The Face Behind the Veil

by Donna Gehrke-White

  All the same, these are disquieting times. Some Muslim families from Salma’s mosque have moved to other countries, no longer feeling, she says, welcome in the United States. After 9/11, a Palestinian immigrant she knew at her mosque was abruptly arrested, and no one in the congregation has seen him again. He later was mentioned in the newspaper as a terrorist suspect who allegedly used Muslim charity money to support terrorism around the world. All of this mystifies Salma. True, he was a loudmouth, especially about the Palestinian cause, she thought, but he never seemed dangerous. After his arrest, the mosque helped support his family—he had a wife and three small children. But as his detention turned from days into weeks, and finally months, his wife gave up and went back to the Middle East, Salma says.

  What Salma would like to see is an America before 9/11: full of serenity. She has dreams of America returning to what she considers a better era—say, the 1950s and 1960s, when family values were stronger, when piety was welcomed.

  But even today, the United States, with its looser values, has a big advantage over other countries: its tradition of tolerance. Grateful to live in such a climate, Salma is repaying America for its generosity to her with loyalty to her new country. After all, she says, the Quran requires that. “You’re supposed to be loyal and follow the rules,” Salma says. “Otherwise your Islam is not complete, and you are not a good Muslim.”

  36

  HAWA: THE QUEEN TAKES A WALK

  HAWA KHAMIS wears a flowing white robe and scarf with bright blue trim as she adroitly maneuvers a stroller that seats her baby. Her two preschool boys are walking alongside her, clinging to her robe.

  She is tall, perhaps more than six feet. Indeed, Hawa, thirty-one, is a striking woman with a wide smile that flashes brilliant white teeth. Her posture would be the envy of any queen, as she walks regally to the refugee center in Glendale, Arizona. Here is where she is learning English, and how to read for the first time. Here, also, she finds Arabic-speaking people who can provide a link to what now seems like a distant past.

  She was only in her mid-twenties with two toddlers (she now has five children) when she arrived in the United States with her husband to escape the violence in their native Sudan. Today there’s awareness among Americans of the genocide that is occurring there, particularly against Christians in the south. But Hawa, a devout Muslim, reports that people of her faith have been targeted for violence too. Humanitarian groups have documented how the predominantly Arab Muslim regime routinely attacks native tribes, whether or not the tribes are Muslims. They report of Arab militias raiding villages at night, burning every house and shooting those who try to escape. Sudan has also suffered serious food shortages and drought, driving many from their homes simply to survive. The war—and there has been war since 1983—has displaced millions. More than 10 percent of the world’s uprooted population are Sudanese.

  “It was very difficult—there were too many problems,” Hawa says before adding quietly, “One of my brothers got killed there.”

  A sister remains in the Sudan but Hawa and her husband decided they had to get out. They took their two children and fled east, crossing into Ethiopia, where they stayed in a refugee camp. Hawa is not one to talk about the conditions there. Suffice it to say, they eked out a living until they could come to the United States. They were lucky: Many still languish in the makeshift camps.

  Like many other third-world refugee women, Hawa was illiterate when she arrived in Arizona. The United States government estimates that about half of women in the Sudan can’t read or write. Overall, the literacy rate is just over 60 percent, with more men than women educated. But Hawa now has opportunities to learn that she never had before, even though the demands of being a young mother restrict her, at least for now. With her husband working and studying, she needs to be at home taking care of the children. (Her husband once teased her that she had already had enough education in America, remarking in front of her, “I sent her to school six months and now she needs more?”) Hawa may be too busy with a new baby to go to formal classes, but she is learning.

  Hawa is glad that her family can have a normal life again and settle into a routine. She is grateful she can walk wherever she wants to, without fearing for her or the children’s safety. It wasn’t like that in Sudan.

  However, because Hawa now lives in the United States, where few women wear traditional Muslim dress, doesn’t mean that she is going to quit wearing her flowing robe, the long turban-like scarf that frames her face while discreetly covering her hair. She dresses as a proper Muslim woman would in her native Sudan. In that sense, America hasn’t changed her, and it won’t.

  “My religion is very important,” Hawa says. She’s not one to go to the mosque, though. In her opinion, that’s for the men. “Only my husband goes.”

  Meanwhile, she is busy tending her children, the oldest of whom is ten. By now, even he finds Sudan and its violence a distant memory. Hawa’s youngest three were born here and are American citizens.

  Hawa and her husband like the Southwest, where the weather reminds them of their homeland. But the similarities end there: Arizona is peaceful, and they feel safe here. “We like it here because we are free.”

  Education, she feels, is the best benefit of life in America. Her school-age children are learning how to read and write. She herself must sacrifice her own English classes to take care of her youngest preschoolers. But soon they will be going to school and Hawa lights up at the thought that all her children will be educated. She’s got a handful but she is the queen: All she has to do is gesture, or softly say a few words, and the children obey.

  PART V

  The Changers

  If they see something wrong, they want to change it. They are the Changers: Muslim women in America out in the forefront of politics, religion, law, academia, and human rights organizations.

  One is following an unorthodox path: W. L. Cati is a former Muslim who became an evangelical Christian minister trying to help abused Muslim women. She knows their pain firsthand: She says she herself was abused, often in the name of Islam.

  But the great majority of Changers remain in the faith as they sort out problems. Clareen Menzies describes how she also was a battered wife. But she stayed with Islam and became a Muslim leader in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

  Many of the Changers have made inroads in more than one profession or cause. Zakia Mahasa, profiled in chapter 45, is believed to be the first Muslim woman appointed to a judicial position in the United States. She is a Master in Chancery in the Family Division of the Baltimore City Circuit Court. Master Mahasa also leads the Michigan-based Muslim charity Mercy USA as volunteer chairperson. “You have to have balance,” Master Mahasa says. “You can’t be all about your career.” Indeed, Sarah Eltantawi took time out from her future academic career—she is working on a doctorate at Harvard—to help start the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. She says there’s a need for another “voice” in the Muslim community as an alternative to the conservative imams in the United States.

  Reforms are inevitable, declares Ingrid Mattson. As vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, she is one of the nation’s top female Muslim leaders. Fighting for equal treatment of women, she says she does not want anyone to feel left out of a faith that has enriched her life.

  Other women have helped reinterpret the Quran, such as Azizih al-Hibri, a law professor at Virginia’s University of Richmond. She has analyzed the status of women in the Islamic family laws and found women benefited from its requirement that men support their wives and children. Through studying the Quran, she discovered how the Prophet Muhammad promoted the treatment of women. However, she says Islam has been misinterpreted by male religious leaders to shore up their power and keep women subservient. In Washington, D.C., she started a human rights group to help women globally. She named her group Karamah, after an Arabic reference to a Quranic verse that reads, “We have given dignity to the children of Adam.” Her group has attrac
ted the notice of President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (who was the country’s National Security Advisor when she spoke at a Karamah gathering).

  Many Changers say America’s Muslims face pressing matters, including defending their civil rights. Muslims are under attack with the USA Patriot Act and other new laws, says Dalia Hashad, a leader in the American Civil Liberties Union. She describes how she is helping lead a national effort to protect Muslims’ civil liberties.

  Other Muslimah Changers feel the heightened tensions from the war on terrorism and are trying to educate non-Muslims about how Islam promotes peace. Sarwat Husain, herself the victim of a hate crime, started a newspaper to help educate about Islam, for both Muslims and non-Muslims. She is also a volunteer in San Antonio, Texas, for the Council of American-Islamic Relations and frequently holds press conferences to denounce terrorism and other acts of violence. Her loyalties and responsibilities are to both the United States and Islam, she says. “America is my home,” Sarwat says, “and whatever I can do to serve this ‘land of the free and the home of the brave,’ I will do.”

  She is among the dynamic leaders profiled in the following chapters as changing America and Islam.

  37

  SARAH: PROGRESSIVE AND PROUD OF IT

  IT’S IN THE DEAD OF WINTER—frankly, drearily, January cold—and former Californian Sarah Eltantawi is flying to one of the coldest spots in the United States: Chicago. But it’s important. The twenty-eight-year-old wants to speak to a group of Muslims to correct what she calls the “great misunderstanding.” She wants to say that the newly started Progressive Muslim Union of North America—PMU as she affectionately shortens it—is not the bugaboo that so many conservative Muslims seem to fear. Just go to the website, for example, she says, and see how the PMU advocates reading the Quran.

  But also make no mistake: The progressives want structural change, what Sarah calls “new institutions to reflect the values and lives of Muslims.”

  These changes include accepting gays as equals, women as clergy, and allowing men and women to pray side by side instead of the now segregated services that are conducted at nearly all the mosques in America. They want the faithful to read and interpret the Quran themselves instead of relying on Islamic scholars, many of whom over the centuries have interpreted passages of the Quran to treat women as second-class citizens.

  “I’m traveling everywhere answering questions,” she says before adding cheerfully, “It was a rough beginning but the PMU is going to survive.”

  She’s still a bit surprised at how she came to where she is now: in the center of a hailstorm of controversy.

  But then she knows what it is like to take on controversial issues. She has defended Palestinians on national television shows, walked through the front doors of a mosque that were for men only, and defended women’s right to choose whether they wear a veil or not.

  Such positions have earned her enmity from all sides, from conservative Muslims to those bashing her for being anti-Jewish.

  “I need an ‘enemy’ and I found her. Her name is Sarah Eltantawi and this smug American of Egyptian background is a walking and talking 24/7 rationalizer for terrorism,” wrote a man on the Internet who called himself Andrew. He was fuming after Sarah had appeared on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes in 2002 and criticized Israel for “occupying three million people, humiliating them, setting up checkpoints, and turning their life into a hell.”

  But Sarah holds strong feelings—she was in the Palestinian West Bank just before the Intifada broke out. She says she saw the daily humiliations and violence the Palestinians were forced to endure. She remains concerned about what she calls the ongoing psychological and physical abuse of Palestinians. To her, it is as much a kind of apartheid as what blacks had to endure in South Africa.

  “These people (like Andrew) who call me a terrorist sympathizer are like children throwing a temper tantrum on a playground, covering their ears, sticking out their tongue and screaming at the top of their lungs to avoid getting down to the nuts and bolts of this situation,” she says. “I am confident that one day their racism will be exposed, and then we’ll travel down the road of healing and peace.”

  Sarah feels just as strongly that reforms must come from within the mosque. That is why she joined other young Muslims in forming the Progressive Muslim Union.

  At first, Associated Press reporter Carol Eisenberg marveled in the fall of 2004 when Sarah and others were forming the group: “They looked like any group of hip, young New Yorkers hanging at the Starlight Diner on West 34th Street. But this was no ordinary social hour. Crowded elbow to elbow around a long table strewn with coffee cups were eighteen men and women, mostly in jeans and T-shirts. They were thoroughly Muslim and thoroughly Western. And they were brainstorming ideas to transform Islam in America.”

  But then the criticism came. The Union didn’t include enough voices, such as Republican Muslims. PMU had too many liberal positions. Sarah was even called a “radical.”

  The New York Times’ Clyde Haberman wondered about the “conspicuous absence” of any discussion about terrorism. “Nowhere,” he noted, “in the group’s mission statement or in the members’ remarks was terrorism mentioned. Why is that?”

  Sarah tried to explain to Haberman: “We’re not going to equate Islam with terrorism.” Instead, she says, the PMU is trying to set a positive path for changing Islam within.

  Then there is the criticism she has to fend off that the Progressive Muslim Union is too American and out of touch with other Muslims around the globe. Sarah grows exasperated when other American-born Muslims tell her that fighting for reforms within the mosque is bad and that it reflects “your American neocolonialist attitude.”

  “Cultural relativism is not an excuse. Abuse is abuse,” she tells them bluntly.

  Other Muslims in the Third World “are way more critical” and are, to her mind, clamoring just as hard for reforms.

  Take the French ban on hijabs in schools and other religious markings. An Egyptian activist decried the controversy over the ban, worrying that women opposed to the new law were unwittingly helping promote patriarchy and the conservative faction within Islam that forces women to wear some sort of veil.

  Like the activist she is, Sarah wants women to be able to choose without being pressured. She doesn’t wear a hijab. She doesn’t see a connection between covering her hair and being religious. It has wrongly become, she says, “almost a fetish piece of cloth for Muslims around the world.” Sarah feels there is “weak theological evidence” for women feeling they have to cover their hair while in public. “It’s not in the Quran,” she adds. The actual Quranic verse that supposedly required women to cover refers to women throwing a cloth over their chest. In the seventh century, when the Quran was first being written, many Arabic women were openly walking about bare-breasted. But there is no actual demand for covering the hair, she says.

  Most Muslim women today in the United States and even some predominantly Muslim Third-World countries do not wear the hijab, Sarah points out.

  Sarah is convinced PMU members and other Muslims want change in the mosque to reflect how Muslims live in today’s world. That’s why many Muslims don’t go to prayer services—they feel out of touch with their local mosque.

  “People want to see change,” Sarah emphasizes. “They want openness, critical changes.”

  As one such would-be reformer, she knows this firsthand. How can she be otherwise, she says, as an educated woman?

  In March 2005, Sarah joined other men and women in New York, praying side by side—which is considered taboo—and listened to Amina Wadud, an Islamic expert at Virginia Commonwealth University, lead men and women in prayer, another controversial move. The participants had to brave death threats and people yelling at them as they went to the Friday service.

  “It was amazing,” she remembers.

  Just the summer before at a West Virginia conference, she joined a movement to protest mosques’ unequal, seg
regated treatment of women. She and four other Muslim women broke another taboo by walking into the men-only front door of a mosque and praying in the main hall. (A man joined them in solidarity.)

  Normally, women are supposed to enter through the back and pray in the women-only segregated balcony. But Sarah and the activists felt enough was enough. While many Muslim women in America say they don’t mind entering through rear doors, Sarah and others say they are tired of being treated as second-class citizens.

  “As I was walking through the mosque,” Sarah recalls, “I was not scared, but I can’t say that my feelings were unambiguous. Our action drew a lot of media coverage, and it was clear that the mosque and its members were under a large amount of stress that day. Usually—given my work for the past few years—I’ve been on the other side of the camera, so to speak, helping the mosque fend off various accusations or threats. This time, actions I was participating in were bringing trouble and wrath to the mosque, and it was hard for me to watch older men, who reminded me of my father and uncles, looking worried, fretting, and perhaps fearing for their families and for the mosque. I’m too intimate and familiar with the fear Muslims are broadly experiencing in this country today to have not had this emotional response.”