Author: Ann Rodgers and Bill Schackner
Publication: Post-Gazette
Date: May 11, 2004
URL: http://www.post-gazette.com/search/redir.asp?path=/pg/04132/314380.stm&date=5%2F11%2F04+4%3A36%3A43+AM
One of the last friendly faces Wall
Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl saw before he was kidnapped and murdered
in Pakistan in 2002 was that of Asra Nomani, an American Muslim who was
a close friend and Journal colleague.
Pearl's murder, which came after
he was forced to say he was a Jew, galvanized a new concern in the Indian-born
journalist for Islam and its relationship to society.
Pregnant and unmarried, she returned
to Morgantown, where she had grown up and graduated from West Virginia
University. Last year, she decided to attend the mosque that her father,
now a retired WVU professor, had helped found 23 years ago.
"I had just had a baby, and you
want to find religion with your baby," she said. "I went to the front door
of the mosque and the board president yelled at me to take the back entrance.
I had to sit in the balcony."
So began her moral jihad against
the leadership of the Islamic Center of Morgantown, which she has taken
to the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times. By
her account, puritanical Arabs, whom she labels Wahhabis, a disputed and
pejorative term for the strict strain of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia,
have seized control and are pushing a theological agenda that demeans women
and teaches contempt for non-Muslims.
Leaders of the mosque say they can't
understand why she is so angry and confrontational. Pearl's death was a
horrible crime but has nothing to do with whether Muslim women in Morgantown
sit in the balcony, they say.
"She doesn't seem to have anything
better to do than to fight her fellow Muslims," said Ahmed El-Sherbeeny,
a WVU doctoral student in engineering who gives the call to prayer and
whose recent sermon on women outraged Nomani.
The mosque has no prayer leader,
or imam, and the disputed leadership was put to the test in voting over
the weekend for a new executive committee. Last Friday, parking was tough
to come by as members gathered in the beige brick center built last year
on a side street near the campus.
Nomani, accompanied by her son and
parents, wore a hooded sweat shirt, her nod to the practice of women covering
their hair during prayer service. She expected little from the election
and, in fact, didn't bother to vote.
She was one of a tiny minority of
women among more than 100 men. But by some at the mosque, she is viewed
as a minority of one. They insist there was no friction or debate until
she created it.
"You saw ladies going in there,
right?" Ahmad Abulaban, an executive committee member, said to a reporter,
gesturing toward the mosque. "Did you see any problems at all, any friction?
We're not hateful people. She's trying to use the community as a bridge
to fame."
Islam is united in its core belief
in one God, in the importance of the Prophet Muhammad and the practices
of prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. But Muslims from Algeria to
Malaysia have developed different ways of doing those things. As global
immigrants find themselves sharing the same mosques in America, tensions
arise.
As in Morgantown, the conflicts
are often riddled with cultural subtexts, including the uneasy relationship
between Arab and Asian Muslims. The problems become most acute in places
like Morgantown, where there is only one mosque, said Omid Safi, professor
of Islamic Studies at Colgate University and author of "Progressive Islam,"
which advocates gender equality and pluralism.
Because of a lack of theologically
trained religious leaders, it's not uncommon for new American immigrants
nurtured on a zealous, anti-Western Islam to assume mosque leadership,
he said.
Nomani regards the Islamic Center
of Pittsburgh as a model for Morgantown to follow. Women can enter through
the main door of the mosque in Oakland and worship with the men, though
seated behind them.
Dalia Mogahed, outreach coordinator
for the Pittsburgh mosque, agrees on Muhammad's respect for women but says
Nomani is viewing the issues through the eyes of a secular feminist rather
than the eyes of a Muslim. And Mogahed, who was born in Egypt, believes
Nomani's essays are implicitly anti-Arab.
Although Mogahed usually enters
the mosque through the front door, there is a separate entrance for women
who prefer to use it. Many Muslim women embrace this separation because
they believe it offers freedom and privacy, she said, and it is wrong to
paint them as oppressed dupes of Muslim men.
Nomani, 38, was born in Bombay,
India. The family emigrated when she was 4 and became the second Muslim
family in Morgantown when she was 10.
The original mosque was built without
any provision for women, who were forced to pray in a stifling back room
that the men often invaded. "That is something my father apologizes to
me for. Twenty-three years ago he didn't even recognize women's rights
within the mosque."
Nomani's journalistic career took
her across the globe, and she often wrote stories on sexual practices for
The Wall Street Journal. After 9/11, she took an assignment for Salon.com
in Pakistan, where she hosted Pearl and his wife just before he left for
his fatal interview.
"We spent a month trying to find
him," she said. "In that month I came face to face with the slippery slope
of where hatred can take us."
At about the same time, Islamic
extremists in Pakistan murdered a dozen Shiite professionals because they
didn't believe that Shia Islam was pure enough.
"I used to be very relativistic
and say that we had to accept all these different ideologies without censorship,"
she said. "Now I think there have to be limits to tolerance. It would be
like someone in 1950s America saying that you have to be tolerant of white
supremacists."
So when she was told to go to the
back door and sit in the women's balcony, she resisted. She tracked down
Islamic scholars who convinced her that Muhammad allowed men and women
to pray together. She found a study of more than 400 U.S. mosques showing
that the percentage requiring women to worship behind a curtain or partition
had increased from 52 percent in 1994 to 66 percent in 2000.
She blamed it on the growing influence
of Saudi and Egyptian schools of Islam among Muslims studying here. With
her mother, sister-in-law, niece and one or two young girls, she persisted
in praying with the men. Despite cutting remarks, they allowed her to do
so, she said.
Late last year, the mosque leadership
collapsed -- due, by various accounts, to infighting, fatigue, apathy or
all of the above. Into the power vacuum stepped a "temporary executive
committee." To Nomani, it was a coup by extremists. Others say someone
had to step forward to make sure that basic maintenance got done.
Nomani took her complaints to outside
organizations. One was WVU -- on the grounds that some of the offending
preachers were students or faculty. Another was the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR), which investigates complaints of discrimination against
Muslims.
Last month, she lodged a complaint
about a sermon in which a student declared that "to love the Prophet [Muhammad]
is to hate those who hate him." He claimed that "the most wonderful example
of love" was an early Muslim who killed his own relatives in battle when
they attacked Muhammad, she said.
In response to Nomani's compalint,
Hany Ammar, a mosque executive committee member, denied that the sermon
preached hatred, although he said that difficulties in translation from
Arabic could have caused misperception.
He offered to meet with Nomani but
accused her of disruptive behavior for taking notes during sermons. Not
only does the rustling paper disturb worship, it also "causes an emotional
distraction in many people because they have become aware that Ms. Nomani
uses these notes to lodge complaints against her own community," he said.
Normally, CAIR does not intervene
in intra-mosque disputes, said spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. But because this
case has become so public, CAIR is investigating with an eye toward possible
mediation.
Nomani said that El-Sherbeeny's
April 30 sermon on women, which ignited the most recent dispute, attacked
Egyptian Islamic feminists as "advocates of hell" and said that when a
woman loses her chastity "she is worthless."
El-Sherbeeny admits saying that,
but said Nomani ignored his larger point that women are held in high respect
within Islam. "Women are to be cared for and supported financially and
physically as wives and daughters and sisters. And women have a responsibility
to preserve their chastity and their honor."
He realized his sermon would strike
a sensitive nerve with Nomani, a single mother. But her problem isn't so
much what he called her "great sin," but what he perceives as a lack of
repentance.
WVU administrators aren't about
to intervene. "I think the best thing we can do is be respectful," said
Brent McCusker, who teaches geography of the Middle East.
Still, he wonders if Nomani's essay
in Thursday's New York Times will alter the dynamic of what has been essentially
a low-profile dispute within a local institution.
"I think a lot of people will be
watching," McCusker said. "It's going to be under scrutiny now."
Friends and foes have suggested
that Nomani find or found another mosque, but she would consider that surrender.
"If we walk away, we are really abandoning our responsibility to the religion,"
she said. "To me this is really a fight for Islam."
Hatem Bata, a WVU senior, feels
he is caught between warring parties and says he is typical of the community
of about 350. He agrees with some of Nomani's concerns but "there is extremism
from both sides," he said.
After the results of the weekend
vote were made public yesterday, Bata said he considered them a source
of hope in that the executive committee, which he said was all far right,
is now more moderate.
Nomani, who had declared her candidacy
for the nine-person executive committee but withdrew, was more circumspect
in assessing the results.
"The challenge today is the same
as yesterday -- can the voice of moderate, tolerant and inclusive Muslims
define our mosque in Morgantown? If it can, it's a victory for not only
Islam but also the world."
(Ann Rodgers can be reached at arodgers@post-gazette.com
or 412-263- 1416. Bill Schackner can be reached at bschackner@post-gazette.com
or 412-263-1977.)
