A Quiet Revolution (43 page)

She won a scholarship to attend college, and after graduating she went on to teach at a girls’ high school. This was the apartheid era. Nonwhites (such as Haffajee) were not allowed to use the “Whites Only” facilities in the main building, and Haffajee was given a key to the out- house. “Nonwhites in South Africa had to find ways to improve the con- dition of their people,” she wrote, “so activism became a way of life. We raised funds and awarded scholarships for them, and we provided facil- ities for extracurricular activities, such as monies for tennis courts. So- cial injustices were a way of life in South Africa.”

Haffajee made her way to Canada, and here she was taken by a friend to attend an MSA meeting in
1968
. “Wow!” she would write of this event, “the images are still fresh thirty-six years later. For the first time in my life I heard individuals speak so eloquently about Islam, af-

firming its relevance in the twentieth century.” She was invited a few years later to address an MSA annual convention. She stipulated that she would speak only if she could address a mixed-gender audience. When she rose to speak men tried to shout her down, and some then staged a walkout. She continued “unfazed,” she wrote.

After going to Mecca for ‘umra (the “lesser pilgrimage”) in
1979
,

she starting wearing hijab—the first woman to do so at the school in Canada where she taught. Haffajee was always open about her beliefs and fully explained them to her students. She never encountered hostil- ity from anyone, she wrote, about her hijab. On the contrary, she said, she received only friendliness and gifts—baked goodies and scarves—

from students and parents alike. Through the seventies and early eight- ies Haffajee spent her vacations in a supervisory role in summer camps for Muslim girls.

Her life in this way was filled with firsts, Haffajee wrote. Among such firsts were her travels with another Muslim woman activist to Zim- babwe and Malawi, to address Muslims in a tour sponsored by the Is- lamic Federation of Students’ Organizations. She felt a deep kinship with her fellow-lecturer, whom she had never met. They were “Muslim sis- ters,” she wrote, both “shaped by the Quran.” Among her most cher- ished memories of this trip was of their speaking at a mosque, after which a “very old man, a man who needed help to stand, got up, tears stream- ing down his face, and told us he was so happy to see two women from so far away speak to a mixed gathering in the mosque!”

Haffajee went on to take on challenge after challenge. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan she grew concerned about the plight of women in Afghanistan, and she traveled to that country in
1987
to work with local women’s organizations in refugee camps. She returned armed with

many photographs, with which she traveled and lectured in Canada to raise donations for refugee women and children. In
1995
she attended the U.N. women’s conference at Beijing and subsequently became active in interfaith work. Haffajee did not marry until she was about fifty, be-

coming, as she put it, “wife, stepmother, and grandmother, all in one year!”

Haffajee (like other ISNA women mentioned here) does not use the term “feminism,” a term belonging to other discursive worlds and one that is perhaps not necessarily very meaningful in relation to the struggles in which Haffajee herself was most enmeshed. Her commit- ments and actions in pursuit of her own education and in the service of other nonwhites in South Africa, and her later struggles and endeavors in Canada—always fired to be sure by her faith as a Muslim and her own passion for justice—seem nevertheless to directly parallel the motiva- tions and commitments of many other women in the larger societies of America and Canada—motivations and commitments typically labeled “feminist.”

Other prominent women in the ISNA gallery of characters include Maha Elgenaidi, Nimat Hafez Barazangi, and Ekram Beshir. Elgenaidi, a

woman perhaps in her mid-thirties in the early
2000
s, was founder and president of Islamic Networks Group, an educational and outreach or- ganization with affiliates now in twenty U.S. states, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom. Growing up in America with an interest in mathematics, Elgenaidi was sent by her parents to study engineering in Egypt (their home country) to help her to “reconnect with my Arab her- itage.” In the end she attended the American University in Cairo, where she obtained degrees in political science and economics. She then re- turned to graduate school in the United States, after which she began work as a marketing analyst manager.
54

In the ensuing years the first Arab Gulf war and the sanctions im- posed on Iraq, as well as the “dehumanizing, automated existence of the corporate world,” brought Elgenaidi to crisis, and she began reading the scriptures of her Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish friends. Then she de- cided to read the Quran, “which had an immediate profound impact on my life.” She began to pray and “to dress more modestly”: Elgenaidi, like all the ISNA women mentioned above other than Alkhateeb (who wore a headscarf)—Mattson, McGee, Haffajee—wears the strictly conceal- ing hijab as well as the loose, flowing robes of conservative Islamic women. Growing up Elgenaidi had kept her distance from Islam because,

she said, she herself had so completely absorbed and internalized the negative views of Islam and in particular those notions of its “oppres- sive” treatment of women that are commonplace in American culture. Her own former prejudices with regard to Islam would prove useful to her, she believed, in her work as president of the Islamic Networks Group (ING), an outreach agency working to provide institutions such as schools and the police with accurate information about Islam, with a view to addressing and correcting prevailing false stereotypes and mis- perceptions of Islam and Muslims.

Elgenaidi’s greatest challenges in the course of her career, she ob- served, had been those encountered in working with Muslims who thought women’s roles should be confined to sitting on women’s com- mittees and staying home to raise the children. “Here I was a young cor- porate manager being told to take notes in all male meetings . . . so I had to learn very fast about women’s rights and roles in Islam to be able to fight back and hold my ground, while continuing to manifest my faith in

the way I was inspired to by God.” In pursuing the educational goals of ING, Elgenaidi encourages and promotes interfaith work, drawing in- spiration from “the civil rights movement where groups across different sectors in society joined together successfully to gain their rights and freedoms.”

Nimat Barazangi, who, in the
1980
s, would become the first woman

invited to serve on the ISNA Education Committee, arrived in the U.S. from Syria in the late
1960
s. At that point, in rebellion against her mother, she wrote, who wore only a headscarf, Barazangi herself chose to wear a jilbab and khimar: a “heavy coat” and “heavy headcover” in her words. Over the ensuing years, studying, getting degrees, becoming involved as researcher and practitioner in Muslim education in America, Barazangi would undergo a number of sartorial transformations—aban- doning hijab altogether, then adopting a headscarf, then changing again to a more conservative head covering—transformations accompanied by a number of intellectual revolutions that she describes in her biogra- phical account “Silent Revolution of a Muslim Arab American Scholar- Activist.”

Core and consistent elements in Barazangi’s ongoing revolutionary commitments, as she describes these, included “revolution against the social systems that abuse and stereotype Muslim Arab women—be it the Muslim, the Arab or the American system,” and a commitment to Islam, which she understood as a “belief system and worldview” whose main objective was that of bringing about “social change and, in particular, enhancing gender justice.” At ISNA she worked with some of the women mentioned above, including Haffajee, who chaired one of the commit- tees that Barazangi served on, and Alkhateeb, whom she describes as a very good friend. Barazangi, along with Alkhateeb, attended a White House Eid celebration in
1998
at the invitation of First Lady Hillary Rod- ham Clinton.
55

Ekram Beshir, described as a frequent speaker at ISNA and ICNA and other American Muslim organizations, and a leader (along with her husband, Mohamed Rida Beshir) of workshops on Muslim parenting and education across North America, Europe, and South Africa, is a founder of Rahma and Abraar, Islamic schools in Ottawa, Canada.

Beshir, the only woman figuring on this list whom I have never per-

sonally met, appeared earlier in these pages as the young college student in Alexandria, Egypt, who in the early
1970
s was among the first wave of young women to embrace hijab and the activist Islam of the Islamic Resurgence. Concerned to find a husband no less dedicated than she was to serving and spreading Islam, and who, just as importantly, under- stood that her commitments to serving Islam took precedence over pro- viding him with a “freshly cooked meal every day” or keeping a “spotless house,” she met and married Mohamed Rida Beshir and immigrated with him to Canada, where they settled in
1975
. There her husband be- came “heavily involved” in founding the first MSA chapter at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Beshir, who had, like her husband, qualified as a doctor, decided to involve herself as a volunteer in the activities of her own children, as well as other children. In this way she “became aware of the pressures her children faced in the North American school system.”
56

For Beshir, in true Islamist tradition, Islam above all entailed ac- tivism. “I believe it’s everyone’s job to promote Islam and do
da‘wa
(spreading the news about Islam),” she wrote, “in whatever form they are capable of.” Beshir would involve herself in Islamic education, pio- neering the field in North America: founding two Islamic schools and writing several books with her husband on parenting Muslim children in the West.
58
As the biographical information offered on the cover of sev-

eral of her books notes, in
2000
, Beshir received the Ottawa-Carlton Dis-

trict School Board award for her contributions as “best educator.”

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11
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American Muslim Women’s Activism in the Twenty-First Century

T

ayyibah Taylor, founder of
Azizah
magazine, was born in Trinidad and raised in Canada. Taught by her parents always to “behave perfectly, speak eloquently, and dress impressively, so that, as a person of color, others would deem me accept-

able,” Taylor recalled her first encounter with
Ebony
magazine as mark- ing a particularly important moment. For the first time, she wrote, she saw “media images of people of color that were positive.” The experi- ence began for her the process of undercutting an “internalized sense of inferiority” that had begun to seep into her with her move to Canada at the age of seven.
1

On a visit to Barbados during her college years in Toronto, Taylor embraced Islam as her “spiritual path.” Subsequently she lived for a time in Saudi Arabia, then in Seattle, where she helped to found an Islamic school at which she also taught. Thereafter she set about pursuing her dream of launching
Azizah,
a magazine “for the woman who doesn’t apologize for being a Muslim and doesn’t apologize for being a woman.” The magazine deliberately avoids focusing on any particular ethnic group, and does not affiliate itself with any particular a school of thought or organization. “Instead,” Taylor wrote, “it reflects all Muslim women in their diversity, thus speaking to the polycentric nature of Islam.” The name Azizah, Taylor further explains, a name found “in any Muslim

country,” means “dear, strong, noble. So, we defined the
Azizah
woman as the one who is dear to herself and others, with noble strength and dig- nity, boldly reclaiming our attribute of strength.”

Azizah,
which features the fabrics, colors, and dress styles of the Muslim world in its transcontinental diversity, is known for the elegance of the fashions that fill its pages, including its stylish hijabs—a garment that Taylor herself elegantly sports. The magazine, which Taylor de- scribes as a “catalyst for empowerment,” is also known for its coverage of issues, activities, and books of importance to Muslim American

women. In
2007
, for example,
Azizah
published a discussion of a newly

published translation of the Quran, along with an interview with the translator, Laleh Bakhtiar.
2

Bakhtiar’s translation,
The Sublime Quran,
the first English trans- lation by a Muslim American woman, created a stir because of Bakhtiar’s translation of one particular verse in the Quran, a verse of critical im- portance with regard to the treatment of women—verse
4
:
34
.

Bakhtiar herself anticipated controversy over her unconventional rendering of this verse. In her Preface and Introduction to the translation she describes her research methods and sources, explaining how she es- tablished the exact meanings of words and where her translation differed from other English translations. Bakhtiar observes that one underlying difference between her own and other translations is that in prior trans- lations “little attention had been given to the woman’s point of view.”
3

“The absence of a woman’s point of view for over
1440
years since

the revelation” was clearly, Bakhtiar observes, a situation that needed to be changed. Convinced that “the intention of the Quran is to see man and woman as complements of one another, not as superior-inferior,” and acutely aware of the widespread criticisms that were made of Islam “with regard to the inferiority of women,” Bakhtiar now paid particular attention to the one key verse on which the notion of the inferiority of women might be said to hinge. This, she says, is verse
4
:
34
, which is typ- ically interpreted to mean that a husband may beat his wife “after two stages of trying to discipline her.”
4