Standing Alone (3 page)

The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women, when the
hudud,
or sacred frontier, is not respected. . . . To be a Muslim was to respect the hudud. And for a child, to respect the hudud was to obey.

HYDERABAD
,
INDIA
—I stared at the bare-chested laborer standing on the roof of my childhood home in India, hammering at its final remnants. It made me reflect on my roots and the imprint they left on my identity.

When I left India at the age of four, my grandmother—whom I called Dadi, meaning “paternal grandmother” in my native language of Urdu—dressed my brother and me in matching outfits cut from the same striped cloth (in case we got separated and had to be matched), and she lined my
eyes with black kohl, or eyeliner, to protect me from the evil eye. It served me well in a life that, much like most lives, has encountered tests. We lived first in Piscataway, New Jersey, where I spent my girlhood trying to find a place for myself as an immigrant child of America. Watching a children's TV program called
Romper Room
, I waited for the hostess to call out my name when she greeted children in TV land called Mary, Sue, and John, but I never heard her say my name. At home I grew up following the script of a traditional Muslim girl. I stopped wearing dresses when I was nine years old because my father, with his traditional Muslim sensibilities, felt that it wasn't proper for me to keep baring my legs.

When I was ten, we moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, where my father got a job as an assistant professor of nutrition at the local university, West Virginia University. Morgantown is tucked into a north-central corner of the state about seventy-five miles south of Pittsburgh and two hundred miles west of Washington, D.C., along a river called the Monongahela. About 90 percent of the population is white. West Virginia University is known for its football team, the gold-and-blue Mountaineers, but it has also churned out a record number of Rhodes scholars to Oxford University. West Virginians have a fierce mountain tradition of independence that I seemed to absorb. I was always proud to be on my side of the boundary line between Virginia and West Virginia. When the war over slavery broke out, our territory had stood on the right side of the issue, breaking off from Virginia to create the free state of West Virginia. In Morgantown, we had a dynamic intellectual community. West Virginia University was the richest academic enclave in the state. Drawn by the university, immigrants from India were one of its largest minority groups, next to immigrants from China. I went to sixth grade at Evansdale Elementary School, across University Avenue from my family's simple three-bedroom apartment in the WVU faculty housing. Unknown to me, feminist scholarship was just starting to take root on campus, where Dr. Judith Stitzel, the mother of one of my classmates, was starting to teach women's studies courses. By no coincidence, her son, David, took my arm and led me across one of the greatest divides that defines traditional Islam, and most of our world—the divide between males and females. He was my square dancing partner. Mrs. Gallagher, our sixth-grade teacher, had sent a note home with all of her students, asking our parents' permission to let us learn to square-dance. My mother invoked what she had been taught in her Muslim family against boys and girls dancing, but I begged and begged for permission to squaredance. Finally, my mother relented.

Some might say that was when my troubles began. But for eight years I lived by most of the
hudud
, or rules of my Muslim culture. I didn't protest when I had to sit with the women in the kitchen while the men sat on the nice Montgomery Ward living room sofas. I could hear the roar of my father's voice as the men engaged in political debate. As I grew up, I cared about the civil war in Lebanon and the Iranian hostage crisis. But I never felt I could enter the men's space, and I didn't—except to whisper messages from my mother to my father to stop talking so loudly.

I knew enough, though, to recognize that women were restrained just because of the gender into which we were born. My junior high journal for Mrs. Wendy Alke's English class is filled with snapshots that reveal that it was in my character to be a free spirit. I chronicled the biking accidents, the kickball games, and the other adventures that filled my free time. Not long after I moved to Morgantown, I shared a seat on my bike with a friend. “The handlebars started shaking. I was tense when all of a sudden the bike went down! We both fell, and I got most of the impact since I was up front! We had to walk the bike all the way back to the Med Center Apts., and on our way we saw a car and thought wow! If that had been two minutes later, we could have been run over!” Another time, I recounted how I broke my arm jumping off a wooden fence in my rush to play baseball with my brother and his friends. “I was going to play baseball. The log twisted, and I lurched forward. I got up and oh! yelped in pain. My arm had been broken, and I walked home with the help of my friend.” These would have been ordinary childhood stories except that in my life they were also symbolic of the freedoms my parents allowed me as a girl. In traditional Muslim cultures around the world, girls aren't allowed to ride bikes in public; they aren't allowed to play baseball with their brothers; and they most certainly aren't allowed to walk home alone. I started earning money before I hit my teen years, babysitting neighborhood children named Bobby and Misty. I chronicled the night I earned $2.50. This was also remarkable because it set me on a path toward economic independence that so many women in more traditional Muslim culture aren't allowed.

It is clear from my childhood expressions that I looked to God for help in my life. As it sleeted outside one November day, I wrote that the Condors won their kickball game during lunch that day. “That means we are tied with them for 1st place and have to play them to see who is No. 1.” Invoking a Muslim phrase that means “God willing,” I wrote, “
Inshallah
, we are.” When my brother fell ill one summer, I took the blame. Earlier I
had gotten jealous that he was healthy while I was sick, and I yelled, “I wish you would die!” With my brother sick, “I started crying and crying and everyone else tried to hold it in. We were all praying and praying!” When my brother survived, I prayed in relief and vowed never to curse anyone. “I was afraid we would lose bhaya [the Urdu honorific for “older brother”]! Thank you so much God for teaching me not to say such bad things and for saving bhaya!” So much is said about Catholic and Jewish guilt, but Muslim culture has its own guilt trips, and I absorbed all the messages that told me my sins could cause damnation. To counter these messages, I looked for inspiration in other sources.

From early on I found strength in the stories of women who challenged tradition. I talked in my journal about Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
, a tale of strong women, as “my most favorite book.”

At many different times in my life, I also felt my culture trying to confine me and define me. From that early age, I could feel the difference between circumstances that were oppressive and those that weren't. I enjoyed a gathering one night celebrating the Hindu holiday of Diwali, or a festival of lights. “Us girls had relay races in the hall and arm wrestling (I beat them all). . . . It was fun all in all.” I continued: “The next night . . . there was an Islamic association party. It stunk! The ladies had to go up to a little efficiency apt. (owned by one of the members) because they weren't to sit with men. There were like 15 people in one dinky room! The men carried the food up and oh! it was as if we were in jail!”

As I entered into adulthood I began confronting the boundaries in my life, accepting them at times and daring to challenge them at other times. My father had his own struggles reconciling his culture with his beliefs, but as a scientist he firmly believed in having an open mind and pursuing intellectual inquiry, and he encouraged me to develop these attributes. My father crossed state borders to drive me to New York City so that I could do a summer internship at
Harper's
magazine, but he was also crossing a much more profound kind of line: the cultural tradition that a daughter didn't leave her father's home except to go to her husband's house.

Indeed, to respect these traditions, my parents told me to apply to only my hometown school of West Virginia University, but even there I continued resisting traditional Muslim boundaries. At the age of eighteen, I kissed a man for the first time, and he wasn't my husband. In the study carrels in a building called Colson Hall, our shoes slipped off during an all-night study session, his toes crossed the unspoken physical boundary
that my culture and religion had put around me, and he dared to touch my bare feet. The next year I crossed the most sacred of boundaries of a woman's body and consummated my love, but it wasn't my wedding night. I wept in confusion over the truths of my physical and emotional urgings and the expectations of my religion and tradition.

I broke my parents' hearts with my social trespasses. I tried to live a double life, but they knew enough to be disappointed. Still, my parents did not remain captive to their cultural traditions, because higher values overrode their fears, and they allowed me to do my graduate work at American University in Washington, D.C. By doing so they helped me find economic opportunity and professional status. I worked for twelve years as a journalist for the
Wall Street Journal
beginning in 1988, flying into new cities, diving into rental cars, and navigating my way to interview CEOs and senators. I spent my young adulthood trying to understand the amalgamation of identities within me.

In 2000 I took a leave from the
Journal
and traveled alone to India to report and write a book. If my Indian world is divided into a “North” that includes the West and a “South” that includes the East, I am a daughter of the South, but a woman of the North. I went to India as an author to research a book on Tantra, an ancient Hindu philosophy in which feminine powers and sexuality are a critical part of worship. I had written a frontpage article for the
Wall Street Journal
about the big business of selling Tantric concepts of sacred sexuality at weekend workshops from Santa Cruz, California, to Ottawa, Canada. I had thought I would wander the caves of India studying with Tantric masters, but my itinerary soon became a journey into the corners of my own identity as I tried to traverse the dualities in my life. I thought I was searching for love, but I was in fact searching for the answer to the question of who I was as a woman.

As I traveled in India I embodied the values of self-determination that I had learned in America. To be mobile, I dared what had been unthinkable to me even in America: I learned how to ride a motorcycle. It was a scooter by U.S. standards—a sleek, black, 100-cubic-centimeter machine—but it was my vehicle of empowerment. I rode that Hero Honda Splendor into the Himalayas, having cut my long hair and wearing pants and jackets to resemble a man. Women didn't ride motorcycles there. But no matter how high I went into the Himalayas or how far away from home I traveled, the voices of traditional values echoed within me.

LUCKNOW
,
INDIA
—Following my encounter with the Dalai Lama, I drove to visit my elderly aunt, Rashida Khala
(khala
means “maternal aunt”), in the city of Lucknow. I figured I could do the hajj on my way back to the United States. As it turned out, the closest I could get to Mecca was walking into the Saudi Arabian Airlines office, near the bustling Lucknow neighborhood of Hazratganj.

At first, a man named Nadeem told me there would be only an extra $75 stopover fee on a ticket to New York to do a trip to Mecca.

Awesome
, I thought. I am a visual learner: until I go someplace, I don't know where it is on the map. I had no clue where Saudi Arabia was located, beyond knowing it was somewhere in the Middle East, and it was a relief to know it was somewhere along the flight path between the United States and India. Saudi Arabia is a short flight westward from New Delhi. Then the ticket agent added a caveat: “You must go with your
mahram.”

“My what?”

“Your mahram. Your father, your husband, your son, or your brother.”

“What?” I asked. Alone, I had jetted into the cities of the world—among them, Bangkok, Delhi, Tokyo, and Paris—but I couldn't fly into the holy cities of my religion? He explained: sharia, or Islamic law, in Saudi Arabia rules that a Muslim woman must do hajj with a mahram, either a husband or an adult male escort who can't legally marry her—her father, son, or brother. Uncles and cousins do not qualify.

Historical anecdotes from the time of the prophet Muhammad are used to support this rule. It's said that a man came to the prophet Muhammad and said, “My name has been included in jihad and my wife has left for the hajj pilgrimage.”

The prophet replied: “Go and perform the hajj with your wife.”

To me, that seemed interesting, but it certainly didn't make it a rule. For all that is written in the Qur'an about the hajj, no mention is made of chaperones being required. I had only the Saudi Arabian Airlines ticket officer to ask my questions of “Can I go with a tour group?”

“Perhaps, but you must come and go with them. The leader has responsibility for you.”

Responsibility for me?

I was thirty-five years old. I had been independent and self-sufficient since the
Wall Street Journal
started cutting me paychecks. I'd driven a motorcycle through the Himalayas. I'd interviewed President Bill Clinton
in the Rose Garden of the White House. Surely, I could take care of myself. My thoughts were interrupted by my physical mirror image—a woman walked inside the office shrouded in a black burka, a kind of graduation gown with a loose ninja hood; only her eyes were visible. A man came in with her. She flipped open her passport. The picture inside showed her face, but her hair was still completely shrouded. I wondered what identity I would have to assume to make this journey. Did I have to become
her
? I cherished cousins and aunts who dressed in burka. But as much as I loved and respected them, I didn't think I'd ever adopt their external persona. I left frustrated.

In the house of my elderly aunt, Rashida Khala, a doting, pious, and beautiful woman, I met a distant cousin. He was planning on going on the hajj with his wife. “Can I go with you?” I asked eagerly.

“We shall see,” he answered.

He was my elder. Surely he could qualify as my mahram. Surely the Saudi government didn't care if he was a distant relative. Surely, it turned out, it did. I rode my motorcycle for almost seven hours (with a rest overnight) to my ancestral village of Jaigahan, where women don't emerge from the cloisters of their houses except in burka. Yet I couldn't travel to Saudi Arabia with a cousin. I had to be accompanied by a direct bloodline male relative. On top of that restriction, the fundamentalist Hindu government in power in India didn't seem to rank Muslim pilgrims as a top priority. Fundamentalism in Hinduism was like fundamentalism in all religions: its adherents believed in the supremacy of their faith over others. Its politicians wanted to turn India's secular state into a Hindu nation. This was an issue for hajj pilgrims in India, where, as in many countries outside the Western world, pilgrims have to be state-sanctioned. I called my relative from a phone booth in the Jaigahan bazaar.

After our greetings, I asked, “Are you going?”

“It is not so simple being a Muslim in India,” my cousin told me.

His wife had to get a new passport before she could apply for a hajj visa. “They see a Muslim name, and they delay the application,” my cousin said.

It continued like that for days. Finally, I had to admit to myself that I was not going to be able to do the tricks in this circus—at least not that year.