The Face Behind the Veil

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The Face Behind the Veil Page 15

by Donna Gehrke-White


  “It seemed to me that he had been engineering a way to have two wives when he could not afford to do so,” Juwayriah says drily.

  She left him.

  Juwayriah, now fifty-five years old, married again, and she says, “Even though there may be problems from time to time, both my husband and I fear Allah and let that be a guide for our marriage.”

  She met her new husband on the Internet in one of the Islamic marital websites. Less naive now, she checked his references. They were able to vouch for him and his character. She married him. She says she has high hopes and prays to Allah to guide her and her husband.

  Despite her two bad experiences with marriage, Juwayriah is glad she came to Islam. Looking back, she sees her experiences in marriage as a result of bad choices (as she says, “I own them!”) and naiveté.

  “However, the most important part of it is that it is all part of Allah’s plan for me,” she says. “I was to learn something from each experience that would help me be a better Muslimah.

  “I was not born into Islam in the conventional sense,” she adds. “As Muslims, we believe that everyone is born a Muslim and that their parents make them some other religion. To that end, my mother was Catholic and my father was Jewish. My father was the first to intermarry in his family, as my mother was in hers. Being politically correct, or in an attempt to blend together, we celebrated the holy days of both religions. We had Hanukkah and we had Christmas. We had Easter and we had Passover. I went to church and occasionally to synagogue.

  “When I was around eleven years old, my parents divorced. My mother returned to her hometown and she put us into a Catholic school. We were baptized, were confirmed, made confession and accepted Holy Communion all in the first year there. It was an adjustment, but the Catholic Church gave me some comfort. I liked the beautiful church and its rituals. I was a child in a great deal of emotional pain.”

  But after her teenage years, when she could make her own decisions, she returned to Judaism.

  “Despite my love for the Catholic Church, I never could understand the concept that Jesus was ‘God’ or the ‘Son’ of God,” she says. “Returning to Judaism also emotionally reconnected me with my Jewish family.”

  Judaism, like Islam, can be culture-bound; both are more total ways of life, she points out. Both sides of her family were from Eastern Europe, but her Jewish family was more tied to Eastern Europe and its values, customs, and history. “Maybe World War II and the Holocaust also had something to do with it—that Judiasm is intertwined with one’s identity as a person,” she says.

  For her, becoming a Muslim unifies her background: Islam draws from the richness of both Judaism and Christianity, she says.

  “Actually, Jews and Arabs are the same people. We are both from the Prophet Ibrahim—the Arabs from the line of his son, Ismael; the Jews from the line of his son, Isaac. The role of Jesus clearly connects the three faiths as well. He was a Prophet of Allah, sent to the Jewish people to guide them back to the straight path.”

  While Islam has also given Juwayriah peace and firm grounding, it has allowed her to see, for example, how she can live simply but fully. “In America,” she says, “we have so many wants and so few real needs.”

  Islam has also helped her cope with her past. She comes from a tough childhood that might have overwhelmed most people. Her mother died an alcoholic; her father was a criminal and drug user who married several times. Amid such turmoil, Juwayriah was vulnerable. She claims to have been repeatedly molested by an uncle and four cousins. Scared and trusting no one, she told no one. Her mother “didn’t catch on,” she says. But then, Juwayriah adds, “no one wanted to know.”

  She began to abuse drugs around age nineteen. Her drug of choice: heroin. She ended up on the streets, but she didn’t care. She supported herself and her addiction through prostitution. She says she had numerous negative experiences in the streets, including being raped. She finally got clean and at age thirty-three started a new life.

  “What made me get clean? I was sick of going to jail,” she says. “And after numerous overdoses, I was afraid I was going to die. I hit bottom, by the grace of God.”

  A twelve-step program and faith in a higher power helped her recover. “I’ve been clean for twenty-two years,” she says proudly. She came to Islam when she was about fourteen years clean, re-establishing her life working full-time while attending college part-time to earn her bachelor’s degree in psychology. She is now a substance-abuse counselor.

  Juwayriah remains a contented woman proud of her faith and continually learning more about it—and from it.

  “Everything is a test and a lesson from Allah,” she concludes. “There are no mistakes in Islam. Allah is the best of planners.”

  24

  PATRICIA: AN

  EXTRAORDINARY TEACHER CHANGED BY ISLAM

  PATRICIA SALAHUDDIN LIFTS A FINGER to her lips. Shhh. Her high schoolers, loud and boisterous in the hallway, become silent as she leads them into her darkened Miami classroom. Two small lanterns are the only light. Soft rhythmic music plays in the background. The kids grope their way to their desks and sit down, snickering nervously. This is not their usual English class. They tend to be chatty but the strangeness has left most of them quiet. They stare up expectantly at Patricia.

  She smiles. She is about to give them a breathing lesson: Breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly. Now the class becomes pin-drop quiet as they follow her instructions.

  “Welcome to meditation,” she announces.

  Now calmer, more tranquil, they’re ready to write in their journals and still later to give reports.

  They’re used to such creative approaches: Patricia is a National Board–certified teacher who is on her way to earning a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at Florida International University. Now teaching at one of Miami’s well-regarded magnet high schools, the Design and Architecture High School in the heart of the city’s design district, Patricia is trying to pass on her expertise to the growing number of teachers in Muslim schools throughout South Florida. As a leader in the Muslim Teachers Association, she has helped assemble a conference called “Educating the Muslim Child: Ingredients for Success.”

  Volunteering to help improve private Muslim schools justifies the grueling schedule of teaching Patricia has assumed while working on her doctorate.

  “During the first semester I was asking myself: What am I doing here? Why am I doing this? The reason is, I have always wanted to help Muslim teachers. This was God’s way for me to spread knowledge.”

  Then she laughs. “I think I am crazy sometimes. I’m suffering with doing all this course work. But I think God wanted me to do this. And God is Number One in my life. I attribute everything in my life to Him—in all aspects of life. I know I have choices and I pray that I have His guidance to make those choices.”

  And, she says, she obeys the command: Make the Quran the light of your path.

  This degree of religious conviction might make many nervous but Patricia is sincere as she speaks it. She is from the Bible Belt South and is used to piety as a part of everyday life. Her father, after all, is a Baptist preacher, now age seventy-nine and retired. She didn’t grow up with him; she lived with her mother and stepfather on a farm they owned in Mississippi. They were active church-goers, and so Patricia went, too.

  She grew up at the tail-end of the South’s segregation and Jim Crow laws. She knows she was lucky. Her family was relatively prosperous. In addition to the farm, her mother had her own business. “I worked in our fields—I worked hard—but we owned the land. That was a big difference.”

  Because of her family’s relative financial comfort she says she was largely sheltered from the worst of segregation, and did not encounter many white people at all while she was growing up. A white man did own land next to their farm, and they would see him in his pickup, but they did not wave to each other or even acknowledge each other’s existence. This was the South: Black and white people went their separa
te ways.

  Patricia went to all segregated schools. Today she is glad: Some of her friends volunteered to help integrate the whites-only high school, and as a result they endured much abuse, from slurs to fights.

  “When I think of the difficulties of my classmates who went to the integrated high school, I don’t know if I could have stuck it out. I might have quit school.”

  After she graduated from high school, she went to Mississippi State University, which had already been integrated for a few years. There, she began searching for spiritual answers. She was eighteen.

  “Maybe I was in my rebellious years. I prefer to see it as the age of awareness.”

  The truth was that Patricia was not comfortable with Christianity. Segregation in the pious South was the worst on Sunday mornings. There were white churches and there were black churches, and no one dared cross from one to the other, even though they prayed to the same God. There was no need to put up a sign, “Whites only” or “For the Colored.” People knew.

  To Patricia, this made no sense. Christianity seemed to be part of the South’s problem.

  “I saw religion participating in segregation. To me, that is not religion. I did not want to practice that.”

  Her friends were searching, too, for a new faith, and in 1969 they encouraged her to attend a Nation of Islam meeting. The speaker: a young Louis Farrakhan.

  “He talked of a positive self-identity for the black person. I was very impressed with his message of self-help—that God has given us everything we need, that the black man did not have to go pleading for help to the white people. I was so impressed with the language, the self-reliant attitude, I started attending the meetings.”

  Patricia had to tell her Christian parents, and she was surprised how receptive they were, even her preacher father. (Patricia’s mother warned him in advance.) Today he still goes to his Baptist church and she goes to her mosque.

  While still in college at Mississippi State, Patricia met another student who also was interested in the Nation of Islam. They met, of all places, in a Chicago factory, where they both had taken summer jobs to pay for college. Patricia was staying with relatives in Chicago. The son of Panamanian immigrants, he was from Chicago, the home base of the Nation of Islam, and was studying at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He would share his books with her, heavy-duty stuff like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. They fell in love and married in 1971, the same year Patricia graduated from Mississippi. They decided to change their last name to Salahuddin, which in Arabic means “one who protects the faith,” or “one who looks out for the good and right.” (Patricia decided to keep her first name but chose Zahirah as a new middle name.) She moved up to Carbondale to be with her new husband while he finished school. At one point he worked in the nearby coal mines because, as Patricia explains, “That’s where the money was.”

  When he graduated, they opted to settle in Mississippi. Things had changed for the better. By then Mississippi had improved its race relations and was more hospitable to African Americans. “I wanted to go back to Mississippi because my family was there. I had been in Chicago and couldn’t stand the cold.”

  Soon after relocating, they had two young babies. (They would go on to have five children in six years.) Patricia went to work in a childcare center, while her husband started his own business and eventually earned a master’s degree from Mississippi State.

  In 1983 they moved again. This time, it was his idea. He was losing the Spanish he had grown up with, and as few people spoke Spanish in Mississippi, he wanted to go to Miami, where many people were Hispanic. He landed a good job with the county government. Today, he is deputy director of the Miami Port Authority.

  They go to a mosque in inner-city Miami that is predominantly African American but not affiliated with the Nation of Islam. Like many other African Americans today they have moved away from the Nation of Islam toward the practice of a more orthodox Islam. They welcome anyone to their mosque, and it attracts some immigrants for the customary Friday prayer services, but it is primarily African Americans who gather on Sunday for classes and other mosque activities. The Sunday habit of going to church is entrenched in African-American culture, Patricia observes with a chuckle.

  She faithfully goes both days. Islam has been a comfort to her.

  She’s made lifelong friends at the mosque; she has learned from the Quran; and her five daily prayers replenish her. Even the hijab, which she feels she is required to wear, is not a problem. She is a stylish woman who wears beautifully patterned scarves that cover her hair and match her clothes. As seen on one winter day, she is particularly striking, dressed in a smartly tailored brown pantsuit with matching heels and a lighter brown patterned scarf.

  Faith is not a burden, she adds, but a reward.

  “I know it helps,” she says. “Through God’s help I have been able to do a lot.”

  She ticks off her accomplishments: She was able to raise five children close together and still work. She was able to take in her mother after she developed Alzheimer’s disease and care for her until she passed away. She was able to focus on her passion—teaching—while working on her doctorate and keeping up volunteer work.

  “God helped me do all of it,” she says. “He put people in my life. It’s been hard, but I would have done a lot less if I hadn’t had God in my life.”

  25

  YUKO YEARNS FOR FAMILY AND FAITH

  THIS WAS THE WAY Japanese American Yuko Davis went to school in rural Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans: Every morning she entered the classroom to sit on the girls’ side of the room. The boys sat on the other. The playground—and playtime—also was segregated, as was lunch. She didn’t have significant conversations with the boys; that was discouraged.

  She wore her skirts long, her blouses buttoned up to the neck. Card playing and dancing were considered sinful. She grew up not collecting rock ‘n’ roll records. (“I did like the Beatles,” she confesses years later.) She didn’t go to movies either, not even G-rated ones. (In Yuko’s graduating class, a classmate was stripped of being named valedictorian after she was caught her senior year leaving a G-rated movie at the local cinema.)

  Such were the rules of the fundamentalist church school Yuko grew up in, and they shaped her childhood. Yuko felt comforted by such structure. To this day she tells of how she automatically accepted the rules in exchange for the order in her life. No rebellion for her.

  “I was a goody two-shoes,” she says candidly. “I only sat in the front of the class. I loved the environment. It was protective.”

  She never missed church on Sunday, contentedly enduring the long hours required for both Sunday school and services. She even accepted the congregation’s pride in being strict. Said one leader to Yuko: “We’re narrow-minded and we’re proud of it.”

  And she agreed with the church’s philosophy that a woman’s first priority was marriage and family. Foreign to her was the notion that a career was a young woman’s goal. Although she did want a professional career, Yuko wanted first to rear happy and successful children, then go to work. Mothers were her role models. Ultimately, she believed success was found in following God.

  She might still be in rural Louisiana today, except that everything changed when the bus rules did.

  “The last straw,” she recalls, “was the bus ministry.”

  Yuko was one of the teen volunteers on the bus that picked up children for Sunday-morning services. One day, she says she was told they would “no longer be picking up any more black children.”

  Yuko couldn’t believe the new rule, but she was assured this was the best for everyone, including the black children who were no longer welcome at the church. “That didn’t feel right. When they said that, it really disturbed me.”

  Although church members told her that segregation was good this didn’t seem like the teachings of Christ. And when she asked questions, she was told, “We have to obey church leadership.” Being the polite gir
l she was, she fell silent.

  But in her mind began whirling a lot of thoughts—rebellious ones. Why, she asked herself, was it the church’s dogma that it was a sin for the races to mix? This meant that one of her mother’s Asian-born friends was going to hell because she had married a black. And the friend’s biracial child was, too, as a product of a so-called sinful union. That made no sense to Yuko.

  “This wasn’t coming from God. These sounded like man-made rules.” She thought so because, as she points out, she and her mother were accepted—although her Japanese-born mother had married a Caucasian. It didn’t seem to bother the church that Yuko was biracial. “That’s different,” church members reassured her. “You’re one of us.” Yet Yuko was aware of her darker skin, her “otherness.”

  Her father, a Louisiana farm boy, had been a GI stationed in Japan where he met Yuko’s mother and married her, and where Yuko was born. When Yuko was about a year old, her father finished up his Japanese tour and, discharged from the military, he brought his young family back home to Louisiana. Yuko and her mother quickly absorbed the American ways they encountered. Yuko’s Buddhist mother went to her husband’s Baptist church. They were a close family and Yuko might still be a Baptist today, were it not that her father died young and Yuko’s mother, seeking refuge, started going to the stricter fundamentalist church whose members seemed so open and welcoming. She enrolled Yuko in its school.

  Yuko and her mother were always told how welcome they were in their church, despite their obvious Asian looks. Yuko was always told not to worry about her heritage: The church didn’t consider her Asian ancestry a “minority.” But Yuko began feeling like an outsider after the black children were excluded. She still marvels how church members never could understand why she was upset at the exclusion.

 

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