Standing Alone (30 page)

MORGANTOWN
—On a Friday night in January 2003, I got ready to go to the mosque in Morgantown for the weekly
halaqa
that only men seemed to attend. It was a different story in Mecca, where, on the hajj, other women and I attended and participated in all of the same study sessions
that men enjoyed. There was no segregation, separation, or even discouragement in Mecca. We sat wherever we wanted to sit. Sometimes I sat right next to my father or other men, as did other women. There was no discomfort. I asked questions freely, as did other women. It was the same at the national convention of the Islamic Society of North America, where men and women had sat freely wherever they wanted and were not excluded from any events.

It wasn't right that in Morgantown men enjoyed weekly study sessions, often along with free dinners, and women were not welcome. I wanted to know what they were learning. But I was also afraid. I wrote to Saleemah, “How sad. I am about to go to the mosque, and again I face my own fears. I am going to the weekly Friday night
halaqa
. Women do not go. I want to partake in this religious education the brothers of my community receive. But I am afraid of the reception I will receive. But I will have with me all the sisters and brothers with whom you have connected me. Thank you.” Saleemah wrote back immediately: “Yes, take us with you. Call on the powerful, free, and fully self-expressed woman that Allah made you! And remember the legacy of Hajar, Khadijah, and Ayesha, may Allah be pleased with them. In solidarity, Saleemah.”

I closed the e-mail, internalized its message, and set off for the mosque with my father. There I walked inside with parts 1 and 2 of
The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an
, with commentary by the Islamic scholar Yusuf Ali. His translations were considered among the most lyrical. I slipped to the floor at the rear of the main hall, about thirty feet behind a huddle of men reading the Qur'an to each other. I closed my eyes and started meditating. I saw all the beautiful people of Islam whom I had gotten to know since I had gone on the hajj.

There were the noble brothers in Islam who had been supportive and kind: Dr. Godlas, Ahmed Nassef, Dr. Omid Safi, Michael Wolfe, and Alex Kronemer. There was the Chicago lawyer-comedian, Azhar Usman, at the Islamic Society of North America conference who made us laugh at ourselves as a community divided over how to properly greet each other. There were the sisters in Islam, strong, feisty, and expressed: a rap poetess in hijab, strong and determined at the ISNA convention, where leaders recognized they couldn't silence the women and youth; Ingrid Mattson, the vice president at ISNA who acknowledged that mosques are men's clubs; Saleemah; Mohja.

Hearing noise around me, I opened my eyes. In the front of the room a Syrian American cardiologist from Clarksburg was taking a seat. He was a member of the board and had voted to make the main hall and front door
“solely” for the use of men. The halaqa was about to begin. I remembered the study sessions in Mecca and Medina. Men and women sat in the same space, close to the speaker, and I had asked questions without fear or difficulty. In Morgantown I moved forward to take a seat behind the men, sitting at least ten feet behind them.

“Sister, sit in the back,” the cardiologist ordered.

I didn't know if I had heard right. Surely, he had greeted me in the salutation typically exchanged. I answered him as if he did. My father later confirmed he had not. “Walaikum as salaam, brother,” I said, giving the reply that usually comes after a greeting. I tried to respond to his demand. “What are you suggesting? That I sit in the back against the wall?” I said, pointing about thirty feet behind me to the dark back wall where rolls of unused carpet were tossed.

“Yes.”

I couldn't understand. I had sat not even behind men but next to men to listen to lectures during the hajj in Mecca and Medina—the two holiest cities of the Muslim world. Nobody had demanded that I sit even ten feet away from the men. Even the conservative Sheikh Alshareef, our hajj tour guide, looked me in the eye when he answered my questions. But somehow in Morgantown, this man was trying to turn me into a pariah. I refused to be cast aside. “Brother, I have an Islamic right to sit here and participate.”

He snapped at me: “The brothers do not want you here.”

“How many brothers want me to sit in the extreme back?”

The group included professors and tomorrow's leaders—graduate students, engineering students, and medical residents. Slowly each hand but my father's hand rose.

In my book, the majority didn't define justice. If that had been the case, Islam would never have survived the rejection that the prophet Muhammad initially received in Mecca. America would never have integrated if the issue had been put to a vote in the white South. “It is not Islamic to impose these conditions on women,” I said.

“The mosque board made rules. Your father is on the board,” he answered. This was the first public admission of the ban that the board passed the day after my mother, niece, and I walked through the front door to pray in the main hall. They hadn't yet been publicly posted or expressed.

“My father did not agree to these rules,” I said.

My father, otherwise quietly observing until then, interceded. “These rules are wrong.”

“I am the teacher. Why do you come to listen to me if you cannot respect me?” the cardiologist asked me.

“But, brother, you are not respecting me.”

A man turned toward me with anger in his eyes. He was an Egyptian research assistant professor of engineering at WVU. “Leave,” he yelled at me, as if he had a right to make such an order. He continued his tirade, thrice calling my father “idiot” and flailing his arms so wildly at my father that a man from Turkey had to restrain him.

When I protested his disrespect, he said, “He is an idiot. Look at the kind of daughter he raised.”

This was a displacement of blame with which I was familiar. It was the same mentality that blamed a woman for distracting men. Then the cardiologist threatened me with a restraining order, banning me from the mosque. When I refused to budge, he cancelled the halaqa, but he just moved to the other side of the hall, the men, including my father, encircling him and shutting me out. I didn't resent my father sitting with the men. It was a confusing moment in which tradition and justice clashed.

I realized there were wider dynamics at play. In my effort to do social service after I'd returned from the hajj, I'd become a volunteer for our local Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center, which ran a shelter and hotline. In my training, I learned about something called the Power and Control Wheel. It was a model for what abusers commonly eked out to those who challenged their authority in domestic violence situations. I could now see that it applied to all aspects of life, including my experience with the men in power at the mosque.

I closed my eyes to meditate. In the midst of troubles, the prophet Muhammad had gone within himself to find a divine answer. I could at least seek out human insight. In the course of one hour, I had gone from such appreciation for the
sangham
, the spiritual community, I had found in Islam to despair. I could feel my soul quivering from the way these men had physically threatened my father and me.

When I rode my Hero Honda Splendor motorcycle through India, I meditated on the image of the fierce Hindu goddess Durga on a tiger, not because I worshiped her, not because I was committing
shirk
, or idolatry, but because this image captured the spirit of a strong woman. In mythology, she slays fears. At that moment in the mosque, the darkness of my lids shielded me from the violent men around me. I went back to a graveyard in Mecca and saw dear Khadijah, the first wife of the prophet, commanding her caravans, challenging her husband. I saw Aisha, the youngest wife of the prophet, in the mosque, chronicling Islamic history
and theology. I saw dear professor Ingrid Mattson, sitting poised and dignified with her intellect and power on the dais of the Islamic Society of North America convention. I saw my mother, my anchor. I saw Safiyyah, the future, our hope.

I knew that people often lose sight of basic human decency. When we were returning from the hajj in Amman, Jordan, we watched a pack of irate pilgrims stampede the gates to storm our plane so that they could get seats on it. They had missed their own connection. Yelling and screaming, they delayed our departure so long that we missed our connection from New York City home to Morgantown. I wondered how we had become so indecent as an ummah. A single tear sat locked between my eyelids.

Wake up from your sleep and say, “Bismillah [In the name of God].”

MORGANTOWN
—The next morning I awakened before dawn. I had forced myself to go to sleep, but my night hadn't been restful. I knew I was physically safe. A woman dispatcher for the Morgantown police told me that the state of West Virginia didn't issue restraining orders in nonfamily disputes. But I was spiritually brutalized.

I slipped a CD into my stereo system. The singer was Dawud Wharnsby Ali, a Muslim convert living in Canada. A hajji, he celebrated the hajj with a song, “Here We Come,” translating the prayer we had chanted going to the Ka'bah and to our mosque in Morgantown the morning of our predawn ascension. I'd bought the CD at a table at the bazaar at the Islamic Society of North America convention. I had seen a familiar face behind the table: Suhaib al-Barzinji, a bespectacled man. He was one of the guides during the hajj, and he had helped unload our suitcases when our bus pulled into Mina. He was running a booth for Astrolabe, the Islamic media distribution company he ran with his wife. I was walking the floor of the bazaar at the time with Sheikh Alshareef, my group's guide around the Ka'bah and elsewhere. Unlike the men at the mosque the night before, the men attending the convention talked respectfully and freely with me. Nevertheless, the horror of the night before stayed with me. I had wanted to write about the beauty I had witnessed in the Muslim
community. Instead, I found myself writing through a flood of tears in the stillness of the dark predawn. I sobbed so hard that my body shook. Dawud Wharnsby Ali's singing spoke to me: “Wake up from your sleep and say, ‘Bismillah.'” In the name of God. The word was meant to be a touchstone for staying mindful of a higher calling in all of our actions.

When would Muslims awaken as a people? I had witnessed so much need for awakening. Erum Afsar, a young woman in Canada, wrote to tell me about the neighborhood mosque she was afraid to enter because of its hostile policy toward women. Pamela Taylor, a Muslim convert and writer, had to step on a path of crushed, rotten cherries leading to the rear women's entrance at a mosque in south Florida; Sara Tariq, a young Arkansas physician, lost access to her childhood mosque in Little Rock when conservative men took over. I thought I would feel triumph for the ummah that at least we had women and men who were testifying about injustice. Instead, I was weeping.

The songwriter's words echoed in my house with the fears he imagined the prophet Muhammad felt on his deathbed for the future of the Muslim community, the ummah. He sang of the stillness around the prophet as the companions gathered near his deathbed. The prophet died on June 8, 632, at the age of sixty-three, just one day after the date that marks my birthday. “As Aisha, his wife, held tight to his hand, the prophet spoke again before he passed away. My ummah, those who follow me, the future of the faith makes me worry until I cry. My brothers and my sisters in Islam, will they be strong and carry on after I die?” I asked myself these questions through my tears: Brothers and sisters in Islam, will we be strong? What is the future of our faith?

That afternoon, in hope, I turned again to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. As a Muslim woman, I was being physically and verbally threatened for not leaving my mosque. I pulled out the mobile phone number for Ibrahim Hooper, one of the organization's founders and its spokesman, and called him.

“As-salaam alaykum,” I said, hearing shouts behind him.

“Walaikum as salaam,” he answered. “Could you wait one minute?” he asked. Behind him I could hear a man shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” prompting Ibrahim to repeat the call, “Allahu Akbar!” God is great!

He was in front of the French embassy in Washington, D.C., taking part in the protests that Muslims were holding nationwide against the ban on head scarves in public schools in France. The protesters cited article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes
freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The Muslim world was galvanized to protect the rights of women to wear scarves on their heads, but I was left standing alone in my mosque in Morgantown as the men attacked me for trying to exercise my right to observe my religion in “community with others” and seek knowledge. The irony struck me. At a time when Islamic organizations and civil rights groups were pumping resources and organizing tens of thousands of Muslims from Alabama to France to sign petitions, hold rallies, and uphold the right of women to wear hijab, Muslim women were being denied fundamental Islamic and human rights to speak, participate, and learn in mosques throughout the United States and Canada. Men could feel noble protecting our right to wear a cloth over our hair, but they went silent when it came time to protect our right to speak.

Ibrahim Hooper returned to the phone: “Yes?”

“You're working so hard to defend Muslim women's rights to wear a scarf over their head. More power to you, but meanwhile Muslim women in America can't even exercise their rights in mosques.” I was sick to my stomach as I explained the events of the night before, shocked at how my voice was trembling. The hostility I'd met with had disturbed me more than I dared to admit to myself. He listened to me and then said, “You're in the wrong town.” I was aghast. “Is that what you would say to a Muslim woman who is disrespected at her place of work in any town in America?”

He said he would look into it and got off the phone.

It was obvious that the community would not rally to protect women such as myself. I told my father I was going to report the incident to the police. I didn't ask him to go with me. He volunteered. That meant so much to me, because often we are not just fighting the status quo when we try to challenge authority but facing off against our loved ones as well. I drove my father and myself to the Morgantown Police Department, a sprawling building in downtown Morgantown just two blocks from where my father had started the mosque and my mother had started her boutique. My voice trembling just slightly, I related the incident to a policeman, Officer M. J. Bloniarz, who listened intently. “Did you feel physically threatened?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. A local, he told me that not long before he had been called to an accident involving a Muslim woman who was wearing the full face-covering veil popular in Saudi Arabia. Her husband, in the passenger seat, wouldn't allow her to answer questions from the police officer. “It is my religion,” he told the officer. “What did you
do?” I asked. He let them go. “I didn't want to be disrespectful.” I shook my head in amazement. That incident was yet another example, even minor, of how the puritans were wrongly using Islam to barricade themselves. After all, the woman's mahram, or sanctioned male relative, was present, and the conversation would have been not only chaperoned but purely business.

I completed the paperwork and became incident report number 04-2646. The police classification: assault intimidation. I felt better for having documented the spirit of intimidation with which the puritans were trying to keep their hold on not only our mosques but the Muslim world.

“Do you feel okay about it?” I asked my father as we drove away. “I have no regrets,” he said firmly. “The extremists cannot just bully their version of Islam upon everyone.”

I sent the report to Saleemah the next day on Martin Luther King's birthday, “with great sadness about the present but hope for the future.” “Oh, yes,” she wrote back. “On this day that we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King, I can't help but remember his quotation, ‘We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.'” He spoke those words in 1967 to oppose the Vietnam War, but his words were universal in the struggle of all people to act on their conscience.” She ended: “Onward.”

In a field trip to the Pittsburgh Zoo with our families, the local Muslim woman who courageously left her husband after he constantly beat her taught Shibli to drink from a straw for the first time. That afternoon, as we raced from the elephant house to the monkey house to get out of the cold, I turned to my mother to make sense of the men at the mosque. “Why are they so mean?” I asked. “Power and control,” she answered. “Asra, it is not easy for anyone who wants to bring about change. They hated Jesus. They hated the prophet Muhammad.”

Her thoughts made me remember a moment in Mecca when we saw the site of a house next door to the prophet's house where Abu Lahab, his uncle, had lived, tormenting him. Interestingly, the spot was now the site of a men's restroom. Samir had studied the spot and asked, “His evil uncle lived next to him?” That's right, I said.

When the prophet and his army defeated the soldiers of the Meccan Quraysh tribe in the Battle of Badr, it's said, Abu Lahab, in a fit of anger, struck a servant who sympathized with the Muslims. A woman, Ummul Fadhl, or “mother of Fadhl,” hit Abu Lahab on the head to rebuke him and succeeded in silencing him. I drifted to sleep that night with this aimless thought, praying that somewhere, in the course of the long, dark
night, somebody could smack some sense into the minds of those who opposed change just to hold on to power and control.

I found some hope. The secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America called the cardiologist to tell him the mosque needed to back down from its exclusionary policy toward women. The research assistant professor apologized to my father, who accepted his apology. And some days later, on a Friday night, I opened an e-mail message from the acting president of the mosque. He thanked me for my “input” into the mosque's operations and said, “For your information Islamic Center of Morgantown has a policy that every Muslim man or woman is encouraged to pray and is welcome to attend masjid services.”

He noted in a paragraph set off from the rest of the letter: “Sister, the Board of Trustees wants to assure you that no discriminatory policy will be implemented in the Islamic Center of Morgantown.”

“A victory!” I shouted to my mother, bounding up the stairs with a printout to show her in the kitchen. She studied it and said, “In three months, you've done what your father couldn't do in thirty years.”

My father smiled proudly and hugged me. “Al-hamdulillah!” Praise be to God! But after the buzz of the victory was over, he, the son of a defense lawyer, sent me back to the computer to clarify that the statement affirmed the rights of women to the front door and the main sanctuary, including all activities there, such as the study sessions. I got no response to this query.

In separate personal conversations, about six Morgantown Muslims blamed me for tarnishing the image of Islam and the Morgantown Muslim community. A Muslim man sent me an e-mail: “As your eternal brother in Islam I strongly support your ends; but as a member of this community and of the greater
ummah
I vehemently disagree with your means.”

I met him, a graduate of the West Virginia University School of Law, at a local coffee shop, Panera's Bread. He had praised my
Washington Post
essay in an e-mail to his father, a former West Virginia University professor who was in Egypt. But then he talked to the conservative men at the mosque. I had shamed the mosque, he told me.

“Stop writing,” he said.

“I won't,” I said. But I would be happy to meet with the men at the mosque, I told him, to discuss how they could bring about changes that would make the community more welcoming to women. He told me he'd call me back about setting up a meeting. He never did.