Standing Alone (15 page)

MEDINA
—My father felt a special connection to the prophet of Islam as he walked the streets where the prophet once walked. Like the prophet who was moved to start a new community of believers, my father was always committed to building inclusive Muslim communities.

Since his earliest days, my father firmly believed that Islam is a religion of peace, love, justice, equality, respect, and accountability. He had long felt that Islam's principles of equity, justice, and respect apply to everybody—Muslim and non-Muslim, black and white, male and female, adult and child. Born in India during the British colonial rule of India, he was moved by expressions of human struggle. The start of World War II still echoed in his ear: “World war has started. Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor,” the radio announcer said on the BBC. He still remembered the cuts of the tree he climbed to listen to Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi protest British rule. The scenes of death and survival during the great Bengal Famine of 1943, claiming an estimated three million to five million lives, were seared in his memory. He imagined himself as one of the children lying dead on the streets of Calcutta. Allah kept him alive. He asked, “Why?” In his reflections as a child, he found the answer: to serve humanity and care for his family and the community. “At home,” he told me, “my mother was the leader of our family. She was the pilot of the ship we called home. She was the radar. She was the force. She was the
shakti
” (the Indian concept of energy). He said, “I learned from an early age to always respect women, their voice, and their authority.”

Growing up, he witnessed highly educated men verbally and physically abusing their wives. He was struck by the double standard by which they preached ethics in the public sphere that they didn't practice at home. “I realized that the global society is male-dominated and social, cultural, and legal rules are mostly made by men to favor men,” he said. To him, the prophet was a pioneer 1,400 years ago in encouraging and supporting women's rights, freedom, and social status. He was horrified at what had
happened to women's rights in Muslim societies. When he heard about another “honor killing”—a father murdering his daughter for having sex before marriage or even for being raped—he wondered, “How many fathers have shot their sons for dishonor?” He was my fiercest defender for having accepted my responsibilities as a single mother, while my son's father walked away. “Many men do all kinds of nonsense, but they remain clean as men in society look the other way. Women are exploited or oppressed in both the West and the East, while we as men preach justice and equality,” he told me.

When my father arrived in the United States in August 1962 as part of a faculty exchange program with Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, he became involved with Muslim students who had met earlier in the year and formed a national organization they called the Muslim Students' Association. Then he went back to India, where he saw his firstborn son for the first time, my brother Mustafa, and he and my mother conceived me. After he returned to the United States—this time to New Brunswick, New Jersey—my mother joined him, but immigration laws and my father's meager student wages kept my brother and me in India with our paternal grandparents. My parents moved to neighboring Piscat-away, New Jersey, where my brother and I arrived in 1969.

As in most other Muslim communities in the United States, community organizing started with assembling a place for men to gather for the Friday
zuhr
prayer, the early afternoon prayer accorded the special status given to Sunday services in Christianity. In New Jersey my father helped coordinate the Friday prayer and build a Sunday school and local Islamic community organization. It became the precursor for the sprawling Islamic Center of Central New Jersey in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and many other Islamic centers in the state. The center's history gives credit to four Muslim Rutgers students and four community families for starting the Islamic Society and Friends of Rutgers University. My father was one of those students. There is no mention of my mother or any other women.

After we moved to Morgantown in 1975, my father started Friday afternoon prayers with some other men in the basement of the Drummond Chapel, a Methodist church two roads, a creek, and three weeping willows away from our ground-floor apartment in the West Virginia University faculty apartments. My mother and I could see the church from our front windows, but we were never invited inside for our Muslim prayer. My father took my brother as a teenager to congregational prayers with
other men and boys in the basement there. The next year the men started gathering for Friday prayer at the Mountainlair, the university student union, where they got space for free. Again, my mother and I were never invited.

When local Muslim men rented space for a mosque in the summer of 1981, my father was thrilled. An immigrant Muslim was running a medical exam preparation class out of the room. The mosque was a room about the size of a narrow master bedroom. It accommodated four rows of about eight men. There was room for one row of women, but since it was so tight, the men said there wasn't enough room for women. It became a men's club. The Walnut Street station of Morgantown's Personal Rapid Transit System—a high-tech people mover—sat between my mother's boutique and the mosque. My mother was a block away from the mosque, but she never crossed its threshold. The first time my father saw women enter mosques was in 1988 when he went on sabbatical to Pakistan and saw women praying at the Shah Faisal Mosque in Islamabad and at a local mosque in Federal B Area in Karachi.

Over the years my father merged his work with his life as a Muslim as he continued his work with the Muslim community in Morgantown. The Hassan II Foundation for Scientific and Medical Research on Ramadan gave my father first prize for best research for his paper “Dietary Fat, Blood Cholesterol, and Uric Acid Levels During Ramadan Fasting.” He had beat out scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Morocco, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries. It was one of the high points in my father's life, and my mother jetted with him to Morocco to claim the prize for their first trip together since their first years of marriage.

Over the years it upset my mother, however, that men could leave the house for Friday night study sessions at the mosque no matter how many responsibilities were left untended at home. My father would say: “She doesn't let me go to the masjid.” But if my father had just thought about it, my mother said, he would have understood that her resentment toward the mosque was directly correlated with how unwelcome she felt there. “He could just walk away very conveniently, no matter how many things there were to do at home.” She paused and recited a saying from India: “First, light the candle at home, and then light the candle at the mosque.” In case I didn't get the point, she explained: “First you take care of house responsibilities, then make the bigger world a better place. To me, Islam is about taking care of your family first.” She was on a roll,
reciting another poem by a renowned Muslim poet, Allama Muhammad Iqbal.

Yet my father, like other Muslim men, believed that women have a role in the public sphere. We met one of them one night in Medina when a man and his wife sat down at our table. There was a separate section for women who wanted to sit on their own, but otherwise men and women could sit wherever they wanted. I felt comfortable that way. We were surprised to find out that they were from West Virginia. The husband's name was Majed Khader, and he was the chief librarian at Marshall University in Huntington, a few hours south of us in southern West Virginia near the state capital of Charleston. He was clean-shaven and friendly. His wife's name was Husna Khader, and she was equally engaging. They had opened a restaurant in Huntington, the International Café, where Husna cooked gyros, falafel, and other Middle Eastern dishes.

Did any members of the local Muslim community harass him about his wife working outside the home at the restaurant? Sometimes the puritans try to put pressure on moderate men to keep their wives at home. “I don't care what they say,” Majed said. I was surprised at his bluntness, but he had thought through carefully the rights that women have in Islam. He was on the Marshall University schedule in the fall of 2003 to teach a course, “Women in Islam.” He had concluded that culture, man, and politics have altered divine law. “One of the biggest losers is women,” he said. “They became the victims of gender discrimination.” I was stunned that he so clearly expressed what I had suspected for so long. He was looking forward to reforms that would remove certain traditions and allow women to reclaim their Islamic rights. “Hopefully, the collective efforts of many will grant Muslim women their rights as vital members of society and help reinstate their rights revealed in the divine law,” he said. He paused, as I absorbed his words, little realizing that I was on the brink of becoming part of that collective effort. He concluded: “Divine law does not discriminate.”

My father nodded his head enthusiastically in agreement.

MEDINA
—In the great mosque expansion projects that lined the pockets of the bin Laden empire, the Saudis had built a massive new mosque around the prophet's original mosque. Excitement filled our hearts as we wove through the cavernous space of the women's section of the mosque to get to the original mosque. The new mosque was a world apart in so many ways: it was opulent, and, importantly, unlike with the original mosque, the Saudis had separated this grand mosque into a men's section and a women's section.

Samir smiled, remembering an earlier visit the day before. Two boys had wrestled in this sacred space during the Friday prayer. I had prayed in the women's section with my mother, Safiyyah, and Shibli. It was so massive I didn't even see the walls of the men's section in front of me.

This mosque stretches over a vast space with room for tens of thousands of worshipers. It's surrounded by marble and granite. The expansion includes twenty-seven new tombs and six new minarets, bringing the total number of minarets to ten. To me, such opulence seems unnecessary.

The imam leading the prayer and giving the Friday
khutbah
, or “sermon,” was a disembodied voice over the loudspeaker. His voice bounced off the hundreds of glittering chandeliers that filled the mosque.

We had to enter the men's section in order to see the prophet's mosque. This was where the Saudis said Muhammad was buried. We were on our guard. Wahhabi Islam has changed even the way in which pilgrims pay their respects to the prophet. Some Muslims don't perform the hajj without first calling upon the prophet at his grave. But when my father performed umrah some years before, he kissed the grill around the grave of the prophet Muhammad only to see a stick in front of him, in warning. Religious officials who police the country were standing beside the grave to check the behavior of pilgrims. Kissing the grill around the prophet's grave was a violation of Wahhabi tradition, which rules that such behavior represents the worship of a human being, something disallowed in Islam. For my father, his gesture was simply a sign of respect.

My mother had decided to stay at the hotel. A relative had told us the latest hajj gossip: word was that you go straight to heaven if you pray in the mosque by the prophet's tomb, and there had been a stampede to get close to it.

“Four women died like flies,” the relative had told us.

My mother looked at her, horrified. She wasn't about to join the fanaticism. She'd heard it all before. One prayer in the holy mosque in Medina equaled one thousand prayers at home. And on and on. She didn't believe God handed out lottery tickets to heaven.

Just as we were about to step into the men's section, a phalanx of women shrouded in black nikab suddenly stepped in front of us, blocking our way.

“Stop! Go back!” they shouted at us over and over again in an Arabic we understood through the nonverbal communication of their stiff spines and firm footing. We had just missed the narrow window of opportunity given to women to visit the tomb of the prophet. We could see the entryway just beyond the phalanx of women in black, but we couldn't venture toward it. We stood hopeful for a few moments that they might let stragglers through. But the women remained firm.

Shutting out women from the place of the prophet's burial seemed to be a betrayal of the presence of the feminine up until the last moments of the prophet's life. Safiyyah, at eleven, was close to Aisha's age after she had married the prophet. But if Aisha had lived today, her full and vibrant scholarly life would have been constrained by barriers that she never experienced at the time of the prophet.

As we stared at the phalanx of women in black, I realized the disappointing truth: we were banned from visiting the place where Aisha and great women in Islamic history once ran their professional lives. Dejected, we turned back through the women's section, past women in prayer and in conversation. Outside, we found my father in his white cotton pajama and kurta. He bent slightly with a crooked back to push Shibli in the Sears yellow plaid stroller I'd brought from Morgantown, its frame built slightly low for even our short statures. The marble exterior of the mosque was mostly empty, a steady stream of pilgrims and locals drifting in and out of the mosque but not overwhelming it. Surely, there was space inside for us. But, no, only men were now allowed to enter the prophet's original mosque.

“Samir, you can go with me,” my father offered.

“What about Safiyyah?” Samir asked, looking up at his grandfather.

“She cannot go. Women cannot go with the men.”

“But she is a
girl
,” Samir insisted.

“No, she cannot go.”

“That's not fair. If my sister can't go, then I'm not going. I'm only going if my sister can go.” It was inconceivable for Samir to claim a right denied his sister just because she was a girl. Samir and Safiyyah had a relationship built on equality. If he got a Tootsie Roll, she got a Tootsie Roll.

“Why should I be allowed if my sister's not?” he said.

If he went and Safiyyah was denied entry, he knew she would be sitting in the hotel room unhappy. He didn't want that. Standing outside, barred from entry into the prophet's original mosque, I had an epiphany. So often, Muslim men—just like men in so many other cultures, societies, and religions—accept the entitlements that they receive by virtue of their gender, but men have the choice to reject those privileges unless they are also granted to women. In America white men got the right to vote years before women got the right to vote. And then black men got the right to vote years before black women—or any women for that matter—got the right to vote. Nine-year-old Samir faced the same choice Muslim boys and men encounter every single day: they are served dinner before women, given jobs denied to women, and, yes, allowed to enter passageways banned to women. Samir refused to walk through the door and receive the divine blessings of praying at the prophet's tomb if his sister was denied that same right. The Muslim world needed more men like him.

The sun was pouring its late afternoon rays upon us. We were hot, not to mention exhausted from the travel. Safiyyah was dejected, just as so many women have been in the face of inequity and discrimination. She crawled into Shibli's stroller with him as we walked back to the Medina Sheraton, my father's and Samir's kurta billowing in the wind. “Maybe girls are allowed during the
men's
hour,” I offered, always trying to figure out a way to bypass rules that just don't make sense. “They're not,” my father said, definitively. Safiyyah pondered this possibility silently as we dragged our feet home.

“Ask!” Safiyyah said back at the Sheraton.

To his credit, my father left to ask one of our leaders.

When he returned, Safiyyah sat on the edge of her bed, giving him no pause. “Did you ask?”

“They said, ‘Girls are not allowed during the men's hours.'”

“That's because they marry them that young!” I said in anger.

This was the first moment that Safiyyah had stared in the face of strict segregation. She didn't like it. And I too resented it. We prayed freely at the Ka'bah, but there were limited hours for our entry in the mosque of the prophet, where he himself had allowed women to freely enter. The modern-day Saudi guardians of the mosque wouldn't even give eleven-year-old girls that privilege, not even for a few moments out of the day.

I realized that the fight for women's rights in Islam, just as in any other religion or society, isn't a gender battle of men versus women. Safiyyah and Samir helped show me that it was much more complicated. It was a
battle between those seeking equity and those preserving the status quo.

Safiyyah had a friend beside her—the kind of Muslim brother who would bring about Islam's renaissance in the modern world. This experience gave me the resolve to fight this oppression, not in Saudi Arabia, where repression could have me killed, but in the West, where I wanted to help create a new reality for young girls like Safiyyah who were learning to claim their full rights in the world at large but were denied their full rights in their Muslim world. I didn't know how, but I knew that I had to do something to try to change our communities so that Safiyyah didn't grow up with her Muslim community alienating her from Islam, as mine had done to me.

That night in room 214 of the Medina Sheraton, Safiyyah wrote with appreciation about her brother's position when it became obvious that he, but not she, would be allowed to see the prophet's grave. “My brother could have gone in, but he was kind and said he would not go without me.”