Going Where I Know I Belong
by Asra
Q. Nomani
On the 11th
day of the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in a pre-dawn lit by the moon,
my mother, my niece and I walked through the front doors of our local mosque
with my father, my nephew and my infant son. My stomach churning, we ascended
to a hall to pray together.
Islamic
teaching forbids men and women praying directly next to each other in mosques.
But most American mosques have gone well beyond that simple prohibition by
importing largely from Arab culture a system of separate accommodations that
provides women with wholly unequal services for prayer and education. And yet,
excluding women ignores the rights the prophet Muhammad gave them in the 7th
century and represents "innovations" that emerged after the prophet
died. I had been wrestling with these injustices for some time when I finally
decided to take a stand.
I had no
intention of praying right next to the men, who were seated at the front of the
cavernous hall. I just wanted a place in the main prayer space. As my mother,
my niece and I sat about 20 feet behind the men, a loud voice broke the quiet.
"Sister, please! Please leave!" one of the mosque's elders yelled at
me. "It is better for women upstairs." We women were expected to enter
by a rear door and pray in the balcony. If we wanted to participate in any of
the activities below us, we were supposed to give a note to one of the
children, who would carry it to the men in the often near-empty hall. "I
will close the mosque," he thundered. I had no idea at that moment if he
would make good on his threat. But I had no doubt that our act of disobedience
would soon embroil the mosque, and my family, in controversy. Nevertheless, my
mind was made up.
"Thank
you, brother," I said firmly. "I'm happy praying here."
In fact,
for the first time since the start of Ramadan, I was happy in prayer. In the
nearly two months since that day, I have entered the mosque through the front
door and prayed in the main hall about 30 times. My battle has been rather
solitary; only four women, including my sister-in-law,
and three girls have joined me from time to time. And yet I feel victorious.
In a
sense, the seeds of my rebellion go back to childhood. I am a 38-year-old
Muslim woman born in Bombay and raised in West Virginia. My father and other
men started the first mosque here in Morgantown in a room they rented across
from the Monongalia County Jail. When we were young, my brother used to join
them in prayer. I don't remember ever being invited. What I do recall is
celebrating one Muslim holiday trapped in an efficiency apartment with other
women, while the men enjoyed a buffet in a spacious lounge elsewhere. As I grew
older, I felt increasingly alienated because I didn't feel I could find refuge
in my religion as a strong-willed, open-minded woman.
When I
became pregnant last year while unmarried, I struggled with the edicts of some
Muslims who condemned women to be stoned to death for having babies out of
wedlock. I wrote on these pages about such judgments being un-Islamic, and my
faith was buoyed by the many Muslims who rallied to my side. To raise my son, Shibli, as a Muslim, I had to find a way to exist
peacefully within Islam.
I had
tried to accept the status quo through the first days of Ramadan, praying
silently upstairs, listening to sermons addressed only to "brothers."
After so many years away, I felt I would be like an interloper if I protested.
But my sense of subjugation interrupted my prayer each time I touched my
forehead to the carpet. I lay in bed each night despising the men who had
ordered me to use the mosque's rear entrance. "Your anger reveals a deeper
pain," my friend Alan Godlas, a professor of
religious studies at the University of Georgia, told me when I described the
conflict I felt.
It was
true. I had witnessed the marginalization of women in many parts of Muslim
society. But my parents had taught me that I wasn't meant to be marginal. Nor
did I believe that Islam expected that of me. I began researching that
question, and I found scholarly evidence overwhelmingly concludes that mosques
that bar women from the main prayer space aren't Islamic. They more aptly
reflect the age of ignorance, or Jahiliya,
in pre-Islamic Arabia. "Women's present marginalization in the mosque is a
betrayal of what Islam had promised women and [what] was realized in the early
centuries," says Asma Afsaruddin,
a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of
Notre Dame.
And that
marginalization seems, if anything, to be worsening. CAIR, the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, has concluded, based on a 2000 survey, that
"the practice of having women pray behind a curtain or in another room is
becoming more widespread" in this country. In 2000, women at 66 percent of
the U.S. mosques surveyed prayed behind a curtain or partition or in another
room, compared with 52 percent in 1994, according to the survey of leaders of
416 mosques nationwide.
And yet,
notes Daisy Khan, executive director of ASMA Society, an American Muslim
organization, "The mosque is a place of learning. . . . If men prevent
women from learning, how will they answer to God?"
The
mosque was not a men's club when the prophet Muhammad built an Islamic ummah, or "community." Nothing in
the Koran restricts a woman's access to a mosque, and the prophet told men:
"Do not stop the female servants of Allah from attending the mosques of
Allah."
The
prophet himself prayed with women. And when he heard that some men positioned
themselves in the mosque to be closer to an attractive woman, his solution
wasn't to ban women but to admonish the men. In Medina, during the prophet's
time and for some years thereafter, women prayed in the prophet's mosque
without any partition between them and the men. Historians record women's
presence in the mosque and participation in education, in political and
literary debates, in asking questions of the prophet after his sermons, in
transmitting religious knowledge and in providing social services. After the
prophet's death, his wife Aisha related anecdotes about his life to scribes in
the mosque. And Abdullah bin Umar, a leading companion of the Prophet and a son
of Omar bin al-Khattab, the second caliph, or leader
of Islam, reprimanded his son for trying to prevent women from going to the
mosque. "By the third century of Islam, many [women's] rights slowly began
to be whittled away as earlier Near Eastern . . . notions of female propriety
and seclusion began to take hold," said Afsaruddin.
The Fiqh Council of North America, which issues legal rulings
for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), supports women's rights in the
mosque. "It is perfectly Islamic to hold meetings of men and women inside
the masjid," the mosque, says Muzammil H.
Siddiqi, a Fiqh Council
member. He adds that this is true "whether for prayers or for any other
Islamic purpose, without separating them with a
curtain, partition or wall."
All too
often, however, the mosque in America "is a men's club where women and
children aren't welcome," said Ingrid Mattson, an Islamic scholar at the
Hartford Seminary and an ISNA vice president.
One of
the issues working against American Muslim women -- an issue not much discussed
outside the Muslim community -- is the de facto takeover of many U.S. mosques
by conservative and traditionist Muslims, many from the Arab world. Most of
these are immigrants, many of them students, who follow the strict Wahhabi and Salafi schools of Islam, which largely exclude women from
public spaces. They stack our mosque library with books printed by the government
of Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabi teachings reign. Here in Morgantown, students
from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, mostly male and conservative, were virtually
nonexistent 10 years ago. More precisely, there were three. Today there are 55,
and their wives regularly glide through the local Wal-Mart wearing black abayas, or gowns. (Ironically, the Saudi
government says that partitions and separate rooms aren't required in mosques.)
Sadly,
the students' presence emboldens (or in some places cows) American mosque leaders,
many of whom try to rationalize the discrimination against women through a hadith,
a saying of the prophet: "Do not prevent your women from (going to) the
mosques, though their houses are best for them." But scholars consider
this an allowance, not a restriction. The prophet made the statement after
women complained when he said Muslims get 27 times more blessings when praying
at the mosque.
Much of
this discrimination is also practiced in the name of "protecting"
women. If women and men are allowed to mix, the argument goes,
the mosque will become a sexually charged place, dangerous for women and
distracting to men. In our mosque, only the men are allowed to use a microphone
to address the faithful. When I asked why, a mosque leader declared, "A
woman's voice is not to be heard in the mosque." What he meant was that a
woman's voice -- even raised in prayer -- is an instrument of sexual
provocation to men. Many women accept these rulings; their apathy makes these
rules the status quo.
I am
heartened that some Muslim men are fighting for women's rights. On that 11th
day of Ramadan last month, when I made clear that I would pray in the main
hall, my 70-year-old father stood by me as a mosque elder said to him,
"There will be no praying until she leaves."
"She
is doing nothing wrong," my father insisted. "If you have an issue,
talk to her." Four men bounded toward me. "Sister, please! We ask you
in the spirit of Ramadan, leave. We cannot pray if you are here." But my
answer was: I have prayed like this from Mecca to Jerusalem. It is legal within
Islam, I said. I remained firm.
The next
day, the mosque's all-male board voted to make the main hall and front door
accessible solely by men. My father dissented. Mosque leaders have not
prevented me from worshiping in the main hall while the decision receives an
internal legal review. "Grin and bear it. It will change one day,"
one American Muslim leader suggested to me. A woman in my mosque pleaded with
me not to talk about any of this publicly. But gentle ways protect gender
apartheid in our mosques, and we do no one a service by allowing it to
continue, least of all the Muslim community. So I have filed a complaint
against my mosque with CAIR, whose mandate is to protect Muslim civil rights.
After one
of the final nights of Ramadan, considered a "night of power," my
father gave me an early eidie, a gift
elders give on Eid, the festival that marks the end
of the holy month. He handed me a copy of the key to the mosque's front door,
sold the night before at a fundraiser. I traced the key's edge with my thumb
and put it on my Statue of Liberty key chain, because it is here in America
that Muslims can truly liberate mosques from cultural traditions that belie
Islam's teachings.
"Praise
be to Allah," my father told me. "Allah has
given you the power to make change."
I rattled
the keys in front of my son, who reached out for them, and I said to him,
"Shibli, we've got the keys to the mosque. We've
got the keys to a better world."
Author's
e-mail: asra@asranomani.com
Asra Nomani,
a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of the forthcoming
"Daughters of Hajira," about women in Islam
(Harper San Francisco).
Webmaster’s
note: It is apparent that one of the reasons for the early separation of men
and women in the mosque was based not so much on a distinct legal issue but
rather one of matrices. The early synagogues and churches were so constructed,
and there was therefore an architectural model to follow. Also, if we believe
the hadith, the early mosques did not have many doors, and the women were at
the back since there was a door there to allow for easy exit – presumably they
had domestic matters that could necessitate their emergency departure. Whatever
the issue that allowed for early separation, those issues no longer exist.
While it would be problematic to advocate for a complete change – indeed this
has not been done in Judaism which has been trying since the 19th
century, and different denomination synagogues have different rules – the fact
that each mosque could have an independent policy based on the prevailing
custom of the land seems viable.
Posted December 30, 2003. The above article was printed in the December 28, 2003 edition of
the Washington Post. It is posted here with the permission of the author.