Red, White, and Muslim: My Story of Belief

Introduction

When I wrote Why I Am A Muslim (published in 2004), I felt that I was able to step outside the fray that surrounded Islam and provide an easy-to-read, spiritual description of my reasons for being Muslim. Today, several years later, the War on Terror, and the focus on Islam, has changed and deepened. I find that non-Muslim Americans and other Westerners are even more challenged in understanding Islam. While some understand the basics (and others still haven’t bothered), many ignore them and move on to histrionics and platitudes. Those with good intentions are genuinely confused by the ambiguities of how Muslims actually live their daily lives and form their opinions, which sometimes have no Qur’anic or theological basis. Issues like Sunni-Shi’ite discord, the viability of democracy in an Islamic country, and, most important to me, the status of women in Islam, confuses and terrifies everyone alike, even me as a Muslim.

The pressure on Muslim women now is different than it ever has been. All the issues I mentioned as well as the side effects of the War on Terror come down most strongly on Muslim women. The War on Terror has produced a war on women. When the West asserts itself on Muslim men, Muslim men assert themselves on Muslim women, for lack of any other reachable target. Muslim women, in response, turn off or turn away. I loathe criticizing the Muslim community, but I believe that Muslim women all over the world are facing a spiritual crisis as a result of this pressure. Even for me, constantly responding to Why don’t Muslims condemn terrorism more? leaves less time for me to nurture and advocate the optimistic and spiritual side of Islam, which is the essence of why I am a Muslim. Everyone who is concerned about the state of the world needs to refocus on and educate themselves about what Islam truly stands for and why Muslims hold the beliefs they do.

Most Muslim women around the world are not conservative in their practice, but moderate. Yet the Muslim leadership, from Wahhabi-American imams to the late (and tragically assassinated) Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, espouses hijab—a conservative concept—as required for Muslim women who practice properly. This issue is sticky for the majority of Muslim women, who do not wear hijab (including me). When I was giving radio interviews for the previous edition of this book, in cities across America as well as in London, women with Muslim names would often call in. Without identifying themselves as Muslim, they would ask about some controversial area of Islam—one that Western feminists and critics had picked on, attempting to show Islam’s inferiority or its supposed tendency to oppress women. After a few of these calls, I realized that these women were not conservative Muslims trying to challenge me. They were actually moderate Muslims themselves who had been pushed away from the faith and were in disbelief that someone like them still staked a claim for Islam.

How can you be a Muslim without wearing hijab? one woman with an Arabic-Muslim name asked me during an interview at an NPR affiliate. Her tone was angry, but I could tell that it was not because I didn’t wear hijab, but because she didn’t, and therefore felt she couldn’t consider herself a good Muslim. What this caller was really asking was: how did I have the guts to consider myself Muslim, even though I didn’t subscribe to the establishment views, albeit minority ones?

How do you explain that, in Islam, women inherit half of what their brothers do? I was asked once on the air by a bleak and angry female voice. From all these women, I could hear their anger at Islamic practices, their frustration. How could the religion these callers were raised in let them down like this, betray them? I understood their frustration. While on the one hand, our community teaches us all the rights Islam celebrates for women and that are stated in the Qur’an, a conservative minority increasingly touts repressive principles and cultural, tribal attitudes. Most Muslims don’t agree with these repressive views, but share the progressive values I describe in this book. When we allow this conservative minority to define our religion, those of us with the correct view of Islam are browbeaten into believing we have the wrong interpretation.

The very identity of Muslim women—even Muslims in general—is in question. Many of us Muslim women don’t fit the full conservative model of Muslim womanhood accepted at the mosque, yet we can’t bring ourselves to wear a bikini on the beach or eat bacon with our pancakes. I hear this frustration in the voices of fellow Muslim women, a frustration that has markedly increased in the last few years. I feel this conflict within myself. It is challenging to belong to a religion whose male adherents often ignore not only the tenets of the religion, which clearly stand for equality, but also the repression they are exerting on their own mothers, wives, daughters, and friends. The community leadership often says that being a Muslim female means wearing hijab, standing in the back of the mosque and at the back of Muslim burials, even for your own relatives. I am afraid that many Muslim women, possibly millions around the world, are saying in response, "Fine. We’re not Muslim then." These external, conservative, and actually extra-Islamic markers of being a Muslim woman are leaving many Muslim women out. They don’t convert to another religion, but they think of themselves as being secularized, or simply raised Muslim but not much more.

In Ethiopia, where I visited in 2006 as a speaker for the U.S. State Department, I realized how far Muslim women are being held back. The status of women in Ethiopia is abysmally low.

People all over the world, especially Muslims, are eager to hear about American Muslims. I have travelled to Europe, Asia, and Africa and have held many videoconferences with the U.S. embassies of Muslim and non-Muslim countries around the world. Many of the participants are fascinated that Islam even exists in the United States, that there are Muslims who were born into American Muslim families and raised Muslim in America, who speak English without an accent and sound American.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I spent most of the Ethiopia trip on the receiving end of vociferous complaints about the war in Iraq and American imperialism. Most of the State Department officials accompanying me didn’t even attempt to defend U.S. policies. Besides the officials, one group at these gatherings was also noticeably quiet: the middle-aged Muslim women sat silent, with blank expressions. In contrast, the Muslim men and younger Muslim women were enlivened by their newly found Wahhabi beliefs. (Wahhabism, a literal and conservative interpretation of Islam, is a rather new development in the Muslim world, especially outside of the Arab world. I am not against different interpretations of Islam, but I feel that Wahhabis and other conservative Muslims want to strangle any interpretations of Islam outside of their own.) Lecturing against the U.S. and modern Muslim women came easily to these young Muslims, but any real dialogue did not. It was ironic to me that in the ancient Ethiopian walled city of Harar, where I was giving a talk, a young, soccer-jersey-clad Wahhabi man lectured me on how my dress and appearance were sinful and wrong (in addition to the hatred he had for the United States). The middle-aged women at the event, who said nothing and avoided making eye contact, grew up with a different Islam. Their faces were those of the shamed victims of a crime, just staring ahead, not giving away any emotion. Every woman wore hijab, as a rule. Even I was tricked into wearing it on one occasion, and on others simply gave up and put it on.

After the soccer-jersey Wahhabi and his cronies left, the middle-aged Muslim ladies approached me. They told me that they disagreed with the Wahhabi views but couldn’t speak up. They said that since 9/11, Wahhabism has grown. (It is possible that these Wahhabis, seeing the United States attacked so successfully, have been emboldened, although they had nothing to do with the attack.) This growth in Wahhabism requires that all women wear hijab and not attract attention to themselves in public. If a woman defies these rules, she cannot leave her house at all without being harassed. So they said they have just given in, in exchange for some semblance of a normal life, some hope to still be part of society, to go to lectures like mine and work at least. The Harar women told me that, previously, most Ethiopian women didn’t wear hijab. It was a new phenomenon with the growth of Wahhabism. I do not understand how the Muslim world expects to grow and flourish when half its population likely feels imprisoned without bars. A society cannot advance if most participants aren’t free to contribute to that advancement.

The only private event I had was with a group of Muslim women parliamentarians. I expected a room full of the Hillary Clintons and Nancy Pelosis of Ethiopia. But it was the opposite. In fact, the women were so modest and mild-mannered that it was hard to believe that they held public office at all. They did their best to blend into the background. I found out during the meeting that most of these women were teachers who had held local posts. When the prime minister won his reelection in 2005, in a hotly disputed contest, he dismissed all elected officials who were not in his party, from the national bodies all the way down to local assemblies, sometimes even imprisoning them. These dismissals vanquished national, intermediate, and local representative bodies. Generally, when a representative was dismissed, the representative from the lower house would replace him. But with so many representatives dismissed, the last official standing for some spots, at the end of the line, was a rural teacher who had held a local post. Most were, fortuitously, members of the prime minister’s party or of a coalition party. In the prime minister’s zeal to remove his opposition, he actually elevated a few select Ethiopian women—a small step for Ethiopian woman-kind achieved purely out of coincidence.

Once the ladies finally became comfortable, and after some prodding on the translator’s and my part, they began to perk up. The first one spoke, looking less at me and more into the open space straight ahead of her. She talked about how impressed she was that I was a lawyer and how she never thought she would meet an American Muslim female lawyer. Another woman made similar comments (all translated) with a similar demeanor. Soon all the women were speaking in turn, still not quite smiling but jubilant that I was a lawyer. I told the lady parliamentarians how greatly I admired their election to office. In my eyes, their achievements were greater than going to law school. Again, they returned the translation with blank stares. Their reactions, their inability to open up, were bizarre to me. One of them even said that what they did was not anything special, nothing to brag about.

I wanted to take a picture with the lady parliamentarians, to remember my visit with Hillary’s and Nancy’s Ethiopian counterparts. Upon exiting Parliament, where my camera had been held at the door, I started signaling for the ladies to gather around the entrance to the government building, a natural backdrop for our photo. The ladies were hesitant, and then many of them started lining up to go for it after all. Immediately, one of the two guards posted at the door rudely chided the ladies. He gruffly told them to move and insisted that photos could not be taken there. I didn’t realize what was happening, but I did notice the ladies acquiescing quietly and moving away. I followed the ladies and asked what happened. The translator told me that the guard had chastised them for attempting to take the photo in front of the building. Why, I asked the translator, would a guard tell a Member of Parliament what to do? That would be like the metal-detector guard at the U.S. Congress telling Hillary she couldn’t take a photo in front of the U.S. Capitol. It would be an outrage.

The ladies quietly moved on, taking their chastisement without so much as a frown. Their stares were the same as I saw in middle-aged women all over Ethiopia. We took our photo in another location, and the ladies dispersed without even so much as a good-bye. Ethiopian women, even Members of Parliament, don’t linger. When these moments of injustice take place, I always think I will stand up against them. But, as with many things, the individual events happen so quickly that it’s over before I can protest. I did nothing.

More than a year after I met them, I thought of the Ethiopian women while I was standing outside the Garden Grove Mosque in Southern California. My uncle Adnan was telling me how my grandmother’s burial service would proceed: The imam and the mosque people want the women to stand in the back, because women get emotional. I gave him a blank stare back, which is an unusually passive response for me. He added, Women start crying, and then they might throw themselves or fall in the grave. I had to resist telling him that we were not in a Bollywood movie from one hundred years ago and that I had enough sense not to jump into the grave.

Visiting Ethiopia a year earlier had made me feel lucky to live in America, where varying and misguided religious interpretations do not often affect me directly. But on this day of grief, I was confronted again with the Muslim community’s extra-Qur’anic patriarchy. It rears its ugly head, and it is the rare woman who has enough education, confidence, and support to say no, this is not what Islam says; this practice is a cultural one. I didn’t feel like arguing the point with him. I just said quietly and apologetically, because I did sympathize with how the mosque folk would hold him responsible for my insubordination: I’m sorry. I can’t do that. I am going to stand wherever I want.

She was my grandmother, after all. I had every right to watch her go into the next world and a duty to be a witness for this event. She would have done the same herself, I imagined. She possessed a bold personality, unlike Western stereotypes of Muslim women and unlike the lower-level status that Muslim leadership forces Muslim women into today at the mosque, in organizations, and socially. She was headstrong and lucky that she moved to the United States in the late 1970s, away from Pakistan when Wahhabism and conservative views began gaining in popularity. My grandmother was full of life and emotion. She quite infamously, upon meeting a suitor for my sister’s arranged-marriage years ago, hugged and kissed him and gave him a one-hundred-dollar bill, per the Pakistani tradition. (Despite this bribe, surprisingly, it didn’t work out for him and my sister.)