But, she adds, the women had to do it to jumpstart reforms.
“I know firsthand that no amount of politeness has been enough to get the powers that be to prioritize our rights,” she says. “At best, Imams will tell you that the issue is ‘too explosive’ and now is ‘not the time’ or they don’t want to offend their patrons in the Gulf; at worst, we women will continue to be called temptresses, and the ‘spiritual health’ of men will continue to be the uncritical priority. So I’m glad I did what I did, and I continue to admire, respect, and befriend the women I met that day, as well as the one Muslim man who marched with us.”
Sarah is the daughter of Egyptian immigrants. Her father came to the United States in 1973 and her mother in 1975. They settled in southern California, where Sarah grew up. She remembers growing up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles.
In some ways it was idyllic. She grew up in a multicultural area where Hindus, Christians, Jews and she, a Muslim, all went to school together. “I identified with everyone,” she says. “I didn’t identify with being a quote-Muslim-unquote.”
When she asked her father about her identity, he told her she was ethnically Egyptian, her nationality was American, and her religion Islam. “That sounded fine with me,” she says.
In retrospect she says she grew up in a remarkably tolerant, civil time. She and her friends socialized without thinking about religious differences. “I remember going to church all the time with friends because it was social, it was fun.” She reciprocated by taking her friends to Muslim functions.
Like many other Americans, her family went to religious services off and on. Sometimes they would have spells of going every weekend to their mosque; at other times, years would go by with the family attending only on religious holidays.
Still, she remembers her father excusing himself for his daily prayers; both of her parents encouraged her to read and memorize the Quran. She is grateful for that early religious education.
What sometimes made her uncomfortable as a child of immigrants was the strict enforcement of cultural traditions that her parents brought from Egypt. Sometimes she chafed at the restrictions.
“I was never allowed to spend the night at someone’s house,” she says. “While I wore shorts and short skirts, it was never without a fight.”
Dating? Sarah didn’t even think about it.
But now she appreciates how her parents’ conservatism helped her, and how savvy they were in protecting her. And they did allow some leeway. She could have both girls and boys as friends, for example. She could go to many social functions with her friends.
“I know there is this stereotype about Arab men but my father always raised me to be an outspoken woman. I was encouraged to have opinions, to read. I felt like I could speak to any man in the family about important issues and that was fine.”
While she was growing up, her parents stressed education. They did not want her worrying about boys—finding a mate would come later, they assured her. That gave her a buffer. While other girls seemed to be excessively worrying over boys and sex, Sarah didn’t have to face any pressure to be sexually active.
“Some of my female friends really obsessed about boys and sex—it took away from their intellectual development. You can spend too much time on that stuff. I was shielded from that, and I do feel lucky.”
She feels she really came into her own when she went to UC Berkeley, where there were thousands of other liberals like herself. “It was utopia,” she says. “I was a very driven, idealistic undergraduate.”
She majored in rhetoric and English literature. After she graduated she worked for a year as a childcare coordinator at the San Quentin prison, helping provide activities for inmates’ children while the inmates visited with their wives. It is there, she says, she learned how to pool other nonprofit resources to provide even more services. The local Humane Society brought in guinea pigs for the children to enjoy; other volunteers provided other activities.
Then she went to Harvard to study for a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies. In Massachusetts, the California girl not only had to endure snow and freezing temperatures—which took a lot of getting used to—but Sarah also had to contend with what she considered an emotionally colder, more conservative, campus. Still, she appreciates what Harvard gave her. She learned how to be objective as a scholar, to not let her opinions seep into her research. “It gave me better skills,” she concludes. “Your work has to be objective.”
Her Harvard studies also gave her a life-changing experience: She went to the West Bank to study Arabic at a Palestinian school, just before the Intifada erupted. “I loved the West Bank,” she says. “It was beautiful.” But now she mourns that it has been “destroyed,” with the Israelis setting up settlements everywhere. Even before she left she saw, to her chagrin and growing outrage, the increasing number of gun-toting Israeli soldiers patrolling and causing more havoc for the average Palestinian. “Even Israeli settlers carried Uzis,” she says. It was apartheid, she feels. Few Americans realize how Palestinians are humiliated on a daily basis. She saw young Israeli soldiers pushing around unarmed older men—the ultimate indignity for Palestinians, who honor the elderly. “It’s horrible to watch a grandfather getting beaten up,” she adds. Americans don’t realize that the Palestinians are being treated unjustly because the media doesn’t show a true picture. “It filled me with anger of a kind I have never had,” she says.
She carried that anger home, “ranting twenty-four hours a day—to my parents, family, and friends.” Finally, they suggested that if she felt that way why not volunteer at the Los Angeles office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council?
At first she declined, saying, “They’re going to make me wear the veil. I don’t want to deal with that stuff. It’s the politics I am interested in.”
But she had respect for the executive director, Salam Al-Marayati, and so she went. She soon became immersed monitoring the media’s reporting on the Infitada and preparing a report. This was in August 2001.
Then she was offered the job as communications director for the group in Washington. So, once again, she was back on the East Coast, arriving only a month after the terrorist attacks.
The media flooded her with calls on all subjects, from the plight of the Palestinians to how Muslim Americans feel about terrorists. Sarah tried to talk as frankly and honestly as she could. That got her into trouble—with hate e-mail such as Andrew’s, that she says is “mired in fear, ignorance, and stereotypes.” That can be scary, Sarah says. But she is not backing down.
“I do feel threatened and I do feel afraid,” she says. But she relies on “help from friends and colleagues who go through the same abuse or worse. These people’s selflessness is inspirational to me.”
She also doesn’t want to be lulled into thinking that giving CNN an interview is the final solution to helping solve Muslims’ problems in the United States. Rather, she feels Muslims need other voices. So she is helping promote the Progressive Muslim Union, flying around the country to encourage others to stand up against conservative Imams she is convinced are holding back the faith.
She is also getting on with her own life, going back to Harvard to pursue her dream, a doctorate. She wants to study the progressive Muslim counterparts—the liberal Christians and those in the Reform Judaism movement.
She herself has felt a spiritual awakening in, of all places, crowded New York where she sees all races and ethnic groups.
“God created an amazing diversity of people, and when you put them together and leave them alone just a little,” she wrote in a lyrical essay, “the result is an overwhelming sensation of peace and tranquility.”
38
INGRID: THE LEADER OF THE MOSQUES
INGRID MATTSON DOESN’T WANT women to feel unwelcome at a house of faith that has brought her so much spiritual enrichment. As the first woman to become vice president of the Islamic Society of North America she feels she has a clear mandate to push for refor
ms. It might seem a trivial issue, but if some women are offended that many mosques require them to enter through a back or side door—while the men use the front—she believes that must change. If some women feel victimized that they are relegated to an overcrowded balcony or a basement while the men have the mosque’s entire main floor to themselves, that, too, must change. In her opinion, the recent resistance to making changes is a sign that substantial reform is in the offing.
“We are in a struggle,” she says. “I believe the struggle is now out in the open and that it will get better soon.
“Look at it historically: Conflict increases just before a major breakthrough. We will see a major breakthrough soon. There will always be very conservative mosques, but over the years they will come to be marginalized.”
Her own mosque in Hartford, Connecticut, is being renovated and the new building will have a front entrance open to everyone.
In other cultures, reforms at the mosque might not be so important. Indeed, in some predominantly Muslim countries, women do not go to mosques. “They pray at home; they have women’s groups,” Ingrid says. “They don’t see this as a big deal.”
In America, it is. The mosque has become a community center, much in the way synagogues and churches are used by their members. Mosques now host all sorts of programs, from marriage counseling to youth groups. It is also a gathering place for the Muslims who might not otherwise see each other.
“The mosque is such an important place,” Ingrid insists, “that women need to be represented in any decisions.”
She herself knows the pain of exclusion. When she was on the road, volunteering to help Afghan refugee women in Pakistan, there would come the time of day to pray. But, as a woman, she would not be able to go into certain mosques. She remembers seeing a man sweeping at the front of one—a gatekeeper to keep her and other women out. “I felt, Who are you to keep me from praying?” she remembers. “It was very frustrating.”
Once, as newlyweds, Ingrid and her husband were traveling in Pakistan and the time came for prayer. They found a mosque, but it was for men only.
“My husband and I just decided I would come in,” Ingrid says. “I was not going to pray on a dirty sidewalk. They weren’t very happy, the doormen.” Nevertheless, she and her husband were allowed to pray peacefully.
If you had told Ingrid as a teenager that she would be so concerned about prayer that she would flout rules (normally, Ingrid is quiet and soft-spoken), she would have looked at you in polite disbelief. She was born into a Catholic family in Ontario. Her father was an attorney, her mother a homemaker who cared for their seven children. Ingrid stopped going to church at age sixteen. “I just didn’t have any conviction,” she says. “I had no faith. By the time I was a teenager I had put religion behind me. I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that I was angry—religion just had no hold on me, no grip.”
While at the University of Waterloo in Canada, she began studying engineering but became taken with philosophy and made it her major. Studying philosophy helped her to think more clearly.
“I was always a thoughtful person,” she says, “always thinking and reading. I wanted to live a life of integrity. But I guess I was kind of a dissatisfied person. There are things missing…the way people behave, the life around you. I felt there should be more meaning to life than just having fun and enjoying yourself.”
She found it one summer when she went to Paris to study the history of film. There, she met some West African students who changed her life.
“They were the most incredibly generous, kind, and balanced people I had ever met.” They were also Muslim. “Not overtly religious,” Ingrid adds, but quiet, practicing Muslims.
She became intrigued and began asking them questions and reading about Islam. She continued her reading when she returned to Canada. Over the next year, in fact, she read and read and thought and thought.
“Over time, to my complete surprise, I felt, ‘I am a Muslim.’ It was a big surprise to me. I hadn’t previously been able to embrace a religion.”
Islam, however, offered Ingrid a path to the ethical life she had always wanted to lead.
Those feelings only intensified in the summer of 1987 when she took on a tree-planting job in British Columbia and read Fazlur Rahman’s Islam as she traveled across the Canadian prairies. She became so immersed in his descriptions of Islamic theology and law, she wrote to Rahman, a professor at the University of Chicago, to ask if she could study with him.
To her surprise, she found a handwritten note from him when she returned home to Ontario, inviting her to Chicago to study with him. Ingrid decided to accept, but she wanted first to spend a year helping Afghan women in refugee camps in Pakistan.
That year turned out to be, she says, “the best time of my life, a great learning experience for me. You go with the idea to help people, but what you find out is that the people help you. Difficult situations bring out the worst in some people, but they also bring out the best.” The refugee women, she adds, “taught me a lot about generosity, grace under pressure. They were hospitable, beautiful people.”
She also met her future husband there, Amer Aetak, an Egyptian engineer who was helping construct homes and water wells for refugees—a hundred thousand of them—who were stranded in an almost desertlike section of Pakistan with no trees or shelter. They had been living under bleak conditions for years. Amer was like Ingrid: He wanted to make a difference. They fell in love and quietly married (Ingrid didn’t have a wedding dress). When the refugee families found out about the marriage they did something that Ingrid remembers to this day.
“They were so sad,” she said in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor. “They pooled what little money they had and presented me with this outfit of satin pants and a red velveteen dress with pompoms—it was incredible.”
She worked to help educate the women and girls at the camp as well as help set up medical services, women’s centers, and work projects. Only a miniscule number at the camp—less than 1 percent—didn’t want girls educated, and those were mostly from a tribe whose elder had claimed there was no need to teach females.
After extending her stay, Ingrid decided it was time for her and Amer to go to Chicago. She had already deferred admission to the University of Chicago in order to finish up projects at the refugee camp. Unfortunately, around that time, Professor Rahman had died after undergoing heart surgery. “I found myself there without the mentor I thought I had.” Nevertheless, she remains grateful to him, and has written, “It was his book and his encouragement that inspired me to start on the path to scholarship that I had found so rewarding.”
At the University of Chicago, Ingrid found the other students welcoming, the classes stimulating, and the faculty distinguished. But life was difficult: She had a daughter in 1989 and a son in 1991. Given the all-consuming demands of graduate school, she had to rely on her husband. He came through, helping take care of the children while working as an engineer, to help free up time for Ingrid to study. “It was a big blur, to be honest,” Ingrid remembers. “I didn’t get any sleep.”
But a reward awaited her: She finished her doctoral course work and was hired at Hartford Seminary’s Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian/Islam Relations. She finished her dissertation as she taught classes. In 1995 she was made an adviser to the Afghan delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. This was before the Taliban had taken over and issued draconian restrictions against women.
After 9/11, she found herself swamped with media interviews with journalists who wanted her to discuss Islam. She even joined a CNN.com chat room to discuss Islam a month after the attacks. One participant asked her bluntly: “What possible justification in Islam can there be for the wholesale massacre of civilians?”
Ingrid’s answer was equally to the point: “There is no justification. It is prohibited in Islamic law. It is a great sin in Islamic theology. This has been stated before and after Se
ptember 11 by leading Muslim scholars throughout the world. Osama bin Laden and his group are not considered scholars or legitimate interpreters of religion by the vast majority of Muslims in the world.”
She would later tell other interviewers that it was Muslims’ responsibility to denounce the terrorist acts. Still, she admits it can be wearying for Muslims to respond to every action. “It’s more than a full-time job,” she says.
Although not a Wahhabi follower, she defends it against criticism that it has promoted terrorism. The Wahhabi movement (named after its founder, Muhammad Wahhab) began more than two hundred years ago in Saudi Arabia as a puritanical Sunni sect, Ingrid explains, to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretations that had been acquired over the centuries. It was analogous to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. She feels it would not be accurate to define the movement as that of an extremely right-wing sect founded and funded by the Saudi royal family and led by Osama bin Laden, as some have alleged. She points out that Saudi scholars who are Wahhabi have denounced terrorism publicly.
In turn, many Muslim feminists in the United States denounce the Wahhabi movement for restricting women. In Saudi Arabia, they still can’t vote, drive a car, or go out in public without a veil.
But Ingrid feels Muslim women continue to make progress—not only in Saudi Arabia where a growing number of women are venturing into the workforce for the first time, but globally. One of her best friends has been fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan for years, receiving death threats during the Taliban reign. Today, under the country’s new government, women and girls are being educated, Ingrid says. Women are even being appointed to high government positions.
Here in America, Ingrid sees Muslim women progressing, too. While she is a peaceful person, she says, sometimes there has to be a fight for meaningful change, such as making sure everyone feels welcome into the faith.
Ingrid wants to see no one turned away from Islam. Muslim men and women should both feel equally at home when they worship. That’s why she supports reforms within American mosques. “I would never take on being the vice president of the Islamic Society of North America were I not willing to be an advocate.”
The Face Behind the Veil Page 22