Authors: Asra Nomani
CHICAGO
âWe had gone on the pilgrimage with the Islamic Society of North America, and I had been pleasantly surprised at how affirming they were of women's voices. The society was holding its annual convention, and I threw caution to the wind and registered to go with my father and Shibli. I had never gone to one of its conventions before, afraid of not fitting into the scene.
I went, in part, as a journalist. I wanted to know the answers to questions such as Islamic law's ruling on Amina Lawal. She was facing a trial date for her appeal, and I wanted to know whether I was intellectually or theologically flawed in defending her. My opportunity to find out would come during a news conference at which the society's top woman leader was going to speak. She was Ingrid Mattson, a scholar and convert. She was the one my father had told me about, selling me on the idea that the society was open-minded.
I took a seat in the second row, where it dawned on me: I wanted a seat at the table in the Muslim world. I didn't want to remain in the shadows, as I had done not only in the Muslim world but even in my life as a journalist for the
Wall Street Journal
. I remembered who I was. I was the reporter
who never asked questions at press conferences. I was the reporter who dared ask a question of the Dalai Lama only when I felt that the stakes were too high to allow demonization, intolerance, and suspicion to have the final say. I did something awesome for me: I stood up and moved to a seat in the front row between a public radio journalist and another reporter. And I raised my hand. “The Islam that the West is seeing is an Islam that sentences a woman in Nigeria to death for having a child out of wedlock. Is this an accurate depiction of Islam?”
The secretary general of the society stood at the podium first and shook his head in understanding at my question. A native of Kashmir, India, his name was Sayyid Saeed. He was a congenial-looking man with a head of thick graying hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. He said that verdict reflected only one interpretation of sharia, and he personally rejected this interpretation, as did many scholars. With that, he gave the podium to Dr. Mattson. She was one of the scholars who rejected the verdict of stoning, and she gave a poised and powerful defense of her position, arguing that Islam's teachings on compassion and tolerance override any perceived sexual crime. I felt so affirmed that my religion didn't condemn a woman such as myself and that in America I had the intellectual freedom to find that out. More than in any Muslim country, this was where I could be a fully realized Muslim woman and mother. “We should not judge women,” Dr. Mattson said.
As the press conference closed I felt so buoyant about being a Muslim woman in America. This was where I could live with my head held up high, as my religion told me I deserved to do. Dr. Mattson held her head up high, silver thread glittering off the hijab she wore. I held my head up high, my black hair just touching my shoulders.
MORGANTOWN TO ATLANTA
âIn Chicago, I met Michael Wolfe for the first time in person. His father had been Jewish, his mother Christian, and he exemplified plurality. He was warm, engaging, and normal, relating to me. He interacted with respect, but ease. I appreciated this after growing up in an immigrant community in which men kept an uncomfortable distance from women. I asked him if he could recommend anyone in the American Ismaili Muslim community with whom I could talk. He suggested that I talk to a friend of his, a California businessman by
the name of Amir Kanji. In Chicago I also met Alex Kronemer, Michael Wolfe's co-partner in film making. I had an easy conversation there with both of them about identity, faith, and the challenge of Islam in our time. Amir Kanji, I discovered, was also easy to talk with about these things.
A distributor of halal food (ritually fit according to Muslim law) out of Northern California, he gushed with excitement about expecting his first grandchild soon. His eldest daughter, Shari, had married a white American Christian man and was now pregnant. I was stunned at how easily he talked about it. A woman marrying outside Islam was anathema in the Muslim culture in which I had grown up. The Qur'an (5:5) allows Muslim men to marry Jewish and Christian women: “This day are all things good and pure made lawful to you. . . . Lawful to you in marriage are not only chaste women who are believers, but chaste women among the People of the Book, revealed before your time.” But non-Muslim men are forbidden to Muslim women. The Qur'an (2:221) says: “Nor marry your girls to unbelievers until they believe. A man slave who believes is better than an unbeliever.”
Accepting this edict, I had turned away from a man who loved me deeply. He was a white Lutheran man from Iowa. I broke his heartâand only later did I realize my own as wellâto marry a Pakistani Muslim man who was right for me in every way but substance. I had never met Muslim parents who accepted their child's marriage to a non-Muslim. “That's okay with you?” I asked. “We are Ismaili Muslims,” Amir told me. “Living in North America, Ismaili Muslims, like other Muslims, are learning to live with the reality of inter-faith marriages.
“
Ismaili
?” I answered.
I had heard this word mentioned only a few times in my life, but I had no idea what it meant. Ismaili Muslims are a part of a minority sect of Islam that doesn't subscribe to some of the mainstream interpretations of Islam. For example, they don't impose a ban on Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men. It was a right I had never even allowed myself to think could be possible. A while later I read that a religious body in Turkey reversed the ban. Only then did I realize just how much suffering this edict had brought to my life. I was an American. For years I had denied it. But there was no denying my cultural affinity for the values that I had learned growing up in West Virginia.
In trying to understand this school of Islam that expanded my relationship with Islam, I got a history lesson in politics in the early days of Islam. What I learned was that, as undignified as it sounded, leadership
after the death of the prophet came down to a chick fight. In one corner was Aisha, the young and favored wife of the prophet. Her father was Abu Bakr, an elder statesman. After the prophet died in 632, his companions sided with Aisha and elected Abu Bakr the first caliph of Islam. The line of caliphs starting with Abu Bakr had the allegiance of people who later became the roots of the Sunni sect, the majority of believers in Islam. Ismaili Muslims, on the other hand, as part of the minority sect of Islam called Shi'a, believe that the first rightful caliph of Islam should have been Ali, the husband of Fatima, the prophet Muhammad's favorite daughter. In a land where blood relations are sacred, Ali, a cousin of Muhammad's and the son of a man named Abu Talib, was the prophet's closest male relative. Although he was young and inexperienced, the Shi'a believe the prophet designated Ali to be his political and spiritual successor and that Fatima lobbied for him. The followers call themselves Shiah i-Ali, “the Partisans of Ali,” or simply Shi'a. Although she lost the battle over succession, Fatima became the namesake for the Fatimid line of caliphs, which traces its lineage to her and Ali.
Ali Shariati was an Iranian sociologist and thinker who may have been killed by the Shah of Iran's secret police before the Shah's overthrow in 1979. A Shi'a, as are most Iranians, he lectured to his students in Iran about Fatima. “The visage of Fatima,” he said, “the visage of the woman who existed, who spoke, who lived, who played a role in the mosque, in society, in home training her children, in her family's social struggles and in Islam; a woman whose role should be made clear in all its dimensions to the present generation (not only to Muslims, but to any human being, man or woman, who has human feelings, who believes in human values, and who is faithful to real freedom) should be accepted as the best and most effective role to be imitated by the present generation.”
The prophet called his daughter Fatima one of the four greatest women in the world. When she was a girl, she walked hand in hand with her father as he brought social revolution to Mecca and Medina. When his enemies once dumped dust on his head from a balcony, she wiped the dust from his face. In exile with her family in the desert outside Mecca, she comforted her elderly mother, Khadijah, and her older sisters. Her sisters lived important but ordinary lives with their husbands and families, while she had a place in Islamic history. When it came time to marry, she continued her life as a revolutionary, accepting the hand of Ali, a man who could offer her nothing but love and, literally, the proceeds from the sale of a shield. Taking little dowry money from her husband gave her a place
in history. When I was married, I took this “dowry Fatima,” which evokes an independence and self-sufficiency in which I believe. As a mother, Fatima dispatched her sons, Hussein and Hasan, to learn how to lead under the tutelage of their father and grandfather. On her lap and in her home, she raised her daughter, Zainab, to become a revolutionary and a pioneer. All the while, her father believed in her. He called her “the woman among the women in the world,” establishing her as a role model. Over the protests of companions of the prophet, she fought for the right to own a small farm called Fadak. Despite their differences, even Aisha, the prophet's wife, said, “I never saw anyone higher than Fatima, except her father, the prophet.”
As part of the Shi'a sect, Ismaili Muslims live in about twenty-five countries, mainly in South and Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as in North America and Western Europe. The achievements of the Fatimid dynasty dominate accounts of the early period of Ismaili history, roughly from the beginnings of Islam through the eleventh century. The Fatimid dynasty created a state that stimulated the development of art, science, and trade in the Mediterranean Near East over two centuries. Its center was Cairo, founded by the Fatimid as their capital. Following the Fatimid period, the Ismaili Muslims' geographical center shifted from Egypt to Syria and Persia. After Alamut, their center in Persia, fell to Mongol conquerors in the thirteenth century, Ismailis lived for several centuries in dispersed communities, mainly in Persia and Central Asia but also in Syria, India, and elsewhere. The leader of the Ismaili Muslims is called their imam, and they call him “His Highness the Aga Khan.” In the 1830s the Shah of Persia granted Aga Hassanaly Shah, the forty-sixth Ismaili imam, the honorary hereditary title of Aga Khan. In 1843 the first Aga Khan left Persia for India, which already had a large Ismaili community.
The most recent imam, the forty-ninth hereditary imam of the Ismaili Muslims, became the leader on July 11, 1957, at the age of twenty, succeeding his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan. Ismailis have a history uncommon among Muslims. This imam, Karim Aga Khan, was born on December 13, 1936, in Geneva, spent his early childhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and then attended Le Rosey School in Switzerland for nine years. He graduated from Harvard University in 1959 with honors and a BA degree in Islamic history. The Aga Khan would set forth a philosophy that established Islam as “a thinking, spiritual faith,” teaching compassion and tolerance and upholding the dignity of women and men.
He saw it as his mandate to “safeguard the individual's right to personal intellectual search and to give practical expression to the ethical vision of society that the Islamic message inspires.” I connected to the way the Ismaili world wanted to express Islam.
In a speech as long ago as 1976 in Karachi, the Aga Khan argued that the prophet Muhammad's example should inspire Muslims to create “a truly modern and dynamic society, without affecting the fundamental concepts of Islam.” That was music to my ears, but blasphemy to the ears of puritanical Muslim leaders who prospered teaching intolerance, hate, and the status quo. Still, Ismailis were breaking new ground. In Canada, the home to many in the community's diaspora, an Ismaili woman, Yasmin Ratansi, was poised to become the first Muslim woman elected to Parliament.
One of the few contexts in which I'd heard about the Aga Khan was through an elite university he endowed in Karachi, aptly called Aga Khan University, or AKU to alumni. I went there to interview a physician, a woman, about depression and suicide in the country. Wandering through the campus, I wondered whether I had somehow found myself on the campus of UCLA in southern California. “Dude, where you headed?” I heard a young man in a baseball cap ask a friend. When I turned around, I saw a gaggle of hip young Pakistani Muslim men and women who had a Western air about them, just like me, only ten years younger.
During our hunt to find my friend Danny, I had taken his wife, Mariane, to one of the Aga Khan Hospital clinics for pregnancy-related blood tests. When I discovered I was pregnant, I went to the clinic hesitantly for my own testing. In the back of my mind, I wondered whether Pakistani law enforcement officials would seize the results of my blood tests and use them as evidence of my pregnancy, and thus zina. After I had left Pakistan and was in Paris, at the start of my second trimester, I asked Shibli's biological father over and over again to pick up those test results, but he broke promise after promise and never got them. I always wondered if he just never wanted to be associated with this proof of my pregnancy.
As I talked to Amir Kanji, the Ismaili halal food wholesaler, I wondered if my results were still sitting in the hospital files. But Amir rejected the criminalization of zina and the other expressions of puritanical Islam, particularly in the West. “We need to create an American Islam versus being just Muslims in America.” He invited me to Atlanta for a meeting of the Ismaili Health Professionals Conference. I boarded a flight to Atlanta with Shibli, not knowing what to expect.
ATLANTA
âMy education in the freedoms possible for Muslim women in modern-day Islamic society began at the check-in counter at the Atlanta Westin. The two dark-haired, olive-skinned women in line behind me seemed to be South Asian. But otherwise they belied the traditional stereotype of Muslim women. They were assertive and poised, rolling their carry-on bags behind them as they stepped up to the counter, throwing me friendly smiles as they passed. Their short hair danced on their shoulders without cover. After I got my room key, a buoyant teen guided me to the conference registration table. Her parents were conference organizers, and she was part of the Ismaili youth group volunteering over the weekend. My head was spinning seeing Muslim women like me and Muslim girls like the girl I used to be.
In my hotel room, I talked to my father to let him know we'd arrived safely. Before I knew it, I started getting angry. I hadn't even participated in the first session of the conference agenda, but I'd gotten an early sense of how much this community of Muslims valued women as vibrant, equal participants. I wasn't naiveâI knew every community had its problemsâbut the openmindedness I'd seen in Ismaili Muslims was a far cry from what I'd experienced in my local Muslim community. “It's just ridiculous the way you treat women. We don't even get to speak,” I yelled at my father. “We have to sit like we're deaf, dumb, and blind.” “I know, honey,” my father said. “I have fought with them so much. I am tired. They don't care.”
As I talked with my father, Shibli played by my feet, fascinated by the white puffs of cloud that decorated a rug the bellhop had brought us to accompany a cozy crib. After I got off the phone, I danced with Shibli in our room, with lines of twinkling car lights from an Atlanta road shining behind us. High up in the sky in this high-rise building, I felt invincible and happy in a Muslim community in which I had a sense of belonging and worth as a woman.
The next morning I sat in the second row of the grand ballroom at the Atlanta Westin, meeting up with Amir when he waved me to the seat beside him. Upstairs in room 1202, babysitters were watching Shibli for the first time since the night eight months earlier when I threw rocks at the devil on the hajj and left him with fellow pilgrims. He was happily playing with his babysitters when I left.
I felt affirmed there in Atlanta among the Ismaili Muslims. The women didn't cover their hair. They sat anywhere they wanted to sit. The
night before, a young woman, Salima, had worn a sleeveless black pantsuit without shame. Years before, a first cousin had scolded my parents for letting me wear my sleeveless Morgantown High track uniform, because a woman's biceps were not to be seen in public. According to the puritanical Muslims, a woman's upper arms are part of her
awrah
âthe parts of the body that need to be shielded from public view. But there amid the Ismaili professionals, these rules didn't matter. Greater priorities defined this community, such as improving health care, education, and prenatal care.
In the ballroom I felt such anger toward the leaders of our Muslim community in Morgantown, including my father. Since the arrival of Arab immigrants with their strict cultural sense of segregation, we hadn't even been able to enjoy Muslim holidays and social gatherings as a family. There in Atlanta men and women sat shoulder to shoulder without judgment. A film rolled with footage of the Aga Khan's wife. A PhD, she wore a black sleeveless dress.
The morning's program started with the national anthem. I sang the words with my right hand over my heart. For most of my life I had not put my hand on my heart when I heard these words. I had always been made to feel embarrassed about being American when I went to India for summer trips. It was in the way my cousins made fun of my Urdu, my American accent, and even the fact that I ate with a fork instead of my hands, as is done in traditional culture. When I became a U.S. citizen in 1981, it was really only to fulfill the citizenship requirement for college scholarships. Then, in my late twenties, I found myself standing in the outfield bleachers above the Big Green Monster at Boston's Fenway Park, my hand over my heart, belting out the words to the national anthem. I was starting to realize that I was American.
Unlike in Boston, in Atlanta we stayed standing for a recitation from the Qur'an. “We have created you male and female,” a woman said, her white
dupatta
falling off her head onto her shoulders without reproach. I had been taught that I couldn't read the Qur'an without covering my head for modesty. The Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi told me in Morocco that she didn't cover up every time. The Qur'an, she explained, was “a research book” for her.
With the formalities complete, it was time for the main speaker. She was Princess Zahra, a daughter of the Aga Khan and a 1994 graduate of Harvard with a degree in Third World development studies. She sat at the table with her brothers, Prince Rahim and Prince Hussain, working together for the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of institutions
dedicated to improving living conditions and opportunities in the developing world through such ventures as micro-credit loans to Muslim women in Mozambique.
With her introduction, Princess Zahra strode to the podium with the determined gait of the athlete that she was, her calves bulging beneath the knee-length hem of her business suit, which was cut to fit her figure snugly. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and her face glistened under the bright stage lights. With her regal air, Princess Zahra is the closest thing Islam has to a Princess Diana. She was even married in England to a British man who didn't convert to Islam. As she talked she exuded the kind of confident energy that I wished I could express in my Muslim community or even see in another Muslim woman. In her speech she laid out an aggressive and smart development policy for countries in the developing world.
The princess made an important point: education has a key role to play in emancipating Muslim society from traditions and ideologies that contradict fundamental Islamic beliefs regarding women, non-Muslims, and community. Toward that end, the Aga Khan Foundation had built Centers of Excellence in the far corners of the world, from Karachi, Pakistan, to the Central Asian states of Kyrgistan and Tajikistan and the African nations of Mozambique and Kenya. As she closed, I joined the applause, enthusiastically.
I left wondering how the global Muslim world, not just this pocket of it, could embody some of these principles of tolerance, women's rights, and plurality, all rooted in Islam. I went to meet, for the first time, the Muslim scholar who had helped me find so many answers to my questions about my faith. He was Alan Godlas, the professor of Islamic studies at the University of Georgia. Its campus is in Athens, just outside of Atlanta. Not only was I meeting him for the first time, but so was Shibli. They took to each other immediately. “This,” I told Shibli, “is your godfather who will teach you Arabic.” I wanted to help my son to understand his religion fully and represent it, as much as he wanted, as positively as he could in the world. Shibli smiled warmly at Dr. Godlas, and their friendship was sealed.
As we played in the nursery, chasing Shibli here and there, I asked Dr. Godlas the question on my mind. Referring to the questions I raised in my first book about the Muslim world's relationship to terrorism, intolerance, and the criminalization of women's bodies, he said, “Your book is the kicking of the fetus in the belly of Islam.” I looked at him curiously. He continued. “One can look at you and Islam together as the fetus kicking
and trying to come out. Islam wants to be born into the postmodern world.” He confided that he had felt his own anguish as he read my book. “There are still forces trying to hold this fetus inside. It hasn't grown enough, and the mother who is in the world is the collective consciousness of Muslims. The fetus is the growing soul.” I knew this baby had to be born.