She needed whatever help she could get. She was a mom at age seventeen—a teenager who had dreamed ever since she was four years old of being an attorney. But there she was–a girl herself with a baby. Even then she had a steely focus: She proceeded to college, then law school. Goals, she says, “keep you focused and InshaAllah it will work out.”
It did work out, but it took eleven years. During those years, she says, she “never missed a PTA meeting and I went to all his school and sports activities. I was on autopilot. I just did it.”
She was blessed, she adds, that her parents pitched in and watched over her son while she had to be at work or class. Thanks to them, she never had to have a babysitter.
It was while she was a young mother with a toddler that she began thinking about a new faith. “I had been born a Christian, but I didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity.” She felt she needed a faith that made sense to her. “I realized I was a spiritual person.”
She didn’t agree with the philosophy of the black nationalist Nation of Islam, but she kept coming back to the more orthodox Islam. This was something with which she felt at peace, and it answered her questions. “It was intellectually stimulating,” she remembers.
It also gave her a sense of assurance: with Allah in control of the world, things would work out. “Nothing is ever going to be safe or easy,” she observes, but she knows that with a higher being in charge, she does have a destiny, a reason for being here. “It’s made me want to be the best I can be.”
When she was considering converting to Islam, she pondered for a long time and finally asked God to give a sign that He favored her becoming a Muslim. Just as she was walking across the street, she saw a beam of light flash upon something shining. Curious, she walked toward the illuminated object. She was stunned: It turned out to be her own missing earring, a birthday present that she had lost exactly a year earlier, on the day before her birthday. The judge took that as a sign of affirmation that she had found her faith.
The mysterious light would appear to her again more than twenty years later when she went on the Hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. She joined the tens of thousands walking or taking a bus. “All these people were going for the same thing,” she marvels. “You had this feeling that Allah was with you. It was a very palatable feeling, of being protected by Allah.”
After a lot of walking, she would get tired, but when she would see people in wheelchairs pushing on the sight galvanized her. Then she climbed up Mount Arafat to pray. As she began reciting her prayer she suddenly felt a beam of sunlight directed right at her. It flashed before her, just as the light had appeared years ago when she found her earring. There, on the Saudi mountain, she began to weep.
“This light opened me up. I had a sense of my powerlessness and of providence. I had this sense of His magnificence, of His awesome power. I just started crying.”
Afterward, she felt the same intimation of divine power that she had experienced so many years before.
She has never regretted her move to Islam. Her parents, however, were particularly skeptical about her change of name. In Arabic, Mahasa means “to examine closely,” or “to be just,” and Zakia signifies purity. She loves her name—and what it means.
She accepts Islam’s rules, including that she must marry another Muslim. So far, though, she has stayed single after her divorce. She likes to joke that she has had many opportunities but no real choices.
Other experiences have beckoned, though, such as travel to South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt. And, of course, there is her work. After she finished law school, she opened a general legal practice, taking everything from divorce cases to personal injury lawsuits. She did that for two years before joining the Legal Aid Bureau to represent abused or neglected children. At last, she had found her niche. Later, she also served as legal counsel to a nonprofit organization that worked with abused women and their children, eventually becoming managing attorney in its legal clinic before being appointed a Master in Chancery.
“I love helping juveniles. It’s been very rewarding.”
She requires many of the youngsters who come before her to write a letter about what services they need and, more important, what they feel they must do in order to stay out of trouble. They’re also directed to write about their future career plans. It’s the first thing she asks for and usually she insists it be finished within two weeks of the youngster’s court appearance.
“I don’t care about spelling or punctuation,” she recently told one of the youngsters. “But I do care about the thought.”
If there isn’t enough of the latter, she will order it redone. Or, as she told one juvenile, “If I don’t think you have thought about it enough, you’ll be writing another letter.”
The letters, she adds, are the first things she looks for when she goes to work.
She wishes many of the youngsters who pass through her courtroom received better guidance. Too many are growing up without any at all. They lack parameters and rules that a structured way of life provides.
“There has to be a guiding force,” she adds. For herself, she feels Islam has helped her with “a sense of commitment and of keeping my priorities straight.”
46
AZIZAH AL-HIBRI: CHAMPION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
IN THE FALL OF 2002, Azizah al-Hibri, a former foreign-exchange student who had once been asked by her American professors why she was bothering with graduate school, was seated on a podium next to one of the most powerful women in America, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Dr. al-Hibri had toughed it out during the days when women grad students were looked down on, and had gone on to distinguish herself in her adopted country, as a philosophy professor, feminist editor, Wall Street lawyer, law professor, and an international advocate for human rights. As the founder of Karamah, a Washington-based group of Muslim women lawyers for human rights, she is now considered one of the go-to Muslim leaders in the United States. She has appeared with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a forum to discuss women’s issues. And she has advised President George W. Bush on the matter of how best to protect American Muslims from persecution after 9/11 and how to draw up guidelines so that Muslims in the United States could contribute to charities without being wrongly linked to terrorists.
Condoleeza has praised Dr. al-Hibri and Karamah for their essential work. “Let us work for a world where all women and all girls, from Kansas to Kandahar, can pursue their dreams and live up to their potential,” Rice said. “Remember, democracy is a journey, not a destination. It is something that you get up and you build day by day, brick by brick.”
That is a message Dr. al-Hibri takes to heart. From her own difficult journey toward secularism and her return to an enthusiastic embrace of Islam, she has come to see Islam as a powerful force to help women and bring peace to a troubled, embittered world.
As she has said, “God gave Muslim women all the rights, it is only the Jahiliyyah [patriarchal thinking] of others that has restricted them.”
When Dr. al-Hibri came from her native Lebanon to study in the United States in the early 1970s, she was ready for feminism. She was tired of the patriarchal traditions she had encountered in her country, traditions that favored men. Then she got the shock of her life: Her American male professors were worse. They would pelt her with questions: “Why am I going to school when a guy could have my place so he could support his family? Why don’t I go home and be a good homemaker?” They did not take her seriously. “In my own country I was given a lot more respect,” she says. But Azizah believed in herself, and as the women’s movement gathered strength Dr. al-Hibri became a part of it. It changed her life.
She became friends with other American feminists, women who still keep in touch decades later. They were idealists intent on bettering conditions for all women, including the religious ones who were trying to meld their feminism with their spiritual beliefs in spite of what feminists viewed as centuries of discrimination imposed on women by religiou
s leaders, be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. Some feminists were openly hostile to religion. Nevertheless, Dr. al-Hibri says, “We wanted to make room for those religious women. I learned to be inclusive.”
Azizah earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. At a time when colleges were beginning to cut back on hiring liberal arts professors, she found a tenure-track position at Texas A & M University. While teaching, she published in academic journals, even starting one herself—Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She was soon highly respected in her field.
Her personal life was also flourishing. Friends had introduced her to a Saudi graduate student, who courted Azizah for five years. She is grateful he was persistent. “We have been happily married for twenty years,” she says.
Despite her personal and academic successes, she felt restless. She wanted to act on her beliefs, to further pursue shattering glass ceilings for women. “At one point, I thought I would like to bring about change rather than write about it,” she says. She decided to give up teaching and take up a completely new career: law. She was accepted at the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, and back to Philadelphia she went.
“I left a very nice teaching job,” she says. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”
Law, she felt, was one of the last frontiers for women, particularly the formerly all-male preserve of corporate law. She set her sights on Wall Street. Although she briefly returned to academia as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School and the Center for the Study of World Religion, by 1986 she was firmly ensconced as an associate in a New York law firm and, later, as a Wall Street attorney specializing in securities regulation. She exuded polish and confidence as she began working the required marathon hours the job demanded. She again found emotional support from other Muslim women lawyers trying to achieve in a male preserve. Life was good, but Dr. al-Hibri kept asking herself: Is this all there is? After all, she wasn’t doing it for the money. After six years on Wall Street, she discovered she missed teaching and researching. In 1992 she got a chance to go back to teaching, this time law, and accepted a position as an associate professor at the T. C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond in Virginia and later became a full professor there. It was at Richmond that she rekindled her passion for Islamic law and women’s rights.
In 1992, she broke ground in a new academic field, writing an article about Islam and democracy for a scholarly journal. “They said, You must write about it,” she remembers. “But I had no idea what to say. No one had examined the topic so basically I had to invent the wheel.” She delved into Arabic texts, hundreds of years old. What she came up stunned many in the academic community. It turned out that early Islam leaders had emphasized free thought and movement, what today is considered essential in a democratic society. “The first thing that the Prophet did was to put together a bill of rights. He had a charter between him as the head of the city, and the people—the Muslims and Jews.” All were to be treated with respect, given individual rights, and expected to defend their city. The charter, she says, is remarkably similar to the United States Constitution. At the same time, it is at odds with the policies of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and of other Muslim-dominant countries in Asia and Africa. Dr. al-Hibri believes that the powerful corrupted the faith, and that many clerics—who themselves were not well-versed in Islamic scripture—helped perpetuate for centuries a status quo that was not based on Quranic teachings. This wrongful use of scripture, she points out, served to justify the repression.
Her article showed how early Islam promoted democracy. What she had to say on the subject was, she says, “so unusual and so fresh, it created quite a stir.” Her article was widely read, although some scholars found it hard to believe that Islam was ever as she described it. However, she adds, “In the Muslim community, it was a huge success.”
Other scholars followed Dr. al-Hibri’s lead, writing many other articles and books on the issue. “And now everybody thinks of Islam and democracy as compatible.” She says, adding with a laugh, “I had to do the hard work.”
In her next article, she discovered her passion for analyzing the status of women as set forth in Islamic family laws. Again, she says, “that was a very new topic.”
Writing gave Azizah pause to reflect on her own life, to review Islam, and to welcome it back more deeply into her life. By then, she had been reading the Quran on a daily basis and found it empowering. She realized that the Prophet Mohammed had been ahead of his time in promoting the treatment of women, quite the opposite of many male religious leaders who misinterpreted the Quran intentionally in order to shore up their power and keep women subservient.
Human rights, Dr. al-Hibri says, “flow from God and no individual or government can take them away from us.” In that light, she named her human rights group Karamah, after an Arabic reference to a Quranic verse that means, “We have given dignity to the children of Adam.”
She is keenly aware, though, that change does not come quickly. “What was really hard while growing up was the interpretation of Islam I was receiving in my society.”
Reading the Quran changed her. “I found out that I have all the rights I ever wanted. There was no reason for alienation; there was no reason at all to think that the Quran gives women a subordinate place in society.”
Azizah acknowledged that her newfound knowledge of Islam empowering women surprised her. It also caused her to reflect more favorably on her own upbringing—how her family had pushed her to become a highly educated woman in a male-dominant society. “Islamic culture,” she adds, “was patriarchal but supportive. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
She was born into a distinguished family in Beirut, where her grandfather was widely esteemed by other Lebanese religious leaders there. He and her father emphasized education and saw to it that Azizah went to Lebanon’s finest schools. “I was very young, about three years old, when I first went to school,” she says. She spent two years of preschool and kindergarten at a French-run school, but when her father decided she must learn English rather than French, he transferred her to the American School for Girls. “I had a great time there for twelve years,” she says. She would later graduate from the American University in Beirut with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.
At the same time, she was being educated about Islam at home. She was her grandfather’s pet and he confided in her about his religious thoughts, and the result was that she, as a young girl, became more knowledgeable about Islam than some poorly educated Imams. This knowledge would come in handy with her academic research in the United States. But her family gave her more than scriptural instruction. They also emphasized a life of service, of helping others and acting on their Muslim faith. Growing up, she was very active in charitable work and social work.
She recognizes that today many Muslim women do not receive the same encouragement as she did. This perception has been supported by her travels throughout the Muslim world, where she has seen the differences in how women are treated.
Nevertheless, she is optimistic that Muslim women will be granted more rights—through working within the cultures of their own countries. For example, she’s been a consultant to the Supreme Council for Family Affairs in Qatar to develop a draft family code. However, she is mindful that what works in, say, Jordan, may not be suitable in more conservative countries such as Saudi Arabia. But change will come. Already in many Middle East countries including hyper-conservative Iran—more women are occupying more college classrooms than men.
In Dr. al-Hibri’s opinion, American feminists mean well in their efforts to aid women around the world, trying to end genital mutilation in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. But they have to realize that women in Muslim countries have their own priorities which may be different from those attributed to them by American feminists. Women in Muslim countries, she says, are first and foremost concerned about their families’ well-being. In her artic
le, “Introduction to Muslim Women’s Rights,” she has stated, “Although gradual change is frustrating, it is, nevertheless, more stable and less destructive of society than a radical coercive change.”
And, she says, it’s not just in the Middle East or Africa where the potential of Muslim women is being suppressed. In the United States, some women are held back because they’re ignorant of their rights. Separated from their families and not always able to speak English, they can be abused by husbands, Dr. al-Hibri says. Indeed, one of Karamah’s missions is to help Muslim women in the United States become educated about their rights.
“There is a real need among the American Muslims to develop what we call legal literacy,” she told a seminar about the challenges American Muslim women face. “There is really not much knowledge among the Muslim population in the United States about the law in the United States. And, as a result of that, very often unfair situations could have been avoided had the person known about American law.”
She cites the example of a Muslim woman who decided to divorce her husband under Islamic law—but decided she couldn’t afford to get a divorce in U.S. civil courts. According to her reasoning, she was divorced in the eyes of God and later she remarried in an Islamic ceremony. But, of course, this was not a legal union, as she was still married to her first husband. Dr. al-Hibri points out that later, when the second union fell apart, the woman couldn’t ask for any assets or “enforce her rights in court because she was not legally married in the United States. She could have avoided all that by simply finding a way, through Legal Aid or some other community resource, to finalize her civil divorce. There is no reason why she should have disadvantaged herself.”
The Face Behind the Veil Page 27