Standing Alone (28 page)

There were virtually no students from Saudi Arabia and Egypt in Morgantown in 1993. More precisely, there were three. By the fall semester of 2003, however, there were fifty-five, mostly male and conservative, and their wives regularly glided through the local Wal-Mart wearing black
abaya
, the gowns I'd seen in Saudi Arabia that cloaked their faces as well as their hair in black. I was starting to understand what had happened.

Sadly, the students' presence emboldened (or in some places cowed) American mosque leaders, many of whom tried to rationalize discrimination against women through a hadith: “Do not prevent your women from [going to] the mosques, though their houses are best for them.” Scholars consider this hadith an allowance, not a restriction. The prophet made the statement after women, busy with household chores, complained when he said Muslims get twenty-seven times more blessings when praying at the mosque.

As I continued my Internet sleuthing, I found a document that didn't make sense. It was a fatwa by the Saudi government stating that partitions and separate rooms aren't required in mosques. I called the Saudi embassy in Washington to authenticate the decree. I found the press spokesman, Nail al-Jubeir, brother to the aide to Prince Bandar, Saudi
Arabia's ambassador to the United States. Talking fast and feverishly, he confirmed that the ruling was true. Unprompted, he brought up the example of Muslim women and men praying freely at the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. I was stunned. The government of Saudi Arabia understood my point? It agreed with me? Maybe the Saudi government was practicing post-9/11 spin control to distinguish itself from militant Muslims like Osama bin Laden and the September 11 hijackers. Whatever the Saudis' intention, I thought to myself,
I'll take it.

I told Nail al-Jubeir about life in our mosque and explained that many of the members were Saudi students arguing for the strictest separation for women, essentially marginalizing us. “You know what I tell these students?” he said. “They had a choice to come to study in America. They could have studied in Pakistan or one of the Gulf countries. But they chose America. If they don't like it here, I tell them, ‘There are three flights a day back to Saudi Arabia.'”

I couldn't believe my ears.

On the tenth night of Ramadan I went to our student union, the Mountainlair, on the campus of West Virginia University. I had zipped through it many times a day as an undergraduate, shuttling between classes and my interviews as a hard-charging reporter for the student newspaper, the
Daily Athenaeum
. As in the rest of Morgantown, this was a place where I had fully realized my potential. The West Virginia woman convert had booked the theater to show the documentary
Muhammad: The Legacy of a Prophet
, coproduced by the Muslim writer Michael Wolfe. The theater was mostly empty: men from the mosque were packing a room down the hall to discuss their civil liberties under the Patriot Act. Muslim men had been detained and deported under new powers the federal government had given law enforcement after September 11. I deplored the abuse of civil liberties, and sitting in the theater I saw how our Muslim world had also eroded. Watching the documentary, my heart wept for how far Muslim society had strayed from the ideals of Islam espoused by Muhammad, and I had an epiphany: Muslim women, with Muslim men supporting them, should obey the Qur'anic injunction to fight
zulm
, or oppression, even if it came from within our own community.

In the courtyard of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, I prayed just about fifty feet from the Ka'bah with a swirl of women
and
men beside me, in front of me, and behind me. There were no partitions, barriers, or curtains. All over the world Islamic culture keeps men and women from praying next to each other in mosques. But as I'd seen, most American
mosques, like mine, have gone well beyond that simple prohibition by importing a system of separate accommodations that provides women with wholly unequal services for prayer and education. And yet, excluding women ignores the rights that the prophet Muhammad gave them in the seventh century and represents a
bida
—an innovation that emerged after the prophet died. I had been wrestling with these injustices for some time when I finally decided to take a stand as the credits rolled on the life of the prophet.

I had no intention of praying right next to the men even though I felt I had a right to at least a parallel section beside a section for men. To me, it was a compromise to accept praying behind the men. I understood I was accepting a second-class status from third class. I just wanted a place in the main prayer space. That night I sat at my computer and shared my epiphany with Michael Wolfe. “As I listened to the life of the prophet Muhammad, I wanted to weep thinking about the sorry state of the Muslim community today. We have wandered so far from the principles of fairness, compassion, and simple consideration that are supposed to be at the heart of Islam. We are not going to accept the discrimination any longer. It is ultimately the principles in Islam of equity and a woman's rights that guide us. My family is going to act together. We will pray beside each other as we did earlier this year in Mecca and Jerusalem in two of the holiest mosques in Islam. Our mystical night journey will continue to Morgantown.”

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

       
Make your land a sacred area

       
For you are in the sacred area.

       
Make your age a sacred time

       
For you are in the sacred time.

       
Make this earth into a sacred mosque

       
For you are in the Masjid al-Haram.

       
For “the earth is God's mosque”

       
And you see that:

       
It is not.

MORGANTOWN
—In the predawn darkness of the eleventh day of Ramadan, my family and I continued the mystical journey we had begun when we traveled from Mecca to Jerusalem.

The prophet Muhammad had climbed onto a winged creature called the
baraq
. We climbed into my family's Chrysler minivan, my father behind the wheel. We set off on the wings of our commitment to the essence of Islam: truth, justice, and equality. We were the same ordinary pilgrims who had set off for Mecca almost eleven months earlier: my father, my mother, Samir, Safiyyah, and Shibli. We had prayed together as a family in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca and the Holy Sanctuary in Jerusalem; now I wanted to realize that experience at home. That morning, as the mist sat in the West Virginia hills like clouds descended to earth, we turned down a winding street called Van Voorhis Road and passed a branch of the local bank, BB&T, and a convenience store called Dairy Mart. My father nosed our baraq toward the new mosque, the road mostly desolate. Samir remembered the call to God we had recited as we approached the Ka'bah. “Labayk. Allahumma labayk. Labayk. La shareeka laka.”

“What does it mean in English?” I asked the children. As we dipped down a hill I answered my own question: “Here I come. At Your service, oh Lord. Here I come. No partner do you have.”

With my stomach churning as I worked to overcome my fears, my mother, my niece, and I walked through the moonlit front doors of our mosque with my father, my nephew, and my infant son. Resolute, we turned to the right and climbed the front staircase for the first time ever. It was only two paces from the front door, but we had never dared set foot there before. We quietly ascended and emerged into the greatest hall I felt I had ever seen. All the rules that forbade me to enter that space made it seem like a place larger than life. It was a space equal to a hotel ballroom, and entering it seemed as great an achievement as the prophet Muhammad's mystical ascension to the heavens. I had had to liberate myself from fear, control, and tradition to stand in this vast space. There were only about half a dozen men sitting in the front of the hall, a good thirty feet in front of us. We sat in front of the pillars lining the back of the great hall. Behind us was a darkened space, the women's balcony above it. “It's no big deal,” Samir whispered to me, relieved.

Samir thought to himself,
This is it. There is no going back
. He was
frightened—a little less than when he trespassed at the KFC in Mecca with his unescorted grandmother—but he felt he was taking the right stand. He had grown up on the tales of men and women in history fighting for their rights. He admired Martin Luther King (“He did things not only for his own ego but everybody”), Rosa Parks (“She thought everybody should have the same equal rights”), and Muhammad Ali (“The coolest Muslim I've ever read about”). He recalled how Muhammad Ali broke racial barriers to become heavyweight champion of the world. Samir had just finished writing a book report on a biography of “the Greatest.” When Muhammad Ali was eleven, he'd discovered, members of the Ku Klux Klan stole his bike. That motivated him to learn how to box so that he would learn to overcome his fears. I told Samir I had met Muhammad Ali at a memorial for my friend Danny. Ali had responded to a request by Danny's father, Judea Pearl, to appeal to Danny's kidnappers not to kill him, and he came to the memorial to offer his condolences. He was feeble when I met him, but a strong symbol of a man fulfilling Islam's principles of tolerance. Samir knew what it meant to make a commitment. “I took a vow,” Samir said, “to help the freedom of women.”

To him, the logic was obvious. “It isn't fair for women to be alone, sitting alone, with the men clustered together somewhere else. If we're all in the same religion, why should we be separated?” As he looked over at my mother, his sister, and me, Samir felt good that the family could pray together. He saw no reason to leave his grandmother, sister, and me behind just so he could enjoy the vast main sanctuary.

Next to him, Safiyyah was the new pioneer Muslimah, the feminine form of Mussalman, or “Muslim.” At school and at home, she got messages encouraging her sense of self-worth. When I talked with her about the arrangement at the mosque for women, she said: “Why can't I pray in the
front?
” At an early age, she had seen the equal conditions granted to men and women in Mecca and Jerusalem. Medina was a wake-up call that showed us the rights that women aren't denied just because they're women. Now, here in Morgantown, she had been the first to lead us through the front doors and into the main hall. She had hauled her heavy baby blue Gap messenger bag, packed with her schoolbooks. She had read about the sit-ins of the American civil rights movement. She was ready for a pray-in.

She wrote her reflections in a notebook. “How would you feel if your own brothers discriminated against you? Well, I don't feel I can go anywhere they are unless I want to come back home all mad because I don't feel welcome.”

Unlike many people decades older, she understood clearly what was happening. “Discrimination against feminists is what's happening at our mosque in Morgantown, W.V. Yup, that's right, the majority of these men don't want us praying a foot behind them.” As it turned out, they didn't even want us thirty feet behind them.

At that moment one of those men—the Egyptian American board president who had ordered me to use the rear door—descended upon us. His loud voice broke the quiet. “Sister, please! Please leave!” he yelled at me. “It is better for women upstairs.” He wanted us in the balcony. When we didn't move, he thundered, “I will close the mosque!” I had no idea at that moment if he would make good on his threat. And I had no idea that our act of disobedience would soon embroil the mosque, and my family, in controversy. Nevertheless, my mind was made up.

“Thank you, brother,” I said firmly. “I'm happy praying here.”

In fact, for the first time since the start of Ramadan, I was happy in prayer. My father had taken my sleeping infant downstairs so I could concentrate. But my peaceful reverie was interrupted when I heard my father's voice, as the elder went to convince him to tell us to leave the main hall. Words like “discrimination” and “equal rights” filtered upstairs.

That night I returned to the mosque with my father. He slipped into line with the men, who were already starting the nighttime prayer called
isha.

There were only two rows of about fifty men in the front. I slipped into the vast empty space of the rear of the main hall where I had sat with my family for the dawn prayer. I joined in prayer and sat quietly during the pause. This was the complicated, hourlong
taraweeh
prayer in which congregations recite all of the chapters of the Qur'an over the month of Ramadan. Having never felt welcome at the mosque, and knowing I'd be sequestered in a corner if I did attend, I was thrilled to actually learn the process of this prayer. As it turned out, it wasn't going to be that simple. A man noticed me and whispered to the other men. I heard a voice boom out: “There will be no praying until
she
leaves.”

I stayed firmly in position. I knew my rights. Knowledge was power, and I had it. I wasn't going anywhere. The men chased my father out of line and peppered him with pleas to tell me to leave the hall.

“She is doing nothing wrong,” my father insisted. I had told him earlier that if anyone wanted to discuss the question of women's presence in the mosque, I was happy to oblige. “If you have an issue, talk to her,” my father told them.

Four men bounded toward me. A man from Turkey declared: “Sister,
please! We ask you in the spirit of Ramadan, leave. We cannot pray if you are here.”

“I have prayed like this from Mecca to Jerusalem. It is legal within Islam,” I said. I remained firm.

The Turkish man continued: “But Mecca is a special place. We are weak here.”

I wasn't about to take the responsibility imposed on women over the centuries for men's sexuality. I wasn't going to be denied my rights just because I was a woman. “This is your
jihad bil nafs,
” I answered, evoking the concept of the holy struggle we must all wage within our
nafs
, or “soul,” to transcend our lower selves and rise to our highest spiritual heights.

“You will cause
fitnah,
” the man insisted.

I had never heard of this concept of fitnah until I started trying to understand how it is that men rationalize the erosion of women's rights. It means “conflict”; these men argued that women's presence causes fitnah because it is sexually arousing and distracting to men. Fitnah's theological root makes it a very serious allegation. The proverbial anti-Christ, called Dajjal, will emerge in the days before the end of the world and cause strife, or fitnah. Jesus will join forces with a messianic Muslim figure with the title of Mahdi and slay Dajjal with a lance, ending his reign of terror. According to this version, Christ will convert Christians and Jews to Islam, and everyone will live happily ever after, or at least until apocalypse arrives.

I stared at the man. His efforts to intimidate me weren't working.

I knew that I wasn't acting illegally according to the laws of Islam, and I couldn't be forced to leave. I remembered the Qur'an says, “There should be no compulsion in religion.”

The man turned to me again and asked, “Just tell me. Are you going to leave? Yes or no?”

I felt fully confident in my rights. “No.”

As the Turkish man stood up to leave, an Egyptian student with wide eyes thrust himself in front of me. “Let me just ask you one question!” he yelled. “Is this about you or Allah?”

I knew the answer deep within my heart. This was not about carpet space. This was not about a door. This was a fight for the way Islam expresses itself in the world. September 11 defined the challenge Islam will have in this world during my lifetime. If I was going to raise my son a Muslim, as I had committed to do with his aqeeqa, I, as his mother, had to claim my rightful place within my religion so that I could help to define our Muslim communities by the teachings on compassion, love, and
respect that had kept me within Islam's folds. I didn't believe I owed the man an answer to the question of whether my presence in the mosque was about my heart or my ego. I felt that the men would have been better served if they had asked themselves the same question.

The men returned to their lines, and we completed the night's prayers. The thunderstorm had passed without a lightning bolt striking the mosque. But again, it wasn't going to be so simple. The next day the mosque's all-male board met in the mosque kitchen and voted to make the main hall and front door accessible “solely” by men. My father started weeping during the meeting. The men moved into the office. He continued to weep, crying so hard that he started to choke on his tears, losing his breath. He begged the men to reverse their decision.

“Have mercy on me,” he pleaded. “My daughter has returned to Islam. Welcome her.”

They were untouched. “Everything will be okay for you,” they tried to reassure him. It was as if my father's self-preservation was all that mattered. Still crying, he told the board, “Don't adopt this policy. In search of spirituality and peace, my daughter has traveled all over the world, making pilgrimages to the holy places of the world's major religions, including Mecca during the Muslim holy pilgrimage of the hajj. Finally, she has concluded that she will find her home in her own religion, Islam. Treat women with respect,” he pleaded. “Give them equal opportunity to pray and to learn about Islam.” Alas, his pleas had no effect on the board members. They were solid in their certainty. My father went home and kept the tears he shed at this meeting a secret for months. In subsequent meetings the board members maintained their policy of telling women to pray in a separate space in the balcony.

I continued my act of civil disobedience while having my every request for a formal meeting with the board denied. Inside the main hall I saw the horror of the messages the men delivered to each other about women.

To my shock, at a Friday evening sermon, a visiting imam preached the same message that the book distributed by the Muslim Students' Association had taught allowing “wife beating.” He noted that men were to hit their wives with a traditional toothbrush, the
miswak
, made from a root. He talked about this technique as a way to humiliate women. About one hundred men listened dutifully. In the women's balcony, a woman was seething. She had left her husband, sitting down below, because he used this kind of teaching to rationalize his physical abuse of her. Because I was sitting in the main hall, I walked straight to the imam
after he ended his sermon and challenged it as inappropriate. He tried to rationalize his points with the miswak argument.

“I'm sorry, but you aren't talking toothbrushes when you use the word
beating,
” I declared. I didn't change his mind, but at least I protested. That would never have happened if I'd accepted my third-class status in the balcony.