Standing Alone (38 page)

This book is testimony to the potential for all of us to become empowered, spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally, if we allow it. When I started the book, my goal was to describe my experience doing the hajj. But along the way I found my voice, and the book helped me to clarify my identity as a Muslim woman. What I ended up with was a book in which I've expressed myself in the strongest voice I could muster.

I spent countless days in the downstairs office of a new friend, Ed Jacobs, a professor of counseling at West Virginia University, as he coaxed my voice out of me. He became my life coach, in the vernacular of the new millennium, as I tried to separate my programming from my beliefs so that I could truly succeed as a human being, a writer, and a mother. His message was simple, but one that we so often forget, no matter who we are: “You're doing terrific.”

Ed punched a paper cup with a hole and said, “This is your self-esteem.” I put another cup inside to seal the hole and put them both, one
inside the other, on top of the highest shelf in my writing room at home. I was learning that it was only my own insecurities silencing me—I couldn't blame my religion or my parents—and that it was my responsibility to free myself from the internal wiring I'd inherited from my culture.

Now I hope to amplify the messages in this book with a public voice. I plan to air these messages in a campaign I am calling the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour. I will assert the Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques and an Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Bedroom so that Muslim women's rights are reclaimed throughout the Muslim world. I will do so with the inspiration of centuries of women before me and legions of women around me who have been the Florence Nightingales, Susan B. Anthonys, and Eleanor Roosevelts of the Muslim world, only with names like Rufayda, Aisha, and Khadijah.

Recently, someone sent me a poem titled “The Pious Wife,” written by a man, Abu Jameelah. One line reads: “She opens her mouth only to say what is best. Not questioning her husband when he makes a request.” In reclaiming the history that has been stolen from us, Muslim women must counter centuries of this sort of programming to stay silent.

These forces are still trying to silence us, as illustrated by the challenges I and other women face at my local mosque. While the moderates, including the first woman elected to office, had won the majority of the seats on the nine-member executive committee in an election in May 2004, they ran into constant roadblocks put up by the puritanical. The battle for the heart of Islam in my community erupted on a bizarre front, but one that could have been predicted: a potluck dinner. The executive committee had voted to hold a mixed-gender potluck dinner, with the kind of intermingling I'd experienced from Mecca to the Chicago Islamic Society of North America convention, but the puritans had protested, ruining the dinner. The president of the mosque proposed banning me from the mosque without trial, and then rallied men to encircle me and intimidate me out of the mosque. In an e-mail from his account at West Virginia University, the professor wrote:

The woman member of the executive committee posed a rhetorical question back to the president: “I wonder if Prophet Muhammad, Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him, the Messenger of Allah, Subanahu Wa Tallah [“the sacred and the mighty”], would have chosen such a tactic or procedure to scare off a sister from the masjid?” He didn't respond. Four members of the board, including the woman, resigned in frustration around that time. Not long after, there was another confrontation involving the board president who had ordered me to the back door and the balcony a year earlier. He yelled at two women who were trying to meet in the mosque for a women's study session, ordering them to leave and use the dingy old mosque. The husband of one of the women arrived, and the board president repeatedly pushed him, yelling, “Go out!”

The woman who had resigned office wrote to the mosque leaders lamenting the intolerance toward women at the mosque. She and I had had a conflicted relationship because, while she had initially supported my efforts, she allied herself with the conservative men at the mosque to try to work from within. I respected that decision as the path she wanted to take and had cheered her election to office. But by the end of the summer she clearly saw the gender barriers that puritanical Muslims put up. She wrote that perhaps my father had been right and my use of “pen power” had indeed been essential in tackling men who wanted to deny women their rights at our mosque in Morgantown. After stepping down, she wrote: “Part of my resignation was due to absolute and intolerable disgust at these types of men. . . . I needed a break for my own mental sanity after confronting the dark side of people who claim to be Muslim. . . . Women are not animals confined to dark corners, to be veiled with voices at a whisper. We are thinking, intellectual human beings who are going to stand strong against leadership and men who perpetrate these actions and thoughts.”

The efforts to silence us were many. A professor of psychiatry sent me an e-mail on the eve of Ramadan about dinners, called
iftar
, for breaking fasts. He wrote:

The noninvitation was effective in throwing a punch to my gut, and it hurt. But I knew we had to persevere. I had been inspired to walk into the main hall of my mosque after I had seen Michael Wolfe's co-produced documentary about the life of the prophet Muhammad. I had sat in the back rows of the Gluck Theater in the student union of West Virginia University. With an invitation by the President's Office of Social Justice, I took to the stage for a presentation during Diversity Week. I presented the Morgantown Model of what to expect when challenging power and control, and I illustrated my points with the cycle of intimidation, emotional abuse, and social isolation that I had seen in the year since my family and I had walked into the main hall. On the exact anniversary of that day, on the eleventh day of Ramadan, the
Daily Athenaeum
, the student newspaper, ran a headline that reflected the victory of our commitment to change: “Morgantown Woman Inspires Change in Muslim World.” The story wasn't important because it was about me, but because it was about the reform that we were creating. I recognized that this was what we were doing when months earlier I had plucked the
New York Times
out of the news box in front of the Blue Moose Cafe in downtown Morgantown. Above the fold was a photo of hooded Muslim militants with truck drivers they had taken hostage in Iraq. Below the picture was a headline over another story proclaiming the new reality women are trying to create: “Muslim Women Seeking a Place in the Mosque.”

At our mosque, leaders held a gender-segregated party for Eid ul Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, just like they'd done since my childhood years. “We need to create a new reality,” I told the woman who had resigned from office. “I agree,” she said. “Islam can be a religion of joy.” She bought a jumping pit for children, and organized a multicultural poetry reading for an Eid festival where little girls wouldn't have to write into their journals, as I once did, that they felt like they were in a prison. Our children, in contrast, jumped in joy.

With this success, my father and I drove to a retreat that I had been asked to attend. To my surprise, Daisy Khan—the Muslim leader in New York who had advised me, half in jest but mostly seriously, to make anyone
who tried to deny me access to the mosque feel as guilty as possible—had invited me to attend a weekend retreat for “Muslim leaders of tomorrow.” I hadn't thought of myself as a leader until our Morgantown mayor, Ron Justice, invited me earlier in the year to speak to his leadership class. I was always the secretary of the math club in high school, never the president. I never thought I was worthy of that role. But Ron told me, “You're an agent of change. You are a leader for progress that is inevitable.”

I had come to understand that I had unwittingly become a leader in the place where it is perhaps most important, but also most difficult, for us to show strength—in my own life. I had navigated through contradictions, confusion, doubt, and wonder as I learned to guide myself—and, most importantly, my son—with clarity, truth, and courage. On the banks of the Hudson River, at the retreat, something remarkable happened. Daisy's husband, Imam Fesial Abdul Rauf, had the women pray in a parallel section to the men with women on the right side and men on the left. All of a sudden, I was in the front row. In one year I had gone from the back of the bus to the front.

In a reminder of the challenges still facing us, the president of the mosque sent me a Thanksgiving Day missive with the complaints against me in the trial to banish me from the mosque. The evidence against me: the actions I had taken over the past year to reclaim my rights within Islam. He gave me one week to respond. I took the charges seriously and planned to respond systematically to them. But for the moment I wrote him a simple reply: I'm busy.

While we challenge the status quo, we are busy creating a new reality. At Harvard University in March 2005, Muslim thinkers and activists planned to hold the first convention of the Progressive Muslim Union. Sarah Eltantawi, one of the women who had marched to the Morgantown mosque under the banner of the Daughters of Hajar, is one of the founders. She thought long and hard about Hajar, after having discovered her story with us in Morgantown. She realized how little is said about this brave woman. “We have to take Hajar back and reclaim her, and realize that her suffering as a woman, as a single mother, as a wife, is so central to our tradition that every Muslim in this world is required to run back and forth during the hajj to re-create her footsteps! Yet when is the last time you heard a sermon talking about Hajar?” A possibility for the Muslim conference at Harvard: a Friday prayer led by a Muslim woman religious leader, who would also deliver the week's sermon. The woman: scholar Amina Wadud, who had been such an inspiration to me.

Almost two years earlier, I had stood in front of the Ka'bah without
much awe. But an epiphany came to me as I started writing these words, the letters spilling onto the computer screen with each tap of my fingers, Shibli playing with Thomas the Train nearby.

I realized that standing in front of the Ka'bah had had the profound effect of showing me that I needed to stay true to a point of focus in my life. At that moment of the hajj, it was manifested upon my chest, gurgling and bright-eyed, in my son. It was at that moment, I realized, that I had made a commitment to dedicate my life to good. When I ascended to run in the path of Hajar, I shared my secret with the heavens. Over the next days of the pilgrimage, I came to understand more clearly what was important to me. Much of the hajj is one moment of seeming insignificance leading to the next; but the cumulative effect is transformative. It led me to reclaim my rights as a Muslim woman and seize control over my own identity.

I know the indomitable spirit of women in Islam—and women everywhere—will survive our lifetimes and triumph over more trials and tribulations. After all, in four thousand years, it is said, the well of Hajar has never run dry.

      
1.
  
Women have an Islamic right to enter a mosque.

      
2.
  
Women have an Islamic right to enter through the main door.

      
3.
  
Women have an Islamic right to visual and auditory access to the
musalla
(main sanctuary).

      
4.
  
Women have an Islamic right to pray in the musalla without being separated by a barrier, including in the front and in mixed-gender congregational lines.

      
5.
  
Women have an Islamic right to address any and all members of the congregation.

      
6.
  
Women have an Islamic right to hold leadership positions, including positions as prayer leaders and as members of the board of directors and management committees.

      
7.
  
Women have an Islamic right to be full participants in all congregational activities.

      
8.
  
Women have an Islamic right to lead and participate in meetings, study sessions, and other community activities without being separated by a barrier.

      
9.
  
Women have an Islamic right to be greeted and addressed cordially.

    
10.
  
Women have an Islamic right to respectful treatment and exemption from gossip and slander.

      
1.
  
Women have an Islamic right to respectful and pleasurable sexual experience.

      
2.
  
Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about their bodies, including the right to say no to sex.

      
3.
  
Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about their partner, including the right to say no to a husband marrying a second wife.

      
4.
  
Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about their choice of a partner.

      
5.
  
Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about contraception and reproduction.

      
6.
  
Women have an Islamic right to protection from physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

      
7.
  
Women have an Islamic right to sexual privacy.

      
8.
  
Women have an Islamic right to exemption from criminalization or punishment for consensual adult sex.

      
9.
  
Women have an Islamic right to exemption from gossip and slander.

    
10.
  
Women have an Islamic right to sexual health care and sex education.