Standing Alone (35 page)

PARIS
—Like many in America, I became engrossed in the national bestseller
The Da Vinci Code
, set at the Louvre in the City of Love. I hadn't read any mysteries since my days devouring
Nancy Drew
, but my friend Pam Norick handed it to me as she was reading an early draft of my book. “This will resonate with you,” she said.

She was right. The story of a search by a Parisian cryptographer and an American art historian for the Holy Grail of Christianity was actually a parable for a universal search for the sacred secrets of women's power hidden under centuries of rewritten history. “The Holy Grail represents the
sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church,” the historian tells his partner.

In the margin of the book, I wrote just four words: “Just like in Islam.” The Qur'an doesn't even say Eve was to blame for Adam's exile from paradise. But somehow, centuries later, the men at my mosque told me that I, as a woman, had to stay physically apart from them or I would corrupt them.

It had been in Paris in the spring and summer of 2002 that I had first battled with the doctrine from my Muslim world that judged me as impure, unclean, and illegitimate for having conceived a baby out of wedlock. It was the season of my hell. Two years later I felt as if I had rejected that doctrine. The only way I could really know, however, was to return to Paris, where I had spent many hours weeping over my shame and sense of worthlessness. I had gone to Paris with Danny's wife, Mariane, after we left Karachi, still trying to understand what had happened in Pakistan. We lived in a pied-à-terre that Mariane and Danny had bought when they moved to Bombay for Danny's assignment there. It sat in the charming neighborhood of Montmartre. Patiently, we waited there for Danny and Mariane's son, Adam, to be born.

In my fourth month I lay doubled over with pain. I had just heard that Danny's kidnappers had wounded him in the stomach during his captivity. My insides were already tight from the emotional anguish that my son's biological father was causing me. I was a Muslim woman struggling to simply emerge from the darkness into which I had descended. That night I wept from a deep, stabbing pain in my abdomen.

“My baby! My baby!” I cried into the darkness. Mariane emerged from her bed in the other room, her eyes wide, her response steady. Her friend Ben was waiting for a phone call to drive her to the hospital for her delivery. Instead, it was me who had to be rushed to the hospital. The French doctor at the hospital examined me carefully. He talked to me gently about the external anguish I was internalizing. He assured me that
my unborn baby was safe. “Your baby is protected within your womb,” he told me.

The womb. It is
rahim
in Arabic, and its derivative, Al Raheem, is one of ninety-nine names for God in Arabic, meaning “the Compassionate.” I learned in that moment that I had to be compassionate toward myself. I had to forgive myself for the errors in judgment I thought I had made, the wrong assumptions that plagued me, the disappointment that I felt I had become. With the evidence of my healthy baby in my womb, God was being compassionate toward me.

So, two years later, I returned with my son, healthy and joyful, to Paris and walked through the doors into that pied-à-terre where I had lived with my quiet torment. The room was filled this time with the chattering of Shibli and Adam, who were learning to say “thank you” in every language I knew. “Thank you,” I said. Adam responded in kind. Shibli smiled: “Thunk you.”

“Shukran,” I said in Arabic.

“Chukrun,” said Adam. “Chukrun,” said Shibli.

“Shukriya,” I said in Urdu, with a lilt at the end.

“Shukheeehah,” said Adam, with the lilt just perfect. “Shuheehah,” said Shibli, also with an inflection just right.

As day turned to night, my son's breath filled the quiet of the night like the pulsation of the divine that is universal and timeless. The next day, in an outing with Adam, Shibli and I went together to the Mosque of Paris for the Friday prayer. “Allahu Akbar,” I told Shibli, as we drove in a Paris taxi. “Ababooboo,” he answered.

Inside the mosque the women were crammed into one arm of a verandah that lined an inner courtyard. When we tried to enter one door, the men shepherded us to another door. “Femme. Femme,” a man shouted, directing us to a narrow passageway for women, beside a grander entry for men. In any language, his words were the same. Woman. Woman.

Aspects of society try to corral us and subordinate us. During prayer I stood in a row behind the men with Shibli in my arms, close enough to read the size on the rear label of one man's Levi 501 jeans and the “Algérie” on the bottom of a boy's socks. When the prayer ended, the men rushed through even our narrow entrance, and the ushers gestured for the women to wait. I wanted to get outside to rejoin Adam, who was with the babysitter. When I kept trying to leave, the usher kept gesturing me away. I thought of Mecca, where we piled through the gates without having to wait for men to pass. I decided not to wait any longer. When I finally insisted on leaving, the men made way for Shibli and me.

Muslim women—indeed, all women—still have so far to go in our world to reach the status the divine gives us. But somehow in each of our lives we can claim our intrinsic human rights to self-determination and happiness.

In Paris I was in a celebratory mood. We raced through the exhibits with their looming elephants at the Natural History Museum and then strolled through the Jardin des Fleurs. I felt triumphant and happy, enjoying life with my son and knowing that we were making strides within the Muslim world toward the full realization of women's rights. I darted through the grounds with Shibli and Adam in the Jardin des Fleurs and spun around on the merry-go-round with them. As I pointed out blooming bursts of color to Shibli, my exclamations were simple. “Allah!”

These beautiful flowers were expressions of the divine. We need to revel in the good and the beautiful and transform the ugly. This is how I want Shibli to know God—in the beauty of the world. Shibli answered me each time: “Allah! Allah!”

At home in Montmartre, I danced with Shibli in the quiet of our Friday evening, a string of paper rosebuds lighting the room like Christmas lights. Twirling him in my arms, I sang to him in Urdu, “My son, my son, you have come, you have come.” As he lay down, he echoed my words to lull himself to sleep. I drew him close to me. And then I released him. Such was the embrace that I felt the divine had given me. I went to the holiest cities of my religion a broken woman. Through the process of transformation that was my hajj, I was now a woman with a deep sense of place and purpose.

Breathing in, I felt immensely different from the woman who had sat there two years earlier. I felt free.

MORGANTOWN
—Back in the United States, the Islamic Society of North America was holding its annual convention again in the Windy City. The year before, its pilgrimage tour had opened my eyes to how a woman could be given full and equal access to public space in Muslim society. And its annual convention had shown me women at the dais as scholars, filmmakers, and rap poets.

That was why, early in the year, I filled out a proposal for a presentation from the article my father and I had written for the
Journal of Islamic
Law and Society
on the issue of women and mosques. My father rushed to his office to fax it before a midnight deadline. He didn't get done until 3:00
A
.
M
., because of technical difficulties only my father could find, but to my delight, my proposal was accepted, albeit for a ten-minute presentation on a panel I would share with others. I was honored to get even a minute, I had to admit.

Since I'd sent the proposal, I had had a touchy relationship with the organization. After I filed the police report against the men at my mosque, the society's secretary general, Sayyid Syeed, had been fatherly when I turned to him for help. But its leadership had criticized me after I sought its mediation on the takeover of our mosque and the intolerant speeches preached at the pulpit. In the
New York Times
essay, I had accurately said that the society prefers to stay out of local community disputes. The society responded by running an article in its magazine accusing me of launching a “smear campaign” against the organization. It claimed that I had promised to keep its name out of the essay. A professional journalist for fifteen years, I would never make such a pledge. I considered withdrawing from the conference, but I knew I couldn't. I had to bring the message of the denial of women's Islamic rights to the convention so that as a community we could deal with the problem. I also knew that my presentation would be more like a ten-minute parachute infiltration. I would be an insurgent. I prepared for the worst.

I pulled out a document I had started writing eight months earlier after my article about women's rights in mosques was published in the
Washington Post
and I began receiving support from similarly disenfranchised women in Muslim communities around the world. I called it “An Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques.” This document boiled down to ten simple rights, starting with women's right to enter a mosque, a right that is denied throughout so much of the Muslim world. I sent a draft to my friend Saleemah in Atlanta with the note: “The revolution has begun!”

Over the months, I had vetted the bill of rights with the Martin and Martina Luthers of Islam—Dr. Alan Godlas, Dr. Kecia Ali, Dr. Omid Safi, Ahmed Nassef, Dr. Mohja Kahf, Dr. Aminah McCloud, and Dr. Amina Wadud. Omid suggested that I didn't have to rationalize every right with a hadith. Dr. McCloud suggested that I distribute the rights on bookmarks. I called a husband-wife graphic design team in Morgantown. I thought it was appropriate, in the spirit of pluralism, that the husband's first name was Christian. (The wife was named Paige.) Their design studio was called New Life Arts, and that was what I was trying to do: breathe
new life into our communities. In a day they churned out a design with the verse from the Qur'an that inspired us to “stand out firmly for justice” even if it meant testifying against our own kin. They enlarged the bookmark to a poster I could use in my presentation. “It's ready,” they said, calling me to meet them at the Blue Moose Cafe, a coffee shop in downtown Morgantown. When I arrived, I gazed admiringly at the work. “Our cause is for real.”

Shibli looked at the drawing of the mosque that Christian had sketched and offered his approval: “Ababooboo.”

When it came time to carry the poster board and bookmarks to the car, I had to navigate past young university students lined up to go into a bar notorious for serving alcohol to minors under the legal drinking age of twenty-one. Outside stood one of my greatest detractors from the mosque. He owned the building that housed the club. His name used to be on the license when the club was operating as Speedy's, but it had been fined for serving alcohol to minors and reopened under a new name and a new owner, an American guitarist in a local band. I never saw the guitarist around, but I regularly saw the man from my mosque and his brother at the club, accepting cases of beer from Budweiser delivery men and others. His brother was a young man who came to Friday prayers in a luxury convertible and quietly slipped in and out of the mosque in a traditional gown. That night he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and the women lined up outside the bar were wearing micro-miniskirts. According to sharia, the letter I would have to wear, if I were Hester Prynne, would be “Z” for zina. Ironically, the name of the bar was Club Z.

Appropriately, I had run into a former professor at the Blue Moose. I had taken a course in international human rights from Jim Friedberg about twenty years earlier as an undergraduate honors student. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a Jewish-American, Jim had spent his career studying international law and human rights. In his class I had learned the concept of self-determination and the value of the human rights intrinsic to the lives of all people. I had borrowed the concept of self-determination to create the Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques. As we walked past Club Z, I was grateful that I had evolved from being a silent participant in his classroom to a revolutionary on the streets of Morgantown, passing by my fiercest detractors with bookmarks and a poster reclaiming my Islamic rights as a Muslim woman.

CHICAGO
—Going to the Windy City meant going full circle. I had left in 1992 to pursue a lie. I had walked out of a relationship with a man because he was a Christian. I married another man because he had the right pedigree: Muslim. In the twelve years since, I had tried to resolve the paradoxes within my identity so that I could live truthfully and sincerely.

I was committed to being honest about who I am. Most women, although not all, wore the hijab in Chicago. Even women who didn't ordinarily cover their hair did for the convention so that they wouldn't be the subject of gossip. I cover my hair only in the mosque, and I wasn't going to do it now just for public appearance.

After all of the other panelists had spoken—most with Power Point presentations—I took the podium. I gazed softly at the audience and thanked the Islamic Society of North America. I explained that the presentation was the result of almost two years of work inspired by the transformative experience of praying together with my family in Mecca on the holy pilgrimage of the hajj in February 2003. I had made that journey with the help of the Islamic Society of North America, and I thanked the society for that experience and the opportunity to speak at the convention. My points were simple. “Islam is at a crossroads much like the place where the prophet Muhammad found himself when he was on the cusp of a new dawn with his migration to Medina from Mecca. Medina became ‘the City of Illumination' because of the wisdom with which the prophet nurtured his ummah. In much the same way, the Muslim world has the opportunity to rise to a place of deep and sincere enlightenment, inspired by the greatest teachings of Islam. It is our choice which path we take. It is our mandate to take action to ensure that we define our communities as tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate places that value and inspire all within our fold.”

The problem was clear. “There are many model mosques that affirm women's rights. Yet women are systematically denied rights that Islam granted them in the seventh century in mosques throughout America. Islam grants all people inalienable rights to respect, dignity, participation, leadership, voice, knowledge, and worship. These rights must be granted to women, as well as men, in the mosques and Islamic centers that are a part of our Muslim communities. Islamic teaching seeks expressions of modesty between men and women. But many mosques in America and beyond have gone well beyond that principle by defining themselves with
cultural traditions that perpetuate a system of separate accommodations that provides women with wholly unequal services for prayer and education. And yet, excluding women ignores the rights the prophet Muhammad gave them in the seventh century when he created a Muslim ummah in Medina and represents innovations that emerged after the prophet died.”

I gave evidence of the rights denied in mosques throughout America and laid out the Islamic arguments that had empowered me to take action in my mosque in Morgantown. “It is time for our communities to embody the essential principles of equity, tolerance, and inclusion within Islam,” I said. “And it is incumbent upon each of us as Muslims to stand up for those principles.”

I told them what I had come to realize in the two years since January 2001 when the Dalai Lama had set me on my path toward Mecca. Terrorists transformed our world into a more dangerous place when they attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Before we knew it, a minority of Islamic fundamentalists who preached hatred of the West were defining Islam in the world. Alas, moderates, including myself, have been a “silent majority,” remaining largely quiet. A combination of fear, shame, and apathy has contributed to a culture of silence among even those of us who are discontented with the status quo in Muslim society. Moderate Muslims have a great responsibility to define Islam and their communities in the world. For me, this effort started at home when I walked up to the front door of my mosque for the first time on the eve of Ramadan 2003. It is time, I said, for us to reclaim the rights Islam granted to women in the seventh century. Toward that end, I humbly introduced my poster with the Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques.

The rights are simple: the right to enter a mosque; the right to use the main door; the right to have visual and auditory access to the
musalla
(the main sanctuary); the right to pray in the main sanctuary without being separated by a barrier; the right to address any and all members of the congregation; the right to hold leadership positions, including positions on the board of directors; the right to be greeted and addressed cordially; and the right to receive respectful treatment and to be exempt from gossip and slander.

After reading the rights, I told the audience, “Ultimately, it is incumbent upon Islamic organizations, community leaders, academics, and mosques to respond to this call for improved rights for women in mosques by endorsing and promoting a campaign, modeling it after their very successful
educational and legal campaigns to protect the civil liberties of Muslim men and women in other areas. To do so would honor not only Muslim women but also Islam. The journey is never complete, and a long road remains in front of us, but we have as inspiration a time in the seventh century when a new day lay ahead of a caravan trader who had as much to fear as we do today but nonetheless transcended his doubts and fears to create an ummah to which we all belong today. Allow us all to rise to our highest potential.”

With a deep breath, I sat down, not knowing what to expect next.

Although there were four other speakers, a torrent of questions came at me when members of the audience stood at the microphone.

There were three hecklers. One admonished me for not saying the code phrase “Peace be upon him” after the name of the prophet. Another part of our inside language is “Sall-Allahu aleyhi wa sallam” (May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, abbreviated as SAW), said after any mention of the prophet or an angel. “The Clans” in the Qur'an (33:56) says, “The Prophet is blessed by God and His angels. Bless him then, you that are true believers, and greet him with a worthy salutation.”

At the dais, the director of the Long Island mosque, Faroque Khan, a physician originally from India, had just spoken about the powerful inter-faith work his mosque had done after 9/11 by opening its doors, and he defended me from his seat. “She is a brave daughter of Islam. Do not criticize her for such little things.” The critics were undeterred. A young man stood up and identified himself as a member of the Muslim Students' Association. “Where is your proof?” he demanded angrily, shaking his head, his beard a blur in front of me. I pointed to the seventy-four footnotes in the reprint of the article my father and I wrote for the
Journal of Islamic Law and Society
. “The Sunnah of the prophet will never change,” he said, shaking his head fiercely again. I stared at his eyes, so wide and menacing.
I will never forget those eyes
, I told myself, not realizing how useful that observation would become when I confronted the young man's rage again, days later.

At that moment, though, I didn't know I'd ever cross paths with him again, and I actually felt sorry for him that he felt so threatened by the simple bill of rights. I wanted to scream: these rights
are
the Sunnah of the prophet. I knew what lay beneath his anger. Some men don't want to relinquish the power and control it has taken them centuries to accumulate. Some men think it is their God-given right to express this power and control over women. But the prophet gave women rights that men deny them today, and it is our Islamic duty to reclaim those rights so that we can be stronger citizens of the world.

A twenty-four-year-old African American woman from Boston, Nakia Jackson, stood up. The women in her mosque prayed in a urine-stained, rat-infested room that doubled as a storage closet. And they accepted the status quo. “I feel so alone. What advice do you have for someone like me?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“You are not alone,” I told her. “So often I have stood physically alone in my mosque in Morgantown. But I have felt the spiritual press of so many kindred spirits who stand with me. I am with you. You are not alone.”

Afterward, I was mobbed. I hugged so many women, young and old, that I lost count. And I received the encouragement of so many men, young and old, that my faith was renewed. “We did it!” I told my parents when I called home later.