The Face Behind the Veil

by Donna Gehrke-White

  Laila later told a PBS reporter, “I think what we’re seeing is an unwillingness to listen to the opposite point of view. It’s easy to have conversations with people we agree with and it’s difficult to sit and listen to somebody who has a different opinion. But unless we can do that, we will never get any closer to understanding each other.”

  All the stress from taking an ethical but controversial stand, she says, can make people physically ill and not want to go public. “It is something that creates anxiety, depression and maybe even fear.”

  The discord Laila has experienced is unlike the warm and nurturing southern California home that she grew up in. She was born into a close family in Los Angeles. As she recalls, her late father was very active at the Islamic Center in southern California. “He wanted to make sure it was a place to go, although ours was not a religious family.” Her mother remained a Christian until Laila went to college. Then she had a spiritual awakening and converted to Islam.

  To this day, Laila remains close to her family. She goes on trips with her siblings and can depend on them to help take care of her two sons and her daughter if she gets tied up. Her widowed mother now lives with Laila and her family, and Laila is grateful for her mother’s help. When she gets stressed and might start to take it out on the kids, her mother intervenes to soften and resolve the situation.

  Although she has tried to slow down, Laila is a busy woman. At one time, she maintained her own practice while teaching med students as a clinical associate professor for the University of Southern California. She has since become a part-time doctor, has set hours at two clinics, and is on duty only once or twice a weekend to deliver babies.

  Still, she would not think of quitting: She knows she is needed. Over the years, she has delivered hundreds if not thousands of babies, practicing what has become a high-risk—and increasingly vacant—medical field. Other “baby” doctors in southern California are abandoning the field and new med-school graduates aren’t taking their place. Laila reports that 60 percent of ob/gyn positions remain unfilled.

  For her work, Laila speaks fluent Spanish to help her non-English speaking patients. She is amused that as an Arab American she doesn’t know how to speak Arabic but can readily converse with Latin Americans immigrants.

  Laila’s time is also taken up in her role as spokesperson for the Muslim Women’s League, based in Los Angeles, and her other humanitarian volunteer work. She helped found the league and has served as its president.

  For years, in conjunction with her League work, she has researched and written about Islam and women, as well as human rights violations and religious persecution. Her essays have covered such topics as polygamy, women’s dress, sexuality, and motherhood. As an activist, she has helped persuade more than twenty religious and civic groups to start the Women’s Coalition against Ethnic Cleansing, to help Muslims in war-torn Bosnia. In 1993, Laila led a Coalition delegation to Zagreb, Croatia, to help determine the best way to help rape survivors and other refugees fleeing Bosnia. Two years later, she served on the United States delegation to the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. Then, in 1997, she testified before a U.S. Senate Committee on religious intolerance in Europe that targeted Muslims, doing so as a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad.

  Closer to home, she helped start a sports camp for Muslim girls and developed a sex education curriculum for all Muslim children.

  All of this can be exhausting for even a Super Woman, and Laila has learned to set priorities. So, while she is sympathetic to women wanting equal treatment at mosques, Laila says she must concentrate on larger issues. Many Muslim women around the world are still denied basic rights. If their husband leaves them, they are left illiterate, unprepared to earn a living, and they face abuse. Laila has treated African Muslim refugee women who developed medical complications from their tribes’ primitive operations to circumcise them as young girls—a procedure that is now called female genital mutilation. Then there are the honor killings, committed when a patriarch feels he must kill a daughter or other relative whom he feels has brought disgrace to the family by being sexually active outside of marriage. “Fortunately, we don’t have that in the United States,” Laila says, “but it does occur elsewhere.”

  Laila’s extensive activism would be impossible if it weren’t for her family and her husband, she says. She met Salam as a teenager during a class at the Islamic Center of Southern California. He also became interested in activism, so much so that he switched careers after studying to become an engineer. They married after she graduated from UCLA.

  What saved the marriage, she now jokes, is that she hired a housekeeper to help clean their house. “Salam’s idea of a clean house is really different than mine. I brought in a housekeeper who had worked for my parents. It was hard on the budget but that has helped us a lot.” The housekeeper is still with the family today.

  Laila appreciates how her husband helped her get through med school and training. Whenever, as a resident, she had to work all night, Salam was there to take care of their first child. “It was just him and the baby,” she says.

  They are still sharing chores—“the drudgery of life” she calls such tasks as paying bills. “We just figure it out. We have been blessed with a positive and open attitude.”

  She wishes the rest of the country had a similar attitude. To her mind, the U.S. government does not treat all people—or all nations—equally. Predominantly Muslim countries and their Muslim nationals, are judged more harshly, in her opinion. Nor do most Americans realize how she and other Muslim Americans have felt unwanted, even endangered, in their own country, long before 9/11.

  Laila offers her experience with wearing a hijab. Laila once wore a scarf covering her hair. This was during the 1980s when it was mostly stay-at-home Muslim moms who donned the hijab. As a med student, Laila was unprepared for the backlash that her simple head-covering raised. Most med students took one look at her and shunned her. Others, including doctors and professors whom she revered, made crass remarks, such as: What are you hiding under all that? It only makes you sexier.

  “I was getting tired of attracting attention. It was making me an angry person. Even people on the elevator would comment. I found myself explaining myself all the time. I felt so vulnerable.”

  So she took off her scarf—and was rewarded soon afterward by the reaction of other students, who approached her to say that they had been afraid to speak with her when she was wearing her hijab. She became close friends with many of them. She also learned a valuable lesson about fitting in: Despite America’s professed craze for individuality, most people want their friends to be just like them—a fact of life Laila calls “really sad.”

  Although times are changing, and so many more Muslim women are wearing the hijab that it’s no longer considered such an oddity, Laila is not thinking about putting one on again. Nevertheless, she does consider herself “very observant.” She dresses modestly, prays five times a day, and fasts during Ramadan. And she follows the Quran’s instructions to be generous to the poor. With so much need still in the world, she feels that there is much to accomplish.

  “You have to keep trying,” she adds, “to be a positive force.”

  41

  AFEEFA’S PASSIONS: POLITICS AND EDUCATION

  SHE SAYS SHE WAS WARNED: As a Muslim woman who wears a hijab she’d get doors slammed in her face. Afeefa Syeed decided to run for office anyway.

  As a long-time resident of Virginia’s Loudoun County, one of the fastest growing areas in the nation, Afeefa was tired of the sprawl, the increasing congestion, the overcrowded schools. She wanted to make her community more livable. As she told the Washington Post, “I’m a Muslim, but my issues are American.”

  So, at the last minute, she threw her hat in the ring to be a candidate for the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors from the Potomac District. Although she won a surprise victory in the Democratic primary in Jun
e 2003, outpolling the party pols’ choice, a lobbyist and a former legislative assistant, ultimately she lost to her Republican challenger. As an exurbia county near Washington, D.C., Loudoun County is a heavily Republican stronghold. The whole election “was a bad day for Democrats,” she quips.

  It was also a beginning for local Muslims to become more politically active. Afeefa says she was recruited to run by a newly formed political action committee, the Platform for Active Civil Empowerment, which helped her win her surprising primary victory over the lobbyist. The committee was started after several Muslim homes and businesses were raided in 2002 for having suspected financial ties to terrorists, though no arrests were made. One committee founder, Mukit Hossain, felt that Muslims had to become more active in politics to have a say in how the country is run. “If we have a voice, maybe people will understand a little better about Islam and Muslims,” a Muslim woman told a reporter at the time.

  Afeefa says the race invigorated her and has encouraged other Muslims to run. Still, she wants to emphasize that hers was a race about issues that affect everybody, not just Muslims. The experience taught her that a Muslim woman can be taken seriously when she talks about issues. Even wearing her hijab, she says she received none of the harassment or threats she had been warned about.

  She had been anticipating some incidents when she began campaigning door to door. She feared the worst might happen on one occasion when a tattooed man answered her knock. Looking into his living room, she could see he had hung a Confederate flag, and he had a big, barking German shepherd. Afeefa assumed that the owner would be just as aggressive as his dog. “I was worried that he was going to cuss me out,” she recalls.

  Nevertheless, when she told him she was running for county supervisor and asked what his concerns were, instead of slamming the door, he took her question seriously and demanded to know what she was going to do about the Potomac River. The stretch of it nearby was so polluted, he complained, he couldn’t fish in it.

  “That’s one of my issues,” she answered happily. She, too, wanted to make the river cleaner for everyone to use. That exchange confirmed to her that issues would trump any prejudices people might have.

  Afeefa has brought that same can-do attitude into the educational system. Wanting her three sons to have an Islamic education, although there wasn’t a Muslim school nearby, she helped start one. “We wanted to create a place to nurture the children,” she says. And so Afeefa is the founding director of Al Fatih Academy, which currently has ninety-five pupils from preschool to fifth grade. (The school is adding a grade every year.)

  Around the same time, she also started the Peace Leaders Program, which teaches children ages three and up about resolving conflicts peacefully. It is specifically aimed at working around cultural differences. “Sometimes, the programs we have in schools don’t take diversity into account.”

  Afeefa describes Al Fatih as an amazingly diverse school, where the children or their parents hail from all parts of the world. “We have children who had families living in Iraq during the war, and those who had family members in the U.S. military fighting over there.”

  She tries to emphasize to the children the concept of giving. To do so, the school teamed up with local churches to send care packages to Iraqis. And she started Kids Giving Salaam to foster the love of community service in children.

  Afeefa is a second-generation Indian. Her parents are from the politically torn state of Kashmir. Pakistan and India have fought two wars over the area and a separatist movement started fifteen years ago for Kashmir to become independent. Afeefa’s father had been jailed in India as a political prisoner. Later, when he and Afeefa’s mother came to the United States to study for their doctorates, they decided to stay.

  Afeefa grew up in the heartland; her parents both attended Indiana University in Bloomington. They later moved to Virginia where Afeefa’s father is now secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America. Afeefa went to high school and college in Virginia, earning a master’s degree in anthropology.

  Her interest in cultures has motivated her to teach others about Islam and Muslim. As a diversity consultant and multicultural trainer, she has appeared on a PBS program discussing Islamic teachings and such holidays as Ramadan. She also has gone into public schools to educate students about her faith, an activity that at times has sparked controversy.

  In a magazine article, a writer claimed that Afeefa’s teaching about Ramadan and Islam in public schools was an example of the “spread of Islamic propaganda in American public schools.” The writer told of how Afeefa carried in a globe “to point out the areas of the world lived in by Muslims—which is almost every area of the world, given their propensity to emigrate from their native countries.” She added that Afeefa brought with her Muslim children with prayer mats to further talk about Islam.

  In a letter to the editor Afeefa later protested that the whole exercise was innocent of propagandistic intent. She was invited by teachers to educate children who might not know much about Islam. “The presentations are celebratory about cultural traditions and are aimed at highlighting the commonness among us all,” she tried to explain. “No one is told that Islam is a better religion; no one is asked to accept Islam as the ‘true path.’”

  She pointed out that she goes only where she is invited, and went on to elaborate: “As a parent of three boys, I know the value of having my children understand the worldviews of others from the others’ standpoint, not just from mine.”

  Despite the controversy, she is upbeat about the progress Muslims are making in American politics. More are running for office, including those whom Afeefa has encouraged locally. “We decided we could make a difference.”

  42

  CLAREEN AT THE FRONT

  WHEN CLAREEN MENZIES was recently interviewing for a job at Islamic Relief USA, she made two requests: that she be able to hire more women, and that her fundraising would help establish more programs set up by women to help women. Both requests were readily agreed to, and she was hired.

  Now Clareen divides her time between her longtime home in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area and the Los Angeles area where Islamic Relief USA has its headquarters. It was important to her that she keep her midwestern roots: She is an Islamic leader in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area and was the first woman to serve among all men at the Muslim Organizations of Minnesota. She was also an officer at a mosque and on the board of Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a charter school that serves predominantly Muslim students. She serves on another board of a social services group that offers counseling and is establishing a program for Muslims to become foster parents to Muslim children in state care. And in 1999, Clareen founded Sisters Need a Place (SNAP), a nonprofit group that helps midwestern Muslim women faced with domestic abuse, or problems with housing, employment, transportation, child custody, and divorce. SNAP is an all-volunteer effort: Clareen, for example, helps five women in need while other volunteers handle the cases of abused or needy women. As a former battered woman, Clareen knows firsthand how a little kindness can help victims turn their lives around.

  “We have learned a lot in order to serve women,” she says. “We have made many friends in both the Muslim community and the community at large.”

  Anisah David (see Chapter 27), who sits on Clareen’s SNAP board, calls her a “Muslim powerhouse” who has helped other Muslim women throughout the Midwest. “She has long been a fixture of the human services industry (such as charities and foundations) and her story illustrates how Islam plays a role in the lives of Americans,” Anisah says. “I think of her as a role model.”

  Clareen was one of the first white women to become a Muslim in Minnesota in the mid-1970s. She became interested in Islam when a new family moved into the house in back of hers. They turned out to be Muslims practicing their faith secretly. “They were from Uganda and had left when Idi Amin took power,” she says. The infamous dictator Amin, who had been responsible for as many as 400,000 murdered or missin
g in his country, issued an ultimatum to Asian property-owners living in Uganda: Leave or be slaughtered. That was sufficient reason for Clareen’s neighbors Roshan and Abdul Osman to flee. They eventually settled in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, with a church as their sponsor.

  “To have a sponsor they had to be Christian, so they pretended to be, going to the church on Sunday,” Clareen says. “Then they had Muslim services in secret at their home.” When Clareen’s daughter Naomi became friends with her neighbors’ daughter, Tasneem, she got to know her parents—and Islam.

  “I was having trouble rationalizing my Lutheran upbringing,” Clareen explains. “The questions I asked were causing me trouble. I asked my neighbors questions about Islam and they answered them all.”

  But she was an unlikely candidate for Islam. At that time most converts to Islam were African Americans, especially prison inmates who had been attracted to the faith by the Nation of Islam. A blue-eyed redhead, Clareen was a secretary who was raising a daughter on her own. Her parents had seen to it that she had had a religious background as a mainstream Protestant. All the same, Clareen felt more comfortable with Islam. It seemed to her to make more sense. Islam, she says, “has accepted my intelligence, taught me discipline, and made me curious.”

  As a Christian child, Clareen remembers being lonely. As an observant Lutheran she was expected to quietly stay at home after church on Sundays and spend the rest of the day with her family. “But I had no sisters or brothers,” she says. “I had no one to play with.”

  She became a Muslim at age twenty-eight in a July 15, 1977, ceremony in which she simply repeated the words, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Prophet.”

  Clareen’s early years as a Muslim weren’t easy. There were only two mosques in the entire state of Minnesota—both in Minneapolis—and she didn’t feel comfortable at either. One was for African Americans who at the time didn’t exactly welcome white people at their services. The other was attended mostly by immigrants who were born into the faith. “Few spoke English,” she says, so there was trouble communicating. “I didn’t fit in,” Clareen concludes.