Authors: Asra Nomani
By then, I knew very well the tactics for managing women at mosques: steely eyes and firm fingers pointing to some door other than the front door. I also knew the tactics of civil disobedience. Rafat and I rejected the option of going downstairs to a cluttered and dingy basement room near the entrances to the bathrooms where women watched the Friday prayer on TV. “Thank you, but I'll be going in here,” I said, moving confidently past the mosque bouncers and into the main hall. We were so early that only a few dozen men were present. The manager of the mosque had told us the day before that women couldn't pray in the main hall for the Friday prayer because there wasn't room for them. “Send a letter to the board of directors,” he said when we protested. I stepped to the left and sat down against the back wall. Rafat sat to my left. “What do we do now?” she asked. “Now we pray,” I said. She had been so afraid the night before that she almost backed out. I didn't want to pressure her, so I had reminded her, “It's all your choice.” She showed up the next day. “We have to do it,” she said.
The men started arriving to tell us the error of our ways. I told Rafat, “You don't have to argue now. Just be polite, but stay as long as you want to stay.” Now was the time for certain action, not debate. A man to my right
told me, “This is not Islam.” I conveyed my certainty that it was indeed Islam. “You must convince the ummah,” he said, waving to the room now filled with about three hundred men. I laughed. Social justice can't be subject to a popularity contest.
We sat at attention through the imam's sermon. He argued that men must respect women. It was a good speech. As the men started leaving at the end of prayer, the man who had been to my right said to me, “Thank you, sister. I learned something from you today.” Another man made me smile when he said, “You're doing the right thing, sister.” For that moment, we had changed the reality at the Islamic Center. We emerged into the sunshine triumphant.
That was not the feeling with which I would leave the Idriss Mosque in Seattle, where I had gone to give a book reading. When I took a space about fifteen feet behind the prayer leader in the front of the mosque, a man rushed over to exclaim: “We have a special place for women. Downstairs.” He also gestured to a balcony with a screened wall. Although he seemed confused about where he wanted me to go, he clearly wanted me to leave the main hall. I told him, “I prefer to pray here.” I cited the Fiqh Council of North America's ruling that it is not Islamic to require a woman to pray in a separate area. I cited the tradition of the Prophet in the seventh century that women are not required to pray behind a partition. Refusing to hear me, a dozen men harassed and surrounded me over the next hour, insisting that I leave the main hall. They had plenty of room to assemble for prayer fifteen feet in front of me, but they refused to hold the prayer. I felt so threatened that I pulled out a camera I had with me. They moved away from me when they saw it, but individuals kept coming back, speaking to me in a menacing way. One man threatened, “God will
judge you on your judgment day.” I said, “I am doing nothing wrong. Pray.”
I was reminded that this battle isn't divided according to gender lines. A woman yelled through the screen separating the balcony from the main hall, “This is not Islam. Come here!”
Finally, the men threatened to call the police. I was ready to be arrested, but a friend accompanying me wasn't. I left angry and annoyed. “Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, unable to resist a sarcastic comment. “Don't ever come here again! You're banned from here,” a man bellowed. As I walked away, one of the men followed, still hostile and intimidating. That night I opened my book and read: “I am coming to you from the frontlines in the struggle for the soul of Islam.”
Going to San Francisco was like returning to my youth. When I started there at the
Wall Street Journal
as an intern in the spring of 1988, it never crossed my mind to go to a mosque. This time I decided to visit the Islamic Society of San Francisco in the heart of the Tenderloin District.
Walking past drunks, drug addicts, and the homeless on the sidewalks, I turned up the stairs into a massive loft. I went behind a thick wall and saw half a dozen women sitting in a large space, some of them napping. I sat down in front of a portable TV set.
Ridiculous
, I thought to myself. I got up, walked around the wall, and took a seat nearly to the back of the hall but not completely. The area was massive, and the closest men were many feet away. Immediately, however, a burly man approached me. “Sister, you must sit in the back.” I responded with what had become my mantra: “No, thank you. I'm happy praying here.”
“Do not cause
fitna,
” he said, using the catchall term of intimidation meant to silence protest. “I know you are here to pursue some agenda.”
“Please,” I responded. For the first time, I lost my patience. It's so simple for people like him to dismiss others with the claim that they're pursuing a nefarious agenda. But then something remarkable and unprecedented happened: a man stepped forward to protect my rights. He told the man that the mosque president, Souleiman Ghali, had said women could pray in the main hall. I couldn't believe my ears. Here was a sign of leadership in our Muslim world. Nevertheless, the protesting man persisted, so I resorted to my defense tactic: I started praying. “Interrupt me if you will, but I will testify against you on your judgment day.” He retreated.
Then another remarkable thing happened: the president's sermon was a testimonial to a woman convert who had been a tireless volunteer. Afterward, he welcomed me, saying, “I want more women to come out from behind the wall.” I thanked him for his vision.
In southern California, I had planned a visit with Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl, the UCLA professor of law whom I'd come to consider the pope of tolerant Islam. His kind assistant, Naheed, greeted me with an embrace and the question, “What's going on? They're organizing a town hall meeting on woman-led prayer. The professor asked for you to be there, and they said you're too controversial. The professor thinks that is so ridiculous.”
I had faced off against scary men in Seattle and stared down a burly man in San Francisco. But it was rejection by people I thought of as kindred spirits that was threatening to break me. Some people had begun to perceive me as a liability. The criticism had been fierce after the New York prayer, which I was accused of organizing just to sell books. That stung, because I had been active in this struggle long before my book came out. I hadn't confided my hurt to anyone until I spoke to Naheed. “I was afraid to come here,” I admitted. “I was
afraid that Dr. Abou El Fadl and all of you would also turn on me.”
“No way,” Naheed said, gently putting her arm around my shoulders.
When I greeted Dr. Abou El Fadl in his library, he moved me to tears with his support and understanding. “You are a writer. You write books. You came here to seek knowledge. I helped you. You came to a recognition for which you took action. Most people do nothing with the knowledge they get. I have nothing but admiration for you.”
I gave him a gift: the new “Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Mosque,” complete with the rights he had made me understand we could assert to be prayer leaders to both men and women and to stand in mixed-gender lines in the front of mosques.
I knew that I had to go to the Islamic Center of Southern California, the flagship mosque of Los Angeles. It was supposed to be one of the most liberal mosques in America and had women among its leaders. But I had also heard that women there were segregated in peculiar ways.
Arriving just before the Friday prayer, I walked into a large reception area lined with cubbyholes for shoes. To the right was a room separated from the reception area by tinted glassâthe “women's section.” To the left of the reception area was another room with the pulpitâthe main prayer hall. I stepped into the women's section and immediately felt disconnected from the main hall, with no clear visual and auditory access to the imam.
I stepped into the main hall, which was not yet filled, found a space at the extreme right side of the room, and did a prayer. I then sat down for
zikr
, or remembrance of God, to wait for the sermon and prayer to begin. A man told me: “The sisters' section is in the back. You must leave.” I said, “I will be praying here.” Other men came
and told me to leave. I politely told them that it is Islamically legal for women to pray in the same space as men. One man said, “It is
haram.
” I said, “It is
halal.
” Another said,” Let us remove her. Call the women to lift her and remove her.”
I continued my
zikr
, counting each recitation on the digits of my fingers. A woman arrived and told me, “Sister, your place is in the back.” I said, “It is Islamically legal for me to pray here.” She told me that she had three points to make. “People come to Friday prayer for peace,” she said. I said, “Then let us just pray.” “Women and men have to be separated,” she said. I noted that women and men were not separated by partitions at the time of the Prophet in the seventh century. And finally she said, “I am your elder. I am like your mother. You have to listen to me.” I told her, “My mother supports me.” The woman grabbed my elbow and tried to lift me up and remove me. Although older, she was much larger than me, and physically aggressive. She said, “Let's discuss this over there,” nodding her head behind me. I looked over. She was gesturing to a fire exit door. I declined, and she kept prodding and pushing me. I protested her physical harassment: “Please do not touch me.” I shook my elbow from her hold, stood up, and said, “I am going to pray. I would hope you would not interrupt me.” She did interrupt me, pushing against my shoulder to force me out the fire exit door. I sat down immediately and returned to my
zikr
. I looked down and saw that my hands were trembling. I feared for my physical safety.
Then a man arrived and said, “There is a TV camera here. Let her pray. Call the women to join her.” A group of about six women joined me for prayer, and the mosque officials surrounded us with a security rope. About 150 men prayed to our left. A man whispered to
me, “Sister, you're doing the right thing. You have a right to pray here.” I thanked him. He looked away.
Afterward, the mosque leader, Dr. Maher Hathout, called on members of the congregation to sign a petition against alleged desecration of the Qur'an by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay. He stood in the pulpit to rally support for protecting an objectâa symbolically important object, but nonetheless an objectâbut failed to stop the physical harassment in his own mosque of a human being. He also spoke about the mosque's rights as a private organization with 501-C-3 tax-exempt nonprofit status. The irony of using America's tax laws to protect the right to gender discrimination made me laugh.
I made it back home from a road of much trouble but great victory. During my travels with the Freedom Tour, my son, Shibli, had been a real trouper, so to reward him I took him to Hershey Park, a few hours from home. After a weekend of playing games and riding every train in the park, I checked my cell phone messages as we left. “Hello, Asra,” a man's voice said, slipping straight into Urdu. “Bitch's daughter. If you want to stay alive, then keep your mouth shut. I am going to slaughter you
halal
style.” The Islamic technique for killing animals is to say a Muslim prayer, slice the animal's jugular vein, and behead it. That was how Danny's murderers killed him.
“Bitch's daughter,” the message continued. “I am going to slaughter your mother and father
halal
style. Slaughter. Pray as many prayers as you want. For now, keep your mouth shut. Do it. Otherwise I will slaughter you
halal
style. Think hard before you do anything. Think hard. I know your address. I know your mother and father. If you want to keep them alive, then keep your mouth shut.
Qhuda hafiz,
” an Urdu salutation that means, ironically,” May God protect you.” I was stunned.
I looked behind me. Shibli had fallen asleep. My mother called at just that moment, and I told her, “I got a weird phone call.” She said, “We did too.” The same man had called her, and she had hung up on him.
Knowing this was serious, I called 411 and asked the operator for the city that matched the caller's area code: Chico, California. The Chico police dispatcher couldn't find the number in her records. I pulled into the McDonald's at the intersection of highway 39 and Iâ81 in Linglestown, Pennsylvania, ducking inside. Over the next hour, I reported the case to the Monongalia County sheriff's office. The deputy there knew my case from a memo that had been sent around after my publisher received a phone call warning that I was in danger. I also talked with a special agent for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
A few days later, FBI agents told me what they had learned: the number was a cell phone registered to a young Laotian American man with ties to gangs, drugs, crime, and armed violence. “If a man with a tattoo of a three-headed elephant rings your doorbell, don't answer it,” one of the agents warned. I suddenly recognized what I had started to see after the woman-led prayer earlier in the spring: there were some who would turn to violence in this war within Islam. In the
New York Times
, reporter Andrea Elliott identified the young men who stood outside our march as members of an extremist Queens Muslim group who also opposed America. We are smoking out the extremists when we challenge male control.
In Morgantown, my own spiritual community was evolving. Before a community meeting organized by young reformers at the mosque, the professor who had made sure I knew I wasn't welcome at community dinners the past Ramadan e-mailed to tell me that had been a committee decision, not his own decision. He understood that a Muslim should ask for forgiveness before embarking on a journey. Did he want my forgiveness?
Was he apologizing? I asked him these questions when he approached me before the meeting. I wanted to know if he understood how painful his message had been to me. “I apologize,” he said. I accepted his apology.