Standing Alone (33 page)

“There goes a woman,” resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause, “who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?”

. . . The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame. Despair. Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild,—and they had made her strong.

MORGANTOWN
—During a lifetime as a reader, I had never taken to Western literature, but all of a sudden, in the summer of 2004, I was absorbed in every detail of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel
The Scarlet Letter
. It tells the story of a woman, Hester Prynne, who is sentenced in Puritan America to wear the letter “A” on her bosom for the act of adultery that created her daughter, Pearl. I felt as though Hester's story was my story. The men at the mosque were putting me on trial.

In my case, events unfolded like a twenty-first-century e-inquisition. In the quiet of a Tuesday afternoon I received an e-mail with an innocuous subject line that included a typo: a memo concerning “a Petition and a meeting of the ExecutiveCommittee of the ICM.” The president of the mosque executive committee, the engineering professor who had led the takeover of the mosque earlier in the year, notified me that “we have received a petition, on Friday June 18 2004, signed by about 35 members of the ICM asking to revoke your membership and expel you from the ICM.”

I picked up the phone and called my mother. “They're doing it. They're trying to kick me out of the mosque.”

The engineering professor lived five blocks away from my parents' house. His wife had invited me over for tea to tell me to stop my actions of protest at the mosque. Naively, I had thought she wanted to privately convey her support for my fight for women's rights. Instead, she admonished
me. “The men are selfish. Let them have their space.” She told me that I should spend the rest of life seeking repentance for having had my son while I was unmarried.

Later the professor had complained about “the sound of Ms. Nomani writing notes and flipping pieces of paper” during Friday sermons. In a twist of fate, the professor had been elected president of the executive committee after an election rushed through the mosque. The students who had preached intolerant sermons at the pulpit were now imam at the mosque. And I was on trial. The engineering professor gave me two days' notice to appear before a 9:15
P
.
M
. drawing for the names of people for my mosque tribunal.

I asked for a copy of the complaint against me. Denied. I asked for the names of the complainants. Denied. I asked for a delay so I could find legal counsel. Denied. The Supreme Court had that week granted new rights to Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, but I was being denied the same elements of due process that Muslim civil rights groups were rightly demanding for Muslims.

My friends rushed to support me. Mohja dispatched an e-mail to the engineering professor and tried to appeal to reason—and Islamic precedent.

The answer came back swiftly, full of typical e-mail typos. The engineering professor wasn't going to budge. And he was again arguing that I was to blame for speaking out.

There were two words that separated my fate from Hester Prynne's:
pro bono
. “Time to hire a lawyer,” I told a friend.

“Wow,” he responded. “Did Jeanne d'Arc have a lawyer?”

She didn't. In the fifteenth century, Jeanne d'Arc, a village maiden, inspired and led the soldiers of French king Charles VII to defeat British forces who were keeping him from power in the Hundred Year War. Captured, she was handed over to French clerics of the Catholic Church who supported the British and put on trial for witchcraft and heresy. During her trial sixty highly trained politicians, lawyers, and ambassadors grilled nineteen-year-old Jeanne, even subjecting her to examinations by women
to check whether she was a virgin (she was). Alone, she defended herself, refusing to answer questions she was asked twice and telling court reporters to record her previous answers. During fourteen months of interrogation she was accused of wrongdoing for wearing masculine clothes and of heresy for believing she was directly responsible to God rather than to the Roman Catholic Church. She was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. Pope Calixtus annulled the verdict in 1455, calling it wicked and unjust. Jeanne d'Arc was canonized in 1920; her life is now celebrated with a feast every May 30, my niece's birthday.

Like Jeanne d'Arc, countless other women throughout history have been unfairly persecuted for challenging the status quo. I knew one thing: I was going to fight, but I wasn't going to be a martyr. I was going to find a lawyer.

I wrote to David Remes, an attorney whom I had found after returning from Pakistan to help Mariane, my friend Danny Pearl's widow, and asked him if he knew a good First Amendment attorney. To deny me access to my place of worship was to deny my right to worship with the only assembly we had in Morgantown. And to punish me with exile because I spoke up about injustices and intolerance was an attempt to squash my right to free speech. David was a partner at a high-powered Washington lobbying and law firm, Covington & Burling, and he was one of the defense lawyers for Muslim prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. To my shock, the next day he said that he would represent me. “You will?” I asked, doubting that I had heard right. Having absorbed so many of my community's messages of illegitimacy, I didn't feel I was worthy of help. “I will,” he responded, clearly. David, a Jewish American born in New York City, told me later, “What moved me to help you was my general intense sympathy for those who are powerless and alone and who are being punished for simply being themselves. The greatest cruelty is punishing people for being who they are. Conversely, I intensely dislike the idea of ‘correct' thinking. Freedom of mind and expression are my creed.” For the first time I didn't feel alone. And I realized the incredible power of legal muscle when you have it on your side.

My lawyers couldn't arrive in time for the scheduled first proceeding, and the elected mosque president refused to delay it. On the night of the meeting a searing pain ripped through my head, and I felt nauseated. In the minutes before my trial was to begin, I wanted to flee. My cell phone rang. It was Amina Wadud, the African American scholar of Islam who had taught me the Islamic concept of
tawhid
, the oneness of God with all
things created—equality. “They have no Islamic right to banish you from the mosque,” she told me firmly. “Stay strong.” I lay down at home, trying to draw on whatever reserves I could find. Instead, I found myself doubled over in pain on my bed. “They are trying to drive me from my home,” I cried. “I feel so alone.” But I wasn't. As the moment arrived for me to leave, my father embraced me and said, “You are not alone. We are here.” My mother too had stood by me on my journey. “This does not upset me,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “It should not upset you.” With that, she gave me the simple jump-start kick only a mother can give a child. I splashed cold water on my face and knew that I would not run away.

Sadly, as I went to the mosque with my mother and Shibli, my father, a man who had helped to build the first mosque in Morgantown, was on his way across town to Ruby Memorial Hospital. The stress had caused him to literally lose his breath, and his doctor wanted to check him out. As I later learned, he slept with electrodes attached to his body while his brothers in the mosque were putting his daughter on trial.

I walked up to the front doors of the mosque, took a deep breath, and stepped inside. I took a seat at one end of the cafeteria-style tables arranged in a horseshoe shape in the community room. An assembly of my community sat around the table, mostly men with beards, crocheted prayer caps, and dimly colored pants and T-shirts; others were cleanshaven, intermixed with women hooded with hijab. I tucked my jet black hair into the hood of an oversized, black hooded jacket I had won in a beach volleyball tournament in my younger days. Like Hester most of her life, hiding her lush hair under a cap, I was making myself asexual in this world in which my sexuality had become the evidence of my criminality. My jacket carried the label “Six Pack”—insider volleyball lingo for the power of a hard-driven spike hitting an opponent's face.

The professor pulled strips of paper with names on them out of a plastic bag. He read the names as if he were calling the winners of a raffle. In fact, the people named were going to be the jury in the secret mosque tribunal. The judges would be the five-member board of trustees whose president had ordered me away from the front door the October before. Now, months later, while the world watched Saddam Hussein's defiance on the judicial stage, I wasn't allowed to even turn on my digital recorder. When the professor had finished drawing names, he proclaimed, “We're done with this, and we need to go on.” Sadly for my detractors,
this
wasn't going to go away that quickly.

Both the world and the Muslim ummah are at a crossroads in history. Within the Muslim world, we must open the doors on
ijtihad
, not slam the doors shut on critical thinking for the sake of political correctness. To try to close the doors of God's house to me through a secret mosque tribunal was to try to close the doors on truth, justice, and tolerance. I had decided to fight this effort to ban me to defend not simply my right to walk into my mosque but the highest principles of Islamic teachings—the truth and critical thinking.

That night the mosque leaders reduced me to lining up the slips of paper in an effort to check the names against our membership list. Only my mother and son were with me. When the elected president, derisively dismissing my mother's insistence that I was entitled to a lawyer, said, “Sister, this is an
internal
community matter,” my mother pounced. “Don't call me
sister
. You don't treat me like a sister.”

The West Virginia convert who had organized sisters' swimming now was chairwoman of the
dawah
committee, and she tried to talk to me as I tried to put the papers in order. She used to be the bell ringer. Now she had won a position at the table after all of my clamoring, and I had heard not a peep from her. She whispered to me, “Asra, I want you to know that a lot of people don't support this petition to ban you.”

That could very well be true, but I did the math. About thirty-five members had signed the petition. That left about one hundred members, including this woman, who hadn't taken a strong stand against them. They were the silent moderate majority in the larger Muslim world who allowed the extremists to define Islam in the world. “Great dawah they're doing for Islam,” noted my mother, all too prescient for the liking of our community. This chasm between how Muslims act and what Islam teaches is the kind of challenge that all societies have had to face. As so well described in
The Scarlet Letter
, people distort religion and do it a great disservice when they punish people for their moral judgments. The challenge for each of us is to discern our own personal faith from the doctrines others try to impose on us.