Over the years, she has seen her family take root here. Her daughters went to public school and absorbed the open culture. “My daughters are Americans,” she says. So, she adds, are she and Mohammad. Like other good Americans, she tries to reach out and help others. She recently took in Maria (see chapter 11) who had been abused by her husband, making sure she ate well, took her medicine and regained her mental health.
Mohammad, currently the executive director of the Miami-Dade County Council of Asian-American Affairs, is helping set up a group of volunteers in Miami to help Middle Eastern and Asian women who have been abused or abandoned by their husbands since their arrival in the United States. It is more of a problem than he realized, he says. He is grateful that his wife helped Maria and tried to turn her life around. Not every woman would have been so generous, he says. Shahida could have easily excused herself because of her heavy workload.
Shahida says she is merely following both the Islamic and American way of helping others. “That’s what we are called to do.”
17
SABRINA: A MUSLIM MOM ON THE RUN
SABRINA HOSSAIN WALKS BAREHEADED into her mosque in Virginia, hugging her friends. She’s at ease, comfortable at her place of worship. Here there is not any sort of “cloth war.” Many of her friends at the mosque do wear some sort of covering or veil over their hair, but many others don’t. And that choice is acceptable at this mosque.
The hijab, Sabrina points out, is “not something that shows my faith as a practicing Muslim. I wear the hijab when I pray. That’s mandatory. But at other times, I go without. Islam requires both men and women to dress modestly at all times—and I can comply with that without the hijab.”
She has an ally in her husband, Mukit, who also does not see the need for his wife to cover her head all the time. He, like others, says it is not mandated by the Quran and that, more to the point, it is largely a cultural custom, practiced mainly in the Middle East. Many women in his native Bangladesh did not wear them, he adds.
Sabrina is twenty-five. Her family is also originally from Bangladesh and she did not grow up with the majority of women wearing the veil.
“No one covered, except my grandmothers,” she says.
Not that she thinks every Muslim woman must go bareheaded like she does. Each woman should have the choice according to her own conviction. Islam allows it, and America thankfully does as well, she says.
“I admire women who don the hijab. They have to face a lot of prejudices. But they wear it based on their interpretation of our religious laws. I don’t see the need for hijab for myself now. In the future, if I do, I’ll wear it.”
Sabrina was born in Iraq but with a father who is a petroleum engineer, Sabrina grew up in the countries where he worked, Kuwait, Canada, Bangladesh (mostly for long vacations), and the United States. She is used to seeing women wearing some sort of veil, particularly in Kuwait.
Her father was stuck in Kuwait for months when Iraq first invaded Kuwait during the first Gulf War—a scud missile burst into flames near where he was working. Sabrina and the rest of the family were vacationing in Bangladesh at the time the war broke out and spent an anxious month waiting for his safe exit out. Today he is retired in Canada, amid the mountains of Calgary.
Sabrina lives in Virginia where her husband works. She is thankful that she is now in the United States, which feels like home to her.
She is home schooling her oldest daughter, Maya, age five. Her mosque has a home schooling group where other parents can get together and share ideas. Sabrina says she has learned a lot from them. At home, she says, she can accelerate her daughter’s learning. “Maya is a gifted student,” she says.
Like other home-schooling moms, though, Sabrina can get tired from her hectic schedule. She also cares for her younger daughter, Hana, who is two and a half years old.
“It’s a lot of work,” she admits, “but anything good takes hard work. Mainly it is a test of my patience. If I do it the right way, it will benefit my children.”
She wants her two daughters raised in a religious community and likes her mosque because it is family oriented with a wide range of children’s programs. Her daughters thrive in the play groups and classes. Her older daughter has begun learning some Arabic and about the Muslim culture.
“I want her to be well-rounded,” she asserts. “She is a Muslim in this country. She has to be proud of what she is.”
The girls are also growing up with lots of sports. Her older daughter already has run the field as a soccer player, thrown balls as a softball player, and will soon start ice-skating and karate lessons.
All this emphasis on education and sports—from the mosque to the soccer fields—means Sabrina is driving a lot.
“I live in the car,” she jokes.
That’s okay with Sabrina. She wants her daughters to get off to a good start. Later, Sabrina will think of a career for herself.
PART III
The Converts
Once Islam was for immigrants or black nationalists. Not any longer. More whites, Hispanics, and Asians are visiting a neighborhood mosque—and staying. Many are women. In fact, some mosques are now reporting most of their “reverts” are white women, according to University of Kentucky associate professor Ihsan Bagby.
The new Muslimah interviewed for the book say they became Muslims by choice, not because they married into the faith. Many were attracted to Islam because it promotes a strong family. Some say their new faith strengthened them to endure difficult lives. Many were also attracted to Islam because it promotes education. Muslimah Converts tend to be educated, with at least some college.
Many of the converting women reflect Islam’s diversity in America. Photographer Zulayka Y. “Zuly” Martinez says in chapter 26 that there are an increasing number of Tex-Mex Muslimah. When she first converted, she says she was one of the few Muslim Latinas in the Houston area. She admits to being a bit lonely. She felt the immigrant-born Muslimah were standoffish. That all changed with a rush of new Hispanic converts. Zuly and other “veterans” provide classes and social activities to the newly arrived. Now Zuly feels her mosque is a lot more welcoming.
Zuly and other Converts say in interviews that they had trouble understanding their families’ faiths, especially Christianity and its Holy Trinity. Islam makes more sense to them. African American converts to Islam say they had a problem with an American-flavored Christianity that was too linked with the country’s past racism. Miami’s Patricia Salahuddin, who grew up in the then-segregated Mississippi, says that she saw Christianity as part of the South’s problem, with white ministers preaching in favor of Jim Crow laws. Like other African Americans, Patricia became part of the Black Muslim movement in the 1970s. Researcher Bagby says that conversions of African Americans to Islam “peaked in the 1970s, declined in the 1980s, and rebounded in the 1990s.”
It was not only African Americans who had problems with what they viewed as a racist Christianity. Yuko Davis, a Japanese American now living in the suburban Phoenix area, says that she turned away from her Louisiana fundamentalist Christian upbringing when her church stopped picking up black children to bring to Sunday services. She says she wanted a faith that was more accepting of all.
Other Converts talked of how Islam is liberating to them as women. This is puzzling to many Americans. Haven’t they seen on TV that Islam oppresses women around the world?
In fact, many Muslimah newcomers admit that the religion has been used to discriminate against their gender. But, they say, that is more a reflection of a predominantly Muslim country’s cultural practices rather than Islamic law. They point out, for example, that Saudi Arabia dictates women’s dress while Jordan doesn’t.
Thus, the new Muslimah look to a time in the past when Islam was a leader in promoting women’s rights. “The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart,” religious scholar Karen Armstrong writes in her book Islam: A Short History. “The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and
divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status.”
A few “reverts” have become disillusioned with the underground polygamy that they say goes on in the United States. Just weeks after her Islamic marriage, Juwayrich says that she discovered her new husband already had a wife. Juwayrich divorced him. She has since discovered she is not the only woman to be duped. Still, Juwayrich does not blame Islam but rather opportunistic men. She remains a devout Muslim.
Most Converts stay, too, because they have found Islam enriches their lives. “I had been searching for the right religion since I was very young,” says one recent Convert. She found it in Islam. “There is,” she adds, “something different and something special about Islam.”
In the following chapters you’ll read about ten women’s spiritual journeys to Islam.
18
CATHY’S CONVERSION: A MINIVAN MOM TURNS TO ISLAM
CATHY DRAKE COULD BE the ideal mother as envisioned by the Republican Party or an evangelical megachurch. She’s a college-educated stay-at-home mom in one of America’s fastest-growing exurbias, in northern Virginia—a solid red county in a solid red state. She home-schools all three of her kids and wants them to grow up with religion. And, yes, she drives a minivan.
Cathy is also one of Islam’s newest converts, becoming a Muslim three years after 9/11. But even after the terrorist attacks—and in spite of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—Cathy was undeterred from exploring Islam. She decided it was best for her three children although her eldest, at age ten, is none too thrilled about becoming a Muslim.
“Kids don’t like change,” Cathy says. “Kids like to do the same things. And my son didn’t know any Muslims.”
But Cathy thinks he will come around just like she has.
“I had always been interested in Islam,” she says. “I feel very comfortable with it.”
It goes without saying that she finds Islam’s emphasis on the family very reassuring. She also likes her suburban mosque, which like many churches has a plethora of programs for families. There’s a home-schooling chapter that meets at the mosque, whose members help each other out. There’s also a Daisy troop for her younger daughter. And, of course, there are classes in Islam for both adults and children.
“It’s a very welcoming community. I can’t enter without being greeted by half a dozen people.”
Cathy grew up in a nonreligious Christian family that never went to church. She didn’t want her children to grow up like she did. (Her husband is not keen about organized religion, but tolerates that Cathy and the children go to religious services.) At first, Cathy picked Catholicism because it had been the religion of some members of her extended family.
“It was the faith I was most familiar with.”
She and her family began going to Mass. As families were expected to sit together while the priest gave his homily, it could be hard on Cathy: The church had no nursery for the children. Cathy found it hard to listen and manage her small children. She also felt a bit uncomfortable because the congregation didn’t seem very friendly. She and her kids could go to church and not be greeted once by name. “I don’t think people even knew my name,” she says.
Then she hit a crisis. When her oldest son was taking first reconciliation and communion classes, Cathy discovered she didn’t agree with a good deal of what was being taught in his classes. Take the idea that Catholics must go to confession to tell the priest their sins. “I was having difficulty with that,” she admits. “I always thought you talked to God yourself.”
She realized that she was becoming one of those “pick and choose” Catholics who ignored some of the Church’s doctrines and followed others.
She also was dismayed by the Church’s nationwide sexual abuse scandal. She was horrified that hundreds of priests had used their position to sexually abuse children. But she was more outraged over how the hierarchy had tried to first hide and then downplay the scandal. In her opinion, the Church should have responded openly and immediately.
Not that Islam doesn’t have its problems, too, she is quick to add. It comes with its own “cultural baggage,” some countries denying equality to women, some mosques still separating the sexes so husbands and wives and their children can’t sit together. These things give Cathy pause. She says she can live with the segregation of the sexes because it is in the Quran, but she objects to the social inequality of women because that is not in the holy book. “People think this is Islam and it is not.” Her mosque, she is happy to declare, treats men and women equally.
It was for that very reason that Cathy deliberately picked her mosque, which allows women to pray in the main room, not in a tiny basement room or balcony. The mosque also allows both sexes to enter through the main door, unlike others that relegate women to the back or side door. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that,” she says.
Certain traditional Muslim customs she has taken to quite easily. She now wears a scarf to cover her hair. “I want to identify myself as a Muslim to the non-Muslim world,” she says.
She has noticed a change in how people treat her, especially strangers. “Sometimes I can sense someone staring,” she says, “and sure enough, when I turn around, someone is staring at me.” Some are hostile, she says. “But for the most part people are pretty friendly”—albeit curious. She also feels that people are more watchful, waiting to see her reaction before they enter a conversation or even sit next to her. Then, she says, invariably they relax when Cathy flashes them a smile. “They see that I am just like anyone else.”
Cathy says she can handle that curiosity. It’s worth it to be part of a faith-based community she believes in and her family can be part of, she adds. “I don’t want my children growing up without a faith.”
19
SAMIRAH: THE HIGH COSTS OF BECOMING A MUSLIM
SAMIRAH BINT JACKIE DEAN TODD has no way of knowing where her daughter is. Her ex-husband doesn’t call her and their telephone number in Florida has been disconnected. Her voice almost breaks as she talks about how it has been fifteen months since she last spoke to one of her two daughters. She would be almost ten years old by now. Maybe she’s still in Florida. Or maybe she is back in Maine.
Samirah tries to keep calm: She has been warned that she may have multiple sclerosis and needs to avoid stress in her life to help prevent an attack.
Ironically, it is her Islamic faith that keeps the thirty-something Samirah on an even keel—the very religion with whose marriage practices a judge disagreed, naming it one of the reasons he awarded custody of Samirah’s younger daughter to her ex-husband. And it is the same faith that Samirah’s older daughter, then thirteen, objected to, causing her to ask to live with her grandmother.
Samirah can’t understand the objections to Islam: It has changed her, she says, for the better. “I have noticed how my belief in Islam has fortified me with patience and faith,” she says. “I do not believe I could handle the trials I have gone through without my faith. Islam has changed me as a individual.”
She lives in New Jersey where there is an active Islamic community in Newark and a smaller one in Camden. “I usually go to the community in nearby Philadelphia,” she says. “It is more established there and closer to my home than the one in Newark.”
Samirah started looking at Islam about four years ago. “I was at a low point in my life and started searching for ways to better myself. I always have had a hard time accepting Christianity. But when I started studying Islam I found answers to my questions and was amazed that Islam taught what I had always believed.”
She became a Muslim on July 5, 2001, a mere two months and six days before 9/11. She was thirty-three and recovering from a broken back. While in the process of moving, she was carrying boxes and lost her balance on a flight of stairs, fell and broke her back. Doctors then became concerned that she might have MS, as loss of balance is one of its symptoms.
Samirah was grateful that she had her newfound Islamic faith to help her get through the ord
eal.
“You can’t go through things without faith,” she says, and she has gone through a lot.
“I am Native American from the Cherokee nation. I come from a broken home with an absent father.
“When my parents were married we traveled. My father was in the Air Force,” she says. “I spent time overseas as a child and have lived in various places.”
The family ended up being in the military too, so to speak. Samirah remembers their life as being as regimented as if they too were serving a tour of duty. Everything was controlled. She has not seen her father since she was eleven.
As she puts it, “I had a troubled childhood and an even more troubled adult life.” She was only twenty when she had her first daughter, though she says she was more mature when she had her second at age twenty-seven.
Samirah has had trouble disciplining her older daughter who would fight with other children. Samirah says she once whipped her daughter after she had gotten into some fights which left marks on her little body. Someone at her daughter’s school noticed and asked about them; her daughter explained that her mother had hit her. That was true, except that Samirah says she hadn’t caused the bruises. Nevertheless, a child abuse complaint was filed. Samirah says this was the only time this happened. “Otherwise, I have a clean record,” she says.
She herself was the victim of domestic violence. Her jaw was broken during one attack, she says.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 12