But she kept studying Islam. After all, she was used to being different. Even before she became a Muslim, Clareen was a nonconformist and a risk-taker, despite the difficulties that caused.
As a young woman who had just graduated from high school in the late 1960s, she began dating a black man—a scandalous development to her parents. Clareen’s family wasn’t prepared to accept a black man into the family. They threatened to disown her if she persisted in seeing him—and they did.
“Here’s how the story goes,” Clareen says dryly, “I was fired from my job on Thursday, got disowned from my family on Friday, and got pregnant on Sunday.”
What followed was almost material for a sitcom: Her mother would visit her and urge her not to tell her father. Then her dad would stop by and warn her not to tell her mom. Both blamed the disowning on the other’s more conservative, and scandalized, relatives.
As a single mother at age nineteen, Clareen was urged to give up Naomi, her biracial baby girl. Adoption is better for her, everyone agreed. “I was under big pressure to place her,” she remembers. But Clareen resisted and kept her daughter. She knew that she faced years of struggle, of juggling work and going to college at night, but Clareen couldn’t give up her daughter. Naomi’s father supported them off and on, though he and Clareen never married. At times he could be violent and hit Clareen. Clareen and Naomi made peace with him before he died.
The man Clareen did marry was another African American whom she met while going to night school for her bachelor’s degree in humanities and community organization. He was part of a program to help rehabilitate ex-offenders through education. While in prison, he had become a member of a blacks-only Muslim group called the Moors Science. Clareen knew about his Muslim faith but wasn’t encouraged to learn about it.
He also turned out to be batterer—“a very violent man,” in Clareen’s words—and she left him after twelve years of marriage. Most of those years, she adds, “he was in prison. He was home with me for only twenty-two months.” He too is now deceased.
She met a third man whom she thought was “the one” but he also began to hit her. Clareen threw him out after three years.
By then she was sick at heart. What was there about her that attracted these men, the worst kind? She had been a devout Muslim for years and it bothered her that she couldn’t find a man to share her faith and treat her as she deserved to be treated.
A dear friend, another battered woman whom she lovingly calls a “radical Baptist,” told Clareen something she remembers to this day: Clareen wasn’t facing reality. She had stayed with one abusive husband for twelve years, but stuck it out for only three years with the next one.
“You are getting better,” the friend insisted.
That epiphany helped keep Clareen on the right track and she never again became involved with another abuser.
In retrospect, she says, she and her “radical Baptist” friend had, at least in the early days, fooled themselves into thinking they could reform “bad boys.” As she now admits, “All women think they can change bad boys. When you get to be fifty, you want to find someone who doesn’t need changing.”
After they wised up, the two women relied on each other for reality checks on prospective men. “We wormed our way out of self-deception and settling for something less than we deserved.”
At the same time, Clareen was thriving professionally. She has been a development executive, planning fundraising drives for various charities, for the last twenty years. It all started when Clareen got laid off from her job as a secretary in a Minneapolis company that had eliminated her department. She soon found a job as an administrative assistant with the Minnesota Women’s Fund, one of the first foundations for women in the country. “I was there about twenty minutes—and I was writing a grant,” she remembers. She eventually became its development director.
“It was set up brilliantly,” she recalls. If the group wanted to solicit a wealthy woman for a donation, they sent another well-off woman to plead its case. The same formula was used for women executives, African Americans, Native Americans and others. It was the new girl’s club, and it attracted big donors, one of whom later joked, “I decided to give $1 million and I was going to ask my husband, but then I thought, what the heck, it’s my money!”
It turned out that fundraising was something Clareen had a knack for, as well as the passion. She helped raise millions of dollars for the Fund while overseeing more than five hundred volunteers.
Eventually, though, she became “sick of the politics of women’s organizations” and abruptly quit one day.
Within hours after learning that Clareen had resigned, a Native American woman persuaded her to raise money for Indians. She believed that Clareen understood native culture, and could communicate it to potential funders in a way they could understand. The woman had thought it down to the last detail.
The strategy worked. “We never got a no,” Clareen says.
After that experience, Clareen went freelance, serving as a consultant to such groups.
“I was just crazy,” she says. “I can remember going to bed and setting the alarm for four A.M. because I had to put together ten proposals for the Minneapolis Foundation by four p.m. I would get it done by noon, take a shower, and then go to present them.”
She also ended up being recruited to work part-time for the Minnesota Department of Corrections planning committee for women offenders. One of her assignments: Find out why so many black women prisoners were ending up in isolation in much higher numbers than their white counterparts.
“I told them, You can’t send a white woman inside to find out what’s happening. I was told, No, just shut up and go.”
Clareen did and, as usual, upset some of the prison officials by her nonconformist ways: She asked a recently released prisoner to dine with her—breaking the rule against fraternizing with inmates. But, Clareen protested, how could she find out what was wrong if she couldn’t have heart-to-hearts with the women who knew best about the different treatment?
She ended up concluding that blacks and whites were treated differently because the guards tended to believe what the white prisoners told them. As a result, white inmates tended to receive more privileges and less punishment than their African American counterparts.
“If you were black and you committed an offense, you went to the hole,” she says. “If you were black you may see your kids during visiting hours while whites automatically got to see theirs.”
Clareen did have success with helping some women prisoners. One Native American woman who was finally paroled after being convicted of feeding rat poison to an abusive husband, called her up later to thank her. She proudly told of how she had completed her education and had now attained her dream job: decorating homes. Clareen later passed on the good news to the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who had helped the woman with her appeals and parole hearings.
Soon afterward, Clareen went to work for City Inc., a nonprofit group in Minneapolis that offers family outreach and advocacy programs in an alternative junior and senior high school. She came on board first as a consultant and later as its director of development. She has now been with this agency for six years. “That’s too long. I’ve got to go,” she says with a deadpan expression.
She was joking—but it wasn’t long before Islamic Relief USA began wooing her.
Clareen has also remarried, this time to a gentle Muslim man who pursued her until she decided to take the chance. Like her, he’s a convert to Islam, becoming a Muslim only a few months before Clareen did. They live in a quiet St. Paul neighborhood.
However, when he first proposed to Clareen, he was married to another woman. Clareen wasn’t about to tolerate polygamy, no matter that Islam condones it. She told him bluntly, “I am an only child and I never learned to share,” and forgot about him.
“He would write cards every week,” she says. “I threw them all away.”
He didn’t give up and divorced his wife. Once
more, he asked Clareen to marry him. This time, friends urged her to consider it. One reminded her, “You’ve been hurt by men who hurt you. Why not try someone who will love you?”
So Clareen cornered him. Why, she demanded, do you want to marry me?
“I want to marry you,” he replied, “because I love you and want to care for you—and because I want to be entertained for the rest of my life.”
How could she resist such an answer? “He is hilarious,” Clareen says. “He’s one of the funniest human beings who has ever lived.”
But Clareen has her own sense of fun. For her mahr—what Muslim men give to their new wives as a sign of lifelong commitment—Clareen asked for twenty pounds of green coffee beans. As it turns out, Clareen loves her coffee—and this man in her life.
Life has indeed turned out well for Clareen, the pioneering Muslimah. She says she received tremendous support from her friends, family and co-workers after 9/11. They are as fiercely protective of her as they are of her faith. As she puts it, “Before 9/11 people loved me in spite of Islam; now they love me because of it.”
With her new career, she had to resign from being part of Muslim leadership in Minnesota—including the Imams who head the mosques. As the group’s secretary, she was one woman among twenty-nine men. “Once a month I took the notes” of the meeting, she says. She was awed by how they treat her—with respect and deference. (Clareen is modest about her own accomplishments.)
She attends a mosque where men and women are on different floors. The women listen to the service through a speaker (translation from Arabic is done through headsets). At other mosques in the area men and women are in the same room but separated, or the men are on the main floor and women in the balcony.
At the present time, Clareen is glad that she will be able to make a difference for women at Islamic Relief. She’s also glad that other Muslim women are joining SNAP to reach out to their sisters in trouble. They are realizing that domestic abuse exists in all cultures. A preliminary study shows that Muslim households in the United States have the same rate of domestic abuse as non-Muslims: 12 percent. Such abuse can come in different forms. One woman she is helping is an African refugee who was being treated as a virtual servant by her husband and mother-in-law.
Her volunteering is all part of a day’s work, which can include accompanying other Muslims to the FBI office in Minnesota to demand they quit singling out Muslims for extra scrutiny as potential terrorists. It can also include demonstrations to the curious of how she winds her hijab around her head. In the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, Clareen is known as the woman with fifty hijabs. She likes to color-coordinate her head coverings with her other clothes. Sometimes people want to try one on. And Clareen, ever the friendly and helpful nonconformist, promptly obliges by taking it off and handing it to them.
“Knock yourself out,” she says.
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W. L. CATI’S MISSION: SAVING ABUSED MUSLIM WOMEN
NEED AN ESCAPE PLAN? W. L. Cati has one listed on her website, www.ZennahMinistries.com.
While she would never say every Muslim male is a wife-beater, she knows firsthand that abuse does occur and she has dedicated her life to helping other Muslim women escape it.
W.L. has gone full-circle: Once a veiled Muslimah, she has returned to Christianity, and as an author and evangelist her mission is focused on abused Muslim women.
“The life I was living was not worth anything,” she says. “Literally, I walked out of my marriage with nothing.”
She did leave with something, however: Bleeding ulcers. “Everything escalated—it was just too intense. Nothing was ever good enough.”
W.L. gets e-mails from grateful women thanking her for giving them the strength to leave. She also gets her share of hate mail from Muslims who think she is blaspheming their religion. One was so angry that the writer’s message lacked capitalization, proper spelling or even coherence: “Shame on you so called followers of christ. If jesus came back today and see you getting worldly gain by selling dirty doctrin, he would tell you that you have nothing to do with that he convey long time ago. i will invite you in the name of allah to study one true way of life which is islam, so you can go by his mersy go to heaven.”
W.L. patiently replies to each e-mail or letter, no matter how nasty. She tries to persuade them with logic and knowledge.
“I was a Muslim for many years,” W.L. wrote in one message. “I know as much if not more about Islam than the average Muslim.”
Indeed, there was a time when W.L. lived in a seven-bedroom house in suburban Atlanta, had two vacation homes in Florida, and jetted off to Egypt for Nile cruises—all courtesy of her husband’s million-dollar annual income from a chain of twenty furniture stores throughout Georgia and Florida. Birthday bashes included limousine rides to a favorite Indian restaurant, closed for the day to accommodate W.L.’s celebration with family and friends.
She seemed to have it all spiritually, too. She was a devout Muslim convert who gladly donned a hijab, attended Quran classes, and traveled to the Middle East to officially declare her conversion at the mosque of her husband’s family.
But behind all that glitter and piety was misery. Her charming, worldly husband Muhammed could turn violent; her volcanic mother-in-law would erupt into rages in which she spit on W.L. and violently pushed and pulled her. And W.L. felt violated and humiliated when her husband kept asking her to accept polygamy. Although she refused, he still womanized and was away from home most of the time with his business and girlfriends. (His brother did, in fact, marry two women in the United States.)
W.L. might have put up with all this were it not for an event that occurred at the birthday party of a niece. She wanted to take their toddler twins home to rest. It was a simple request and W.L. asked her husband, as she had been taught that a good Muslim wife does. But her husband erupted in anger. “You will stay here,” he ordered, as the children began crying.
That did it. W.L. rebelled. As she got up to leave, she saw her enraged husband, his face almost beet-red, lunging at her. The next thing she knew she woke up from a blackout. She was in the backseat of their car with their four children.
This, she decided, was rock-bottom. She decided to leave him despite tremendous fear and uncertainty. How would she support their children? How would she live without a man she had thought was her soul mate? How could she turn her back on Islam which she had so eagerly embraced?
She can now say ruefully, it has been a long, arduous journey. It took her five years merely to get a divorce. During those years there have been tearful reunions, passionate promises to reform—and more abuse.
Today, her life of luxury is gone. She’s now living in an 1,800-square-foot duplex and driving an old van. But, she says, she has something much more enriching: her freedom and her faith. She’s back to her childhood Christianity. She’s an ordained minister who has written a book, Married to Muhammed. She has set up Zennah Ministries to help other abused Muslim women.
“God bless them, but there are a lot of them out there,” she says.
W.L. Cati is her pen name; she asked that her real name not be used. She regularly receives threats because her book criticizes what she considers encouragement of the abuse of women within Islamic culture and by the Quran. The book’s chapter titles plainly state her revulsion for such conduct: “His Before Yours”, “The Husband’s Right to Beat The Wife”, and “Polygamy”, in which she quotes the Quran—“Marry women of your choice, two, three, or four (Surah 4:3).”
W.L. says she knows that there are many Muslim women in America who thrive in Islam and are treated well by their husbands. On the other hand, many Muslim women in the United States eagerly want to taste what other American women take for granted: going where they want, wearing what they want, and not fearing an abusive husband.
“In no way do I hold Islam responsible for the actions of my husband,” she writes on her Zennah Ministries website. “I do not believe that all Muslim men beat, abuse, o
r mistreat their wives, that all Christian and Jewish men treat their wives with love the way they should.”
Still, she is concerned that abusive, controlling men use the Quran to justify abusing their wives, mentally and physically.
That’s why www.ZennahMinistries.com lists abuse escape plans.
She named her ministries after her own adopted Muslim name—Zennah. It is also the name of her firstborn daughter. Zennah is Arabic for “perfect” or “fine.” In Farsi it means “beautification, arranging or setting in order to look better.” Ironically, it was to please her husband that W.L. took Zennah as her new name and in countless other ways tried to become the ideal Muslim wife.
Those efforts took her far from her family and home in Alabama.
She had been born into a warm and loving family. “I had led a very sheltered life,” she says. Her family was not serious about religion, though they dutifully showed up in the pews at Easter and Christmas—until W.L.’s mother started going to services regularly. W.L. was impressed at her mother’s transformation. “I saw such a change in her over a short period of time that I had to go to church just to see what it was about.”
W.L. was a pert, pretty teenager who modeled and won beauty pageants, including Miss Alabama Hemisphere. With her pastor watching over her, W.L. settled down to an early marriage at age seventeen with a twenty-two-year-old churchgoer. W.L. discovered that they couldn’t have children so they quickly adopted three children, including a child from Brazil. Her life would have seemed set and, indeed, it was for a dozen years. She continued to win beauty pageants as a Mrs. contestant, but W.L. couldn’t get over the yearning to give birth to her own child. Her marriage floundered, and she had just won the Mrs. Alabama pageant when she and her husband divorced. She headed to Atlanta to start over and, as she now says with a laugh, “to seek my fame and fortune.” She quickly found modeling jobs and one night went to a new nightclub with a friend and fellow model who was helping promote its opening. It was W.L.’s first time in a nightclub, and it was where she met Muhammed.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 25