These Impossible Things

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss religious intolerance, racism, rape, domestic violence and abuse, sexism and misogyny, and political violence, including killings.

Three young British Muslim women, Jenna, Malak, and Kees, have been best friends since they were seven. Now in college, they are sitting together under a tree on campus. Jenna, who is a virgin, discusses sex and romance with Malak and Kees. Malak’s boyfriend, Jacob, and Kees’s boyfriend, Harry, join the group. Jenna comments that even though she adores Jacob and Harry, she does not want to date white, non-Muslim men because she doesn’t want to hide her relationship from her family, the way that Malak and Kees do.

This statement briefly turns the group’s mood serious, but they quickly turn lighthearted again when Jenna tells them she has started seeing a man named Mo, who is studying to be a doctor, just like Jenna herself. Until the previous day, Jenna was seeing another man, and she reveals that the other man broke up with her because she was more than two hours late to a date. Jenna protests that her lateness is a matter of “genetics,” offering a detailed explanation of how various Arab countries have different cultural attitudes toward promptness.