Started on the root-word breakdown—’usr (عسر), from the rootʿAin–Sin–Ra (ع-س-ر), meaning difficulty, hardship, constriction.Yusr (يسر), from adifferentroot,Ya–Sin–Ra (ي-س-ر), meaning ease, relief, expansion, opening.

Not the same root. Hardship and ease are not etymologically identical, but they are deliberately paired in the Qur’an to show they are spiritually inseparable—two sides of one coin, bound together by divine promise.

I looked up at the ceiling—at the elaborate plaster medallion at its center, the small imperfection in the paint just to the left of the light fixture that I’d stared at on a hundred sleepless nights—and said quietly:

"Ya Allah.I know. I know.”

A breath.

“Just keep me steadfast.”

The room was very quiet.

Outside, somewhere in the house, a door closed. Footsteps in the corridor—measured, unhurried, unmistakable.

I recognized them without meaning to.

I looked back down at my notes, smoothed the page flat with my palm, and kept reading.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE✨📖

sets pen down. presses both hands flat on the desk. breathes.

okay.

OKAY.

I need you to understand something before we go any further.

I have never — not once — written in first person POV.

Not once. In my entire writing life. I have always kept that comfortable little wall between me and the story, always hidden behind “she did this” and “she felt that” — and now here I am, throwing myself off that cliff completely, because apparently I decided Ramadan was the right time to try something that terrifies me.

So if this feels different? It’s because it IS different. For the character AND for me.

💭 But can we talk about SAUDA for a second??

Because she is NOT like my other heroines and I need you to understand that going in. She’s not soft in the way you might expect. She’s a molecular biology researcher who literally NARRATES HER OWN TEARS using scientific terminology while they’re falling down her face. She knows it’s cortisol. She knows it’s her amygdala. She knows the exact biological reason her lacrimal glands are betraying her.

AND IT DOES NOT HELP HER ONE BIT. 😭

I wrote that and I just sat there. Because that’s SO her. Logic as armor. Science as coping mechanism. And underneath all of it — this enormous, inconvenient, completely unasked-for heart.

I don’t know if I can do her justice. I genuinely don’t. But I am going to try with everything I have, inshallah. 🤍

And Zaid.

“Either accept my world as it is. Or take khul.”

SIR. You said that like you were reading off a grocery list. Like you were announcing weather. Like you were not in the same room as a human person with FEELINGS—

You know what. I created him. I have to live with him now. That’s my consequence. Moving on.

💭 Tell me in the comments:

First reaction to Sauda? Because I need to know if you see her the way I doThe floor scene — her sliding down the wall and CRYING like that, no cinematics, no grace, just complete collapse — did it hit you?And then immediately picking up the Qur’an and doing ROOT WORD ANALYSIS to cope?? As a coping mechanism?? This woman??Zaid’s full ancestral name list — did you laugh or did you feel something? Because I felt both writing it 😭And that last line. Her recognizing his footsteps without meaning to. Without wanting to. What did that do to you.

I wrote this story for Ramadan on purpose. With intention. Every verse Sauda sits with, I sat with too. Every root word she breaks down, I looked up. I wanted this to be something that fills you, not just entertains you — though inshallah it does both.

This direction is new for me. This POV is new for me. This heroine is new for me.

But maybe that’s the point of Ramadan, isn’t it? Trying things that stretch you. Doing something harder than comfortable. Opening a page and not knowing exactly what you’ll find.

Sauda’s doing it with the Qur’an.

I’m doing it with first person POV.

We’re both terrified. We’re both going anyway. 🌙

Drop your first impressions below — I read every single comment and I genuinely need them to survive writing Zaid for however many chapters this man decides he needs. 😭🤍

—Farzana Tutul,

your author who wrote “I had fallen in love with him” and then immediately listed seventeen names and felt nothing was more accurate than that 📖

(May Allah put barakah in this story and in your time reading it. Ameen.)