faqir
18-03-2005, 09:42 AM
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Loosening their religion
By JORDAN LITE
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
Asra Nomani's stomach was churning as she passed through the front door of her mosque and stepped into its glittering, cavernous sanctuary.
Her prayer there would not be merely religious; Nomani, 39, was making a bold act of disobedience. Women were supposed to take a wooden side door into the building and pray upstairs, away from the mosque's main hall and male worshipers.
When the mosque's president begged her to retreat to the women's balcony, she was resolute. "Thank you, brother," she told him. "I'm happy praying here."
Nomani's outspokenness is unusual, but it is part of the distinctly female voice defining a controversial movement for reform in the Islamic world.
Wounded by public criticism and policies that singled them out after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many Muslims in the United States closed ranks and became tight-lipped.
But the scrutiny of Islam also brought new attention to brutal practices against women abroad in the name of the religion, from lack of education to limited rights to initiate divorce and retain custody of children.
Emboldened by the sudden public interest in these problems, and free in the United States to speak their minds without fear of the government reprisal that exists in many of their homelands, Muslim women have taken the lead in challenging the status quo.
They are taking on everything from women's role in the mosque to the anti-Semitism and anti-Christian attitudes some say are entrenched in Muslim communities.
The high visibility of their actions is often offset by intimidation and even death threats from fellow Muslims who accuse them of self-hatred and airing their community's "dirty laundry."
Deep forces drove Nomani to act at her local mosque. After her friend, Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was killed by Islamic militants and a Muslim boyfriend abandoned her for having their baby out of wedlock (a move that would make her a criminal, he said), Nomani began to wonder whether Islam had a place for her.
The accidental activist
Before Pearl's murder and the birth of her son, Shibli, in 2002, Nomani considered herself a secular member of "the silent, moderate majority" of Muslims. She couldn't have imagined staging the "pray-in" she began at the Islamic Center of Morgantown, W.Va., in October 2003.
But she has become a kind of Muslim Rosa Parks, challenging a tradition in two-thirds of American mosques that requires women to pray separately from the men, often in a basement or upstairs space where they can neither see nor hear the imam, or religious leader.
Today, female congregants are allowed to use the mosque's front door and to worship in the main sanctuary - a tale Nomani chronicles in her new book, "Standing Alone in Mecca" (HarperSanFrancisco), released this week.
"It started hitting me how deep an issue this was," says Nomani, a petite, stylish woman with bright, black eyes. "All fundamentalism in all religions is ultimately united by real bigotry against women. When they can be intolerant toward women, they can be intolerant toward others. I didn't want to be part of that conspiracy anymore."
Women taking the lead
Not everybody believes that Nomani's concerns reflect the Muslim mainstream.
Most Muslim women are content with separate prayer space in the mosque, says Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Islamic Society of North America.
Those who say otherwise are "a small minority who, due to the complete exclusion of some women from the mosque, have gone to the other extreme," she says.
But if these dissenters are a minority, they are a growing - and youthful - one, observers say. The women (and like-minded men) who are speaking out tend to be in their 30s, and their message embodies a generational clash between traditional Muslim immigrants and Muslims born or raised in the West, says Daisy Khan, executive director of the nonprofit American Sufi Muslim Association, which works to build understanding between American Muslims and non-Muslims.
It's precisely that disconnect that's fueling their activism, says Ahmed Nassef, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Muslim Wake Up!, which receives nearly 3 million hits each month.
"Women are taking the lead in this," says Nassef, noting that his new, left-leaning Progressive Muslim Union is dominated by young women. More than 1,000 similarly minded Muslims in dozens of North American cities have gotten together through the community-building Web site MeetUp.com, he adds.
"As a man, it's easy for me to blend in. I go into a mosque, no one knows how I feel. I can listen and go home or go to work. It's much harder to take risks," he says. "For women, the differences are so stark. Women are the ones who are more willing to come out there and tell it like it is."
The pen is mightier
The stories Irshad Manji tells in "The Trouble With Islam" have made her both a best-selling author and the recipient of numerous death threats.
At 14, Manji was thrown out of her madrassa - or Islamic school - for challenging her teacher's anti-Semitism. In her book, she argues that the schools foster unthinking hatred of Jews and repression of women and homosexuals.
The Toronto-based Manji, who is a lesbian, says the death threats mean she is successfully becoming a gadfly to those who oppose the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, or independent reasoning.
"This is a threat to their power," Manji, 36, says over a recent breakfast in midtown Manhattan. Though she is dressed simply in jeans, a black sweater and pink collared shirt, Manji is intense; her large brown eyes never break their gaze.
Manji is producing a documentary about young Muslims, especially women, who are trying to find a way to voice dissenting opinions. She's also creating the Institute for Independent Thinking in Islam, an outgrowth of her book she says will likely be based in New York.
"The real challenge is to convince a critical mass of Muslims to step up to the plate, to drop their fear of persecution and to say what is on their minds," she says. "It is giving them the courage to do that that will be the next big challenge over the coming years."
A scribe for equality
Mona Eltahawy is paving the way for those differing points of view to come to the surface. She is perhaps the only Muslim Arab woman writing regular opinion pieces for the country's leading newspapers.
In her column for the international newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, and in frequent Op-Ed pieces for The Washington Post, Eltahawy brings a usually absent female perspective to political discussions about democracy in the Arab world.
She writes about the politics of the hijab, or headscarf, and about female genital mutilation. More recently she has been focusing on democracy in the Middle East and Muslims living in America.
"The last thing I want is to ghettoize myself in women's issues," says Eltahawy, 37, an Egyptian-born Muslim who was raised in England and now lives in Manhattan.
"I think it's really important for a woman to write about geopolitical issues. Particularly when they concern the Arab world, you rarely hear from women," she says, noting that the editorial pages of newspapers around the world are dominated by male voices.
"You cannot have a functioning, viable community - either here in the U.S. or in the Muslim world - in which half its population are not heard from," Eltahawy says. "That's just impossible."
Seeing and being seen at the mosque
As the calls for reform have grown louder, the mosque remains a key battleground. Women in Boston and Charlotte, N.C., have posed challenges about their own prayer spaces, and in New York, Homaira Mamoor is waging a lonely battle to convince the Islamic Center of Long Island to let women pray alongside the men.
Tradition has it that women pray where they won't touch men or be seen lying prostrate, says Mattson, professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. The practice allows everyone to focus on prayer, she says.
Mamoor, a 37-year-old Afghan immigrant, calls that "an excuse." At the back of the mosque, she says she is shut out of community dialogue.
"If women can look at men's behinds and concentrate, why can't men concentrate?" asks the West Islip, L.I., mother of three daughters.
Faroque Khan, the center's president, says the mosque values women, and that seven of its 27 board members are female. With congregants from 30 countries, it's difficult to accommodate everyone, he says, and women's prayer space "is not the No. 1 item on the agenda."
Mamoor is hopeful that it will become so within her daughters' lifetime. On March 18 at 1 p.m., a woman is slated to lead a Muslim prayer service at the Sudaram Tagore Gallery in Soho, marking the first time a woman will do so publicly in New York City, organizers say.
"Changes happen in time and changes happen in small steps," says Mamoor. "Maybe in the next generation."
Loosening their religion
By JORDAN LITE
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
Asra Nomani's stomach was churning as she passed through the front door of her mosque and stepped into its glittering, cavernous sanctuary.
Her prayer there would not be merely religious; Nomani, 39, was making a bold act of disobedience. Women were supposed to take a wooden side door into the building and pray upstairs, away from the mosque's main hall and male worshipers.
When the mosque's president begged her to retreat to the women's balcony, she was resolute. "Thank you, brother," she told him. "I'm happy praying here."
Nomani's outspokenness is unusual, but it is part of the distinctly female voice defining a controversial movement for reform in the Islamic world.
Wounded by public criticism and policies that singled them out after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many Muslims in the United States closed ranks and became tight-lipped.
But the scrutiny of Islam also brought new attention to brutal practices against women abroad in the name of the religion, from lack of education to limited rights to initiate divorce and retain custody of children.
Emboldened by the sudden public interest in these problems, and free in the United States to speak their minds without fear of the government reprisal that exists in many of their homelands, Muslim women have taken the lead in challenging the status quo.
They are taking on everything from women's role in the mosque to the anti-Semitism and anti-Christian attitudes some say are entrenched in Muslim communities.
The high visibility of their actions is often offset by intimidation and even death threats from fellow Muslims who accuse them of self-hatred and airing their community's "dirty laundry."
Deep forces drove Nomani to act at her local mosque. After her friend, Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was killed by Islamic militants and a Muslim boyfriend abandoned her for having their baby out of wedlock (a move that would make her a criminal, he said), Nomani began to wonder whether Islam had a place for her.
The accidental activist
Before Pearl's murder and the birth of her son, Shibli, in 2002, Nomani considered herself a secular member of "the silent, moderate majority" of Muslims. She couldn't have imagined staging the "pray-in" she began at the Islamic Center of Morgantown, W.Va., in October 2003.
But she has become a kind of Muslim Rosa Parks, challenging a tradition in two-thirds of American mosques that requires women to pray separately from the men, often in a basement or upstairs space where they can neither see nor hear the imam, or religious leader.
Today, female congregants are allowed to use the mosque's front door and to worship in the main sanctuary - a tale Nomani chronicles in her new book, "Standing Alone in Mecca" (HarperSanFrancisco), released this week.
"It started hitting me how deep an issue this was," says Nomani, a petite, stylish woman with bright, black eyes. "All fundamentalism in all religions is ultimately united by real bigotry against women. When they can be intolerant toward women, they can be intolerant toward others. I didn't want to be part of that conspiracy anymore."
Women taking the lead
Not everybody believes that Nomani's concerns reflect the Muslim mainstream.
Most Muslim women are content with separate prayer space in the mosque, says Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Islamic Society of North America.
Those who say otherwise are "a small minority who, due to the complete exclusion of some women from the mosque, have gone to the other extreme," she says.
But if these dissenters are a minority, they are a growing - and youthful - one, observers say. The women (and like-minded men) who are speaking out tend to be in their 30s, and their message embodies a generational clash between traditional Muslim immigrants and Muslims born or raised in the West, says Daisy Khan, executive director of the nonprofit American Sufi Muslim Association, which works to build understanding between American Muslims and non-Muslims.
It's precisely that disconnect that's fueling their activism, says Ahmed Nassef, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Muslim Wake Up!, which receives nearly 3 million hits each month.
"Women are taking the lead in this," says Nassef, noting that his new, left-leaning Progressive Muslim Union is dominated by young women. More than 1,000 similarly minded Muslims in dozens of North American cities have gotten together through the community-building Web site MeetUp.com, he adds.
"As a man, it's easy for me to blend in. I go into a mosque, no one knows how I feel. I can listen and go home or go to work. It's much harder to take risks," he says. "For women, the differences are so stark. Women are the ones who are more willing to come out there and tell it like it is."
The pen is mightier
The stories Irshad Manji tells in "The Trouble With Islam" have made her both a best-selling author and the recipient of numerous death threats.
At 14, Manji was thrown out of her madrassa - or Islamic school - for challenging her teacher's anti-Semitism. In her book, she argues that the schools foster unthinking hatred of Jews and repression of women and homosexuals.
The Toronto-based Manji, who is a lesbian, says the death threats mean she is successfully becoming a gadfly to those who oppose the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, or independent reasoning.
"This is a threat to their power," Manji, 36, says over a recent breakfast in midtown Manhattan. Though she is dressed simply in jeans, a black sweater and pink collared shirt, Manji is intense; her large brown eyes never break their gaze.
Manji is producing a documentary about young Muslims, especially women, who are trying to find a way to voice dissenting opinions. She's also creating the Institute for Independent Thinking in Islam, an outgrowth of her book she says will likely be based in New York.
"The real challenge is to convince a critical mass of Muslims to step up to the plate, to drop their fear of persecution and to say what is on their minds," she says. "It is giving them the courage to do that that will be the next big challenge over the coming years."
A scribe for equality
Mona Eltahawy is paving the way for those differing points of view to come to the surface. She is perhaps the only Muslim Arab woman writing regular opinion pieces for the country's leading newspapers.
In her column for the international newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, and in frequent Op-Ed pieces for The Washington Post, Eltahawy brings a usually absent female perspective to political discussions about democracy in the Arab world.
She writes about the politics of the hijab, or headscarf, and about female genital mutilation. More recently she has been focusing on democracy in the Middle East and Muslims living in America.
"The last thing I want is to ghettoize myself in women's issues," says Eltahawy, 37, an Egyptian-born Muslim who was raised in England and now lives in Manhattan.
"I think it's really important for a woman to write about geopolitical issues. Particularly when they concern the Arab world, you rarely hear from women," she says, noting that the editorial pages of newspapers around the world are dominated by male voices.
"You cannot have a functioning, viable community - either here in the U.S. or in the Muslim world - in which half its population are not heard from," Eltahawy says. "That's just impossible."
Seeing and being seen at the mosque
As the calls for reform have grown louder, the mosque remains a key battleground. Women in Boston and Charlotte, N.C., have posed challenges about their own prayer spaces, and in New York, Homaira Mamoor is waging a lonely battle to convince the Islamic Center of Long Island to let women pray alongside the men.
Tradition has it that women pray where they won't touch men or be seen lying prostrate, says Mattson, professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. The practice allows everyone to focus on prayer, she says.
Mamoor, a 37-year-old Afghan immigrant, calls that "an excuse." At the back of the mosque, she says she is shut out of community dialogue.
"If women can look at men's behinds and concentrate, why can't men concentrate?" asks the West Islip, L.I., mother of three daughters.
Faroque Khan, the center's president, says the mosque values women, and that seven of its 27 board members are female. With congregants from 30 countries, it's difficult to accommodate everyone, he says, and women's prayer space "is not the No. 1 item on the agenda."
Mamoor is hopeful that it will become so within her daughters' lifetime. On March 18 at 1 p.m., a woman is slated to lead a Muslim prayer service at the Sudaram Tagore Gallery in Soho, marking the first time a woman will do so publicly in New York City, organizers say.
"Changes happen in time and changes happen in small steps," says Mamoor. "Maybe in the next generation."