The Face Behind the Veil

by Donna Gehrke-White

  In many ways her mother has the hardest time coping with Michaela’s conversion. While spending a lot of time together sewing and crafting—“Luckily I inherited her and my father’s creative genes”—they avoid talking about religion.

  “But,” Michaela says, “my mother has made a lot of accommodations for me. She is, for example, very careful not to serve pork or pork by-products. She has done this completely on her own. I told her not to go out of her way, because I can make do, but she has been very supportive in this regard.”

  Meanwhile, Michaela’s sister remains supportive, but admits the conversion hasn’t been easy to accept. She is in her third year of medical school at the University of Washington and has had contact with several Muslims locally as well as travelers from abroad.

  “This has helped us bridge the gap,” Michaela says. “In public she can get pretty lippy with people who stare at me. I tell her to relax, but she is adamant about it. I must be used to it, because I don’t usually notice it anymore unless it is very blatant. Once, in Nordstrom, I was shopping and an older couple was looking around in the same section. The husband was just standing there, staring at me as if I were a ghost or alien. His wife got right up in his face and said very firmly, ‘She is a person, you know!’ Wow! Did he get scolded! I felt bad for the guy. He probably did not realize what he was doing.”

  Michaela’s paternal grandmother, who is eighty-five and a devout Catholic, has been among the most supportive family members. She sent an e-mail to Michaela—“pretty nifty for a granny,” Michaela says as an aside—to report that when she told her priest that Michaela had become a Muslim, he said, “At least she believes in God.”

  “She is always sending me Ramadan cards and e-mails,” Michaela adds. “She asked me, ‘Is it Merry Ramadan or Happy Ramadan?’ I told her it is ‘Ramadan Mabruk’, so any English rendition is fine.

  “Once, I was talking to her on the phone, and she was going on and on about misplacing some photo of her as a child. She asked me to say a prayer for her. I told her okay. Then she said she thought it should go something like this: ‘Oh Allah! Please help Grandma Corning find her photo.’ I was so shocked she said Allah instead of God. She does that every once in a while. She is also very supportive of my eating requirements and likes my hijab. She has told me she likes how Muslims dress because she is tired of seeing everyone’s cleavage. I think my grandma really understands the human need for religion, especially a religion with rules and traditions. Like me, she also wakes up very early to say her prayers—only she has her rosary and Hail Marys.”

  Michaela’s family is happy to see her use her creative skills. As a designer for Muslim women, she creates pullover abayas as well as hooded ones and others with mandarin collars. She loves to pick out the fabrics, from lightweight chiffons to brocade tapestry fabrics, “for the woman who wants something that looks very exotic.”

  “American converts want their own style that fits the Islamic dress code but also has a Western feel,” she says. “Whether they are African American, Caucasian, or Hispanic converts to Islam, these women are still Americans. They do not convert to a different culture.” Some of us feel that we look ridiculous in shawar kameez [the traditional pant and long shirt worn by many Pakistani women]. Putting a scarf on your head already makes you look like a foreigner (and not just a Muslim), so those of us who are not immigrants do not want to look like we come from another country.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she adds, “I wear just about every type of Muslim dress from a variety of countries, but when I go into the office, I don’t want to look like anything other than a Muslim who is also an American. This is my culture.”

  It is her faith, not her nationality, that has changed, she says.

  It has been five years since Michaela converted, four years since she told her family, and three and a half years since she started wearing the hijab. And she feels more strongly drawn to Islam than ever.

  “Sometimes, I have small, insignificant doubts, but they quickly pass,” Michaela says.

  4

  MARIA’S NIGHTMARE OF AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE

  THE GROOM’S FAMILY was from Europe, a prosperous cosmopolitan Muslim family who had lived in the United States and had a business in South America. They had come all the way to South Asia to arrange a marriage for their twenty-nine-year-old son. They had heard about Maria, a lovely liquid-eyed nineteen-year-old going to college. She was a proper young woman from a well-regarded family.

  “They came to our house to see me,” remembers the bride.

  She wants to tell what happened to her, but the young woman called here “Maria” is embarrassed. More important, she wants to protect her children, whom she fears she will not see again, from knowing the true circumstances of what their mother endured.

  Maria and her family thought nothing amiss when they invited the prospective groom’s family into their home. In their country many parents arrange marriages for their children. The practice is not so much a Muslim custom as a cultural one, thousands of years old. Besides, the family seemed so pleasant.

  Maria’s mother and father listened to the other parents’ proposal. First, they said, they liked Maria and they liked the idea of their son marrying a proper young Muslim woman. It was time for him to settle down with a wife and children. For Maria it was almost a dream come true. She would be marrying a suave European Muslim who would take her to America where he operated part of the family business. They would live in Miami, which has a subtropical climate similar to what she was used to. The family had businesses in South America so Miami, the gateway to Latin America, made sense as their home. The groom’s family seemed prosperous and able to give Maria a good life. And, above all, they seemed warm and personable.

  Some parents arrange marriages without allowing their children to meet until the day of the wedding. Maria got to meet her future in-laws and husband. However, she stresses she barely was introduced to him before she was whisked down the aisle.

  Thus, with Maria’s consent, her parents agreed to the proposal and Maria married him in a ceremony in her hometown before traveling across the world to Miami.

  At the time, Maria didn’t think anything about her new husband being ten years older than she—a difference that to a nineteen-year-old can seem vast. As Maria had traveled little, he seemed very much a man of the world.

  She wore the hijab—and still does. She wouldn’t think of leaving the home without her hair covered. She came from a family rooted in centuries of tradition—not worldly like her future husband and his family.

  “I didn’t know anything about marriage,” Maria adds. But in retrospect, she feels that such a gap in age and experience between her and her husband should have been a warning.

  As soon as they moved to Miami, their marriage quickly degenerated. Maria found out that her husband had had a girlfriend, an American. While his parents wanted him to marry a more traditional—and Muslim—woman, he was unable to give up this previous romance.

  He began losing his temper and hitting Maria. The beatings began early on in the marriage. “He would be drinking and get mad,” she says. He had total control over her, doling out money for groceries, barely enough for her to live on. He was just as miserly after they had children. And he hit them, too.

  She tried to tell her family about her problems. They told her not to complain. “They would tell me: Have patience,” she says. They would also tell her that such conduct is “normal in a marriage.” It was almost as if this was the fate of women, an attitude Maria attributes to their living in a “backward country. That’s how we are.”

  Three years ago, her husband left her for his old girlfriend. He had gotten her pregnant and, Maria says, “We had a fight over that and he went with her.”

  At the time, she felt relief. At least she would be left in peace. But that was not to be.

  Even though by then she had been in the United States for about five years, she still didn’t understand much about Americ
an life, as he had controlled where and when she went out of the home. Now, though, he left her alone to fend for herself, with no job or family, in what to her was still a strange country. Maria tried to count her blessings: He still gave her money, but she barely had enough to feed herself and their children.

  He had kept a key to their home and was able to come and go whenever he wanted. One day, he decided he didn’t like what he saw and accused Maria of being an unfit mother: He complained that the children were making marks on the walls. Maria tried to point out that she had put paper up on the walls for the children to paint on. He complained that she was sloppy and unclean. A child had spilled juice that she hadn’t cleaned up. Maria protested that she was keeping her home neat according to the traditions of her homeland.

  “I am clean—but my ways are different,” she adds.

  While taking care of two small children, “I wasn’t able to clean all the time,” she admits. Sometimes she was too tired.

  A group of Miami Muslims who found out about her situation, and who ultimately rescued her, thinks Maria was also too depressed to cope with everyday matters. It is common for abused women to have low self-esteem. Maria found it hard to talk to anyone about what was happening to her. With her parents telling her to accept her situation, it was all she could do to keep her marital problems quiet.

  Her husband saw things differently. He went to the police to report that Maria was neglecting the children. The next thing Maria knew, her home was being invaded by police officers, who had believed her husband’s story.

  Maria tried to tell them that actually it was her husband who was the abuser. He had hit the children, she told them. They didn’t believe her, and took her children away. She was handcuffed and jailed. Shaking and terrified, she tried to tell her side of the story. Still the authorities didn’t listen.

  Thus began her ordeal in the United States judicial system.

  According to Mohammad Shakir, executive director of the Miami-Dade Asian American Advisory Board, Maria was first locked up in jail, and subsequently committed to a mental institution for being unstable. “She was detained for almost four weeks,” he says. “She was put in with hardened criminals. When she came out, she was petrified.”

  Such abuse of young married women from traditional cultures is occurring with increasing frequency in the Miami area, he adds, where Muslim or Hindu men more savvy than their immigrant wives use the American legal system to get out of marriages, in some instances absconding with the woman’s dowry or family money. The women do not know how to protect themselves, and for that reason, Shakir is helping start a group to help these women.

  In Maria’s case, there was worse to come: She was assigned a public defender and agreed to plead to a reduced charge of child neglect and receive probation. But she was unable to comply with the court’s order to see a psychologist and obey the treatment plan. “I didn’t have money for gasoline,” she says. “I didn’t have money for medicine either.” So she was picked up again for violating her probation. That meant more time in jail.

  When assistant public defender Rebecca Cox saw her new client, she was shocked. “Her hair was dirty and greasy; she was totally unkempt and uncommunicative,” Cox says. Maria’s eyes were downcast and she would barely look up at Cox, to whom she was deferential and very meek.

  What saved her client, Cox adds, was that a group of Muslims led by Shakir discovered her situation, intervened in her behalf, and agreed to take her into their homes and provide shelter and care. They attended every court proceeding, and there were many because the case was repeatedly postponed.

  “These incredible people jumped through hoop after hoop, in an attempt to satisfy the judge’s concerns and obtain her release,” Cox says. Never had Cox seen strangers offer such support.

  Outraged at what had happened to Maria, Shakir had felt compelled to intervene. He and his wife Shahida agreed to house the young woman as they sorted out her problems. Nearly catatonic when she first came to them, she opened up to them little by little, talking about her abuse and her legal problems.

  She’s still not sure what happened at her court hearings, how her husband was able to divorce her and obtain custody of their children.

  “I didn’t know much about the American system,” she admits.

  The Shakirs treated her like a daughter, making sure she had plenty of sleep and nutritious food. Slowly, she began to recover. Months later she seemed on the rebound; her eyes were sparkling. Maria was even able to go to a party. She dressed in a loosely flowing pantsuit and hijab and looked lovely.

  Her depression returned three months later. She became weary and was unable to imagine her life getting any better. As a result, she decided to go home. Her newfound friends objected but they couldn’t persuade her to stay in America. The best they could do was to pool money for Maria’s one-way plane ticket home to her native country. She says she has no intentions of returning to the United States. And in any event, she can’t: She violated her probation by leaving the country. She was even warned by her probation officer that if she left before her probation ends, the United States will never let her reenter. But Maria saw no hope—or point—in staying.

  Her husband now has custody of her children in South America, she says. He took them while she was in jail. In retrospect, she says, he probably had planned this all along. She is resigned to the fact that it’s unlikely she will ever see her children again.

  She tries not to grieve. She tries to tell herself that he loves his children and will take care of them. She tries not to remember his past abuse of them, nor the recent pictures he gave her of their children during a visit when she was in the mental ward. “They don’t look happy,” she repeatedly says. “They don’t look happy.”

  Still, there is nothing she can do. He has them and they are a continent away. She is what some would consider a criminal and certainly not to be trusted. She admits she doesn’t know what she will do in the country she hasn’t seen in eight years. She is trying to be grateful: “Thank Allah, I am healthy, I am okay,” she says.

  The Shakirs, though, believe it is a tragedy that she was compelled to go home.

  Before she left, she wanted to pass on advice to other young women so they never end up in the nightmare she endured.

  The most important thing, Maria says, is not to agree to an arranged marriage. “Don’t get married without knowing the man,” she says. Furthermore: “Don’t get married so early. I was too young.” Finally, she advises, Don’t marry an older man, who may want you young and naive for a reason—so he can control you.

  5

  AYSHA: THE PERILS OF BEING A MUSLIMAH

  IT WAS MID-MORNING on a day in March 2002, and a new refrigerator had just been delivered to the suburban home of Aysha Nudrat Unus. When she heard a loud boom she thought the delivery men had somehow dropped the old refrigerator they had taken out.

  Imagine her surprise—and terror—when she spotted a group of men in black at her front door. They banged on her front door, not even bothering with the doorbell. “Open the door!” one of them barked. She saw a man brandishing a gun. “He was close to the door,” she says. She remembers being so stunned that all she could do was stand and gasp. “I couldn’t go to the door, I was so paralyzed,” she remembers. Her eighteen-year-old daughter managed to run to a phone to call 911 for help.

  But it was too late.

  The men knocked down the front door. “They called out in a very loud voice, which made them all the more scary,” Aysha says. “I never thought police would yell like that.” But she says, it is a different world after September 11, 2001. These strange men, towering above Aysha (who is at most five feet tall, and weighs 100 pounds), identified themselves as federal agents, and forced Aysha and her daughter to sit on the floor of their own home and hold their hands behind them.

  “They handcuffed both of us,” she says. “They didn’t explain anything.”

  Nor did they read the women their rights—an eve
nt made familiar by American television but not part of Aysha’s experience. The agents began searching the house, tearing through rooms and cupboards, ransacking desks and files.

  The local police had no knowledge of the raid. Two officers responded to the 911 call and thought a robbery was in progress. They were told of the federal investigation by one of the agents as the officers tried to enter the house. It turned out that the agents were raiding Muslim organizations and households in Virginia and Georgia—from the offices of charities to Aysha’s home—as part of an investigation into possible financial ties to terrorists. No charges have ever been filed. No apologies have ever been given.

  The following day, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations strongly condemned the raids as a “fishing expedition” that used “McCarthy-like tactics in search of evidence of wrongdoing that does not exist.” Aysha appeared at the press conference to try to spread the word of what was being done to Muslims.

  John G. Douglass, a former prosecutor and now professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, says he is troubled that information on raids was leaked to the media and that well-regarded Islamic institutions and individuals had been tainted by the barrage of publicity.

  “One of the most troubling aspects of the March 2002 searches is that the government chose to use search warrants at all,” Douglass wrote in 2003 in the Journal of Law and Religion. “In an investigation targeting financial transactions, the government has other means for obtaining the records necessary to trace money and identify its sources. The simplest, of course, is just to ask for the information. Another is to subpoena it. In the vast run of financial investigations, the government obtains most of its information through these means rather than through search warrants.”