The Face Behind the Veil

by Donna Gehrke-White

  Her husband exploded at her, even though she insists he had given permission for her to have the little party.

  “He said I was a burden to my family,” Cassy remembers. “If it wasn’t for him taking pity on me, I would be a high school dropout. I probably wouldn’t go to college if it wasn’t for him.”

  She cried as she had many times before. She even considered killing herself, but no more, and not now. She was ready to leave.

  She telephoned and e-mailed her family back in South Dakota: She had had enough and wanted to come home.

  Cassy’s stepfather phoned her husband, and very casually cajoled him into letting her go home for seven weeks.

  Cassy was eighteen.

  She felt dispirited as she and her baby boarded the plane to the United States. But it only took a week home for Cassy to feel stronger, even confident.

  “After the first week,” she says, “I e-mailed him to say I’m not coming back. I want a divorce. I can’t handle the pressure.”

  He then promptly called her to warn that her family was turning her against him and had even “imprisoned” her.

  Cassy ignored that. Within three weeks she got a job on the night shift helping make electronics. She moved to her own apartment after a month and a half of her return to the United States. Later she took another job—with day hours—to please her Egyptian in-laws who criticized her for working nights. She tried to cooperate with her in-laws who by then had hired an attorney so they could see their granddaughter in the United States. Soon after, her husband filed for custody of their daughter, and that case was heard first before her own divorce was decided.

  The judge never met her estranged husband. Instead, his testimony was given as part of a telephone conference call. Ultimately the judge decided that the father could better care for his daughter because he was better educated and had family nearby.

  Cassy’s mother, in fact, found out about the judge’s decision before her daughter did. Cassy’s attorney had mailed the judge’s written notice to her mother’s home. She read it to her daughter over the phone.

  “I just started crying,” Cassy says. “I didn’t want to hear it…. All of a sudden I heard my daughter coming down the stairs. I felt her hand and her saying, ‘Mommy?’ She had heard me crying. All I could do is grab her and hold her.”

  More action followed: Her husband’s U.S. lawyer petitioned that Cassy not leave the state and that the judge order Cassy to turn over her daughter to the court within days.

  “I admit I thought about running away with her—I was ready to do it,” Cassy says. What stopped her was the idea of breaking the law. She didn’t want her marital problems to turn her into a criminal fugitive. Instead she decided she wanted to fight within the system to get her daughter back permanently.

  So she geared herself to turn over her crying child. It still hurt. She was determined though. As she told her mother, she had to simply place her trust in God.

  Nearly a year later, however, she is not so sure about God or how she feels about Islam. She doesn’t understand. She did everything she was supposed to, yet she still hasn’t been reunited with her daughter. In the spring of 2005, her ex-husband asked the judge not to require him to fly the toddler back to the United States for the summer visit—at least not until she is six years old. Instead, the ex-husband proposed, in a motion, Cassy should come to Egypt for the visits. The judge agreed, despite Cassy’s argument that she was afraid to return to Egypt.

  The judge also ruled in favor of the ex-husband’s request for child support. Cassy says she is now paying $150 a month. Her ex-husband does allow her to call their daughter every day but only in the morning. Cassy worries that they will have problems communicating in the months ahead. “She says, ‘Hi, Mommy. I love you,’ but otherwise she is barely speaking English.”

  The one bright spot, Cassy adds, is that she met a Muslim convert on the Internet, Eric Payne, a twenty-three-year-old petty officer in the United States Navy. They married and Cassy is now living in Virginia, where he is based. “He has been helping me through my depression,” she says. “I realize that despite everything I have a lot to be grateful for.”

  15

  RAHIMA: FAR FROM HER BUROA—AND HER FAMILY

  RAHIMA MOHAMMADULLHA doesn’t have to wear the dreaded burqa anymore. At one time, in her native Afghanistan, she was confined to the head-to-toe covering. But now she is in America, free to choose what she wants to wear.

  Good-bye, burqa, good-bye, in fact, to any kind of covering. No more scarf, veil, chador, burqa, you name it.

  Nowadays she goes out in public with her glossy black hair on full display, styled in a pageboy.

  However, while she is tasting this essential freedom, something even more precious has been taken away from her in the United States, something not even the Taliban attempted to wrest from her: She is unable to see her two younger sisters and brother. The elder of the four children, she has been excluded from raising them. The older sister is now fifteen, her brother twelve, and the younger sister ten. They are growing up without Rahima. She hasn’t seen them for more than a year.

  “I cry a lot,” she says.

  Rahima, now twenty, and her family were once Afghan refugees who fled, like so many others, to Pakistan to avoid the wars, the Russians, and later the Taliban. They settled in a refugee camp just over the border. Conditions were not good but at least they were together, Rahima says.

  When her mother died in the camps, and the children were orphaned, the United States intervened. Officials decided to fly the four kids to America where they would be able to start over, go to school, and have a better life. In 2002, when Rahima was still a teenager, she and her siblings arrived in, of all places, Michigan, where they were placed with a foster family. Soon a major problem developed: The foster family was Christian.

  Nationwide, this has been a growing issue. Many Muslims have objected to non-Muslims taking in Muslim foster children and not raising them with Islamic principles. A group in New York has pleaded for Muslim families to come forward to become licensed foster families to help Muslim children within the state-run system. In Ohio, Muslim leaders have gone to court to plead that Muslims be given custody of Muslim children, in particular the small children of a Yemeni immigrant who was jailed for being an alleged terrorist. (After his arrest, his American-born wife had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized; the children were placed in foster care.)

  Rahima says she had no one to turn to when their new foster parents insisted on taking her and the other children to church. The children were given Bibles instead of the Quran. They were served pork, which Muslims, like Jews, aren’t allowed to eat. The children were not fed anything remotely like a Quran-approved diet, but to be fair to the foster parents they probably didn’t know there was one to follow.

  Rahima says there were no other Muslims in the neighborhood who could intervene, or for the children to go to for advice.

  She says their social workers never asked them where they wanted to go and they are not sure why they ended up in their overwhelming Christian city when the Detroit area has a large Muslim population.

  All she knows is that her complaints fell on deaf ears. The foster family, in fact, became hostile and kicked her out. They accused her of being difficult and uncooperative—in short, a troublemaker. They kept her sisters and brother, though, and they forbade her from seeing them.

  Rahima ended up with another foster family nearby, but she is still not allowed to visit her siblings. She is in the process of going to court to try to be reunited with them.

  She recently married a fellow Afghan refugee and the couple is making their home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. They enjoy the company of other Afghan refugees and frequently spend weekends with their friends. Rahima is already speaking reasonably good English and wants to learn more. Furthermore, she is already preparing for her own new family: She will be having a baby soon. She and her husband are both excited about the pregnancy
. And if Rahima can convince the court to reunite her with her brother and sisters, she looks forward to eventually moving them to the Washington metro area so they can all be together again. This time they hope to create their own American dream as they see it.

  16

  SHAHIDA: SHE GOES TO MED SCHOOL; HER HUSBAND BECOMES MR. MOM

  IT WAS SHAHIDA SHAKIR’S husband Mohammad who came up with the idea: Here she was in the United States, near Caribbean schools that would admit her to medical school. So why not go for it? Wasn’t that her dream, to become a doctor?

  It was, and she did.

  While Mohammad became Mr. Mom—he and his relatives in Miami taking care of their two small daughters—Shahida set out for medical school at the American University of the Caribbean in Montserrat. It was the realization of a dream she had put on hold since moving from her native Pakistan to the United States. She is now an executive helping run two hospital labs in in Miami Beach.

  “Back in Pakistan, I always wanted to go to medical school,” she reflected. “However, my grades weren’t good enough to get me into medical school there.” Nevertheless, they were good enough for her to study chemistry; eventually she earned a master’s degree from the University of Karachi while still a teenager.

  Mohammad felt he was to blame for his wife not going to med school. “She was destined to get the degree but she decided to forgo it for marriage,” he says. “This was my way of making it up to her. I definitely wanted to get married but I didn’t want to wait five to six years for her to go to medical school in Pakistan.”

  Mohammad, Shahida’s first and only sweetheart, proposed marriage while she was still in her teens. No arranged marriages for them. Shahida thought that an outmoded custom, in which couples would meet each other only on the day they took their marriage vows. (They did, however, follow tradition insofar as Mohammad’s family elders visited her family to ask permission for the two to marry.) Though young, Shahida knew Mohammad was the love of her life. He was fun, and eager to see the world, just like she was. He was also kind, responsible, and hard-working, the sort of man who would both work and study, who would save money so that all his brothers and sisters could come to the United States.

  It was mutual attraction: Mohammad liked how close Shahida was to her own siblings. He also was attracted to her because “she has a very calming personality.” He calls her a “great source of my strength—she complements me. She is a fulfilling element of my life.”

  Both Shahida and Mohammad believed in getting a good education and pursuing careers. Now it seems a matter of course, but more than thirty years ago they were ahead of their time, both in Pakistan and America. Mohammad was the rare man who encouraged his wife to have a career. Indeed, he saw nothing objectionable to working and raising children.

  As kids, they both dreamed of going to the United States. This was at a time when Pakistanis held Americans in high regard, when schools, roads, and hospitals were named after American presidents. (One Pakistani highway, for example, was named after former president Eisenhower.)

  So Shahida accepted Mohammad’s marriage proposal. They married in Pakistan while he was on break from his studies in the United States. Then he whisked her to America.

  Because during that era, the 1970s, young people in the U.S. were indulging a fashion for Eastern foods, faith, and clothes, Shahida fit right in, with her brightly colored silken tunics and pants. She wound her long, jet-black hair into a ponytail and it swung from side to side as she walked. She looked like any other young American woman. Having not worn a Muslim head covering in Pakistan, she didn’t wear one here, either. She believed that as long as she was wearing long, loose-fitting clothes she was faithfully following the Quran’s dictates for modesty. The Shakirs came of age at a time when many educated Muslims had grown away from the traditional ways. Like their Jewish and Christian counterparts, they thought they could follow their faith without necessarily following ancient ways. Not until years later did great numbers of Christians, Jews, and Muslims return to literal readings of their scriptures. Decades later, Shahida’s daughter, born and raised in the United States, would be part of a new generation that chose to return to some kind of head covering.

  Eventually, the Shakirs settled in Miami where Mohammad had been studying. As a recent immigrant with a green card, he was required to report to the draft board and was convinced by recruiters to join the armor division of the U.S. Army. The Vietnam War was winding down, and the Shakirs, who had come from halfway across the world, suddenly found themselves engulfed in a controversial conflict they had little understanding of. Nevertheless, a patriotic Mohammad felt duty-bound to serve in his new country’s armed forces. “I take that stuff seriously,” he says. He showed up for basic training and his new wife went to stay with relatives in Milwaukee. She still remembers a reunion in the Chicago train station when he got a furlough, running to each other on the platform. “It was,” she said, “like the movies.”

  Mohammad might have been ordered to Vietnam after basic training, but fate intervened. During training, he fell from a height of eight to nine feet, landing on his back. Army doctors took a barrage of tests and discovered he had been born with a curved spine—he shouldn’t have been serving in the military at all. He was honorably discharged.

  The Shakirs returned to Miami where Mohammad could work full-time and go to what was then called Miami-Dade Community College. He signed his wife up for classes so she could practice the English she had learned in Pakistan. “I also learned how to drive,” she adds, laughing. “I hated it but I learned.”

  When she grew more self-assured and her English was more polished, Shahida ventured out to look for jobs. Her English still wasn’t proficient enough to understand complicated scientific exams, and she flunked her first test to become a lab technician. “I failed royally because I had no idea about multiple choice questions.” But she managed to get hired as an assistant in a small mom-and-pop lab, became more comfortable with test-taking, and passed the licensing test the second time around. Soon she got a better-paying job at a bigger company.

  By then she and Mohammad had had two daughters, Sofia and Sadia—about five and four—born only fourteen months apart.

  This was when Mohammad encouraged her to apply to the American University of the Caribbean in Montserrat—and she was accepted. Mohammad’s sister and brothers had since arrived in Miami and they readily agreed to watch the little girls while Shahida went to the Caribbean university during the fall and spring semesters.

  After she graduated, Shahida was ready to apply for internships but the bad news hit like a sledgehammer: The U.S. government announced it was cracking down on accepting the degrees of med school graduates who had studied in the Caribbean. A scandal had broken out. Some schools were selling diplomas to those who hadn’t earned them. Despite all her hard work, Shahida found her graduation didn’t qualify her to be licensed as a medical doctor.

  Bitterly disappointed, Shahida blamed herself. Now she thinks she shouldn’t have been so timid and ought to have fought harder for her diploma to be recognized. Others from her university did, and are now practicing medicine in the United States. (Indeed, the policy was later reversed and most of her classmates became doctors.) She went back as a lab technician, eventually going to Mount Sinai Medical Center where she began to earn a steady stream of promotions.

  But like every working mother she had to juggle, particularly since she and her husband worked to help their brothers and sisters emigrating to the United States. At one point, while she was working two lab jobs, Sofia, her elder daughter, asked hesitantly, with a woebegone expression, “Mom, do you have time for me?” That was it. Shahida quit one job and took a graveyard shift at the other so she could come home in time to take her daughters to school and then sleep before they returned home. On this schedule, she could spend hours with them before they went to bed and she to work. “I did that for years,” she said.

  Her medical training came in handy at
Mount Sinai where she was put in charge of the lab of its recently acquired Miami Heart Institute and Medical Center. She was then given additional responsibilities to direct Mount Sinai’s lab processing center. “It was a mess and they said if anyone could take care of it, it was me.” She is now in charge of more than sixty lab technicians and other workers.

  “I feel a real sense of accomplishment,” she says.

  Nowadays, Shahida’s daughters are grown up and thriving. Sofia works for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office; Sadia just graduated from law school in Michigan, where her husband, a doctor, went to medical school. They have a daughter, Hanan, now a toddler and Shahida’s first grandchild.

  Sadia is causing her mother to rethink her ideas about the hijab. Sadia has taken to wearing a head covering, as do many women in Michigan’s large Muslim population. She has also adopted the traditional Pakistani woman’s long robe or long tunic and pants. Shahida notices how her daughter has become more spiritual, with more peace of mind, by going back to traditional dress. Someday, she says wistfully, she may do that, too.

  For now, she admits, she has such a busy life that she cannot always pray the required five times a day. Especially at work, she finds it hard to accommodate Islam’s requirements for prayer. Nor does she regularly go to mosque, because Islam has never required women to do that. All the same, she does believe in following her faith, in reading and quoting the Quran. She tries to lead a good life and be good to other people.

  While she is grateful for her life in America, she does have a tough time explaining U.S. foreign policy to her family back in Pakistan. For the first time they see the United States as hostile to Islam. They don’t understand why the United States invaded Iraq and they mourn the dead there, both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. “That doesn’t get on the news in the United States—the number of Iraqis killed,” Shahida says. She and Mohammad try to explain to others that the United States’ policy on Iraq doesn’t reflect the kindness of the American people. Indeed, Shahida loves the United States because of the people. She loves how orderly things are, how people follow rules, and that Americans generally treat each other as equals and with respect. She has seen that civility erode over the years but to her mind America is still the best place for friendly, respectful people.