Standing Alone (32 page)

The men at the mosque retaliated in an article that the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
wrote about the controversy. One of my chief detractors was a Palestinian American man who accused me of being a publicity seeker. The Egyptian graduate student said that he knew I would take his words about unchaste women personally, but he didn't think I had been appropriately repentant after having committed this major sin. Their comments I expected. What hurt me most was the dig by a woman leader at the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, an inclusive mosque that had fought off the puritanical marginalization of women. She said that I was acting as a secular feminist, not a Muslim. “To be Muslim is to be a feminist,” I told my mother, shaking my head. “And it is America's secular tradition that allows Islam to thrive in America. Just see how many churches exist in the nonsecular Saudi Arabia. None. Pluralism thrives in secularism.”

The
New York Times
headline frightened even me, especially because I knew it reflected the truth. I knew we had to be brutally honest in forging tolerant communities if we expected tolerance. And I knew we had to keep asking questions about the source of the hate if we were going to dismantle it. I had no idea my inquiry would lead me straight back to Mecca.

MORGANTOWN
—One month later, on the first Friday of June, I realized—albeit for just a day—the kind of sisterhood and brotherhood that I had dreamed about so many times as I stood alone in my mosque. Five Muslim women and one Muslim man descended on my hometown to march through the front doors and into the main hall with me and my father, mother, brother, and son to affirm the rights of women in mosques everywhere.

They were all new friends I had made in the six months since I had decided to take a public stand to claim my rights at my mosque, and the women were all people with whom I could connect. The first one in the group was Saleemah, who had recently left her job at
Azizah
to edit an anthology of young American Muslim women's voices,
Living Islam Out Loud
. Mohja Kahf, the poet, flew in from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Samina Ali, a novelist born in India and living in San Francisco, flew to Washington, D.C., and then drove to Morgantown with Sarah Eltantawi, an activist and writer living in New York.

Born in California, Sarah had risen to become the public affairs director at a national Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. She battled the neoconservatives on talk TV from CNN to Fox News. And her bright red lipstick always seemed to be freshly applied. Her inspiration was her mother, Hoda Eltantawi, an assistant hospital administrator in southern California and former business owner. For Sarah, her mother was the most insightful, dignified, and elegant person she had ever known, a woman who seemed to be totally self-sacrificing while never losing sight of herself.

At the last minute, we had recognized that we were nothing without our mothers. Saleemah invited her mother, Nabeelah Abdul-Ghafur, a community activist and writer from their hometown in New Jersey. And I
insisted that my mother join us. Besides our march, we planned an evening literary event sponsored by the Morgantown Public Library—a fitting sponsor, since the library had played a critical role in my independence and empowerment. I remembered as clearly as yesterday scouring its shelves in the spring of my freshman year at West Virginia University to find a magazine where I wanted to spend the summer interning and coming across
Harper's
. The Center for Women's Studies at West Virginia University was also a sponsor, and that meant a lot to me. The son of its founder, Judith Stitzel, was the boy with whom I had square-danced in sixth grade. Another sponsor was meaningful to me: the Shelley A. Marshall Foundation. Shelley was the wife of a classmate of mine from Suncrest Junior High and Morgantown High, Donn Marshall. She had died when terrorists flew a plane into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. “Shelley wouldn't have ever accepted a back door,” her husband said. “She would have supported you.”

Before the group's arrival, I worked into the night to create a brochure for our event. I struggled with a name until I finally settled on the perfect expression of what we were doing: “The Daughters of Hajar: American Muslim Women Speak.”

The day before our march, the Associated Press's Allison Barker sent out a dispatch in which my mosque said publicly for the first time that women could walk through the front door and pray in the main hall. The mosque leader: a woman who had become the mosque spokeswoman. We had had a small victory at the mosque. In a May election, the first woman ever was elected to office to something we called the executive committee. A young American convert, she was a lawyer, and we had bonded over our mutual hopes for an inclusive community in which we could raise our children. We were running together for office. In a dramatic moment at the mosque, the conservative men included her on their slate for election. They voted against my being on the slate. I wouldn't have accepted a position on their slate. I turned to the lawyer: “Are you sure you want to be associated with them?” She wanted to try to bring about change from within. I didn't begrudge her choice even though I felt betrayed. That night, she prayed against the back wall where the most conservative men wanted my mother and me to stay. My mother and I prayed in front of her. The men had accomplished what they wanted: division. I withdrew from the race. She won office and so did three moderate men. “It's a jump ball,” I told a friend. We had won the struggle to open the doors of the mosque to women. We were Muslim women
redefining
the boundaries established to control and define us.

Standing proudly with us was a young Muslim man who had driven from Albany, New York, to support our effort. His name was Michael Muhammad Knight, and a punk novel he wrote had first presented to me a scene where a woman leads men in prayer. Then I discovered that in the seventh century the prophet had given a woman named Umm Waraqa (“mother of Waraqa”) permission to lead her staff in prayer, including a man who happened to be a slave. Most Muslims believe that a woman can't lead a man in prayer, but some scholars, such as UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, argue that the Qur'an establishes no moral hierarchy between men based on whether they are slave or free. Thus, the prophet's designation of Umm Waraqa as a prayer leader over a congregation that included a man established two points: that the determination of who should lead prayers should be based on religious knowledge, and that a woman could be designated to lead prayers in a group that includes men.

The other boundary around us was the notion that women must pray separate from—or at least behind—men. Of course, as I had seen, this wasn't practiced in the holiest of Muslim cities, Mecca, and religious scholars such as Dr. Abou El Fadl note that at the time of the prophet men would assemble in the front of the mosque but late-arriving men would fall into prayer lines behind and beside women. A little-discussed but important piece of historical context also makes the issue of proximity between men and women more complicated: men and women didn't wear underwear or trousers in those days, and proximity easily led to immodesty. Modern hijab, adopted for reasons of modesty, makes such considerations irrelevant. As evidenced in Mecca, today men and women can pray shoulder to shoulder and even with women in front of men with no fear of indecency.

Assembling appropriately at the West Virginia University School of Law, as we sought justice, we planned to redefine the boundaries that had disempowered us as women of faith in our communities. If I had to wonder about our correct path, my nineteen-month-old son, Shibli, was reassuring as he lay in full prostration, unprompted, while we sat in prayer, led by Saleemah's mother, Nabeelah. I felt at that moment that we had divine blessing for the action we had just taken. We were eight women spanning two generations from New York City to San Francisco—writers, mothers, sisters, and poets, born in India, Syria, California, and New Jersey, converging in this university town in the Appalachians. We were the physical manifestation of a reform quietly occurring within Muslim communities in America. A taboo act in most communities, Mike
Muhammad Knight stood in line with us, my mother to his right, and he followed Nabeelah in prayer.

We stood and walked down Law Center Drive, crossing the street onto University Avenue, passing Sanders Floor Covering, Hartsell's Exxon, and the golden arches of McDonald's, chanting the call to prayer that I had declared the year before on the holy pilgrimage of the hajj. “Here I come,” Saleemah said, leading us.

“Here I come!” we responded.

“At your service, oh Lord,” Saleemah continued.

“At your service, oh Lord,” we repeated.

To proclaim a united purpose with other Muslim women was important to me because I had very much lacked that kind of connectedness in the world. When Saleemah paused during our march, Mohja started us in a second prayer said by the prophet when he entered a mosque: “God grant before me light, and behind me light, and on my right light, and on my left light, and above me light, and beneath me light, and grant me light.”

Shibli rustled in my arms, light upon me. I no longer wondered whether my back was heavy from the burden of the sin that I had committed in creating my son, as I had thought in Mecca. Our voices rose in an exaltation that surprised even me as we marched to the front door of my mosque and posted a symbolic message on its door by walking over its threshold and ascending into the main hall: women have an Islamic right to equity in the Muslim world, and we will no longer accept the marginalization imposed by cultural traditions. Inside, we stood together, and I felt the press of many shoulders beside mine. In the same line but just a little bit apart, to placate sensibilities, Mike stood beside us. As prayer began a remarkable thing happened: a teenage boy stepped into our line beside Mike. There was hope for a new future.

MORGANTOWN
—As the issue of my sexuality repeatedly became a lightning rod for criticism of my effort to reclaim my right as a Muslim woman to public space, it became clear to me that we have to also reclaim our rights in the most private space in our lives, the bedroom. In my case, that means reclaiming my Islamic right to be free from punishment for having had the premarital sex in which Shibli was conceived, even if it's considered morally wrong; my right to keep my baby; and my right to be free
from gossip, slander, and judgment about decisions I've made about my body as an adult. From public space to private space, followers of the puritanical brand of Islam have tried to control women. We have to reclaim our rights from the mosque to the bedroom.

Sexual authoritarianism in the name of religion has been practiced by the orthodox followers of all the religions of the world. It most often expresses itself as controls over women's bodies. The Catholic Church has declared that the sole purpose of sex is procreation and made abortion grounds for excommunication. Orthodox Judaism requires the evidence of blood on the bed sheets from the bride's ruptured hymen after her wedding night. Puritanical Hinduism doesn't allow widows to remarry, even if they are widowed at a young age, thus denying them sexual intimacy for the rest of their lives.

What I realized was that sex has often been used to deny women not only their sexual rights but their religious rights, such as at my mosque when some of the brothers claimed that women would cause fitnah, or conflict. Sexual and religious rights are also intertwined in the issue of second wives. Sisters in Islam, the Malaysia women's rights group, lays out the rights of Muslim women with regard to polygamy. Islam didn't invent polygamy, it notes, a practice common in pre-Islamic Arabia, and the Qur'an, in fact, was restrictive, not permissive. “If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two, or three or four; But if you fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one. . . . That will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice,” says the Qur'an in “Al-Nisa,” (The Women, 4:3). Elsewhere, the same chapter (4:129) notes: “You are never able to be fair and just as between women, Even if it is your ardent desire . . .” A Muslim woman has the right to protest a husband's desire to marry a second wife, but even in America Muslim men in places like Morgantown sometimes try to keep their first wives compliant by threatening to take a second wife. One afternoon a Muslim woman whispered to me, “
Please
write about second wives.” “What about them?” “How they are
not
allowed.” Not even in Morgantown.

When Saleemah, Samina, and I wrote the vision statement for the Daughters of Hajar, we addressed sexuality at the same time that we campaigned for access to mosques. Our priority was to publicize the rights that Islam grants to women regarding their sexuality and to tackle sexual taboos, such as homosexuality. Mohja imagined, for instance, a “wedding night” initiative to better prepare women for what is often a first-time experience with sexual intimacy.

Reclaiming women's rights from the bedroom to the house of worship isn't a challenge unique to Muslim communities. In 1963 Betty Friedan helped usher in the second wave of the American feminist movement with
The Feminine Mystique
, a book advocating equal rights for women from the bedroom to the world beyond. Reclaiming Muslim women's sexual rights isn't a new effort either. It dates right back to the seventh century and the start of the Islamic faith. As I see it, the Qur'an rejects the sexual double standard so often imposed on women by giving Adam
and
Eve equal responsibility for their exile from heaven. It celebrates sex by declaring poetically that men and women are garments to each other. It speaks sensually about a man's seduction of a woman being like the nurturing of a farm field.

But in most corners of the Muslim world we have long departed from respecting women's equal rights in the bedroom. Divine law has often been used to sanction male promiscuity. From Florida to our campus of West Virginia University, young male Muslim foreign students have sex with women, often American, in something called temporary marriages. They were allowed by the prophet in times of war, but it's a stretch of the imagination to apply that criterion to college campuses in the twenty-first century.

This code has many rules that are accepted by puritanical Muslims, who use a woman's sexuality to sentence her to a prison of silence, shame, and subjugation. The first is that we should be strictly separated and segregated. The second is that we should remain silent and submissive.

There is a common denominator in this debate about women: fear. One day outside my house a chemistry professor from Bangladesh protested my actions at the mosque. “I don't want AIDS,” he told me.

“Excuse me?” How were women's rights in the mosque related to AIDS?

“It will lead to unnecessary mingling.”

“You think we're going to get AIDS sharing the same space in a mosque? We're not going to be jumping on each other just because we're in the same room,” I said. I quoted the Fiqh Council of North America's ruling that men and women could mix in the mosque because it's the best place for us to learn how to interact Islamically in the outside world. He didn't care.

“It will lead to unnecessary issues. Look at American society. Look at the way men and women live together having sex without being married.”

My father lost it. “And the Arab sheikhs that you follow? They're any better? They buy girls in India and Lebanon and God knows where else, have sex with them, and throw them away!”

Then the chemistry professor's teenage daughter bounced down the hill with a tennis racquet over her shoulder.

I wanted to do a Kinsey report on sexuality in the Muslim world. Dr. Alfred Kinsey broke new ground in 1948 when he and his colleagues at Indiana University's Institute of Sex Research (now the Kinsey Institute) published a controversial and groundbreaking study,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. The report found that 50 percent of married men had affairs; that as many as 10 percent of American men were predominantly homosexual; and that 37 percent had engaged in a homosexual act of some sort during their lifetime. Some American religious conservatives accused Kinsey of being part of a Communist plot to undermine the American family, but a Gallup poll found that 78 percent of the people surveyed considered Kinsey's research “a good thing.” The media compared the report to the explosion of the first atomic bomb three years earlier, and America held its breath as it waited for Kinsey's report on women's sex lives. When that report appeared, Kinsey inflamed conservative critics when he said that “it is the church, the school, the home, which are the chief sources of sexual inhibitions, the distaste for all aspects of sex, and the feelings of guilt which many females carry with them into marriage.”

The dichotomy of the private world versus the public world in Muslim communities, as in many traditional communities, leads all of us to avoid being completely honest about our sex lives as Muslims. For all of the judgment against Muslim women who have premarital sex, how many Muslim men do as well? For all of the judgment against Muslim women as sexual beings, how many Muslim men have affairs or use polygamy, temporary marriages, and other forms of religious cover to get extra action in the bedroom?

Kinsey's findings challenged many of the essential assumptions about sex and gender that defined American society at the time. It blew open the lid on many myths. I imagine that a report on the sex lives of Muslims would very much do the same for Muslim society. We could learn from the issues that emerged in the West with the empowerment of women—such as women's tendency to burn out when they strive to be superwomen who have it all—or we could also just go through our own growing pains as we mature as a Muslim society.