An attorney for the grandfather later told an Associated Press reporter that he and his wife were not biased against Muslims but, rather, “concerned” about the child being taken to Egypt because his mother “had been somewhat inconsistent in her behavior.”
At first, the court agreed with the grandfather and gave temporary custody to him and his wife, leaving the young Muslim mother without her son.
“She was devastated,” Anisah remembers. “It destroyed her sense of justice in America, that we have freedom of religion. Nobody would ever think to remove children for what their parents wore for their religion.”
But the judge ultimately sided with the young mother, ordering the little boy returned to her thirty days later. The woman was able to rejoin her husband in Egypt with her son, where they now live.
As director of Human Interactions for Religious Understandings, Anisah helped that woman free of charge, just as she does other people needing her help. She’s also on the board of a Minneapolis-based nonprofit group, Sisters Need a Place, that helps Muslim women and their families throughout the Midwest who face domestic abuse or problems with housing, employment, transportation, child custody, and divorce.
She also lectures about Islam, including at colleges. Because of her conversion to Islam, many think she has conservative views and are surprised when she turns out to be progressive. On the subject of gay rights, she asks college students, “Why is that an issue?” When some say it is a sin, Anisah then asks the students to raise their hands if they are living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, or know a friend who is. Invariably, most raise their hands, and Anisah points out they are sinning, too. “I have to say I have a strong sense of justice,” Anisah admits. “I also have a big mouth. I can’t keep quiet when I see injustice. I get myself in trouble sometimes. But that’s just the way I am. I think God put me on earth to be a squeaking wheel.”
Then, she is used to fighting what most take for granted.
“I learned early in life to struggle for what I wanted, being born with a severe speech impediment and respiratory infection that, at the time, was expected to end my life in infancy,” she writes on one of her many websites. She survived, but “throughout my childhood I battled yearly bouts of respiratory infections and chronic illnesses, which interfered with my schooling.” Anisah says she also had to overcome child abuse and the horror of seeing her mother beaten.
By her mid-twenties she was on her own, struggling after she ended her first marriage. Her first husband, who had served in Vietnam, had violent flashbacks that could be dangerous to others. Then, just as her divorce was to be finalized, she discovered she was pregnant.
As she remembers: “Everyone was trying to pressure me to have an abortion, since I was a soon-to-be divorced mother with a three-year-old to raise all by myself. I went against the social pressure and gave birth to [Cassy].”
She was now alone in northern Wyoming with two small children to support. Refusing to feel sorry for herself, she went on welfare while attending the local college.
“I dealt with the social marginalization of being on welfare while attending school. We lived in the ultimate state of poverty so as to comply with all the federal regulations that are imposed on welfare families. I tried hard to give my kids a ‘normal’ childhood, by getting involved in hobbies that would allow all of us to be together and have fun. We camped, hiked, participated in historical re-enactments.”
It was while she was attending college in Wyoming that she became interested in Islam.
“I met a foreign-exchange student there—” love talking to people about cultures—who happened to be a Saudi. You can’t separate their religion from their culture. As I was trying to understand his religion, I asked him, “Do you have some sort of Bible you follow?” He took it kindly. He said yes, they have the Quran.” He helped Anisah find a copy in the library and she soon became immersed in it.
The Quran changed her life. She felt she had found her religion.
“Islam is an amazing religion to me. It gives answers about diversity and human rights. It talks about the rights of the homeless versus the rights of the wealthy, the rights of the imprisoned versus those who imprison them. Everyone has rights—and responsibilities. I like that Islam acknowledges that.”
She also was struck that the Quran “is so straightforward and did not seem to have gender bias.” In it, she could find out more information about Mary, the mother of Jesus, than what is in the Bible. “I found that refreshing.”
So Anisah decided to become a Muslim in 1988.
Soon afterward she moved from Wyoming to Portland, Oregon. While driving there with her two small children in their loaded-down car, they passed through a large fire on a mountainside, with flames on both sides of the road, that had erupted in Yellowstone National Park. To her, going through the fire was deeply symbolic.
“I went from being a Christian to coming out at the other side a Muslim. I went through this parched, charred land—what I was leaving behind.”
That included friends who didn’t like that she had converted.
But Anisah persevered, despite her family’s efforts to dissuade her from becoming Muslim. But she ended up starting a family trend: One of her brothers also converted and married a Muslim woman from Singapore.
A year after Anisah became a Muslim, she moved cross-country from Oregon to New York where she thought there would be more Muslims. She settled in Brooklyn near a mosque. It was at a time when Afghan rebels were fighting to overthrow their Soviet invaders. She can remember federal agents trying to recruit young Muslim Americans at the mosque to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. She now finds it bitterly ironic that the same government is accusing some of the same men for being possible terrorists. “They were asked to go,” she stresses. “I witnessed it with my own eyes. To me, it’s hypocritical.”
She eventually moved back West, where she had always felt most at home, and settled in Bushnell in 1990. She’s been there ever since.
Bushnell, after all, has been good for her. There, she met her new husband, Eric, a red-headed former Lutheran who sculpts and welds. They met because of her son, who discovered that Eric’s house had the perfect rooftop on which to slide down on a toboggan during one winter when the snowdrifts were as much as twenty feet high. In remarkably tolerant Bushnell, Anisah’s future husband had no problems with the kids using his roof as a sledding hill. Eric soon met Anisah and became interested in Islam…and her. Bushnell’s population now included one more Muslim. They married in an Islamic ceremony. “In Islam, I don’t lose my birthright when marrying. I kept my own name,” Anisah says. “That is my right.”
To help others, Anisah started a matchmaking service, at the request of many of her friends and family. Even total strangers asked for her help, including Christians who were finding it hard to find mates.
They, says Anisah, “were fed up with the lack of decent places to meet decent life partners.”
Most of those whom Anisah helped were Muslims trying to find spouses in a nation overwhelmingly Christian. Many felt isolated—they didn’t even know there were other Muslims in their Midwestern communities, let alone which ones were looking to marry. “I started the matchmaking service because we are so spread out. Because Muslim men and women don’t socialize together the single men didn’t know if a single woman was available.” Thus began her Internet service, www.angelfire.com/nd/MuslimMatrimonials.com.
Her matchmaking became international when Muslims throughout the world wrote in, asking to be considered. “We do it for free. It’s not a paid service. Bringing couples together to start a family is not something I would want to be charging for.”
She says she has helped ten couples marry, including a cardiologist from Jordan who was living on the East Coast. Anisah was able to match him up with an American-born woman, a convert who was, in fact, living in Jordan. Nowadays, with more matchmaking services available nationwide and online, Anisah is not as involved. Still,
she is proud that she helped some couples get together.
Today, Anisah prays that her daughter Cassy will find peace with a good Muslim husband and that her toddler will be returned to her. Bushnell is a good place for a grandchild to visit, she says.
“It is a quiet and peaceful place where time itself slows. The people here are neighborly and speak to strangers and friends alike, but don’t meddle. Privacy is respected and so is neighborliness.”
This is, Anisah says, a place to take root.
And so she has.
PART IV
The Persecuted
Many of America’s newly arrived Muslimah endured years of squalor in overcrowded refugee camps. What even the poorest Americans take for granted—from running water to electricity—many of these refugees are enjoying for the first time in the United States. They are the faces behind the headlines of violence erupting in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Since the 1990s, more than 229,000 Muslim refugees have settled in the United States, a dramatic influx unseen in previous years.
In 1999, a record 44 percent of all refugees arriving in the United States were Muslims, according to the Washington-based Cultural Orientation Resource Center that receives federal funding to help refugees. By 2004, that percentage was down to 33 percent but still significantly more than in the late 1980s when the Department of State was reporting that not a single Muslim refugee had entered the United States. Since the 1990s, however, the Muslim refugees have come from 77 countries, virtually every corner of the globe, according to a report published by the resource center to help educate the refugees’ social workers and other service providers. Indeed, these Muslims newest to America are changing cities around the country. For example, with thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, and Sudanese now calling Phoenix home, the city has assigned a police officer to act as a liaison with its rapidly growing Muslim community.
Less in the news are those Muslims fleeing persecution as a religious minority. In India, for example, riots and racial fighting periodically erupt between Muslims and the Hindu majority. The Muslims invariably lose out. Salma, now living in Florida, still remembers when violence broke out in the Indian city she had grown up in. Shootings and beatings occurred in broad daylight. Homes went up in flames. “It was like destruction from Biblical times,” Salma says.
The Muslimah applying for political asylum include victims of domestic violence. Tania tells how she is now applying for political asylum after fleeing an abusive fiancé who hit her repeatedly even before they were married. Her father had agreed to the arranged match in their tribal society before anyone realized he was violent. Tania managed to win a scholarship to study in the United States and, once here, refused to go back.
Many Muslim refugees flourish in the United States. They climb into the middle class, especially those who were already educated. Senada Alihodzic describes how she and her husband arrived in Erie, Pennsylvania, with only the clothes on their back after he was released from a concentration camp in Bosnia. Once white-collar, Senada’s husband found himself taking any menial job he could find while Senada looked after their two small sons in a cramped apartment. Now he is a high-tech worker and Senada a social worker. They own their home and two cars. They are saving for their three children to go to college.
Muslim refugees from poorer Third World countries also fare well. Women especially benefit. Unable to go to school in their native countries, they are finally learning how to read and write here.
Still, the refugee Muslimah cope with overcoming fear. They may have left the violence of their homelands, but their anxieties follow them. Many Shiites from the persecuted Iraq city of Basra, for example, are afraid to talk openly. “In Iraq, they always felt like someone was watching them,” says Rosalind Rivera of the Arizona Refugee Community Center. “They were afraid to even talk in front of their kids because of what their kids might say in school [one of the places where Saddam’s spies lurked].” A slip of the tongue might have landed them in jail. Even now in the United States many Shiites from Basra remain guarded.
After growing up in cultures that emphasized female submissiveness, many of the refugee women in America learn for the first time how to be assertive, Rosalind Rivera says. This can bring discord in families, although most remain close-knit. “I think of my wife as my partner, my equal,” says Detective Harry Sexton of the Phoenix police department, who is assigned to work with Muslim refugees. “That is not the case with men” from such countries as Afghanistan. In fact, American social workers were advised in the providers’ guide published by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center that some of their male clients would balk at working for a woman and would need help adapting.
Still, despite the considerable obstacles, the refugee Muslimah are forging ahead.
28
WHEN VOTING IS A JOY
BATOOL SHAMIL was but one of the many Iraqis proudly displaying their inked thumbs to show they had voted in a historic ballot, taking place some 8,000 miles from her hometown in southern Iraq.
Batool now lives in the United States but she still wanted to cast her vote on behalf of Iraq’s fledgling democracy. She had already taken the grueling trip once before to register for the historic January 2005 election. So she again left her Phoenix, Arizona, home at midnight to ride with a group of other Iraqi refugees more than seven hours to vote in the Los Angeles area, one of the designated polling cities in the United States. The task completed, they got back in the car to drive straight back home, returning that evening to their families and jobs.
“We didn’t get any sleep,” she says, but that was not important. “I was so happy. There are no words to describe how happy I was.”
Batool, who teaches English to other refugees, can’t believe that some Iraqis she knows in Phoenix are still afraid of Saddam Hussein and wouldn’t vote, regardless of how far away they were from any possible retaliation.
“I was so upset. I don’t know why they didn’t vote, except they were really afraid.”
But they were ashamed and embarrassed, too, she points out, when the election went smoothly, and a majority of Iraqis went to the polls despite threats from insurgents.
Not that Batool doesn’t understand fear—it was a part of her life in Iraq. Batool is a Shiite Muslim who grew up in the south of Iraq in a large family of nine brothers and four sisters. The Shiites were, she says, a majority turned into a minority. Saddam Hussein had a huge network of spies that watched over the Shiites to keep them under control. “There was no house that wasn’t visited” by Saddam’s henchmen, she says.
Her then husband had it particularly hard. He refused to fight with the Iraqi forces during the first Gulf War and fled the country. He ended up in a camp in Saudi Arabia. After the war ended disastrously for Iraq, he returned home, only to face intense scrutiny.
“They didn’t leave us alone,” she says. “The situation was so hard we decided to leave. Life was too difficult there.”
When they came to the United States in March 1996, Batool was only in her mid-twenties. She had been married at age sixteen to her first cousin and had their daughter a year later. Four years later, she had a son.
Life was difficult in America and her marriage did not survive. They divorced five years ago and Batool found herself a single mom, sometimes holding down two jobs.
Still, she clings to her dreams and she managed to buy a three-bedroom, two-bath home for herself and her kids. To Batool, it is a castle. She is proud she is able to provide her son and daughter with their own bedrooms. And she realizes she made a savvy investment: She estimates her home has increased about $110,000 in value.
Nevertheless, it is difficult being a single mom. In the summer of 2005, she faced a layoff from her job teaching refugees at the Arizona Refugee Community Center, because of budget cuts from a local school board. But now the center is trying to raise money so she and the other teachers can come back for a new school term.
It is also a challenge for her
to cajole her children into learning about two cultures. They may live in America now, but she wants them to have an awareness of their Iraqi heritage.
But her number-one goal for her children is to see they go to college. She expects them to earn A’s on their report cards. (Batool’s daughter gets some B’s but so far her son is meeting the straight-A quota.) Batool figures they can live at home while they go to nearby Arizona State University in Tempe. She is already collecting information about scholarships and financial aid for her children.
“My dream is for my kids to go to college.” In Iraq, she says, “there’s no way the children could go to the university. I am working so hard.” At the same time, she is also sending money home to her family in Iraq, and that places great demands on her.
Still, she knows she made the right decision to come to America: She and her children are already better off in their new home. Meanwhile, her family in Iraq has less of a struggle thanks to Batool’s regular contributions.
Most importantly, she says, her children have a chance of achieving, with a solid shot at college.
29
SENADA: THE REFUGEE WHO NOW HELPS OTHERS
SENADA ALIHODZIC WANTS TO HELP the traumatized, newly arrived refugees fleeing war and persecution. These days they’re coming to her Pennsylvania town from the far corners of the globe: Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 17