Standing Alone (24 page)

A Muslim associate producer from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
Newsworld Today
program, Layal El Abdallah, e-mailed me an invitation: “We would like you on air!” I asked her why she was interested
in the issue. Like me, Layal came from a supportive Muslim family, and her parents encouraged her to be a journalist. She had been following the story of Amina Lawal and trying to find someone who would speak about the issue so that she could broadcast it. It started becoming clear to me that the world was desperate to hear the voices of Muslim moderates. A CNN producer called me from Washington. “We'd like to have you on air on tomorrow's morning show.” I had always been a print journalist. Even when the
Wall Street Journal
teamed up with CNBC to put
Journal
reporters on air, I resisted. But confronted with the dearth of Muslim voices speaking out against actions like the sharia sentence against Amina Lawal, I wanted to bring a human face of reason to the issue. Battling stage fright, I proceeded, remembering the encouragement of the many Muslim men and women who had written expressing their support. The interviewer was a CNN veteran, Leon Harris, an African American anchor. I listened to his disembodied voice through my earpiece and argued my case for mothers such as Amina Lawal.

“So what happens to the men in these cases? What happens—for instance, what happened to the father of your son?”

I stared into the camera. How could I answer that question delicately? “Well, he couldn't kind of commit and get beyond the cultural and personal divide that is not even about religion and personal issues sometimes—”

Harris interrupted me. “What? He abandoned you?”

I stammered. I realized how uncomfortable I was admitting the truth. “Well—you want to—you don't want to be so—you know, you hope that.” I paused to collect my thoughts. “I'm not answering you clearly, because—I'm struggling with it, aren't I?”

“It sounds like it,” said Harris. “Why is that so hard to say, if that's what happened?” How could I explain the decades of programming telling me that a woman must be chaste? “I know, it is hard to say because ultimately, this is the psychological dimension of this issue, so even when you're not physically stoned for this kind of ‘crime,' you are struggling with a lot of the . . . shame. I mean . . . it wasn't my plan to
not
have a father for my child when I [chose] . . . to be a mother. And so, this is the personal issue that we all have to deal with when you decide to take on tradition.”

Harris seemed to understand. “That's amazing. And that's how pained you feel about it, and you're not in jail right now somewhere in Nigeria, as Amina Lawal is. We'll have to continue to follow her story, her case, and perhaps we can talk about all of this again with you down the road. Fascinating.”

In that awkward TV moment, I realized how far I still had to travel to accept the fact of my single motherhood. But I knew that I had a personal ethic to which I was trying to remain true. I had committed myself to it on my judgment day in Arafat.

NEW YORK TO LOS ANGELES
—That summer I crisscrossed the United States, often with Shibli and my family, on my book tour, a concept both foreign and daunting to me. As with the hajj, it felt right to have Shibli with me. He had helped propel me into a new identity. I was a Muslim woman who had searched for her voice. I had expressed it powerfully as a journalist and writer. But in the world of journalism, typically, we work very hard reporting and writing a story. When it gets published, we typically just move on to the next story. We hardly go out there to speak about our messages. It was now my time to express my thoughts through my literal voice. And I was afraid.

“I am overcoming my own fears as I stand before you,” I told the audience that had packed a gallery not far from the Williamsburg Bridge across the East River from Manhattan. I immediately broke the first rule in public speaking by admitting my inadequacies. I was marked by the silence of women's voices in the political debates that ignited the men's section at the dinner parties my parents hosted. Even when my mother sent me into the men's room to quiet my father's boisterous position statements (“In its foreign policy, America must practice the democratic ideals it preaches!”), I would always whisper. My senior year at Morgantown High School, I ran away from the microphone when our local radio station WVAQ wanted to interview me for the Superstars Day sports competition I'd organized for the school. A childhood in the kitchen had taught me to remain in the background. I rarely claimed my public voice.

As an adult, I connected with the American feminist writer Susan Faludi's words when she wrote, “I am woman. Hear me whisper,” in a
New York Times Magazine
essay. She had been my colleague at the
Wall Street Journal
, and she wasn't kidding. At an orientation session for new reporters, Susan literally whispered answers to questions. Her front-page story about the human casualties of leveraged buyouts had been so powerful that it had won a Pulitzer Prize, but in a conference room in the
Journal
headquarters in lower Manhattan we could barely hear her. I could
write powerfully, but I was afraid to speak publicly. With my news stories, I had helped send a young scam artist to jail by revealing his fraudulent business practices at Braniff Airlines; I had exposed the secrets of alleged price fixing at the country's major airlines; I had challenged CEOs, CFOs, and corporate raiders like the fiery Carl Icahn. But I had never really set forth my views about . . . well . . . anything. Now all of a sudden I had to speak, and my words were causing a stir. I was shocked. So many people stay silent because they believe, as I did, that others know more than they do or that their thoughts are irrelevant. When I realized that my own thoughts were not only relevant but well informed, it occurred to me that many people have important things to say but remain silent because of their fears. Going on the hajj clarified for me that I had to speak out and challenge some of the antiquated traditions in the Muslim world. When we go against conventional wisdom, we just have to be braced for criticism. People attack those who challenge the status quo.

Indeed, when senior editor Deborah Caldwell posted an interview with me on a religion and spirituality e-magazine called Beliefnet, I received slurs I didn't even know existed. One Muslim called me a
munafiq
for revealing the truth of Shibli's conception. “What does that mean?” I asked my mother, stirring masala, or spices, into that night's dinner.

“Hypocrite,” she told me. “They're stupid.”

Even with my mother's support, the allegation stunned me. It was an Arabic word I had never learned. To motivate me, my parents had taught me not punitive judgments but rather positive ideals. Instead of teaching me about the vice of being a munafiq, they taught me the virtue of being truthful. It was ironic to me that I was being called a hypocrite just as I was baring my soul for the first time in public.

I returned to the computer a few hours later and scrolled through the comments with my father. Another Muslim called me
mushrik
. “What is
that
?” I asked my father. Reading the comment board had become one of my father's favorite postretirement hobbies, much to the annoyance of my mother, who hadn't yet figured out how to send an e-mail. “Someone who commits
shirk
,” he told me, looking up from his screen. He always seemed to have the screen tilted so that he would have to point his chin up a little and read through the bottom of his bifocals.

“Shirk?”
I'd never heard this word before. I checked on the Internet.
Shirk
means worshiping other gods besides Allah, or God. It is pitched by the puritanical scholars as one of the “major sins,” along with murder and zina, giving me a batting average of .666, according to some Muslims. I knew my study of Hinduism and Buddhism would not go over well with
all Muslims. After all, in Nepal, I had bowed my head to Kali, the dark goddess of Hinduism who slays evil. On the roads through the Himalayas in India, I had meditated to Durga, the fierce Hindu goddess who sits on a tiger. In trying to understand the other faiths, I didn't feel as if I was violating the one into which I was born. I was motivated by the Qur'anic injunction to think and to learn. My experience with Buddhism and Hinduism didn't leave me believing in many gods and goddesses. Instead, the way I looked at it, they had simply deified the many expressions of one divine force. Islam, after all, has ninety-nine names for Allah: merciful, compassionate, wrathful, loving, and all-knowing, among them. With visual representations considered un-Islamic, Muslim artists over the centuries have illustrated these manifestations in intricate calligraphies, sometimes depicting the words in the shape of animals. The great Buddhist and Hindu scholars told me that their religions believed too in a singular, wider divine force.

My father rejected these slurs that Muslims, and people of all religions, threw upon others to dismiss dissent. “They're crazy,” he said as he tapped the keyboard. I agreed with him. And I had to look no farther than the pocket-sized guidebook I'd gotten in Mecca on the rules of the hajj to understand where this ideology was rooted: Saudi Arabia's puritanism. “The Things That Nullify
Iman
,” a section of the book began.
Iman
, meaning faith, had become a politically correct concept that Muslim puritans used to distinguish themselves from other Muslims. Of course, they took ownership of the term to define themselves as the true people of faith. To not have faith was to engage in
kufr
, nonbelief.

The number one violation was to commit shirk.

Number two was speaking to God through “intermediaries” like a saint.

Giving polytheists, or
mushrikeen
, any legitimacy was the number three violation. I didn't begrudge Hindus their faith. I respected it. I was guilty as charged.

Number four was giving credibility to “some guidance other than the Prophet's guidance.” Of course, that meant we had to accept their interpretation of the prophet's “guidance.” Violations included believing that secular laws and systems are better than sharia; “the Islamic system is not suitable for application in the twentieth century”; “the Islamic system is the cause of backwardness of Muslims”; Islam “is only a relation between a man and his Lord, and does not have any relations with other aspects of life”; “the judgments of Allah in enforcing the punishments prescribed by Allah, such as cutting off the hand of a thief, or stoning an adulterer is not suitable in this day and age”; “. . . it is permissible to rule by a law
other than what Allah has revealed in Islamic transactions or matters of criminal justice and similar affairs.” Adhering to any other law besides sharia, according to the guidebook, had horrible consequences: “Anyone who regards as permissible something that Allah has made impermissible, such as adultery, drinking alcohol, or usury (loaning money at interest), such a person has become an unbeliever according to the consensus of all Muslims.” It was an exaggeration to say this conclusion would be the “consensus of all Muslims.” The Saudi religious establishment was discounting debate among Islamic scholars and jurists over these points and finding a convenient way to legitimize itself.

Violations number five through ten were all variations of the same theme: allegiance to the Qur'an, sharia, and the traditions of the prophet, without any discussion about which traditions were credibly recorded and which were not. To me, these were the rules of blind faith, and I didn't buy them.

Neither did my father. He was creating aliases under which he defended me in these public message boards. A friend of mine later aptly described the comments on these message boards as akin to graffiti on bathroom doors. Fortunately for me, my father was right in there with the best of the punks.

NEW YORK
—As I stood at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble talking about the injustice of killing mothers for alleged sexual crimes, a young Muslim man stood up and politely, but still directly, admonished me for being a criminal in the eyes of Islamic law. He wanted to hear from my father, as if only my father could defend me. I argued that my position was legitimate even in the eyes of Islamic law, but bowing to this idea of my father as the patriarchal spokesman of my life, I handed the podium over to him. I didn't even realize that my mother, seated in the audience, could just as easily answer the question.

A consummate professor, my father turned the book reading into a lecture. I cringed as he went on and on about the teachings of compassion in Islam, the value of mothers in the Muslim world, and his faith in me. I tuned him out. Then, all of a sudden, I heard thunderous applause for my father. He had just told the audience, “I love my daughter. I love my grandson.”

Torn between gratitude for my father and a resentment I couldn't fully understand, I took the microphone back. That night I exploded. We were standing in front of Curry In A Hurry, a restaurant in the middle of Little India in midtown Manhattan. “Why do you have to talk so much?” I screamed. “Why do you have to go on and on and on? I
hate
you!” My anger was clearly disproportionate to the situation, but I was so consumed by it that I couldn't clearly see what I was really angry about.

The tension between my father and me kept escalating through the summer. It peaked with a showdown late one Sunday morning in July as I prepared to speak at Washington and Lee University about women in the Middle East. I hadn't slept all night, trying to get my thoughts organized.

My mother insisted that my father drive so that I wouldn't risk falling asleep at the wheel. That time I just didn't have the energy to battle my father's monologues. “No! I don't want him to come!” My mother insisted. I stormed out to find my father sitting in the driver's seat with the door locked. “No!” I yelled. “You're not going!” It was a moment out of a teen soap opera. “I'm not going to go with him!” I shouted with a piercing gaze. My mother returned my dagger eyes. “Don't talk about your father that way.”

“You're a mother now! You have to stay alive,” she said, clutching Shibli in her arms and turning quickly back into the house. I strode wildly behind her. She was in the living room beside a round marble coffee table. She looked frightened at my rage. “I know! You think I don't know I'm a
mother
?” I yelled. To my mother, I had suddenly become a stranger she did not recognize. “You hate us!” she screamed.

My father finally relented, getting out of the driver's seat, and I tumbled inside, slamming the door behind me. It was not a Kodak moment in maturity. Rolling through the gentle hills of southern West Virginia into Virginia in our family's Suzuki SUV, I realized the significance of what I had just done. I had refused my mahram—my sanctioned male chaperone. I was a woman driving alone to give voice to my thought. In my fatigue, my deeply rooted resentment at the patriarchal forces in my culture expressed itself in anger. In a way, I did hate my family. I didn't hate them literally but figuratively, for all that I felt I had inherited from them—the silence, passivity, subordination, and compromise expected of Muslim women. What I couldn't see clearly then was how they had freed me from my own inheritance.

As I drove I wondered about the depths to which I had sunk in claiming my independence from my family. I ended up with so much self-loathing
because I couldn't seem to find a mature way to free myself from the programming I wanted to escape. I understood why I had turned to writing. Growing up, I hadn't felt as if I could express myself fully. My parents were struggling with their own feelings of displacement. They loved me deeply, I knew, but each time I went to them with feelings of alienation or discomfort, I couldn't fully express myself. It was a timeless and universal issue, but the particular dynamics of my Muslim culture exacerbated the problem for me. When I couldn't find a sympathetic ear in my family, I turned to my writing. I could at least talk to myself through confessional writing. My notebook never told me to stop my inner dialogue because it was leading me off the “straight path.” My journal never said, “Huh?”—the guttural sound that was the Urdu equivalent of “What?” and my father's response to my views when he was absorbed in his own thoughts and didn't pay close attention to my every word as I impatiently expected.

My journal never expected me to censor myself.

If I paused, I focused on the strengths that I had gained by being a daughter of my family—opportunity, voice, strength, and certainty. But in my moments of frustration I felt defined by my weaknesses more than by my strengths. In this moment of self-criticism, I wanted to disappear. My mother was right. I had become crazed. That was what this tension of the spirit did to my soul. As I drove toward Lexington, Virginia, I felt like a fraud going before the Washington and Lee alumni to talk about women in Islam. That night on campus I tucked myself into bed with hopes that I would awaken with a new fortitude.

Instead, in the morning I felt depressed and couldn't pull myself out of bed. The clock ticked and ticked. I turned on the radio just to be able to drown in noise. The conversation revolved around the NBA basketball star Kobe Bryant and the charge of rape against him. This is what happens, the fundamentalists argued, when a woman doesn't live by
hudud—
the boundaries of a moral code. If she'd had a male chaperone with her, she wouldn't have been raped, the argument went. I would always get tripped up on that logic because it was literally true. I concluded that freedom of choice carries risks but allows for great benefits to society and human beings.

The phone rang. The organizers were politely wondering if I would be joining the conference soon. I couldn't dawdle any longer. I pulled out my notebook. I was clear now about my outline. I gave it a name: “
Hudud:
Sacred Boundaries—the Intersection of the Political and the Personal.” I
knew what I would talk about. My life. Born in India. New Jersey. West Virginia. Journalism. Hudud: the physical: harem, clothes, veils, mobility; sharia laws: Pakistan, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria; zina; hudud breakers: Amina Lawal, Ayesha Khan, Asma Jehangir, Toni Kasim, my mother.

I ventured over to the conference and sat in the back of the amphitheater where the group was listening to a scholarly discussion by a professor. I felt intimidated. The organizer introduced me, and I stood before the jury. I spoke and spoke and spoke. My life story unfolded easily, and the larger points about the cultural limitations and greater possibilities for women in Islam spilled out easily. The audience was attentive and then volleyed question after question at me. They recognized me as legitimate, and I felt credible. At that moment of triumph I missed my father. But I knew I had had to venture out alone to know my own personal strength. On the drive home I bought Shibli a battery-operated hopping rabbit, Beat Box Bunny, that delighted everyone at home, where the fallout from my departure was dissipated in my safe return.