Standing Alone (31 page)

MORGANTOWN
—Sitting in the safety of my hometown, I had to admit I'd gone to Saudi Arabia with a bias against the country. I didn't subscribe to the rhetoric of division that I had heard was promulgated by its ranks of mullah, or religious clerics. I returned from Saudi Arabia, however, having heard only hints of disturbing rhetoric and without having witnessed blatant expressions of hatred toward people who didn't agree on theological doctrine. The Saudi government was starting to wise up to the dangers fomented by hate speech.

That was why I was stunned when I sat one Friday spring afternoon in my corner of the mosque, a figurative bubble around my sister-in-law and me. My mother, who had somehow known he shouldn't listen to what was about to come from the pulpit, had gone downstairs with Shibli. A short, bearded graduate student in engineering from Saudi Arabia stood at the new
minbar
, or pulpit, constructed for the delivery of
khutbah
—the Friday sermons. Until I had started going into the main hall, I didn't have a clue what that word meant. If I had heard it a year earlier, I would have thought someone was clearing her throat. But after listening to sermon after sermon, I'd come to understand not only its literal meaning but also its political significance. In his research, my former professor at American University, Hamid Mowlana, had identified the ways in which the Friday sermon has been used as a political tool by clerics to rally congregations. For this reason, after Pakistan became an ally of the United States in its hunt for Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks, the government tried with only limited success to crack down on clerics at Pakistani mosques who were urging men to join the Taliban in its jihad against the United States.

As the words started spilling from the Saudi student's mouth, I started to wonder where I was actually sitting. “To love the prophet is to hate those who hate him and the Sunnah,” he declared emphatically.

“What?” I mouthed to my sister-in-law. She looked at me, wondering, I could tell, what I was going to do. This was not the message my parents had taught me at home. I started scribbling his words into my notebook. Even in Saudi Arabia the leaders knew the line to toe. King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah had sent a message to pilgrims during our pilgrimage: “We have to build confidence among ourselves and with other nations by adhering to the teachings of Islam, which rejects isolationism and prevents the seeds of hatred being sown among people.” They
preached the message that my parents had taught me since my earliest days. “Islam does not prevent its followers from dealing with people of other faiths,” they said. “It is a religion of tolerance and calls for peaceful coexistence with other communities.”

Over and over again, I had heard that the word
islam
is an etymological cousin to
salaam
, the Arabic word for peace. But in Morgantown this student was railing against man-made laws that have replaced sharia and blasting the “contemporary enemies of Islam” who do not adhere strictly to Sunnah, calling them “evil” and “wicked.” It was the classic rhetoric of Wahhabi and Salafi ideologies, both of which have been used, in part, to breed militant sectarian attitudes against non-Muslims and Muslims who disagree with them. As far as I could tell, they were
not
espousing violence. But they
were
on that slippery slope of dogmatism and intolerance that is extremely dangerous to democratic society. American Muslims may live in a country that has not been the paragon of tolerance with its history of racism, sexism, and, most recently, civil liberties abuses in the name of the Patriot Act, but it is vitally critical that they nevertheless rise to the highest principles of America's and Islam's benevolent teachings.

From the beginning, I knew my battle at the mosque wasn't just a women's issue. I believed that intolerance toward women serves as a predictor of intolerance toward others. Amy Leigh, the mother of Shibli's first Morgantown playmate, a boy named Alex, had given me an article in a magazine put out by her church, the Unitarian-Universalist Church. The common denominator in all fundamentalist religions, it said, is sexism. Another ingredient: intolerance toward people of other faiths. Another friend gave it to me in simple words: making women invisible is a main ingredient of violent societies.

In my mosque, what was alarming was not only that this man, living with two Saudi wives in Morgantown, spewed this hate-filled rhetoric just blocks from the campus of West Virginia University, but that not one of the 150 or so WVU doctors, professors, professionals, PhD students, and undergraduate students in the congregation uttered a protest. From the trenches in small-town America, I was observing something disturbing. Even at a time when the government of Saudi Arabia was taking a more moderate position—at least publicly—tolerant and inclusive Islam was losing in places like Morgantown as zealots filled a vacuum created by an ambivalent moderate majority and a passive, even sympathetic, leadership.

My dear friend Pam was just back from London. The British police had arrested a band of young Muslim men for alleged terrorist activities. She said that what was so unusual was that the Muslim leaders had taken to
the airwaves to encourage Muslims to help the British in their efforts to keep the society safe. The Blair government had gone to these leaders and said that it would work to protect the civil liberties of Muslims if they would help law enforcement eliminate terrorist threats. Just two days before the sermon of hate in our little mosque, the Muslim Council of Britain had sent a letter to one thousand British mosques urging their members to cooperate with antiterrorism efforts, to oppose extremism, and to provide “Islamic guidance” to help “maintain the peace and security of our country.” I saw our choice clearly. American Muslims needed to follow the lead of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain and acknowledge and eliminate the intolerance, zealotry, and hate that quietly permeate so many of our communities.

About one in four of America's mosques is affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America, and most, like mine, have enjoyed tax-exempt status because of that affiliation. The Islamic Society needs to send a clear message to mosques and appoint a representative to respond to acts of intolerance and bigotry in America's mosques so that moderates will have some recourse other than simply abandoning their mosques to zealots. The society is implementing a long-term solution with new leadership training, but the future of Islam in America also urgently needs a shortterm policy on the rhetoric of hatred and intolerance. Infuriated at what they consider to be meddling in Muslim affairs, even liberal Muslims are mocking a plan by the controversial conservative Daniel Pipes to set up an organization under the banner of “progressive Islam” to counter extremism. But instead of being infuriated, we need to stand up from within. I listened to CIA director George Tenet testify to the 9/11 Commission. Borrowing from his assessment of his agency, we need revolutionary—not evolutionary—change in the culture of our mosques and communities.

My little mosque had become a caricature of what happens when Muslims don't take action. A band of men had staged a coup, not only symbolically seizing the power of the pulpit but one Friday literally unveiling the looming new pulpit from where their men preached in the long beards and short robes characteristic of the firebrand school of Islam they followed. The coup leaders included the Saudi student who preached hate, an Egyptian mechanical engineering student who expressed support at one Friday sermon for Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and a graduate student in engineering who screamed at us in another Friday sermon not to mingle with the
kafir
, or nonbelievers. The coup leaders included a cadre of students and three professors from the WVU Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, which has
research contracts with the U.S. Energy Department and the National Science Foundation. One of the grants includes dental forensics work in collaboration with the FBI; another involves computer security work for NASA. In a sermon, the leader of the takeover, a WVU professor of engineering, alluded to the “immoral” people of the West who are on a “dark path,” telling us we should neither mingle with Jews or Christians nor read their holy books.

I went back to the guidebook I'd read from when I walked in Hajar's footsteps between Safa and Marwah in Mecca. I looked up the author, Sheikh Al-Uthaimin. He was another Wahhabi cleric, also allied with the Salafi ideology. I found him listed on a website called Salafi Dawah Online.
Dawah
means to teach Islam to others, most often non-Muslims. I read an account of another book he had written,
The Muslim's Belief
. It had a disturbing passage: “It is our opinion that whoever claims the acceptability of any existing religion today—other than Islam—such as Judaism, Christianity and so forth, is a non-believer. He should be asked to repent; if he does not, he must be killed as an apostate because he is rejecting the Qur'an.”

The murder of my friend Danny Pearl had made all of this hate talk unacceptable to me. I remembered a moment on our pilgrimage when my family and I were driving to the cave outside Mecca where the prophet Muhammad had received his revelations. Safiyyah, Samir, and I had been talking about Danny. “Why did they kill him?” Safiyyah asked gently as we drifted past a Sunoco Service Center. A bus of African pilgrims had departed as we arrived at the base of the cave, near a building marked Turkish Snacks.

“I don't know for sure, Safiyyah, but they hated Jews. And Danny was Jewish. They made him say, ‘I am a Jew,' before he died, as if that was reason enough to kill him.” Samir thought about what I said and gave me the wisdom of a child: “Why would they hate him if Allah put him on this earth?”

As I pondered the frightening rhetoric spilling from the pulpit at my local mosque in Morgantown, I knew my God didn't want us to hate each other. I protested the sermons to our local mosque leaders, the Islamic Society of North America, and even the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Islamic Society told me it wouldn't interfere in local matters. To my delight, CAIR had started a campaign, “Hate Hurts America,” to counter hate speech. I documented the hate speech at my mosque, but to my disappointment the group meant hate speech on conservative talk radio, not at the mosque pulpit. When CAIR founder
Ibrahim Hooper told me, “There is a difference with hate speech at your local mosque and talk radio that reaches millions,” I answered: “But you would protest, appropriately, if one sixth-grade teacher anywhere trashed Muslims.” He said, “Send me the material again.” I did but never heard back.

MORGANTOWN
—At the weekly Friday sermon at our mosque, a graduate engineering student from Egypt stood in front of our congregation of about 150 doctors, professors, professionals, and students and proclaimed: “A woman's honor lies in her chastity and modesty. When she loses this, she is worthless.”

“Worthless?” I mouthed to my mother.

Worthless
, I repeated in my mind. By this man's judgment, that would be me. My empty wedding ring finger and my son, at that moment tossing sand out of a sandbox at his friend Alex's house, were evidence that I was an unchaste woman. It little mattered that I accepted the responsibility of my son's conception to love him fully and completely, while his father abdicated his responsibility. I was confused. I was a mother. Wasn't heaven beneath my feet? The prophet Muhammad had said, “Heaven lies at the feet of your mother.” How could heaven be beneath my feet if I was worthless?

The student continued. He had a friend who had sex with a woman. When it came time to get married, he ditched her for a virgin. “She didn't deserve his respect,” he explained. Just two weeks earlier I had raised a point at a meeting of the men who had taken control of the mosque. Not used to being challenged, especially by a woman, the men stormed out of the meeting. The research assistant professor of engineering who had called my father an idiot earlier in the year screamed at me from across the room: “No one respects you! Just leave the mosque!”

That Friday the student argued that Muslim women don't have the same right to declare divorce that men do because “Allah created woman sensitive and emotional, especially during her menstrual period.” It is because of this “sensitive nature” that two Muslim women equal one Muslim man as a witness. He spoke against the attacks against Islam by “the enemies of Islam” who use women's rights as “the most convenient” entry point. “They try to corrupt our Muslim women,” he said. He equated
“non-Muslims” with “ignorant Muslims” when they criticize the abrogation of the rights of Muslim women. He blasted women's rights leaders in Egypt as “advocates of hell.” Muslim women should not be “deceived” by Western practices, he said, including “Western women going out to work.” “Who can have . . . our Muslim women . . . follow the West?” It was right to “prevent intermixing between men and women.” To clinch his sermon of inspiration, he noted: “Any woman who wears perfume so men can smell her, it is as if she has advocated adultery.”

I thought about the body wash I'd used earlier that day. Danny's wife Mariane had given it to me as a New Year's gift earlier in the year. Aptly named considering the outrage that consumed me at that moment—as in so many moments at the mosque—it was called Total Bitch, “for life's little annoyances.” It had a gentle scent of lily, forest foliage, and fern. “Add explosive suds to a hot-tempered shower,” its package told me every morning. Did wearing the faint scent of Total Bitch make me guilty of zina? Did it make me a criminal? What had happened in my religion that I had to even ask myself these questions? How did the scorn for women's sexuality reach into my personal space in Morgantown, West Virginia? How had women become so invisible a force in our communities that men could stand at the pulpit, speaking for us, judging us, and passing edicts about us?

That night I looked at the latest newsletter distributed by the local Muslim Students' Association. It listed new births, giving the names of the newborn babies and their fathers. There was no mention of the mothers. We were truly invisible.

I did some research about the assumptions the student preacher had made about women's place in Islam. My inquiries led me to
Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women
, a book by Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl, a UCLA professor of law. The professor was born in Egypt and schooled in Western law in the United States and in Islamic jurisprudence in the Middle East. In his pages I discovered that dubious men attributed to the prophet misogynistic statements that puritanical Muslim men of today use to judge, control, and demonize women.

That Sunday night I went to a meeting of mosque leadership to express my outrage. My mother met me there after rushing back from my nephew's soccer game so that she could be there on time. She wore one of my niece's jackets with letters spelling “Brooklyn” across the chest and the hood pulled over her head. I was relieved to see her. We were a team. I wore my sweat jacket with “BrothaHud” across the chest.

“You came!” I exclaimed.

“Of course,” she said.

We joined the meeting in the community room. The men were talking about covering the half-inch cracks between the bathroom doors to protect their
awrah
, or forbidden zones, from public viewing. They had already barricaded the windows of the community room with bookcases and a folding table propped up on its side. We sat at a table separated from the horseshoe table where the men sat. I felt like Amina Lawal in front of her jury of men. But there was a big difference. I wasn't alone. And my mother and I weren't there to be judged but to challenge the indictment of any woman as worthless.

My mother lit into the student preacher. “You harassed us for thirty minutes!” my mother exclaimed, her voice even but her outrage obvious. “There was not one positive thing you had to say.”

The student protested that he had talked about the rights of inheritance and economic security that Islam gives women. My mother responded: “You lost me at ‘worthless.'” She protested his association of adultery with women who wear perfume. I concurred. At that moment the student preacher laid down his cards: “I ask Sister Asra specifically since she raised the question: Does she believe this hadith? If you believe this hadith, you are a Muslim. If you do not believe this hadith, you are not a Muslim.”

I laughed. The student had revealed his true colors: relying on the ideology of judgment and the most rigid expression of Islam, he believed he could judge whether a person is a Muslim based on their acceptance of a single hadith. “Your question is unacceptable,” I said. “It does not allow for
ijtihad
” (critical thinking).

I had checked the hadith. At the time of the prophet, it was also claimed that the prophet said: “Any woman who puts on perfume, let her not attend the
isha
[nighttime] prayers with us.” It was claimed that the prophet said: “Any woman who applies perfume and then goes out among the people so that they could smell her fragrance is a
zaaniyah
” (someone who engages in zina).

I sent an inquiry to the scholars I'd come to know. Amina Wadud at Virginia Commonwealth University wrote back. She noted that the student's claims didn't come from the two highest—and soundest—hadith collections, known as Bukhari and Muslim. “The use of various
hadith
[to discourage] women is a carefully orchestrated methodology,” she wrote, whose purpose is to marginalize and belittle women. What about the idea that a woman is “worthless” if she loses her chastity? I got a response from a sexuality scholar, Kecia Ali, a convert who was doing groundbreaking
work on women, sexuality, and Islam with Harvard University and Brandeis University. She said, “Chastity and modesty are not the sum total of a woman's worth. That's simply not tenable from the perspective of Qur'an, Sunnah, or jurisprudence.”

Dr. Abou El Fadl discredits men like Abu Hurayrah, whose records of the prophet's sayings were often some of the most virulently anti-women elements of the religion. Abu Hurayrah fills pages of footnotes in Dr. Abou El Fadl's book. He converted to Islam late, only three years before the prophet's death. Although he spent less time with the prophet than Abu Bakr (the first caliph), Umar (another caliph), Ali (the prophet's son-in-law), and Aisha (his favorite wife), Abu Hurayrah transmitted more statements by the prophet than any other companion. For that reason, the authenticity of his transmissions has been the subject of debate for centuries, including at the time of Aisha, Umar, and Ali, all of whom severely criticized Abu Hurayrah's reports. Aisha once said to Abu Hurayrah, “Abu Hurayrah! What are these reports from the prophet that we keep hearing that you transmit to the people! Tell me, did you hear anything other than what we heard; did you see anything other than what we observed?” Ever patronizing in making his defense, Abu Hurayrah responded, “Oh mother, you were busy with your kohl [eye liner] and with beautifying yourself for the prophet, but I—nothing kept me away from him.”

In the name of the prophet, Abu Hurayrah objectified, marginalized, and hypersexualized women. He said that the prophet declared women were made from a crooked rib, making us more deficient. He was the one who said the prophet declared we would be the majority of the inhabitants of hell in part because our menstrual cycles made us more deficient—and thus worth only half the witness of a man.

Statements of the prophet attributed to Abu Hurayrah had been repeated at my mosque to corral women. I just didn't realize it until my e-ijtihad connected the dots for me. One night the student preacher who had declared that unchaste women are worthless told the men in a study session: “The Messenger of Allah cursed the man who wears women's clothes, and the woman who wears men's clothes.” It was another way to plant unyielding gender lines in society—dangerous because they were used to keep women out of schools and the workplace. I looked down at my blue jeans, over which I had pulled an oversized hoodie. “Great, so I'm cursed,” I whispered to myself. The source: Abu Hurayrah. It didn't even sound like the prophet to
curse
anyone.

Just about every Friday I heard the prayer leader attribute another
statement to the prophet: “The best of the rows for men are the front rows; the worst of the rows for men are the last rows. As for women, the best rows [in prayer] are the last rows, and the worst rows are the front rows.” The logic, again, was that a woman's sexuality disturbs a man. And the source of this saying? Abu Hurayrah. Classical jurists, on the other hand, interpreted the prophet's words to mean that there should be a reasonable distance between the last row of men and the first row of women. In our mosque my mother and I sat at the back of our main hall, getting there early, when the hall was mostly empty. Normally we were at least twenty feet from the closest men, in front of us. At the busy Friday prayer we sat in our usual spot for the sermon. Men trickled inside afterward and often took seats in a space behind us. One of the community leaders had told me and my mother that we should pray with our backs against the wall to make ourselves the
last
row. My mother turned to the man and asked, deadpan: “Why don't you just dig a hole, shove us in it, and stone us to death?”

From Atlanta, Georgia, to Cairo, Egypt, women are told that the prophet said, “If a man calls his wife to sleep with him and she does not respond, causing him to be angry with her, angels will curse her until the morning.” A Saudi publishing house quoted the saying in a book that's distributed worldwide,
Islamic Perspective on Sex
. My friend Saleemah heard an imam repeat those words to a bride at a wedding ceremony not long ago at the Masjid Taqwa wa Jihad (“mosque of God consciousness and struggle”) in the Bronx. “It was clear: she doesn't have a right to say no,” said Saleemah, as she related the anecdote. The source of the quote: Abu Hurayrah.

It seems that Abu Hurayrah is to Muslim women's status in Islam what some Christians say the Apostle Paul is to Christian women's rights. In all religions we have a Muhammad or a Jesus who envisioned a world of rights and social justice for women. And every religion has an Abu Hurayrah. One Friday the student preacher admonished the men sitting behind my mother and me to move in front of us, even during the sermon, but he tripped on his words. “The best of the rows for the men are the last; the worst of the rows is the front. As for women, the best of rows for the women are the front. The worst of the rows are the back.” My mother looked at me in delight. “Let's go to the front!” But of course we didn't dare. We still couldn't dare claim our space in the front.

At home, shaking my head about the absurdity of the puritans' thinking, I gazed at a recent purchase I'd made on a Muslim website. It was “the
Muslim Doll,” a woman named “Razanne.” The packaging said, “Ra/zaan def. 1. modest 2. shy.” She was the closest I'd get to the student preacher's ideal of the Muslim girl next door. Then I looked closely at the accessories that came with Razanne. I smiled. Sure enough, the evidence against her sat with a hairbrush and a comb; she had a silver-colored perfume atomizer.

I took to the pen again and wrote out my thoughts in an essay that the
New York Times
published on May 6, 2004, on its op-ed page. “Hate at the Local Mosque,” the headline said. I called upon moderate Muslims to speak out against the intolerant sermons preached in mosques in America. I exposed the hate sermon and the one in which the graduate student declared unchaste women to be “worthless.” My friend Mohja wrote me immediately to support me and lament the lack of involvement by the Muslim world's ACLU. She remembered the verse from the Qur'an that enjoins Muslims to witness against your own people when they do wrong. She also sent me another saying of the prophet: “Help your brother whether he is oppressed or oppressing.” When the people asked, “We can help him when he is oppressed, but how can we help him when he is oppressing?” it is said that the prophet replied, “Help him to stop oppressing.” Mohja wrote, “I applaud you for doing this. I am dismayed that CAIR is not helping. I think they need to look beyond the lettering of their mandate and see to the heart of this—it weakens their position not to look at things like this. We're supposed to get other communities to help clear the climate of hate when it bothers Muslims, but we are not supposed to campaign against hate when it is spread by Muslims?”