Standing Alone (40 page)

BOOKS

Abdul-Ghafur, Saleemah.
Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak
. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Abou El Fadl, Khaled.
The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists
. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

.
The Place of Tolerance in Islam
. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

.
Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women
. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2001.

Ahmed, Laila.
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.

Algar, Hamid.
Wahhabism: A Critical Essay
. Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International, 2002.

Ali, Samina.
Madras on Rainy Days
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Aslan, Reza.
No god but God
. New York: Random House, 2005. Barlas, Asma.
“Believing Women” in Islam
. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Bewley, Aisha.
Muslim Women: A Biographical Dictionary
. London: Taha Publishers, 2004.

Hasan, Asma Gull.
Why I Am a Muslim
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Helminski, Camille Adams.
Women of Sufism: A Hidden Treasure
. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2003.

Kahf, Mohja.
E-mails from Scheherazad
. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Knight, Michael Muhammad.
The Taqwacores
. Boston: Autonomedia, 2004.

Mernissi, Fatima.
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1994.

Mernissi, Fatima, and Mary Jo Lakeland.
The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam
. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1992.

Murphy, Carlyle.
Passion for Islam
. New York: Scribner's, 2002.

Nafisi, Azar.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
. New York: Random House, 2003.

Rauf, Imam Feisal Abdul.
What's Right with Islam
. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

Safi, Omid, ed.
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism
. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003.

Viorst, Milton.
In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam
. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

Wadud, Amina.
Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Wolfe, Michael, ed.
Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith
. New York: Rodale Press, 2002.

.
The Hadj: An American's Pilgrimage to Mecca
. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993.

JOURNAL

Journal of Islamic Law and Culture
. Edited by Aminah McCloud. Chicago: DePaul University.

READING ONLINE

Amanullah, Shahed, ed. AltMuslim, San Francisco, www.altmuslim.com.

Godlas, Alan, ed. The Islam Website, Athens, Ga., www.theislamwebsite.com.

Kazmi, Laila, ed. Jazbah, Seattle, www.jazbah.org.

Mazher, Uzma, ed. Crescent Life, St. Louis, www.crescentlife.com.

Nassef, Ahmed, ed. Muslim WakeUp!, Mt. Kisco, N.Y., www.muslimwakeup.com.

Rahman, Monis, ed. Naseeb, Karachi, Pakistan, www.naseeb.com/naseebvibes.

VIEWING

Kronemer, Alexander, and Michael Wolfe, producers.
Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet
. Kikim Media and Unity Productions Foundation, 2002.

Nawaz, Zarqa, writer-director.
Me and the Mosque
. National Film Board of Canada, 2005.

W
ith snowflakes tumbling around me, I walked up to the front door of my mosque and posted a simple treatise: “99 Precepts for Opening Hearts, Minds, and Doors in the Muslim World.”

It was March 1, 2005—publication day for this book and the first day of Women's History Month, a good day to start the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour. I had brought the lessons from my pilgrimage to Mecca back home to Morgantown, and it was from this college town in the Appalachians that I could best share my vision for a new reality in our Muslim world.

As I taped up the precepts, I felt an exaltation I could not have predicted. I was standing up to the extremists in my mosque. When I was done at the front door, I went around back to the “women's entrance” and taped up a copy of the precepts there.

The precepts on the main door would come down quickly. Less than two hours later, the engineering professor and former mosque president who was presiding over my trial arrived for the early afternoon prayer. He studied the precepts, then raised his hand and ripped the poster off the front door. Tearing it in half and crumpling it in his hands, he paused only to shake his fist at a cameraman I had hired to document the day.

Tellingly, the copy I posted on the women's entrance would stay for days, undetected by the men, who would never bother to go around back.

Although they tried, the men of my mosque could not erase my precepts. If Martin Luther had the Wittenberg press to publish his precepts widely, I had the Internet. As I was posting the 99 Precepts on the door of the mosque, they were also being posted electronically on my website. Little did I realize then, however, that in posting the Precepts I had prepared myself to fire a shot about to be heard around the Muslim world.

The first stop on the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour was New York, where I planned to hear Dr. Amina Wadud's speak at Union Theological Seminary on “A Genderless God.” Dr. Wadud, one of the first scholars I called when the men at my mosque told me that women must enter through the back door, had introduced me to the Islamic concept of
tawhid
, or the oneness of all beings that makes men and women spiritual equals. I called her now to ask, “Would you like to realize all of our dreams and lead a Friday prayer?”

Without hesitation, Dr. Wadud said yes. I could hardly believe it and immediately called Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, the writer and activist who had led me and a few others in a mixed-gender prayer service on the banks of the Monongahela River with the Daughters of Hajar before our march of June 4, 2004, on the Morgantown mosque. “Are you sitting down?” I asked. “We can finally do it. We can have a woman-led Friday prayer!” Saleemah readily agreed to help me organize the day, and Ahmed Nassef, editor of Muslim WakeUp, agreed to be a sponsor and to advertise the prayer on his progressive Muslim website.

Our greatest challenge to the realization of this landmark woman-led prayer would turn out to be Muslims themselves. Muslim fundamentalists, both in
America and abroad, tried to stop it with the same intimidation tactics they use to try to silence anybody who opposes their hateful and sexist views. Imams attacked the woman-led prayer in their Friday sermons. A man e-mailed from New York: “Stop!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The New York venue I'd found for the prayer, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, run by a visionary descendant of the Nobel Laureate poet from India, received not kudos for advancing women's rights but hostile e-mails and phone calls, including a threat to “blow you up” and another to stage an “economic boycott.” Ahmed Nassef was accused of being an agent of the West, not to mention the CIA.

I was packing my bags for New York when Sundaram Tagore called to say he had to back out after being alerted to a threat against Dr. Wadud posted in a Muslim chat room. He felt he had to protect his gallery staff. Though disappointed, I understood.

With less than a week to go, I searched desperately for a new venue. Call after call ended with discussions about “liability” and “insurance.” The power of the extremists made me tremble. Then, just three days before our scheduled prayer, I called Mary Lyons at St. John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral on Manhattan's West Side. She offered me a building on the church campus, the Synod House.

I couldn't believe my ears.

“Why are you helping us?” I asked.

“Why not?” she answered.

Indeed, why not. Why not allow women to reclaim their God-given rights within Islam? The Synod House turned out to be perfect, both spacious and, importantly for security, enclosed within a chain-link fence. I also made arrangements with the cathedral's security staff and the local NYPD precinct and hired a former NYPD officer as an armed bodyguard for Dr. Wadud.

On March 18, 2005, when about 125 Muslim women and men stood shoulder to shoulder behind a woman, we took back the faith from the 9/11 extremists and their followers and created a new reality in the Muslim world. As we gathered for prayer, a Muslim man greeted me with respect and kindness, and a woman breastfed her baby. When I stood before the congregation and introduced “The Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Mosque,” I saw tears in the eyes of one of two women from my mosque in Morgantown. A woman, Sueyhla El-Attar, sang to the heavens the call to prayer that for too long in the Muslim world has been heard only through the voices of men. And I sang with Saleemah as she led us in chanting, “Oh light, oh light, oh light,” thirty-three times. We were the light. We were rejecting the darkness.

But outside, Muslim protesters damned us to hell for daring to defy centuries of tradition. G
ENDER
M
IXED
P
RAYER
T
ODAY
. H
ELL
F
IRE
T
OMORROW
, read one sign. Another reflected a stunning knowledge of my first book,
Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love;
it read: A
SRA
N
OMANI
,
BEFORE YOU SPEAK ABOUT
I
SLAM
,
REPENT FROM
YOUR
T
ANTRIC SEX FANTASIES
. The Internet buzzed with an e-mail carrying the subject line: “Stop Women from Leading Friday Mixed Prayers.”

In the quiet of our sacred space, however, Dr. Wadud took her place in front of me, the first woman in the modern day to lead women and men in a public Friday prayer. As she said her final blessings, I turned to Saleemah and exclaimed: “We did it!” For days, I couldn't stop smiling. I decided that I would step forward and lead prayer myself at the next stop on the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour.

As a girl, I had loved reading the Qur'an and memorizing its lines in the original Arabic, as we had been taught. As I recited a chapter over and over again with
my mother again as my tutor, I felt the pulse of my girlhood return. I felt again the enthusiasm I had known for religion.

The second leg of the tour took me to Brandeis University outside Boston. There I led an early afternoon daily prayer on the lawn. There were just four of us present—myself, two young men who were friends of the Muslim punk novelist Michael Muhammad Knight, and Nakia Jackson, a young Bostonian who had asked me at the Islamic Society of North America's conference in Chicago how she could overcome her sense of aloneness at her mosque. Since then, she had become a symbol of courage, her struggles documented by PBS and chronicled by the
Boston Globe.

Neither Nakia nor I had ever prayed before with a Muslim in purple hair and a leather bomber jacket. But this was our triumph, I believed: giving not only young women but young men safe spaces in which to practice their religion. That Friday, I asked Nakia to lead us in prayer, and she did, on the banks of the Charles River. Her sermon moved me with her allusions to God and light and was better than any I had heard in any mosque—a transforming breath of fresh air.

Back home in Morgantown, I called the local Unitarian Universalist Church, which readily agreed to let us use its space for a Friday afternoon prayer. This church had invited me to speak about my first book during a Sunday service—the first time I had stood in a pulpit—and I had broken my silence for the first time that day and spoken to a congregation of friends and neighbors about the challenges I was facing at my mosque.

But first I went to the regular mosque prayer in Morgantown. Not a single man said, “Salam.” There was no joy around me. The sermon was about the “loyal wife,” and the speaker encouraged the congregation to listen to a woman's advice—unless, of course, what she says is
wrong. For the first time, I walked out. I parted company with the congregation of the Morgantown mosque.

I had never felt better. In our new sacred space we would speak about light, our children's future, and the beauty of Islam. Several friends came for the first prayer service, as well as my mother, my father, and Shibli. I set out a fresh bouquet of roses and violets, moved the pulpit so that we would face east, and spread one of my mother's cotton tapestries on the ground. Then, after we had all gathered, I stood and delivered the sermon. “
Noora
is a feminine version of light,” I told the congregation.” There are so many who are trying to perpetuate darkness in the name of Islam. By standing up for women's rights, justice, and tolerance within Islam, we are light.” It was a profound and liberating moment. Afterward, our children blew soap bubbles to the heavens, and the sunlight piercing their ethereal creations seemed to engulf us in floating rainbows. I knew we had the power of the divine with us for we were standing up with love for Islam and this world.

My return to New York was marked, however, by a frightening confrontation. A reporter for the
New Jersey Star-Ledger
wanted to interview me about the struggle to win women's rights in our Muslim communities, and I thought there was no better place for us to meet than a mosque. I knew that the mosque on 96th Street, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, had a “sisters' section” resembling an office cubicle behind the main hall, separated by a curtain. When we arrived, it was time for the late afternoon prayer. I ignored the women's section and prayed instead about fifteen feet behind the men in the main hall. A security guard reprimanded me: “Women in the back!” he yelled.

I said, “No. I have a right to pray in the main hall.” I returned to my prayers. When I had finished, the security guard was waiting for me. “The imam. He wants to speak
to you.” I felt like a truant schoolgirl being called into the principal's office. The imam, Sheikh Omar Saleem Abu-Namous, stared at me from behind his desk, then reprimanded me for praying in the main hall. I stood by my right. He argued that the women had asked for the curtain. That was fine, but I didn't accept the curtain, and I was in America, where I could assert my rights. The conversation soon deteriorated as the imam mocked America.

He said, “America must submit to Islam, not Islam submit to America.”

I responded, “America must submit to Islam?”

“Yes.”

I thought of the electric ticker the mosque had at the corner of 96th Street above its gates, welcoming visitors. “Why don't we put that on the sign you have outside telling all of New York City that ‘America must submit to Islam.'”

He continued to stun me. “If it does not submit now, there will come a time when it will submit in the hereafter.”

“Wow. And how is that going to happen in the current day? How are we going to get America to submit to Islam, tell me? What is your idea?”

“I don't know. That's what America should do.”

“And so how should it be expressed?”

“The fact that America has gone secular, this doesn't mean that it is right.”

“So it should go Islamic?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“America should become an Islamic nation?”

“Yes, why not?”

“We should have sharia in America?”

“Yes.”

“We should define American law by Islamic law?”

“Yes.”

“We should require that all people in America live by Islamic law?”

The imam tried to interrupt: “Sister . . .”

I wanted an answer. “Tell me. Yes? Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“We should all impose the beautiful laws of sharia, such as adultery being punished by stoning, in America?”

“Yes.”

“We should cut off the hands of those who steal in America?”

The imam flipped through the Qur'an to read the citation that the puritanical clerics use to justify amputation for thieves. I wanted a response. “Could you answer?”

“Yes.”

“We should make sure that women do not wear jeans in America?”

“Yes, yes.”

The imam proceeded to argue that women are to be blamed for wearing immodest clothing when they're raped and that I wasn't a “human being” because I didn't cover my hair in public. We had debated so long that it was time for the sunset prayer. “I want to pray,” I told the imam as the reporter and I left his office and walked through the hall. “Pray,” the imam said, “behind the curtain.” I couldn't believe his obstinacy. But I was equally stubborn. “I will not pray behind the curtain.” He responded, “Then you must leave.” As the security guard and an angry man who had glared at me earlier in the imam's office stood menacingly by, I asked the imam, “So you will throw me out because I want to claim my rights as a Muslim woman?” “Yes,” he said with a wide smile.

I went outside and unfurled a scarf onto the sidewalk, forced by the imam's unacceptable conditions to pray in the street.

My next stop: Washington, D.C. The Islamic Center of Washington is America's flagship mosque, sitting on Embassy Row. When I was in graduate school at American University, I had gone there once to pray. Once had been enough. I wasn't allowed to step inside the main hall, and a man pointed me toward a ridiculous annex where the floorboards creaked. For an annoying eternity, I listened to a crackle on the loudspeaker that was supposed to be the preacher's sermon. I left angry and disenfranchised and never returned until a Friday in April 2005, when I walked up to the front doors of the mosque with a new friend, Rafat Khan.