Then there’s the hijab. Except for a head covering when she goes to mosque and prays, Elberry has never worn one and doesn’t plan to.
Americans, she is sad to say, have an “unfortunate image” of perennially veiled Muslim women, that “you have to be like that to be a Muslim.” It is a notion she considers “insane.”
She rejects the idea that the hijab allows a woman to get back to the so-called basics of Islam. The religion hasn’t changed. The basic tenets remain the same, such as believing in one God, praying five times a day, loving your neighbor, giving to the poor, and forgiving others. “These things will never change,” she insists.
The return to the hijab, she feels, is a reflection of some women’s soul-searching, of their attempts to examine who they are. While Zainab appreciates that certain women feel more spiritual wearing a hijab, it’s a concept she doesn’t share.
The convention of women covering themselves started in Mohammad’s time, in seventh-century Mecca, when there was more lawlessness, she adds. “Women,” Zainab says, “needed to dress for protection—in case of danger, other Muslims needed to know what they looked like, from their modest clothing and scarf, so they would rescue them if needed.”
Today, however, “Islam has progressed and changed so much. We have more important issues to tackle than what people should wear. Islam does not have a ‘uniform’ although Muslims understand and respect a certain dress code.”
She notes that few men are bearded, as tradition dictates. So why should women be held to a different standard? “Should we deem any man without a beard a lesser Muslim?” she adds. “Of course not.”
Zainab feels that Americans need to understand that throughout the Muslim world, many women do not wear any head covering. When she was growing up in Cairo, she did not see many women in scarves, at a time when Egypt had a population of two million people in 1950.
“I went to the then-called American College for Girls, the only American school in Cairo, when I was four years old, and finished high school there,” she says.
As a young girl she wanted to work for the United Nations and, toward that goal, she learned fluent English and some French. When she began pursuing her master’s degree in comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, she focused on playwright Tennessee Williams and his portrayal of Southern women.
“The plight of Southern women comes close to how Muslim women have been treated by their society—not by religion,” she learned. “They weren’t expected to work or be politically involved.”
Zainab was uncomfortable in Egypt. The country was still trying to recover from three wars. Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had been leading his country for years steadily toward socialism. He restricted civil rights; dissent was not tolerated. Phone lines were tapped, letters opened, student leaders followed. “There was brainwashing—kids had to go to camp to learn about socialism,” she laments. “Opponents ended up in jails, their families unaware of their whereabouts.”
Zainab believed she would feel safer—and freer—in the United States, so she finished her master’s degree at Vanderbilt University. Her emigration made a profound impression on her.
“You come here and understand what Americans have,” she says. “People have to be free. Tolerance and understanding, is the world’s strength.”
Now, as Americans become more respectful of diversity, Zainab upholds that standard of respect, freely helping all kinds of groups. When she was asked to organize the annual fundraiser for The Links, an African American civic group, Zainab didn’t hesitate—and recruited the help of other Nashville Muslims.
She was thrilled when a friend remarked at her son’s wedding reception: “This looks like a U.N. party. Look at all the different foods, costumes, and people.”
“He was right,” Elberry later wrote in the now defunct Nashville Banner newspaper. “When I composed my guest list, it contained a wide mix of last names of both native-born and new Americans, all of whom I consider good friends and family.”
Her appreciation of America extends into getting involved in politics. Like most Muslim women, she is a loyal Democrat. A particular fan of Tennessee native son, Al Gore, she threw herself into his 2000 campaign and was a stalwart volunteer at his national campaign headquarters in Nashville.
In 2002, after volunteering in a gubernatorial campaign, she affectionately wrote a tribute to political campaign workers and their 24/7 way of life:
The countdown calendar is in a prominent place. Sometimes the countdown days have slogans and pictures of the opponents or their campaign staff: “Woozy Eyes Sally,” “Dumb Jo,” “We’ll whip your…, Don,” etc. All in good fun, not always politically savvy, but it satisfies the purpose of cheering. When the last days come near and the Day of Reckoning is upon the campaign the whole picture takes a dramatic turn. There are signs that a finale is near: A black velvet dress with silver beads hangs on a staffer’s door—hopefully to be worn at a victory celebration. A Mexican piñata with all kinds of goodies dangles for a month and will be hit hard. A bottle of bubbly is stored in view on a filing cabinet….
She still has trouble accepting that Gore did not get to go to the White House even though he won the popular vote. But she tries to be philosophical and accept reality.
In that spirit, she was part of a panel in Nashville to discuss Unconstitutional, a film that explores how Muslim and Middle Easterners’ rights had been violated after the U.S. Congress passed the Patriot Act. She also has joined rallies in Nashville to protest the Iraq war. As she put it in a poem, “We are afraid,” but we must not allow ourselves to simply “go on about our / business…/ ignoring the reality of our humanity.”
12
LUBY TEACHES AMERICANS ABOUT ISLAM
LOBNA “LUBY” ISMAIL is a wife, mother, daughter, entrepreneur, business owner, cross-cultural trainer, PTA volunteer, first-generation American, Muslim, former Floridian, college grad, nature lover, former Miss Softball America player, homemaker, and suburbanite who happens to have multiple sclerosis, a new baby (at age forty-two), and a home in the Maryland woods.
Her life—and the lives of all Muslim women, she points out—amounts to much more than whether or not she wears a scarf to cover her hair. As all Muslim women do, Luby covers her hair when at prayer and at certain religious or cultural events. But she does not make it a habit to wear a scarf at all public outings. Unlike some other women, she does not see the scarf as integral to her faith. To her, differences in attitude toward the veil are part of the diversity and rich tapestry of Muslim life that sometimes is not well understood.
Traditionally, Christian women also have worn some sort of head covering. It is written in the Bible for Christian women to cover themselves and, indeed, until the 1960s Catholic women did so when attending Mass. And Orthodox Jewish women still cover their real hair with wigs.
But, Luby says, only Muslim women are defined and measured by whether or not they cover their hair.
She points to an article by Mona Eltahawy, another Muslim woman, entitled “Boxed in by a Bit of Cloth.” In it, she mourns that when Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi became the first Muslim woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, every news story made the point that she did not wear a head scarf.
“I long for the day,” Eltahawy writes, “when…a Muslim woman is neither the sum or the absence of a head scarf.”
Luby couldn’t agree more. “It’s the pressure, the labels, the assumptions for Muslim women [that restrict us],” Luby adds, remarking on how the hijab reflects the diversity of Muslims. “We’re not one monolithic group and there are various interpretations of practice.”
Indeed, today, only two out of the world’s more than fifty predominantly Muslim countries mandate what women wear in public: Saudi Arabia and Iran. The rest leave it up to the women, although there may be strong social pressure for women to wear the hijab, especially in rural areas. Some secular governments, such as in Turkey, encourage women not to wear any s
ort of veil.
“Islam talks about the diversity of people, of the different nations and tribes,” Luby adds. It is something she knows firsthand.
She is a first-generation Arab American. Her parents are Egyptians who came to the United States to study for their doctorates. Because Luby’s maternal grandmother in Egypt insisted that her daughters get college educations, Luby’s mother pursued her Ph.D. studies despite the barriers against advanced education for women that existed in the United States at that time in the 1960s.
Luby’s parents decided to stay in the United States after they finished their education because of the wars and unrest in Egypt. Her father became a research scientist for the state of Florida. Indeed, he was the state’s top citrus expert for what is now a billion-dollar industry, and eventually director of the Citrus Experiment Center. Luby grew up in the state’s citrus farm belt—the state’s wide middle swath, about thirty minutes from the water-skiing pleasures of Cypress Gardens, a location Luby calls “great.”
She and her family were the only Arabs—and Muslims—in the mostly rural area, and so they could not attend a mosque. However, Luby’s parents taught their faith to their children. With their unusual ethnicity, Luby’s family became a novelty in the community. She remembers her parents speaking at women’s clubs, churches, and at other civic meetings. “It was very positive,” Luby remembers. Her family immersed themselves in American culture, enjoying the Fourth of July picnics, annual county fairs, and trick-or-treating on Halloween.
Still, there were some awkward moments. Luby went to grade school at a time when desegregation was beginning in earnest and a “big issue,” as she calls it, arose: What “color” was she?
“I’m Egyptian,” she would tell them. “I’m not black, nor am I white.”
She did not feel different from her other classmates until she became a teenager. That’s when her faith and parents’ cultural traditions started to set her apart from the rest of the kids. She wasn’t allowed to date, go to dances, drink beer, or eat the pepperoni on pizza (as Muslims are forbidden to eat pork).
“The difficult high school years….,” she now muses. “Suddenly all the girls had boyfriends and were able to go to parties. I didn’t fit in.”
Her solution: She befriended evangelical Christians. When her mom and dad became alarmed, Luby assured them it was okay. Evangelical Christians shared the same values—They loved God, and didn’t date, drink, or take drugs.
“I could go to their youth group events,” Luby says. “There was a real connection. As I look back on them, they were true to their faith and belief in God.”
So she joined their prayer meetings in the band room. They read the Bible, she the Quran.
This was how she became interested in interfaith dialogue and how people from different backgrounds could find common ground.
She even became fast friends with the PKs—the preachers’ kids—and the only activity of theirs she drew the line on was that she wouldn’t go “evangelizing” with them. To this day she has pleasant memories and respect for evangelical Christians.
She believes they and Muslims have much in common. For example, they are both against gambling, they encourage modesty, and value sex within marriage. Both faiths can help their congregations inoculate themselves against the societal pressures of today.
To Luby, the irony is that Americans look “at the poor Muslim women as being oppressed.” But what about the oppression and pressure many American girls feel to be a certain size or have a particular “look”—to be sexually active, wear provocative clothes, and engage in behavior that compromises their values and their intellect? Luby now feels gratitude that her parents set boundaries that protected her from those kinds of pressures. She is just as grateful that they encouraged her to obtain an education.
Luby attended American University in Washington, D.C., where she would earn her bachelor’s degree and where she met her husband, Alexander Kronemer, now a film producer and a converted Muslim. (He has gone on to be one of the producers of the PBS documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet.)
They re-connected when Alex went to Harvard’s Divinity School and Luby was pursuing a graduate degree in intercultural relations at Leslie College in Cambridge.
Islam, Luby explains, helped her husband integrate the disparate threads of his background. He was raised a Christian. His parents were divorced and his mother had taken him to church as a youngster. But his father was Jewish. Islam combines both faiths, Luby says, by including teachings from both Jesus and the Torah.
After their marriage, Alex agreed to go back with her to Washington so she could be an adviser to international students at American University. She was swamped with work during her first two years. Then she became pregnant with their first son, who was born in 1990.
Suddenly, Luby had a dilemma. She wanted to continue her career but she also wanted to spend time with her son. She couldn’t see how she would work all the hours required and still have enough time for her family. All the same, Luby wanted both. “Just because I am committed to my family doesn’t mean I don’t want a career.”
So she resigned and decided to form her own company, Connecting Cultures, that would reflect her desire to promote intercultural understanding. Her company’s mission, she says, is also her passion: to help people understand culture and religion and the impact they have on how we work and communicate.
Today, her company has grown, and gives seminars internationally. “Our market includes community leaders, educators, law enforcement officers, the military, government workers, corporate executives, and managers,” its website says. “We have conducted training all over the United States and the world.”
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, she feared her business would dry up from the backlash against Muslims. But the opposite happened: Americans became more curious than ever to hear about Islam and Muslims.
Indeed, Uncle Sam was one of her biggest clients. A month after 9/11, the Community Relations Services at the U.S. Justice Department hired Luby’s company to begin training police officers and community leaders.
“After 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been a backlash against Arab and Muslim Americans. Our training provides key information about the Islamic faith and culture and how to effectively communicate and build relations with the community,” Luby explains. It is also designed to help end the vandalism, desecration, physical attacks, and arson at mosques and other Muslim facilities.
At one of her recent sessions, held in Fort Lauderdale, she and a Sikh representative talked about their faiths to police officers, most of them from southern Florida. Luby emphasized that if police officers have to remove a suspect’s turban or head scarf, this should be done in private, as these are religious symbols. She also wanted to sensitize the officers into understanding that a Muslim having a Quran in his car isn’t a sign that he is an extremist.
“We want to explain the meaning of symbols such as clothing and religious practices to diminish fear and misperceptions.”
The federal government has also hired Connecting Cultures to help officers in Iraq who are training Iraqis how to patrol and do other police work. She briefs them about the Iraqi culture and how Iraqis may, in turn, have stereotypes of Americans.
It may be painful but Luby recommends that the officers talk openly about these stereotypes—unfair characterizations of Americans being hard workers but also greedy, selfish, aggressive, promiscuous, and uninterested in their families. Luby feels strongly that cultural understanding is a two-way street. To her, a strength of the American people and their government is their eagerness to better understand Islam and Muslims.
Even Fortune 500 corporations are coming to her company to learn more about their Muslim employees, an interest that gives Luby what she calls her “greatest hope.”
She believes that American Muslims can invigorate Islam worldwide with their emphasis on the heart and soul of Islam and interfaith exchange. Ameri
can Muslims can also help bridge the gap between the United States and the Muslim nations.
She sees herself as something of an ambassador. She’s also a working mom, a PTA volunteer, and a soccer mom ready to carpool—all of this despite her MS. Diagnosed with the disease years ago, Luby has occasional flareups. She can’t walk far and needs a wheelchair to manage longer distances. But she’s not one for regrets—or asking why she got the disease. She chooses to see MS as simply another of life’s challenges, one that has made her a better person. She’s found she can persevere despite her physical limitations, and she takes nothing she’s accomplished for granted. Her personal trainer reports she has more upper-body strength than a lot of other people. And while she may not be able to ski she can go snow tubing with her family. Her next dream vacation might be kayaking in Crete.
She loves the spirit in America, that sense of where there’s a will, there’s a way. From her travels, she knows that it’s not the same in some other parts of the world, especially for those with physical disabilities. In the more traditional Muslim societies, she says, organizations or accommodations for the handicapped don’t exist. In America, though, it is almost taken for granted that handicapped people should be out and about and living a full life. For what Luby calls “our just-do-it culture,” Luby is grateful.
As strange as it may seem, MS has given Luby a deep sense of thankfulness for what she has: a loving husband, two sons, and now the surprise gift of an infant daughter, named Laila. “I really count my blessings. This fate of mine has made me more aware of what I have and all that I should be grateful for, thanks be to God.”
13
FAY: A GOOD HEART IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN RELIGIOUS RULES
LIKE A TYPICAL TEENAGE GIRL of the 1960s, Farrukh “Fay” Peshi-mam loved the Beatles and miniskirts. Once she snuck into her home a pair of red-and-black stretch pants—all the rage at the time, but taboo in her Muslim community in Bombay, India. Relatives clucked at her wildness but she didn’t care. She knew she was a good Muslim.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 9