1. The Strong
A. The logical type who respects the views of everyone he (or she) encounters even when he has a different point of view.
B. The person who has to have his own way and doesn’t care about the views of others.
2. The Weak
A. The person whose family can easily bend him (or her) one way or the other. This person is incapable of acting independently because, as Um Nuwayyir points out, “Without his family he isn’t worth a penny.”
B. The person who is easily swayed by his friends and can’t stop swaying. This case is even worse than the first one because this person is convinced that his family is against him and only trusts his friends, who, in general, are likely to be in even worse shape than he is.
Um Nuwayyir worked out the same kind of analysis under the heading of “self confidence.” Here also there are two main groups, the secure and the insecure, and, of course, each group is divided by Um Nuwayyir into subgroups as follows:
1. The Secure
A. The sensible type. People belonging to this group are at peace with themselves, displaying a clear degree of confidence that makes everyone respect them and even hold them in awe. But at the same time, they maintain the love and affection of others due to their modesty and genuine accomplishment.
B. The Overconfident
This includes people who really don’t have anything to be proud of. They have an excess of self-confidence, though they lack any reason for it; no great achievements or outstanding personality or even appealing looks. This type is abominable and, unfortunately, more common than the first one. But both A and B together are less common than the second main group:
2. The Insecure
A. Those who claim to be secure. They affect a self-confident pose that isn’t matched by any sincere belief on their part. They take every word said to them with extraordinary sensitivity and reply with great aggressiveness, shielding their failures with their loud personalities. They make mountains out of molehills, or, as we say, “a dome out of a seed.”
B. Those who are really insecure. People in this group don’t act or claim to be something they’re not. It’s apparent from the first that they are pitiful and they make you feel sorry for them. Sometimes they have an obvious physical problem that lowers their self-esteem, like obesity, short height or even a big nose. Or it could be a social problem like poverty or even a mental one like stupidity. Or sometimes it could be a hidden problem that no one else is aware of, like a broken heart from a lost love that never healed.
Sadeem’s favorite classification was that of “religious types before and after marriage,” and this was the only one that strictly separated men and women. There were three categories: The extremely religious type, the rational moderate religious type and the wild type, who mostly ignored the strictures of their religion. The men and women are mirror images of each other. Let’s look at the men first:
1. The Extremely Religious Type
A. He was once wild but he turns religious.
B. He fears wildness so he becomes religious.
Both fear they will degenerate morally after marriage, so they often end up in polygamous marriages, preferring their wives to be at least as zealous as they are.
2. The Moderate Type
A. A strictly religious man who differs from the first group in the way he treats women: tenderly and without interference. This type can marry a relatively liberal woman as long as he is confident of her love and certain of her morals.
B. The seculars. This man believes that Islam is built on five and no more than five basic and compulsory beliefs. He only attends the assigned five prayers and fasts only during Ramadan. After he has gone on the Pilgrimage to Mecca, he feels he has done his part, as long as he has also adhered to the declaration of the faith and given alms to the poor. This kind of man does not marry a woman unless she is on the same level of liberation as he is. He wouldn’t marry someone who wears hijab, for example, and would insist that his wife be pretty, open-minded and stylish so that he could proudly show her off in front of his friends, who share his point of view.
3. The Wild or Escapee Type
A. Gradual escapee. Someone in this group may have grown up in a very strict religious atmosphere and “escaped” in a religious and moral sense. His escape is a gradual one, happening whenever he gets a chance to be away from the authority of his community. This type might pretend to belong to the first group to prevent any social embarrassment.
B. Liberal upbringing. This type has been brought up in an extremely liberal home to the point of atheism in his religious beliefs and the absence of any kind of bulwark against “bad behavior.” And as we all say in these parts: “He who grows up doing something, grows old doing it.” The problem you find in this type of man is pathological suspicion. Unfortunately, and due to his experiences with some cheap girls, whom we will be discussing later, he believes that every girl is guilty until proven innocent. This is why a man in the “wild” category always prefers to marry an inexperienced girl; she will always view things from his corrupted point of view. Sometimes a man of this type marries a girl who is a flirt but knows how to play the game. She knows perfectly well what her husband is really like and she knows how to manipulate and pretend so that her actions won’t end up being misinterpreted. This is exactly what happened to Sadeem, who didn’t realize who Waleed really was until it was too late and after he had made up his mind that she was “bad.”
Now we come to the matching categories for women.
1. The Extremely Religious (“Bowing to the Faith”) Type
A. The sheltered one. Brought up in a strict religious family, a woman of this type has never been exposed to any conflicting outside forces. If she’s very lucky, she will marry someone equally religious. As long as both are able to accept and be happy with what fate has brought them, they can live “happily ever after” in a peaceful and secure life. But if she ends up marrying a man more liberal than she is, she will be miserable because she will never understand how to please him, since she has no knowledge of his way of life.
B. Sheltered, but with fantasies. This woman also has grown up in a sheltered setting, except that fantasies of bursting out into something new, into some kind of liberation, have always pursued her. She is also pure, not because of ignorance of the world “out there,” but because of her own will, her self-discipline or the surveillance of her family.
2. The Moderate Type
A. Fashion victim. This woman changes her behavior according to the current fashion. If the trend during a certain time is to act all spiritual, attend religious gatherings and wear the hijab outside the kingdom, she will do it and “go with the flow.” But if the trend is to dump your hijab once you get outside the country, and when you are inside to spend a lot of time in the malls wearing a tight-fitted abaya that shows off the features of a woman’s body, then she will go with that flow, too. These trends are usually under the control of men’s preferences during their search for suitable wives, or mothers who are hunting for future daughters-in-law.