Standing Alone (26 page)

MORGANTOWN
—As Shibli grew, I didn't really know if I believed enough in my faith to initiate Shibli into it. After all, some Muslims invoked Islam to label me a criminal. For that reason, I couldn't throw a naming ceremony, called the
aqeeqa
, which Muslim parents usually host for the Muslim community days after a baby's birth. But my heart changed through the summer as I toured for my book and read the words of support from the Muslim women and men who wrote to me after I wrote in defense of Amina Lawal. They made me believe that maybe I could find a Muslim
sangham
, a sort of spiritual community in Buddhism. Maybe I could commit to raising my son a Muslim. With these hopes, I scheduled my son's aqeeqa with his first birthday party.

The crispness in the autumn air reminded me of how far I had come in one year with the help of my sangham. They had given me something that the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach told me Buddha called the “wings of awareness.” I had called Tara to understand the spiritual power of my friends who took care of me when I returned dejected from Pakistan, via Paris. “They recognized your vulnerability and held it with compassion. They saw your goodness, and they acted as a mirror for it,” Tara told me. “The common denominator is unconditional acceptance.”

My sangham included my friend Pam Norick, who introduced me to Tara's latest book,
Radical Acceptance
, which contains the kind of philosophy that she thought could help me. I had met Pam in the summer of 1986 when we both started as graduate students at the American University in Washington. Pam went to Congress as a foreign policy and defense adviser and worked there for nearly a decade before starting her own consulting business specializing in global health and development. As someone who grew up in a Catholic family and then charted her own path for a life as a spiritual activist, she has been a gentle muse for my growth as a woman. Pam comes from a family that up until her generation always
“gave” one girl to the Catholic Church to serve as a nun. Seeking a different path, college, and serving for two years as a teacher in Zaire in central Africa, Pam always cultivated a strong spiritual life. She learned to meditate when she was nineteen, a practice that has grown even more central to her life in the past twenty years. She takes silent retreat several times a year. “I believe that silence is a great teacher,” she told me, “and instructs us to use our whole minds—our intuition and our reason—so that we can live our lives more consciously and with the welfare of others always in mind.”

Another friend was Rachel Kessler. Effervescent and sincere, she delivered to my home, years earlier, a pile of books on depression so that I could understand the gloom I was experiencing after my divorce. We met at the Washington office of the
Wall Street Journal
when Danny and I worked there. Born in New Rochelle, New York, Rachel had a mother who was raised Polish Catholic and converted to Judaism when she married Rachel's father. After a divorce when Rachel was six, her mother slowly reembraced her Catholic upbringing and brought Rachel and her brother to midnight mass on Christmas. In high school Rachel struggled with the question of whether she was Jewish or Catholic. Her father made sure she understood her roots, and she found particular inspiration in her paternal grandmother, Minuetta, an independent woman who as a composer worked in a profession made up mostly of men at the time. Minuetta broke from tradition and divorced her husband, a renowned scientist, in 1949, when it was particularly unheard of for a woman to be a single mother. “Why do I support you?” Rachel said one day when I posed the question to her. “Perhaps because I was so close to my grandmother, a pioneer in her own way, as her mother was a strong pioneering woman as well. Perhaps it's because I come from a family that believes in living life fearlessly, in enjoying and indulging and working hard. Perhaps it's just because that's what friends do.” Her words touched me.

My guests at Shibli's party were from the sangham that had embraced me both locally and from afar after I returned home from Karachi. In Morgantown, Koula Hartnett, a Greek American, and her husband, Richard, walked their dog, Prince, every night by my parents' house, dispensing kind words and support when they saw me outside. My college friend Ellyce Johnson drove in from Pittsburgh for the party. A devout churchgoer, she had a buoyant spirit that kept my spirits up. From Washington, D.C., my dear friend Lynn Hoverman came to Shibli's party. She was a thirtysomething, blue-eyed American woman of German Lutheran ancestry on one side and Midwest Methodist lineage on the other, born
and raised in southern California in the town of Lancaster, a high-desert region of the Mojave Desert where tumbleweeds blew, high school pride was strong, and Little League and rodeo reigned. She was baptized in the Methodist Church, and a girlhood of Sunday school and confirmation classes followed. Her Methodist church had only male ministers, but both men and women taught Sunday school classes, and she attended other Methodist churches where female ministers led the services. Boys and girls equally shared the honor of lighting the altar candles, and the church had openly gay members. Unlike at the churches of some stricter Christian faiths that she attended with childhood friends, Methodism was never touted as being better than other forms of worship. After 9/11, she said, “I began to understand that only moderate voices speaking up and speaking up loudly could counter the extremists. Any real change has to come from within Islam itself.”

For this occasion I wanted to commemorate Shibli's name, “my lion cub.” I found just the right symbol down Route 7 from Morgantown at an unusual place called Hovatter's Zoo. A tiger there had just had a new litter of babies. The owner would send a tiger cub for Shibli's birthday. In a parade befitting a lion cub, we marched together, the unlikely mix of people who made up my sangham. And in the jungle that was our backyard, Shibli and his friends petted this tiger cub that had come to help my lion cub celebrate his birthday.

Up the hill, we gathered on our back deck for the symbolic moment that had brought us together: a hair shaving that symbolizes a baby's initiation into Islam. To continue would be, for me, a conscious decision to raise Shibli a Muslim. I paused to reflect. What I hoped for Shibli was that he would be as stellar as all those in my sangham—Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, and Hindus—who strove to live honestly and well. I would teach him the rituals of my faith, as I did on the hajj, and guide him to understand that, while our paths with others might be different, they were parallel paths toward goodness.

My friend Nancy Snow, a scholar in propaganda, had come to Morgantown for Shibli's birthday, and I found an applicable lesson in her vocation. She had studied with me when I was at American University, and she had made it her life mission to dissect how political and religious leaders so often demonize others to promote their own agendas of power and persuasion. Growing up, she had gone to a Southern Baptist church and heard weekend after weekend that only those who took Jesus as their personal savior would go to heaven. In many conversations, she told me, as part of the peace-loving moderate majority, it was the responsibility of
each one of us to avoid getting manipulated by the propaganda spewed from the pulpit. She had gone to the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University. “Bob Jones taught me at the time to see the world in absolutist parameters—good versus evil, Protestant versus Jew, and Muslims weren't even discussed. As a result, instead of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, I looked at the world through a continual question of ‘Are you with me, or not?' The
not
was anyone who wasn't Christian on my terms; you were sadly classified as headed toward the going to hell exit,” she told me.

When Nancy later studied propaganda, she saw how closely it was linked to messianic visions for absolutist adherence to a particular belief system. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV started the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide—the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Sure enough,
propagation
was the same word the Saudi Wahhabi literature used. “My Bob Jones days trained me in the art of conversion, but now I'm not trying so much to convert as to get us all collectively to think harder and longer about the enemy images we engage in, how words and visuals can both harm and heal, and our need to teach love and mercy as much if not more than fire and brimstone damnation.” The puritans of all religions try to divide and conquer the world with arrogant interpretations of faith that give them a monopoly on the path to salvation. Looking out at my friends, I knew the puritans were wrong.

With that, my father slowly shaved Shibli's hair, just as the prophet had done with his daughter Fatima's son, Hussain, seven days after his grandson's birth. To the surprise of everyone, Shibli sat quietly on his rocking chair. I had done it. I had made a serious commitment with this simple act. I had no idea, at that moment, what it would mean in my life. I was just happy that Shibli didn't get a scratch from the ceremony.

As our last guests left I reflected with Ellyce and Lynn on the events of the past year. Shibli's conception hadn't followed the script that I had planned for myself, but I accepted the responsibilities that came from my life choices. I embraced my son and dedicated myself to raising him with virtue, respect, and honor. It had taken me a year, the hajj, and my tour of liberation behind me to decide to give my son his aqeeqa and raise him as a Muslim. Now that I had made that choice, I knew I had to find a way to coexist peacefully with the people of my Muslim community.

       
Oh ye who believe!

       
Stand out firmly

       
For justice, as witnesses

       
To God, even if it may be against

       
Yourselves, or your parents

       
Or your kin.

MORGANTOWN
—For most of my life I quietly bypassed traditions instead of directly challenging them. When I was married in Islamabad, Pakistan, an uncle told me that my grandmother couldn't be a witness. Two women equaled one man as a witness, according to Pakistan's sharia. Neither relenting nor opposing the edict, I had my grandmother
and
my aunt serve as one witness.

I had always distanced my life a bit from the Muslim community. After 9/11 and Danny's murder, I recognized that the stakes were huge for how Muslims expressed themselves in the world. Muslims like me sat silently while militants wrenched the religion from us and declared they were the protectors of the faith. My immersion into darkness and my experience in the light of the hajj transformed me. It made me recognize that I have a role in standing up to the extremists in my religion who try to intimidate us into respecting and following them. The purpose of religion is to inspire in us the best of human behavior.

Having chosen to raise Shibli as a Muslim, I wanted to find kinship in my local Muslim community. The opportunity came two weeks after Shibli's first birthday. The board of trustees at the Islamic Center of
Morgantown was opening a new mosque that had cost approximately $500,000 to build. It was a new three-story brick building on a street off the campus of West Virginia University, not far from a McDonald's and Hartsell's Exxon. It had a large community room, a kitchen, a small library, and a small office on the first floor, a massive prayer hall on the second floor, and a small balcony on the third floor. The afternoon before the opening a local West Virginia woman, a convert, called me to ask for my help in making sure that leadership set the right precedent for women's rights at the mosque. She had stood in the parking lot across the street from the old mosque when the men claimed there was no room inside for women. She and another convert were turned away from the door when they went to the old mosque to join in breaking the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. She had organized private swimming for Muslim sisters on Sunday nights at an indoor pool, even taping newspapers to the windows, but puritanical gossipmongers sniped at her efforts. And she had organized a family day at Valley's Worlds of Fun, an entertainment center with laser tag and other games, but an extremist protested an activity called “Rock and Roll Cage,” thinking it would promote improper Western dancing. In fact, it was an innocent four-person ride.

These conflicts reflected the imposition of cultural hang-ups on the community, but I realized that there was a much more serious threat to the community than the exclusion of women and canceled activities. Years earlier an Iranian American professor of international communications at American University, Hamid Mowlana, taught me that the mosque plays an important role in defining and disseminating Islamic ideology in the world. He identified the mosque as a place that serves not only as a site for daily prayers but also as a communications model for spreading news and opinion and as a forum for political decisionmaking. My friend Danny's kidnappers had used a mosque in Karachi as a drop-off point for the photos the world saw of Danny in shackles. I felt it was imperative to make mosques—not to mention all places of worship—safe refuges for men, women, and children, not safe houses for hatred, division, and puritanical ideology.

I agreed to meet the West Virginia convert at the McDonald's by the mosque, and I drafted a seven-point “Manifesto for Equal Participation by Women” that included equity in access, accommodations, facilities, and services. The women's restroom, for example, included no footbaths, while the men's restroom had spacious facilities for
wudu
, the ritual cleansing mandatory before prayer. My father joined us and took the manifesto to a meeting of the board that night. He reported to me that they
didn't respond, but they listened to the points. With hope, I walked with great enthusiasm to the freshly painted green doors of the new mosque. It was the eve of Ramadan, the holiest of months for Muslims and a time when we abstain from food, drink, and sex from sunup to sundown on the path to liberate us from our attachments to worldly desires. I had enjoyed this month since my childhood days as a sort of spiritual boot camp. I wore the same flowing white hijab I had worn in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.

“Sister, take the back entrance!” the board president, an Egyptian American man with a PhD, yelled at me. I was stunned, not only by his message but by his tone. It had none of the warmth I'd received from not just women but also men in Mecca and Jerusalem. He didn't even give me the typical Muslim greeting, “As-salaam alaykum.” I was taken back to Mina, where I had learned that small acts of kindness can mean so much.

He expected me to take a wooden walkway along the right side of the building to a back door. It opened into a back stairwell that led to an isolated balcony considered the “sisters' section.” I was so stunned that I continued through the front door, but I didn't dare go up a set of stairs to the right, inside the front door. They led into the main sanctuary. Somehow I knew it was off-limits to me as a woman. I walked through the community room and slipped into the back stairwell and climbed into the balcony. Resentful, I sat down on the carpet, cross-legged, Shibli on my lap. I felt humiliated and marginal. I stared at a half wall. I couldn't see into the main hall unless I looked over the edge, and I—a woman who had fearlessly crisscrossed the globe, meeting with heads of state, the Taliban, and chief executives—didn't have the nerve to even look over the wall. I heard the disembodied voices of prayers and lectures from the main hall downstairs, but with the distance, the inadequate sound system, and the chatter of women who were socializing because they were disconnected from the mosque's main activities below, I could barely make out what they were saying. I didn't have the nerve to speak up or protest. If I had something to say, I was supposed to write my thoughts on a piece of paper, pluck some child from play, and ask the child to pass my note to the men in the main hall. I felt like a second-class citizen.

Worse yet, I was confused. I had never been treated so rudely at the Sacred Mosque in Mecca or in the Holy Sanctuary in Jerusalem. I had walked through those gates freely. I had navigated the halls without restraint. In Mecca I had emerged into the courtyard that housed the Ka'bah without interference. Even though I opposed most of Saudi Arabia's policies toward women, the government made the hajj experience
more equitable than I could have ever imagined. The Saudis hadn't forced families to separate to observe the usual strict segregation that the state imposed on men and women in the public sphere. And yet it was unacceptable for me to walk through the front doors of my own mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia. I hadn't attached much significance to the moment when I had stood before the Ka'bah with my family, unhindered by gender segregation, but in a lesson I was slowly learning, I realized there really were no moments from the hajj that were without meaning.

I went to my parents' home angry. I yelled at my father in the kitchen. “Who decided women are so worthless?” He shook his head, sharing my frustration but feeling helpless. We were lucky that we hadn't been consigned to a totally closed-off room. The board originally had accepted a design in which the wall overlooking the main hall would have been floor-to-ceiling. My father protested that it would cut women off too much. The board wouldn't abandon the design until the fire marshal told the board that it would have to pay thousands of dollars for a sprinkler system if it kept the balcony barricaded. It was an uphill battle to assert women's rights in the Morgantown mosque. “They're male chauvinists,” my father said. I tried to accept the status quo through the first days of Ramadan, praying silently upstairs, listening to sermons addressed only to “brothers.”

On Friday the discrimination became really obvious. The community was gathering to break the fast at a sunset meal called
iftar
. A new female medical resident at the university arrived at the new mosque for the iftar dinner. Enthusiastic about being a part of her new Muslim community, she walked up to the front door with a covered dish. A man wouldn't even look her in the eye as he issued his order. “Women—over there!” he yelled, pointing to the old mosque. “This is the opening of the new mosque. I want to enter,” she protested. But how could she penetrate the phalanx of engrained cultural misogyny and discrimination that made the new mosque a men's club? She slunk over to the cramped old mosque, where a posse of kids ran wild.

The women got a dingy room in the old mosque. We sat on white trash bags on the floor next to ratty filing cabinets that seemed ready to topple over. It was so cramped that my plate of food tumbled to the floor when I stood up as a boy ran by me in play. I went outside and stared at the brightly lit new mosque across the street. I could see the chandeliers inside sparkling in the main hall. The men streamed in and out of the mosque, happily enjoying their dinner inside the spacious community room. We were not included in their definition of community.

Fed up, my mother dispatched a boy to get my father. On the ride
home my mother expressed her frustration. “If I was a man, I couldn't even eat my dinner if I was getting the best while the women and children were getting the worst. I would take the worst and give them the best.” I thought of my nephew, Samir, in Medina refusing to see the prophet's original mosque when his sister couldn't. This was the kind of enlightened thinking we needed to awaken in our men. Not a single one of them should have accepted their entitlement to the spanking new mosque knowing their wives, daughters, sisters, and children were being denied access to it.

Despite my outrage, I felt I would be like an interloper if I protested. But my awareness of our subjugation interrupted my prayer each time I touched my forehead to the carpet. I lay in bed each night despising the men who had ordered me to use the mosque's rear entrance and questioning the value my religion gave women.

I called the scholar Alan Godlas at the University of Georgia for guidance. He empathized immediately with me. He said it wasn't Islamic to treat women as the men in my mosque were doing. But he also knew that the wound I was feeling ran deep. “Your anger reveals a deeper pain,” he said. Over the next days I wondered about what he had said, and I realized it was true. I had witnessed the marginalization of women in many parts of Muslim society. But my parents had taught me that I wasn't meant to be marginal. Nor did I believe that Islam expected that of me. I began researching that question. I wanted to know the truth.