Standing Alone (34 page)

Nina Baym, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana, said in an introduction to
The Scarlet Letter
: “Although Hester suffers enormously from the shame of her public disgrace and from the isolation of her punishment, in her innermost heart she can never accept the Puritan interpretation of her act. To her the act is inseparable from love. . . . Because she does not believe that she did an evil thing, she retains her self-respect and survives her punishment with dignity, grace, and
ever-growing strength of character.” These words could have been spoken from my own heart. The conflicts that Professor Baym identifies in Hester Prynne's life are the same ones that defined mine: private versus public life, the spirit versus the letter, the matriarchal versus the patriarchal ideal. Hester overcomes the power of the letter of the law to believe in the spirit of nature. She stands up for the freedom of her inner world over public expectations. And she is a triumph of matriarchy over the constrained patriarchy of the Puritan elders.

One of the issues in my trial was the allegation that I aired our community's dirty laundry and shamed the community. I had tried to get the attention of the mosque leaders, but they dismissed me without even a meeting. The men at the mosque wanted me to absorb their projected messages of illegitimacy. I couldn't, though. To do so would have been to dishonor not just my son but the force that had created him. I knew this effort to ban me would also be a de facto ban on not only my son but the future of truth-telling in the Muslim world. I knew, however, that truth and righteousness would prevail. My son was living proof.

The meeting broke up with the azan, which starts “Allahu Akbar.” Shibli had first heard it whispered into his ear by my father. Then he heard it in the holiest places in the Muslim world—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. In the nine months since I started taking him to the mosque, he had heard it called out by the graduate student in engineering who described unchaste women as “worthless.” Listening to the call spill into the room, Shibli paused from spinning around the room with his Foosball balls. “Ababooboo,” he said through a grin, imitating “Allahu Akbar.” Then, as my mother and I prepared to leave, Shibli scampered upstairs into the main hall and stood in the sacred space where my mother and I had taken to sitting. He lay in full prostration in the darkness, then jumped up with a smile and caught my hand in his own.

On a whim, I arranged to talk to Khaled Abou El Fadl, the scholar of Islamic law at UCLA whose books had so helped me understand the misogyny in religious traditions. As I talked to him, Dr. Abou El Fadl quoted from the Qur'an (4:135) and set my spirit free:

Dr. Abou El Fadl said Islamic jurisprudence does not allow political expediency to override a morally compelled duty such as speaking the truth.
“They concede all of that, but they say because of political considerations, be a partner in a conspiracy of silence. But the prophet says a person who conspires is a silent devil,” he told me.

The complaint against me had come like an act of retribution after the leaders of the mosque had finally given women new rights. “No one has a right to put you on trial,” said Dr. Abou El Fadl. “It is nothing less than an inquisition.”

At home, my father did something extraordinary. He, an elder, testified to the truth. He took pen to paper and wrote an essay for the website Beliefnet, appealing to the Muslim men of our communities to open the doors, not close them, to his daughter and other women. “I am the patriarchy that feminists talk about in women's studies courses. I am the status quo. I am the old guard,” he wrote. He explained that the inquisition was unprecedented in his lifetime of working within the Muslim community, but “it is emblematic of the way that extremists and traditionalists try to squash dissent within the Muslim world.” He wrote: “Turning to the power of the pen, my daughter was alienated for exposing the community's ‘dirty laundry.' But someone had to try to clean it, not continue to stuff it into a corner.”

In response to the narrow-mindedness of the mosque leadership, my father had resigned from the board. “I am an old man. I don't have energy to argue and fight with stubborn people,” my father said. “Many of the leaders at the mosque want to continue native traditions followed in the U.S., disrespecting the human rights of women. They need to be more open and tolerant not only towards women, but also to those who aren't Muslim and those who don't follow their particular ideology.”

After retiring, he wrote that he was happy to be a soccer mom to his grandchildren. “Sadly,” he said, “I feel as if I was a failure in protecting women's rights at our Islamic center. Other men, in all communities, remaining locked to tradition and power, need to transcend their egos so they can understand the pain and suffering women endure at the hands of inequity and injustice.” He made one request: in the case of his death, he asked that his prayer be performed at a mosque where women are respected. And he made an admission: on the day of our march to the mosque, he walked inside—behind my mother and me.

MORGANTOWN
—As I waited for my trial to proceed, I continued going to the mosque. The last Friday in June 2004, the Egyptian graduate student in engineering stood at the pulpit and shocked me with his gall. He noted: “Allah forbade the believers from loving or caring for the disbelievers and stated that doing so leads a Muslim to become one of them which Allah forbid.” I couldn't believe my ears. I immediately thought about my Jewish and Christian friends whom I deeply cared about. I pulled out a paper and started scribbling his every word, not even discreetly this time.

Allah said, he claimed, “Do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies.” Oh, that made a lot of sense. What, then, was he doing in America? How could Saudi Arabia have an alliance with America? He continued: “One of the most important fundamentals of our religion is to love and be loyal to Islam and the Muslims and to hate and renounce the disbelievers.” He had twisted the first chapter of the Qur'an, adopting a translation commonly used by Wahhabi clerics, to proclaim that Jews and Christians have strayed from “the straight path.” This path seemed to be very different from the one my mother had taught me about since my childhood days. I knew many Jews and Christians who lived on “the straight path” more religiously than some Muslims I knew—including this man, who was hurling insults, it seemed, at everyone he could. To punctuate his point, he called Jews and Christians “cursed.”

I knew this ideological bully. He was the same student preacher who had called unchaste women “worthless.” I sat in my usual spot in the rear right side of the main hall, aghast. Since I had penetrated into the sacred men's space, Friday after Friday I had protested the sermons preaching intolerance against the West, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and women. They were professors, graduate students, and engineers at West Virginia University who stood at the pulpit with hate-filled words rolling off their tongues. I noticed that sometimes they stumbled on their words and didn't even seem to be able to read the lectures printed out on sheets of paper in front of them. Most often, I protested alone. But this time, fortunately, so too did others. The elected committee had an emergency meeting and did the right thing: they fired the student from his post as a voluntary imam.

That weekend he wrote his defense to the congregation and provided a startling revelation: he had gotten the sermon from a website called al-Minbar (“the Pulpit”). At my desk at home I plugged the site's name into
my Web browser. What I found stunned me. The site was a slick one that disseminated prefab speeches of hate written by clerics in Saudi Arabia. It called itself the “orator's garden and the Muslim's provision.” It followed the Wahhabi school. The speech I had just heard in my mosque was a combination of sermon number 1628 and number 1381. As I scrolled through the sermons, I read verbatim the other sermons that had been delivered at my mosque. In his earlier speech denouncing unchaste women, the graduate student had referred to “a friend” who married a virgin rather than the girlfriend with whom he had had sex because the girlfriend didn't deserve his respect. The student had no such friend. The incident was lifted straight from sermon number 678. The Egyptian American WVU engineering professor who was overseeing my trial had delivered a sermon that spring about the West being on the “dark path.” That was sermon number 184. I found the source of the words by the graduate engineering student from Saudi Arabia who exhorted the congregation in April to “hate those who hate” the prophet Muhammad, right down to the mention of a “filthy polytheist”: sermon number 848.

Recalling the famous dummy of the vaudeville ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, these Muslim preachers in the United States had become the Charlie McCarthys of Islamic fundamentalism. But who was pulling their strings?

I turned to Internet sleuthing techniques I had learned trying to find Danny's kidnappers in Karachi. E-sleuthing is a new and critical component in the war to stop terrorism as criminals increasingly use the Internet and false e-mail addresses to hide their identities. The one difference here was that al-Minbar proudly named its top officers and even provided a cell phone number. It also displayed its home base prominently: “Direct from Makkah.” That was the same Mecca—birthplace of the prophet, holiest city of Islam, heart of the religion—where I had walked only the year before in my spiritual pilgrimage. I was stunned.

The Saudi cell phone number didn't work, and my messages sent to the e-mail addresses listed as contacts went unanswered. I called the Saudi embassy for comment and sought out the spokesman, Nail al-Jubeir, who had been an unexpected ally on the issue of women's rights in mosques. He remembered me. He listened to my findings about al-Minbar and immediately expressed outrage at the messages in the sermons, but he was no dummy. His brother was Adel al-Jubeir, Crown Prince Abdullah's foreign affairs adviser and a top deputy to the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and they were both on the TV circuit regularly touting the Saudis' alliance with America in its war against
terror. In the remarketing of Saudi Arabia after 9/11, a new thirty-second TV ad, “The People of Saudi Arabia: Allies Against Terrorism,” showed images of women working in labs and in front of computers and conveyed a simple message: “In thirty years, Saudi Arabia has changed from a desert kingdom into a modern nation. Our nation's citizens are educated and committed to a more secure future. We are proud of how far we have come in thirty years and look forward to strengthening our alliances.” It ended with an image of two girls sitting on a rocky ledge by the water, their hair flowing freely in the wind—an experience that my niece, let alone my mother and me, would never have been allowed to enjoy in Saudi Arabia because of the contradictory reality of that rigid culture. I noted the condemnation in the al-Minbar sermon of Muslims being allies with the West—an injunction clearly contradicted by Saudi Arabia's friendship with the United States.

The press aide immediately tried to distance himself from the website. “Just because they say they're in Mecca doesn't mean they're in Mecca.” He said he would have his technical staff look into it. His assistant wrote back that the website's Internet server was in Virginia. That was a meaningless fact. A server's location has no direct association with the location of the
providers
of content to a site.

Indeed, the Saudi government was on the wrong trail. I logged onto a website database company, Network Solutions, and found out that, according to Internet database records, al-Minbar was run out of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was associated with the Internet address 207.13.11.2. Another database revealed that the IP address belonged to an innocent-sounding company called Infocom Corp. It ran al-Minbar's website on a server in Richardson, Texas. I got no answer to my inquiry at Infocom; an e-mail to the company bounced back. To my surprise, I found a mention of Infocom on the U.S. Attorney General's website. It turned out that the company's founders, the Elashi brothers, had just been found guilty of numerous federal charges brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Texas related to money laundering and aiding and abetting a terrorist.

The trail to al-Minbar was getting murkier and murkier.

Somehow, from Morgantown, I returned electronically to Mecca. An e-mail to al-Minbar came back with an answer from a man named Sheikh Wajdi al-Ghazzawi, a father and entrepreneur. He was listed as the executive director of al-Minbar. He readily agreed to a phone interview, during which he connected the dots on a communications network tied to the Saudi government. He ran his own website with photos of himself at work. At the age of thirty-nine, he was exactly my age. He was an ambitious
man who spoke impeccable English. He was born and bred in Mecca and in fact worked on the outskirts of town in a neighborhood I had passed on my way into Mecca for my pilgrimage. It wasn't far from a storefront I had passed with a misspelled sign, the Center for Islamic Propogation, which was one of the major dispensers of the Wahhabi propaganda that filtered into the world from Saudi Arabia.

Sheikh al-Ghazzawi was also the executive director of a company called Webcrescent. He listed as his clients the Saudi-run Islamic University of Medinah, the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Office of the Amir of Jeddah, and, close to home regarding the work that I was doing, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj. I had crossed paths with all of these entities during my hajj. Sheikh Alshareef, our group guide, had graduated from the Islamic University of Medinah. The other government offices had coordinated our hajj, as they did every hajj every year. Sheikh al-Ghazzawi started al-Minbar in 1999 as a way of spreading the faith. He was part of a growing rank of Muslim ideologues who had earned the label “cyber mujahideen,” a brand of freedom fighters waging their ideological battle in cyberspace. While the United States and other nations vigilantly watches its ports, airspace, and water supplies, it faces more insidious opponents in cyberspace, where lethal ideas cross borders without censor. Some of the treasures from al-Minbar sermons, all originally preached from the pulpits of Saudi Arabia, include:

Ironically, Sheikh al-Ghazzawi was particularly proud of one of his latest creations: an antiterrorism website called TerrorExposed.net for a Saudi government office. The site quoted fatwa by the Wahhabi cleric who had written my pocket-sized prayer book and the other book I had found denouncing nonbelievers as people who should be killed. When I was checking out the site, his politically correct fatwa was that Islam doesn't allow the killing of innocent civilians. I considered this to be true, but I still thought it was most unfortunate that clerics like him were allowed to distribute their work spewing intolerance and hatred. Interestingly, Sheikh al-Ghazzawi said that al-Qaeda operatives considered him an enemy because he posts
sermons that denounce the killing of civilians. Al-Minbar abided by a strict code for sermons: they could not be political; they could not name enemies; and they had to be grounded in the Qur'an and the Sunnah.

How, then, could he justify the rhetoric of hate found so frequently on his website against Christians, Jews, and others—including Muslims—who didn't follow a specific interpretation of Islam? The Qur'an, he insisted, condemns acts but not people. “Like hating the sin but not the sinner?” I asked. “Exactly.”

So I read from the speech that had just gotten the student preacher fired, the one about hating Jews and Christians. “Don't you see how that kind of rhetoric fuels the hatred that results in the acts of terrorism that you're condemning?” I gave him credit for listening to me. That was more than the leaders at my mosque did with me. But I didn't change his mind.

“That's in the Qur'an,” he insisted.

But it wasn't. It was just in his interpretation of the Qur'an.

This was all an odd turn of events for me, but not surprising. I was on a loop between Mecca and Morgantown. I went to the holy city of Islam from my hometown with the markings of my past in the West—my son and my attitudes. I returned to Morgantown rich with the experience of the hajj. In Morgantown I tried to implement many of the teachings I learned on the hajj, becoming a more awakened and empowered woman in Islam. And in doing so I found myself back in Mecca, uncovering the intricate system by which Saudi Wahhabi clerics are able to disseminate the hate that fuels acts of violence by Muslim extremists.

While denouncing violence against civilians, Sheikh al-Ghazzawi was proud of his role in spreading the gospel, so to speak. He said that his site got three thousand hits per day, of which about one-third came from the United States. Oregon, where al-Ghazzawi had friends, had about fifty hits a day. The number of “unique visitors” from Virginia hit the hundreds on Wednesdays and Thursdays, when religious leaders were preparing their Friday sermons. He said the site served seven thousand Muslim clerics worldwide in seventy countries.

To some critics who have quietly discovered him, al-Ghazzawi is the Goebbels of Hitler Germany. As an empowered woman in my religion, I had found him out, and I was going to go back to the government of Saudi Arabia to hold it accountable for the rhetoric of hatred spewing out from the holiest place in the Muslim world, the city for which the Saudis had declared themselves custodians, contradicting not only their advertisements in the West but, more importantly, the very principles of Islam.
I tried to get comment from the Saudi government but wasn't able to get a statement on the sermons.

What scared me was the ideological loyalty garnered by this type of rhetoric. To my surprise, I got a call from the Egyptian research assistant professor who had called my father an idiot and told me that nobody at the mosque respected me. He had missed the Friday sermon because he was in Washington, D.C., making a presentation to the FBI. He was the researcher on a National Science Foundation grant at West Virginia University looking into dental forensics; the FBI was a collaborator. What he said next disturbed me. “I read what was said. There was nothing wrong with it religiously. It is just that Islam says that we have to be diplomatic. That sermon could have been said in Egypt but not in America.” I was stunned.

“There was
everything
wrong with the sermon,” I said, “and it absolutely does
not
represent Islam.” Another fact bugged me: I knew about the importance of dental forensics in identifying the victims of terrorism. In Mariane Pearl's ninth month of pregnancy I got a request from the FBI to try to find Danny's dental records to identify his remains. In the contradiction of Saudi Arabia itself, how could a man who believed this way be working in America? This was the same contradiction that puritanical Muslims in the West expressed when they held sexist attitudes but freely participated in American society. If we were going to truly live up to the ideals of an honest society, it seemed to me, Muslims had to reconcile these contradictions, guided by the principles of tolerance and equity.