A Muslim Courting App Powered Their Connection

When Jafreen Momtaj Uddin and Shakil Sarfaroz Rabbi matched on Salams, a Muslim relationship app, in June 2021, they instantly started a two-hour on-line dialog that Ms. Uddin described as “extraordinarily snug.”

“I used to be visiting an aunt in Philadelphia that day,” mentioned Ms. Uddin, 36. Whereas certainly one of her dad and mom drove, she exchanged messages with Dr. Rabbi, additionally 36, “throughout the experience.”

“It was a very simple and really gratifying dialog,” mentioned Ms. Uddin, the manager director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York. A graduate of Columbia College, she holds a grasp’s diploma in world historical past from N.Y.U.

Dr. Rabbi, an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., discovered the alternate equally nice.

“We simply saved speaking and speaking, it was one topic after one other,” mentioned Dr. Rabbi, who graduated from Franklin & Marshall School in Lancaster, Pa., and obtained two grasp’s levels, one in English literature from the College of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and the opposite in English, rhetoric and composition from Penn State, the place he later earned a Ph.D.

With Ms. Uddin, “I may converse my thoughts freely,” he added, “which wasn’t at all times the case for me in earlier relationships.”

They organized for a primary date the next month on the Longwood Gardens in Chester County, Pa., a midway level between Ms. Uddin’s residence in Montclair, N.J., and Mr. Rabbi’s in Laurel, Md.

[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]

“I believed he was at the least value that journey,” mentioned Ms. Uddin. “I’m very conventional, I at all times knew I needed to finish up with a person who was South Asian Muslim.”

The date lasted for a number of hours as Ms. Uddin, who grew up in Montclair, and Dr. Rabbi, who was born and raised in Bangladesh, obtained to know one another higher whereas strolling amid the gardens full of cherry blossoms and roses, tulips and azaleas, daffodils and wisteria.

Early on, they realized that the gap between them and their busy schedules would make seeing one another troublesome. So “we needed to learn to benefit from fast day journeys at any time when attainable,” Ms. Uddin mentioned.

Their second date came about only a few days later, when Ms. Uddin gave Dr. Rabbi a daytime tour of Montclair. It went easily till the couple realized that they had been working late for Dr. Rabbi’s prepare again to Maryland.

“We had quarter-hour to get to Newark Penn Station,” recalled Ms. Uddin, who managed to ship Dr. Rabbi to the station simply because the Amtrak prepare was chugging into it. With no time to spare, he dashed aboard because the doorways had been closing behind him.

“In hindsight, that quarter-hour of chaos has develop into symbolic of how we strategy our relationship and partnership collectively,” Dr. Rabbi mentioned. “It doesn’t matter what the world throws at us, we’ll make it collectively.”

The 2, who nonetheless reside in several states (they’re “attempting to determine it out,” Ms. Uddin mentioned), turned engaged in November 2021, on the weekend after Thanksgiving. Dr. Rabbi delivered his proposal within the type of a handwritten letter that requested for Ms. Uddin’s hand in marriage.

“One actually expects no much less from an English professor who’s proposing to a girl who runs a literary nonprofit,” mentioned Ms. Uddin.

They wed on Jan. 30 at Crystal Plaza, an occasions venue in Livingston, N.J. Imam Shahid Hoque, an officiant with Muslim Marriage ceremony Service, led the ceremony in entrance of 200 vaccinated company, who included the bride’s dad and mom and, by way of video, the groom’s.

“I come from an enormous household,” defined the bride, noting that she has 20 aunts and uncles and 100 cousins who dwell inside a 20-mile radius in New Jersey. Dr. Rabbi, she mentioned, “suits proper in with each certainly one of them.”