Standing Alone (27 page)

MORGANTOWN
—I found overwhelming scholarly evidence that mosques that bar women from the main prayer space aren't Islamic. They more aptly reflect the age of ignorance, or Jahiliya, in pre-Islamic Arabia.

Through the power of our information age, I discovered that I wasn't alone in my rebellion. Working by day in my childhood home in West Virginia, I found Asma Afsaruddin, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame. “Women's present marginalization in the mosque is a betrayal of what Islam had promised women and [what] was realized in the early centuries,” she e-mailed me, adding:

The marginalization of women seemed, if anything, to be worsening. The Islamic Society of North America, the national Muslim organization whose hajj tour group I had joined, conducted a survey in 2000 in which it concluded that “the practice of having women pray behind a curtain or in another room is becoming more widespread” in the United States. In 2000 women at 66 percent of the U.S. mosques surveyed prayed behind a curtain or partition or in another room, compared with 52 percent in 1994, according to the survey of leaders of 416 mosques nationwide.

The survey revealed a dearth of women in leadership positions in many mosques. Over the past five years women had served on the boards of about half of the mosques. Shocking to me, they weren't even
allowed
to serve on the boards of 31 percent—or one in three—of the mosques surveyed. If parent-teacher associations anywhere had similar bans on Muslims, it would be appropriately unacceptable. It was unconscionable to me that national Muslim organizations had known for two years about the gender discrimination uncovered by the survey and had aggressively not done something about it.

I didn't know where the modern-day scholars fell. I went back to the Islamic Society of North America and looked up its vice president, Ingrid Mattson, the Islamic scholar at the Hartford Seminary who had spoken at the Islamic Society's annual convention in Chicago. I thought she would be as good a person as any to test for official Muslim world opinion. To my surprise, I didn't have to explain anything to her. All too often the mosque in America “is a men's club where women and children aren't
welcome,” she told me. Afterward, I double-checked my notes. She had indeed called mosques “men's clubs.”

ISNA is affiliated with an outfit called the Fiqh Council of North America, which issues its rulings on questions of
fiqh
, or jurisprudence. I was stunned to discover among its rulings a fatwa supporting women's rights in mosques. “It is not required to place a curtain or division in the mosque between men and women. There is no verse in the
Qur'an
or
Hadith
of the Prophet—peace be upon him—that tells us that we must do so,” wrote Muzammil H. Siddiqi, a Fiqh Council member and past president of the Islamic Society of North America. He concluded that it is perfectly Islamic to hold meetings in the mosque that include both men and women, whether for prayers or for any other Islamic purpose, without separating them with a curtain, partition, or wall. Siddiqi further noted: “In America we are living in a very mixed society. Our brothers and sisters are all going out for work, shopping, study or just for outings. Our mosques should be the places where we should learn and teach our children the etiquette of living in a mixed society with Islamic manners. If we make artificial barriers between men and women inside our places of worship, where are we going to learn Islamic manners of being together as believing men and women?”

I was breathing easier and easier as I started to realize that the oppressive spirit I so often felt in my Muslim community was denying essential rights that Islam had granted women in the seventh century. I learned too that, besides Dr. Mattson, there was an entire new generation of Islamic scholars who were ready to dismantle the traditional barriers to the full realization of women erected by men. One academic led me to another in this loosely knit network of scholars who were like a secret society of men and women dedicated to resurrecting the early principles of Islam, among them the power of the feminine. A monk named Martin Luther had posted reforms of the Catholic Church on the doors of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. To me, Muslim women scholars were the Martina Luthers of the Muslim world, and men like Dr. Omid Safi and Michael Wolfe were humble Martin Luthers publishing important books in our modern-day effort to return Islam to its essential teachings. They were not trying to create a schism but rather to take back Islam, the title of a book edited by Michael. In Ithaca, New York, Islamic scholar Asma Barlas wrote
Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an
. A year earlier I would never have read anything with the word
patriarchal
in its title. Now I took it every night with me to the mosque. Ramadan is the month when it's said God started revealing the Qur'an to
the prophet Muhammad. We were supposed to spend the month reading the Qur'an. It was the right month for me to understand how men had interpreted the Qur'an to deny women's rights. It was time that we took back our religion.

The systematic elimination of women's rights was starting to make sense to me. I was relieved. It was about power and control. It wasn't about Islam.

From Richmond, Virginia, a scholar by the name of Amina Wadud told me that the Islam concept of
tawhid
, or the oneness of Allah and all beings, emphasizes the equality of men and women. An Islamic studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, she coined the term “tawhidic paradigm” to assert women's equal rights at the mosque.

The Qur'an (“Al-Ghafir” [The Forgiver], 40:40) evokes the virtue of righteousness equally in men and women.

In “Al-Imran” (The House of Imran, Qur'an 3:195), God says that men and women are equally rewarded for their acts of goodness on this earth:

Over and over again the Qur'an teaches us that women are equally charged with carrying their weight. It was a lesson that I learned on a reporting assignment in the summer of 1984 outside Washington, D.C. I was a nineteen-year-old summer intern at a sweatshop called States News Service, and I was wearing night goggles while going through field exercises run by the Army National Guard in light infantry warfare, the kind of military strategy that the United States has employed in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Everyone carries their own ruck,” the army sergeant barked, referring to our backpacks. I took his point to heart and saw that the Qur'an imparts this idea to us as citizens of the world.

The true believers, both men and women, are friends to each other. They enjoin what is just and forbid what is evil; they attend to their prayers and pay the alms and obey God and His apostle. On these God will have mercy. He is Mighty and Wise.

Dr. Wadud claimed that the rights Mecca gives women, including the right of women to pray together with men at mosques, are affirmed in something she refers to as “Meccan
salat
,” or prayer without formal gender segregation, as we had experienced in Mecca. I related to Dr. Wadud on so many levels. She was a single mother and a Muslim feminist. After we got off the phone, she sent me an essay extolling the virtues of Hajar.

My eyes were opened to see Muslim women excelling in the world under the umbrella of Islam. I learned about an Indian Kashmiri Muslim woman in New York with an unorthodox first name, Daisy Khan. She had met her husband, a bold Muslim leader by the name of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, in the mosque he helped lead, Masjid al-Farah. I connected with her immediately when I called her. “Your marriage is what happens when genders mix in the mosque,” I half-joked when she told me her story. What had happened was good. Together she and her husband were dedicated to expanding the traditional definition of our Muslim community.

Daisy Khan had responded to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, by sponsoring interfaith art exhibitions through an American Muslim organization she had founded with her husband, the ASMA Society. She told me that women had a designated space in their mosque. Late-arriving men often ended up praying behind the women already settled in their space. Her husband even had women do the sacred duty of the call to prayer. And Daisy led mixed-gender study circles. She told me, “The mosque is a place of learning. . . . If men prevent women from learning, how will they answer to God?” She made such sense. She also was a tough cookie. When a woman at a mosque tugged at her sleeves while she was in the midst of prayer, to admonish her to pull her sleeves to her wrists, Daisy turned to the woman afterward and said, “How are you going to answer on your judgment day when I testify to God that you prevented me from doing my prayer?” The woman pleaded, “Please forgive me! Please forgive me!” I made a mental note to keep that tactic in my bag of defenses against theological intimidation.

Much of the discrimination of puritanical Muslims against women is practiced in the name of “protecting” women. If women and men are allowed to mix, the argument goes, the mosque will become a sexually charged place, dangerous for women and distracting to men. In our mosque only the men were allowed to use a microphone to address the faithful. The first Friday of Ramadan, the West Virginia convert who had organized Muslim sisters' swimming excitedly announced that a student, Dana, would recite her
shahada
for the first time. For all Muslims, the first and most important pillar of Islam is the testimony of faith, or shahada: “There is no true God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” To be a Muslim, you have to say and believe these words. They are supposed to be the words we utter with our dying breath. To hear these words uttered by a new convert is considered blessed.

The West Virginia convert asked the mosque manager to bring the microphone to the women's balcony so that everyone upstairs and downstairs could hear the student's shahada. He refused, telling her: “A woman's voice is not to be heard in the mosque.” What he meant was that a woman's voice—even raised in prayer—is an instrument of sexual provocation to men. Some puritanical Muslims consider a woman's voice
awrah
, or a part of a woman forbidden to be displayed publicly. Many women accept these rulings, and their apathy makes them the status quo. The women in our mosque accepted the ruling. The men downstairs talked noisily through the conversion ceremony, oblivious to the profound act upstairs of Dana converting to Islam. Dana left, disheartened. “This isn't the Islam I was promised,” she said, slipping out by the darkened rear staircase for women.

One of the issues working against American Muslim women—an issue not much discussed outside the Muslim community—is the de facto takeover of many U.S. mosques by puritanical and traditional Muslims, many from the Arab world. I had gotten a sense of this ideological shift from my father's comments about his frustrations at the mosque. It was the convert who had urged the writing of the women's manifesto who identified the takeovers as ideological. “They're Wahhabi and Salafi,” she told me quietly one night.

Wahhabi, I understood. It's the ideology that defines Saudi Arabia and restricts the lives of Saudi women, for instance, by forbidding them to drive. But
Salafi
? I turned to the modern tool for empowerment: Google. What I learned helped me connect the dots. Salafism is an ideology related to Wahhabism. Its proponents fancy themselves as “pioneers,” borrowing on the word
salaf
, which means the early generations of Muslims,
and, like Wahhabism, it follows a very narrow interpretation of the Qur'an and the Sunnah—the sayings, traditions, and examples of the prophet. Fundamental to its interpretations is male control over women.

Now I got it. Since my childhood days, immigrants who followed this ideology, most of them from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, had overrun my town, and they had managed to transform my local Muslim community through strict rules of segregation and disempowerment of women. Even though the man who had most liberated my mind to think freely, Dr. Mahmood Taher, was also from Egypt, what I learned was that Muslims are in an ideological war: just as in the United States, there are many competing strains of puritanical and moderate thinking in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. The immigrants at my mosque had stacked our library with Wahhabi books printed by the government of Saudi Arabia. To my shock, the local Muslim Students' Association distributed a book,
Women in the Shade of Islam
, by a Saudi sheikh, Abdul Rahman Al-Sheha, that included a section called “Women Beating.” He repeated a disputed translation of the Qur'an that the puritanical says allows “beating of women . . . in restricted and very limited occasions [such as] when a wife disobeys her husband's instructions for no visible and acceptable valid reason.” The sheikh noted that “submissive, or subdued women” are the kind who “enjoy being beaten.”