Because I Said So (4 page)

I left Pakistan for Morgantown, pregnant and angry. I
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returned home to West Virginia and found my father redecorating a room for my baby and me, his fingernails coated with paint. I was not to be imprisoned or lashed. I had the support of loving parents and was shielded by progressive laws and societal notions that had largely decriminalized consensual adult sex in a country where religion and state are separated.

Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which
had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a
direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had
given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and
descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!

“He is beautiful,” I whispered as I took my son into my arms for the first time in the protected space of my hometown hospital’s maternity ward.

It was a death-defying delivery, as so many are, in which my baby’s heartbeat slowed suddenly and dangerously, sending me into the operating room for a C-section. When I emerged from the slumber of my anesthesia, I felt as though my son had given me new life. He was
so
beautiful. None of the trauma of my pregnancy had soiled his perfection. He had lashes that flapped like butterfly wings, long and graceful. He breathed gently and softly.

And, my father insisted, he had smiled when he emerged.

When my baby was born, it was my father who whispered the
azan,
or Muslim call to prayer, into his ear, a responsibility usually reserved for a baby’s father. I named my son Shibli, meaning

“my lion cub” in Arabic, evoking the most famous ancestor in my paternal lineage, a late-nineteenth-century Islamic reformer and scholar by the name of Shibli Nomani.

I had new life. I did not have to accept the dishonor that had marked my state of mind during my pregnancy. My body had shaken with so many tears during those months. No more, I told myself. With my son, I was reborn.

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Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to
keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible
rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to the
death.

My father had helped to build
the new mosque in Morgantown, and I was excited to join the local Muslim community. When Shibli was three months old, I had taken him with me, bouncing on my chest in his baby carrier, to Mecca for the holy pil-grimage of the
haj
; on his first birthday party, I initiated him into life as a Muslim with a ritual Muslim naming ceremony. But when I tried to enter the mosque with Shibli on its opening night, the president of the board stood at the door and barked at me to take the door reserved for women. “Sister, please, take the back entrance!”

The men at the mosque expected women to take the rear entrance to an isolated balcony, denying the rights Islam had granted women centuries ago, which allowed them to participate and pray in mosques without having to be hidden behind a parti-tion. I walked through the front door despite the board president’s protests.

Days later, I entered the main hall with Shibli in my arms. 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, not up in the balcony, where women who wanted to participate in the activities did so long distance, through notes sent down to the men. As my mother, my niece Safiyyah, and I sat twenty feet behind the men, a loud voice broke the quiet. “Sister, please! Please leave!” the mosque president yelled at me. “It is better for women upstairs.”

“Thank you, brother,” I said firmly. “I’m happy praying here.”

The president went to the mosque’s lower floor, where my father had taken Shibli so that my mother and I could pray. I couldn’t make out all of their words, but I could hear my father’s voice filter upstairs with proclamations such as “equal rights”

and “justice.”

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The next day the men on the board met and passed a rule to make the front door and main hall solely for the use of men. In protest, my father choked on his tears as he appealed to them to open their doors—not shut them—to his daughter and other women who were trying to find their place in the mosque. “Please have mercy on me!” my father cried. They remained firm, and through the months that followed, my father, too, remained solid in his support for my position.

Another night, I sat respectfully behind the men for a weekly study session in the mosque. The men exploded with anger that I had dared join their class, usually attended only by men. A member of the congregation, one of my father’s colleagues at the university, wildly gesticulated at my father and lashed out at him verbally.

“You are an idiot!” he thrice exclaimed, making his point with this logic: “Look at the kind of daughter you raised!”

Shaken, I returned home, hurt and angry. My father stood by me. “They do not like losing their men’s club,” he said. “Do not let their words hurt you.”

Paradoxically, I had also begun to feel free. I was ruffling feathers because I was not hiding the fact that I was an unwed mother. But this gave me the strength to overtly challenge the system: writing about it, refusing to be silenced, fighting for inclusiveness and tolerance. I wrote an essay for the
Washington Post
about reclaiming the rights Islam had granted to women in mosques in the seventh century. In it I mentioned that the kindness of many Muslims to my single motherhood had buoyed my hope in the Muslim community.

So I wasn’t surprised when the matronly wife of one of the mosque elders, neighbors of my parents, called me shortly after I walked through the front door of the mosque. I had heard a rumor sweeping through the community: her husband was insisting on marrying a second wife in their native country, against her wishes. I was fighting for women like her, whose husbands filled the mosque with chauvinist chatter. At the mosque, her husband had won support for polygamy.

When I arrived at the woman’s house, she opened the door with a smile. She invited me to tea and I settled into her oversize
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sofa, absorbed the Qur’anic verses framed and hanging from the walls, and readied for her secret expression of support. Instead, through smiles, she admonished me.

“You are young and pretty. The men, they are weak. They are selfish. Let them have their place,’’ she argued.

I sat, dumbfounded. She took issue with my argument that unwed mothers shouldn’t be stoned to death or lashed. “It is God’s law,” she said. “You should spend the rest of your life praying for repentance.”

Not long after my neighbor’s reproof,
I gathered with our community for a holy feast marking the day that Abraham was prepared to slaughter his son Ishmael in response to God’s call, an act meant to symbolize the challenge of every person to sacrifice that which gets in the way of their spiritual practice.

A clown entertained the children in a spacious restaurant.

After the clown was finished, the women scampered off with their children to a cramped private room with a security guard posted out front to guard them from intruders. The men took over the main dining room and bounced from table to table in festive conversation.

Overheating with the pulse of so many women and children in our small space, I greeted a young woman ripe with new motherhood. Her newborn on her lap, she tore into me. “I don’t agree with the way you are trying to bring about change. People are going to think you’re crazy.”

With my son ready to tumble a tray of basmati rice to the floor, she continued: “I’m not saying it, but others are going to say, ‘Look, she’s an unwed mother. She breaks rules.’”

By this point, Shibli had lost interest in the rice and turned to a tray of salad. “I am trying to make our communities welcome all women,” I tried to explain.

The young woman was only interested in making her point.

“I’m not saying it, but others are going to say, ‘Look, she’s an unwed mother’ . . .”

I stopped listening to her chiding of me, only to hear her com-12

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plain a moment later, “We have nothing to drink while the men have everything.”

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing
that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every
word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in
contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished,
and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere . . .

I continued to publish articles and opinion pieces about sexism and intolerance in the Muslim community, reporting on the appeal of Amina Lawal, the Nigerian mother who had escaped being stoned to death when her conviction was overturned. My public stance gave my detractors the opportunity to scrutinize and discredit everything about me. I was equated scornfully with novelist Salman Rushdie, who had gone into hiding after a
fatwa
that ruled he should be killed for his writings, which had been deemed blasphemous; and with Taslima Nasreen, who also had a
fatwa
on her head in her native Bangladesh for her writings challenging traditional Muslim society. Muslim readers complained via e-mail that I was trying to force “progressive” ways onto the traditions of Islam, that I didn’t cover my head with a scarf, and that I had had a photo taken by a male photographer who wasn’t my
mahram
—an adult male chaperone from my family. My maternal instincts were questioned for my not shielding my son from the shame of his birth, and it was predicted that he too would be ostracized. I was devastated when I read an e-mail from a Muslim man who insisted that I should give my son up for adoption. Not one of the people who denounced me raised the issue of my baby’s father’s responsibilities.

I received notice
of my twenty-first-century inquisition via e-mail. The elder who was president of the mosque’s management committee wrote that “about thirty-five” members of the mosque had signed a petition to revoke my membership and expel me from the mosque. It was alleged that I had engaged in actions and
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practices that were “disruptive to prayer, worship and attendance” and “harmful to members of our community.”

This elder, a university professor active in the Muslim Students’ Association, had earlier complained about “the sound of Ms. Nomani writing notes and flipping pieces of paper” during Friday sermons. In the spirit of Ziploc justice, he had led a takeover of the mosque and gotten elected president in a rushed election. Students who preached hatred became volunteer
imams
, religious leaders who give sermons at the pulpit.

The professor gave me two days’ notice before my trial would begin.

. . . it may seem marvellous, that this woman should still call
that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs
be the type of shame. . . . Here, she said to herself, had been
the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her
earthly punishment; . . . Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee.

The night of the trial arrived. My stomach was in turmoil. A terrible pain pierced my head in the minutes before the trial was to begin. I wanted to flee.

My mobile phone rang. It was Amina Wadud, an African American scholar of Islam. “They have no Islamic right to banish you from the mosque,” she told me firmly. “Stay strong.”

I lay down at home, trying to draw whatever reserves I could find. Instead, I found myself doubled over in suffering on my bed.

“They are trying to drive me from my home,” I cried. “I feel so alone.” But I wasn’t. As the moment arrived for me to leave, my father embraced me and said, “You are not alone. We are here.”

My mother, too, stood by me. “This does not upset me,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “It should not upset you.”

With that, she gave me the simple jumpstart kick only a mother can give a child. I splashed cold water on my face and knew that I would not run away.

• • •

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While the world watched
Saddam Hussein’s courtroom defiance on TV, I wasn’t even allowed to turn on my digital recorder in our mosque.

I asked for a copy of the complaint against me. Denied. I asked for the names of the complainants. Denied. I asked for a delay so I could find legal counsel. Denied. Muslim civil rights groups had demanded and won due process rights for Muslim prisoners-of-war in Guantánamo Bay, but here in my own country, I was being denied them.

My mosque leaders reduced me to lining up in front of me the slips of paper with the jurors’ names, in an effort to cross-check them against the mosque’s membership list. My mother alone was with me, because my father had been rushed to the hospital. The stress had weakened his health; he hadn’t been able to catch his breath. As he rested with electrodes attached to his body, his brothers in the mosque put his daughter through the first steps of her trial.

An American convert, chairwoman of the committee to educate non-Muslims about Islam, tried to talk to me as I kept order of the papers. She used to be the mosque’s bell ringer. After all my clamoring about equal rights, she had won a position at the table, but I had heard not a peep of support from her. Now she whispered, “Asra, I want you to know that a lot of people don’t support this petition to ban you.”