A Quiet Revolution (41 page)

Esack began his talk by declaring that he had never imagined that he would ever be invited to speak at ISNA—but here he was at the invi- tation of a former student and colleague and member of ISNA. Esack’s declaration drew a response from Mattson, who also was a speaker on the panel. Speaking in her capacity as vice president Mattson thanked Esack for his “courageous” voice and his presence and went on to say that ISNA

belonged to its members and that ISNA’s organizers welcomed propos- als for parallel sessions. After Esack completed his talk—in which he ad- dressed, among other things, the distortions of Islam that were being produced by the agendas of imperialism—Mattson spoke of her own history of activism. She had been active all her life, she said, on workers’ issues, and had grown up “singing union songs in Canada.” Women are not off the hook, she said. Gender oppression has to be dealt with, but women are also divided by class. “There are women who clean our mosques for below minimum wage and women who have to leave their children alone because they have to work ten-hour days.”
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Others appearing on ISNA’s panels were people whom I would pre- viously have assumed would not have been among those that ISNA would feature. In
2004
, for example, Asra Nomani, the former
Wall Street Journal
reporter, spoke at ISNA. Nomani was by then well known for

the campaign she was conducting, extensively covered by the media, against her Morgantown, West Virginia, mosque for its discriminatory practices toward women, and in particular its relegation of women to the back of the mosque and its requirement that they use only the back door. In addition, Nomani had been an outspoken critic of conservative Islam generally, including of Islamic sexual rules and mores. She had also been very public—as a point of feminist politics—about her own unwed mother status.

Her speech, in which she declared that Islam “grants all people in- alienable rights to respect, dignity, participation, leadership, voice, knowledge and worship,” was reportedly well received, particularly by the young in the audience.
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Sabreen Akhtar, for example, a writer for

Muslim WakeUp! (a website founded by two young Muslims in
2003
to

serve as a voice for “progressive Muslims,” and whose contributors were mainly young people), described herself as “excited” to discover that the “revolutionary and inspiring activist, journalist and author Asra No- mani” had been allotted ten minutes on a panel. Akhtar also noted in her article that her own small Chicago-based Muslim group had had the privilege of previewing Nomani’s presentation and that Nomani’s “ideas and researches had been very warmly received.”
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Nomani is a member of the generation of American Muslims who would come to maturity as professional adults in the shadow of
9
/
11
—

an event that created an appalling, and for some an evidently nearly in- tolerable, mental association between Islam and terror, Islam and mur- derous violence. In Nomani’s case that shadow of terror and its link with Islam was all the darker and sharper because of the horrific fate of Daniel Pearl, a fellow journalist and personal friend of Nomani’s who was mur- dered by a terrorist group in Pakistan. It was this event, Nomani re- counts, that had spurred her into activism against extremism and to pursue women’s equal space in mosques.

In this post-
9
/
11
climate, Nomani’s activism appears to have quickly

had a significant impact on ISNA and other Muslim American organi- zations as regards their publicly articulated position on women in mosques. Thus these organizations collectively issued a booklet in
2005
entitled “Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Work-

ing Together to Reclaim Our Heritage.”
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The booklet recommends that “women and men, girls and boys should have equal access to and must feel equally welcome to participate in schools, the masjid [mosque] and other civic and cultural institutions.” Noting that reports confirmed that many mosques relegated women to “small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters,” the booklet declared that such practices were “un- just and degrading.”
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The booklet does not explicitly refer to Nomani or indicate that its publication was in any way a response to her activism, but, given the timing, it seems likely that it was.

Also at the
2005
convention, a film was shown on the topic of

women’s inadequate and unequal spaces in mosques. The filmmaker, Zarqa Nawas, does not indicate whether Nomani’s campaign against her Morgantown mosque had in any way inspired or influenced her work. Nawas, who would go on to produce a successful series
Little Mosque on the Prairie
for Canadian television, retained a distinctly critical outlook in her film, but she handled her subject with playful humor rather than in Nomani’s confrontational style. Nomani’s sharp confrontations and run-ins with the mosque board and the community at her mosque (now depicted in a documentary that aired on PBS in July
2009
, entitled the
Mosque at Morgantown
) convey the impression that she was intent on achieving her goals of front-door entry and acceptable and equal space for women regardless of how deeply she alienated the mosque commu- nity. In contrast, Nawas, who herself appears alongside her mother in

her film
Me and the Mosque,
seems entirely at ease with her own mosque and with mosque communities more generally, even as she appears in- tent on bringing about change through the gentler work of persuasion. Even as she contests the separation of women and their unequal treat- ment, her work seems to be simultaneously an affirmation of community and of the value of conversation, inclusion, negotiation. Still, the com- bined activities of these two women and their supporters tell us that dis- content and desire for change is brewing among young Americans regarding the issue of women and space in American mosques.

Overall, Nawas, like Yasin, appears to be entirely at home in both her American and Muslim heritages and communities. Nawas, like Yasin, also takes for granted the natural similarity and complementarity of the two ethical traditions. This is also the case with respect to another American Muslim of their generation, Hadia Mubarak—whose words I

quoted above. She was elected in
2004
as the first female president of the

Muslim Students’ Association, and its first American-born president.

Mubarak grew up in Florida, where she began wearing hijab at the age of fourteen and where she was the only girl wearing it at her high school of over two thousand. This led her to become determined, she wrote, “to raise awareness about my faith and to break down the multi- ple barriers that exist.” As her text makes clear, Mubarak takes for granted the fact that the American heritage of social struggle in the name of justice is a heritage that is rightfully her own. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, and the peace movement, she maintains, are struggles for justice that to her are part of her own heritage and tradition as an American Muslim. This struggle for justice, as Mubarak presents it, is one that by force of circumstance now falls to Muslim Americans in particular to take up, it is they who must stand up and “awaken America’s collective conscience.” This way of understanding the role of American Muslims was, as already described, a commonly expressed view at ISNA conven- tions, conventions that Mubarak as a young MSA member would have regularly attended, as the MSA held its own panel sessions alongside those of ISNA.

Although grounded firmly in this speech in the American tradition of activism in the cause of justice, Mubarak shows herself to be just as firmly grounded in the Islamist tradition. Speaking of the hijab, for ex-

ample, which Mubarak refers to as the “mandatory covering” for women

—making use of a phrase that CAIR and other Muslim American or- ganizations commonly use for this dress—Mubarak goes on to explain it in terms which entirely conform to Islamist rationalizations and ex- planations as offered by hijabis encountered in the preceding pages. Thus, though wearing hijab, Mubarak explains, is seen as a religious obligation by religious scholars, in fact, she continues (repeating an idea first reported, as we saw earlier, in relation to Cairo in the
1980
s), “it is ultimately each woman’s prerogative to decide whether or not she will cover her hair. No one—not a father, husband, or brother—can ever force a woman to cover against her will, for that in fact violates the Quranic spirit of ‘let there be no compulsion in religion.’” She herself had made the decision to wear hijab, she informs her readers, and rel- ished “the freedom the hijab gives me, the freedom from having my body exposed as a sex object or from being judged on a scale of
1
–
10
by strange

men who have no right to know what my body or hair look like.”
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For Muslim women, Mubarak further explained, “the hijab is a form of mod- esty, security and protection, shifting the focus of attention from a woman’s physical attraction, or lack thereof, to the personality that lies beneath. By forcing people to look beyond her physical realm, a woman is valued for her intellect, personality and merit.”
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For Mubarak, just as for Yasin and Nawas and many others who live at the confluence of American and Islamic, and specifically Islamist, traditions, the ideas and worldviews of their dual heritages are naturally mutually reinforcing and complementary. These young people, growing up American and shaped by American schools and other socializing in- stitutions, take for granted that the American heritage is naturally and rightfully their own. They have in common the key importance in their lives of the influence of Islamism—as distinct from the nonactivist and privately practiced tradition of Islam—with its commitments to activism in pursuit of justice, to serving the Muslim community, and to hijab. Be- sides being members of the Islamist-founded MSA, Mubarak and Yasin also served as presidents of the national and local organizations. Yasin— in a classic pattern of Islamist commitment and activism—served as a vol- unteer working with refugees in Bosnia. Their commitments to serving the community are evidenced even in their serving as presidents of their

organizations—positions which place them at the hub of a network of the Muslim American extended community, and more exactly of the ex- tended Islamist-influenced segment of the Muslim American commu- nity. In her film work too, Nawas, even as she gently criticizes some aspects of mosque life and practices, is similarly strongly affirming of this mosque-going and Islamist-influenced Canadian Muslim commu- nity with which she clearly identifies. And like Yasin and Mubarak, she is entirely at ease with her identity as both Canadian and as explicitly and self-affirmingly and visibly Muslim (for like Mubarak and many other young Islamist-influenced American Muslims, Nawas wears hijab). Islamist influence is in fact a common feature in the lives of prob- ably the overwhelming majority of the most prominent American Mus- lim activists of our day. The presence of this influence applies also— somewhat paradoxically, on the face of it—to American Muslims who are playing prominent activist roles today with respect to issues of

women and gender, as I discuss in the following chapter.

American Muslims drawn from this Islamist-influenced segment of the population appear to be thoroughly at home in their identities as both Muslims and Americans. It is they who are most activist in social causes of import to American Muslims, and who commonly undertake their activism explicitly as self-identified, visibly
Muslim
Americans. They generally speak from positions that assume the natural similarity and complementarity of the two ethical traditions to which they are heir.

The fact that the majority of American Muslim activists today, even in relation to gender issues, appear to be drawn from this very specific and distinctive Islamist-influenced segment of the American Muslim pop- ulation is in itself a remarkable and unexpected finding. It is all the more remarkable considering that this segment of Islamist-influenced Muslims

—Muslims who attended mosques and/or Islamic schools and/or were members of the MSA and other American Muslim organizations and in- stitutions—make up, according to the experts, no more than a minor- ity of the American Muslim population.

The importance of creating and fostering a sense of community was clearly a critical aspect of the ISNA conventions’ overall function and purpose. As I observed the greetings and the scenes of effusive reunions

that were frequently in progress in the hallways, restaurants, and other public spaces, it became abundantly clear that reconnecting and social- izing with family and friends living in far-flung towns and cities all over North America was an important dimension of the conference. In many cases this was probably the chief reason that people, coming from all over the United States and Canada, undertook the effort and expense of at- tending the ISNA conventions.

ISNA also offered matrimonial services. People could list them- selves or their relatives as seeking spouses with ISNA’s matrimonial de- partment. Then, over the course of the convention, there would be several events dedicated to matrimonial get-togethers. These events, which I myself never attended, took place in huge ballrooms and drew enormous crowds.

The matrimonial lists (minus the individual names) were posted in a special room of the convention center where anyone could come to look through them. In browsing I saw that both men and women were listed, sometimes by family members, or by themselves. There seemed to be about equal numbers of each, and commonly those listed were in their twenties and thirties, or older. Women as well as men were generally professionally employed, and men as well as women often indicated that they were looking for professional spouses.
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