Ella Al-Shamahi

Why am I imam, by the way?

My dad wasn't even involved.

It was my first semester at university.

Really?

The imam suggested to me that, yeah, he wanted me to marry one of his children.

other um students and i was like okay and so that took a while excited about were you flattered was that did that feel good or did that feel icky you know what like i i didn't know him i had three chaperoned meetings with him to decide if i was going to agree to marry him and then we basically never talked ever

I can't explain it enough.

I just didn't know him, you know, and like, we had to get my dad to agree.

And so that took a while because dad didn't want me getting married before I'd finished my first degree.

And so we had to wait.

And so, you know, all of this was going on.

I was, you know, traveling up and down, like doing this, doing that.

And at the same time, it's like, it's just constantly like picking at this, this, this theory of Darwin's, right?

I mean, effectively, what I was doing was trying to unpack a massive puzzle.

Now, everybody else had already unpacked it 150 years ago.

And I'm coming along being like, hold on.

We can just, we haven't thought of something.

Give me a minute.

And by the way, some people do that to great success.

Some people have won Nobel Prizes on the back of this.