A Quiet Revolution (47 page)

Gradually, and after checking with the “de facto Muslim chaplain at Harvard,” where she was studying (a chaplain whose wife, Useem ob- serves, wore full, black Islamic robes and a face veil, and who confirmed to her that all four schools of Sunni law agreed that covering was re- quired), Useem, after reading and praying about the subject, became convinced that God required her to dress this way. Various subsequent experiences, however, including a sojourn in Muscat, Oman, where hijab was the norm, led Useem to increasingly question this form of dress. Eventually, thinking about the “medieval scholars who had decreed cov- ering from head to toe to be mandatory for women,” Useem arrived at

the understanding that “I did not convert to Islam to follow their lead: I had little if any allegiance to them.”
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For Useem as for others mentioned in these pages, aspects of Islam and even of the Quran that violate their own sense of the meaning of justice as, by definition, inclusive of justice for women, are elements that in the end come to be for them irreducibly troubling. Thus Useem, for example, finds herself compelled in good conscience to dissociate herself from interpretations and even Quranic verses that do not con- form to her understanding of justice. As she wrote, “I am uncomfort- able with aspects of the Quran and classical Islamic law that allow polygamy, or unilateral male divorce, or make a woman’s legal testimony worth less than a man’s. In my mind, now, the scarf is of one cloth with these ideas, and I needed to separate myself, at least symbolically, from them.”
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Over all, these committed and activist American Muslims share a num- ber of noteworthy traits. Among these is the fact that as a cohort they make up the first numerically significant generation of American-born (or raised) Muslims—or they are converts to the faith. Ranging in age from twenty-five to forty-five (as the ASMA Society identified American Muslim activists of this generation in a conference it organized in
2004
for “Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow”), these activists are typically also “ethnically diverse and as well affiliated with different sects of Islam.” They share too a “demonstrated commitment” (as ASMA described it) to the Muslim community, “not only in America but throughout the umma,” evidenced in the various activities they pursue, be this “in the area of political engagement, interfaith work, social work, community service, religious service, academia, journalism, or a slew of other pro- fessions and interests.”
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Markedly for this generation of American Muslims who pursue their work and activism within the framework of Islam, their identity as Muslim Americans clearly trumps and supersedes their sense of identity and community as grounded in either ethnicity or national origins. In the foreground of their work is their identity as Muslim Americans: a trait which sharply distinguishes them from many other Americans of Muslim heritage from backgrounds that were not influenced by Islamism

and who did not attend mosques or Islamic schools and thus were not exposed to Islamist thought via those institutions. For this latter group, who in fact probably make up the majority of American Muslims, Islam, whether as faith or as identity, is not generally ground either of action or self-presentation. In contrast to that larger group, this younger genera- tion of American Muslims who are grounded in Islam as faith and/or identity seem to see themselves first of all as part of a multiethnic Mus- lim American generation whose bonds of commonality as Muslim Americans are stronger and more important—in contrast to the per- ceptions and sense of identity of their parents’ generation—than are other national or ethnically based identities.

Consequently they work collaboratively as Muslim Americans, and their activism and writings are intensely in conversation with each other. Abdul Ghafur’s collection is a perfect example of the culturally and in- tellectually multiethnic American reading of Islam beginning to come into flower in our times. While there are indeed frictions occurring at mosques and at ground level between different Muslim American eth- nicities and communities, on the cultural and intellectual plane, at least among people for whom issues of women and gender are primary areas of concern, their work collectively and their multiple histories and per- spectives are drawn on not in rivalry but in collaboration. They bring into being a complex and richly variegated exploration of the Islamic re- ligious heritage in its intersections with the twenty-first-century Amer- ican Muslim experience in its diversity. This trend, distinctly in evidence in activists whose focuses are issues of women and gender, also appears to be more broadly a feature of American Muslim intellectual and cul- tural production in our times.

Finally, another distinguishing mark these American Muslim women and gender activists share is (as I have implicitly suggested) the fact that nearly all were directly touched and influenced by Islamism at some point in their lives. This is obviously the case with the people as- sociated with ISNA or the MSA. But it is also the case with respect to many of the liberals and even the radicals who often also had connections with the MSA or ISNA, and/or grew up assuming that the hijab was a basic requirement for Muslim women—itself a sign of the shaping pres- ence of Islamist influence. Or they are people like Wadud, who at some

point in their lives (and in Wadud’s case this was in the critical time of her conversion) frequented mosques influenced by Islamists such as Mawdudi.

Even non-Sunnis were affected by such influence: Samina Ali, for example, of Shi‘i background, grew up attending a Sunni-dominated Is- lamic center because (as must have often been the case in many towns) this was the only available Islamic center in the neighborhood. Islamic centers, like most institutional forms of Islam in this country, as already noted, tended to be dominated by Islamist perspectives. To be sure not all the activists mentioned here appear to have been influenced by Is- lamism: Laleh Bakhtiar, for example, and Omid Safi seem not to have been so influenced. But they appear to be the exceptions.
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This Islamist heritage is in many ways implicit in some of the traits which characterize this generation of activists. It is after all Islamism specifically that valorized activism and activism explicitly undertaken as committed and visible Muslims in the cause of social justice as a funda- mental religious obligation. These goals and obligations of activism as committed Muslims formed no part of the old-style, quietist, inward- looking, and private rather than overtly enacted forms of Islam that were commonplace in the Middle East and elsewhere prior to the Islamic Resurgence. Similarly it is Islamism that emphasizes the primary char- acter of Islam and the Muslim umma as the true and proper ground of identity and community for Muslims.

Indeed, the Muslim World League founded by Saudi Arabia in the
1960
s specifically set out, in its initial confrontation with Nasserism and Arab nationalism, to promote Muslim identity and loyalty to the Mus- lim umma—rather than ethnicity—as the only true grounds of identity

and community for Muslims. This is possibly one element contributing to the sea-change that Arab Christian as well as Muslim identities have been undergoing in the last couple of decades as Arabness, formerly the bond holding together Muslim and Christian Arabs, steadily fades al- most into insignificance and Muslim identity takes its place (thus loos- ening the bonds between Muslim and Christian Arabs) as ground of identity, meaning, and community. Similarly, to the American majority and most particularly to the forces of security, it is no longer now, as it

was until the
1990
s, Arab identity that triggers alarms but rather more

specifically today Muslim identity, whether Arab or not. Naturally, though, there are many forces, including forces internal to America, that have their part in shaping contemporary American Muslim identities.
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*

The Jews. It’s the other question [the first being the “woman question”] that perturbed me during my madressa years be- cause the Jews came in for a regular tarring. Mr. Khaki taught us with a straight face that Jews worship moolah not Allah, and that their idolatry would pollute my piety if I hung out with them. (Irshad Manji,
The Trouble with Islam
)

This influence of Islamism is present even among American Mus- lim feminists who take a radically critical stance vis-à-vis Islam and women (and indeed often vis-à-vis Islam more generally), such as No- mani and Manji. In Nomani’s case there appear to be distinct traces of Islamism in her early life. For example, she mentions that when her fa- ther first came to America in
1962
he became involved with “Muslim stu- dents who had met earlier in the year and formed a national organization

they called the Muslim Students’ Association.”
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After a visit to India her father returned to America and became involved in New Jersey in coordinating prayers and Sunday school with the local Islamic commu- nity organization, work which laid the ground for what would become the Islamic Center of Central New Jersey. These activities would seem to suggest that if not an Islamist himself, Nomani’s father shared in some of their goals as regards instituting Muslim spaces. At the same time, the positions that Nomani describes her father as consistently taking—in- cluding his unwavering support for her as an unwed mother—seem to suggest that, if he was an Islamist, he was certainly a flexible and open- minded one. Nomani’s descriptions of her mother suggest that her way of practicing Islam was distinctly more in line with old-world, traditional forms of Islamic practice rather than with Islamism. Islam for her mother, for example, Nomani tells us, was “a private act of faith.” Going on to observe also that her mother did not perform the regular prayers, Nomani further writes that for her mother “prayer doesn’t know a time clock or prostration. Life is prayer.”
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Nevertheless, once Nomani began to be actively engaged with

working and wrestling with Islam her activism would in important ways remain within the Islamist framework—even as she vigorously took on the task of contesting and protesting against Islamic and Islamist sexism. It was not until early
2002
, she tells us—in the wake of the murder of her friend Daniel Pearl and of her own difficult experiences in Pakistan in January
2002
—that Nomani found herself precipitated into wrestling with and in general plunged into deep involvement with Islam. Previ- ously, in addition to working as a Wall Street journalist, Nomani had written
Tantrica: Traveling the Road of Divine Love,
a book which ap- peared in
2003
. The shock and horror of Pearl’s murder and her own difficult personal experiences with the father of her child led her to feel “very much at odds with my religion.” Now, “instead of turning away from Islam, I decided to find out more about my faith.” Thus Nomani decided to make the hajj, or pilgrimage, setting forth on the journey that would also lead to her feminist activism in relation to Islam.
‌

Her work as an activist has centered on creating equal space for women in mosques. At no point does Nomani ask—as did many radi- cal feminists of the sixties and seventies among them most notably Mary Daly—whether creating equal space for women within a patriarchal in- stitution is necessarily a worthwhile goal for feminists. Mosques obvi- ously—along with churches and other religious spaces—may be seen as places where audiences can be collectively inculcated with the run-of- the-mill patriarchal views that have typically pervaded and formed the staples of monotheistic religious teachings. It was the Islamic Resurgence, after all, which brought women back into mosques after centuries of ex- clusion—exclusion which, from a feminist perspective, might plausibly be regarded as having perhaps been in fact a boon rather than a depri- vation. Naturally mosques today in America serve complex purposes, and it is easy to see that equal space and roles in mosques for women might indeed be desirable. But some acknowledgment along the way, from Nomani and others seeking improved or equal space in mosques, of the inherent ambiguities of the situation from the feminist point of view, would have added a valuable layer of complexity to the subject.

In Manji’s case the issue of her early exposure to Islamist ideas is unambiguous. In
The Trouble with Islam,
Manji writes of her ongoing distress and unhappiness at having to attend Islamic school as a child.

This school, or “madressa,” as she calls it, was located in the local mosque where “men and women entered the mosque from different doors and planted themselves on the correct sides of an immovable wall.” Attend- ing this school, which Manji continued to do for five years, entailed wear- ing “a white polyester chador,” a garment which Manji describes as “a condom over my head” intended to protect her from “unsafe intellectual activity.” Manji was critical from early on of the school’s position on gender issues—such as girls not being allowed to lead prayers—and her attendance at the school ended when she was dismissed for objecting to her teacher’s derogatory references to Jews.
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Both Nomani and Manji share with other Islamist-influenced Mus- lims of their generation their explicit self-identification as religiously committed Muslims as well as their commitment to activism in the ser- vice of Islam: in the service specifically of reforming Islam, a project and objective shared in one form or another by most other American Mus- lim “feminists.” (The influence of Islamism is even more starkly present in the life of Hirsi Ali, another fierce critic of Islam who now describes herself as an ex-Muslim. Hirsi Ali moved as a child of six with her par- ents from her native Somalia to Saudi Arabia, where she remained for a number of years living in the Saudi environment of Wahhabism, a form of Islam to which her mother was strongly drawn. Her subsequent cri- tiques of Islam following her immigration to Holland took shape in the context of the politically fraught debates around immigration issues in Holland and they have been extensively discussed in relation to their context in numerous reviews and books.)
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