Some immigrant Muslim women may also endure abuse unnecessarily because their husband tells them they have no rights in the United States, and they believe it. Some husbands are so underhanded they obtain permanent residence and citizenship for themselves and their children, but not their wives. These men tell their wives that they must obey them or risk being deported. Sometimes they divorce their immigrant wife and claim she is not entitled to any of the family’s assets. They may try to obtain custody of their children. Often their ex-wives are left destitute, without money or work skills, forced to rely on family in the United States or assistance from a charitable group. That, Azizah says, is an injustice that can be remedied in the courts. Immigrant women are entitled to the same divorce protection laws as are American-born women. They can also apply for legal residence on the basis of being abused by their husbands.
U.S. courts have not always been protective of Muslim women, particularly if they are immigrants who married in their native country. When they divorce in the United States, the courts may not always give them what they are entitled to, such as their delayed dowry, called a mahr, that has been agreed upon before the wedding as part of the kitab, the Muslim marriage contract. In Muslim countries, the delayed mahr—usually cash or property—is automatically given to the wife in cases of divorce (unless, as the Prophet states, there is no reason for the divorce). However, Dr. al-Hibri explains, some U.S. courts, relying on inaccurate expert testimony, have been reluctant to give the woman this settlement. In one case, the judge was told by “experts” that a woman loses her dowry if she initiates the divorce—something Dr. al-Hibri refutes. The rule is more complicated than that. Unfortunately, the woman in this case ended up losing her mahr, and was compelled to suffer the court’s moralizing that any Muslim marriage contract in which it is specified a woman receives her mahr upon divorce is “designed to facilitate divorce” and is rendered “void as against public policy.”
“In other words,” Dr. al-Hibri says in disbelief, “if you have an agreement which encourages you to divorce, that’s against public policy. The court says that a kitab, an Islamic marriage contract, encourages the woman to divorce. Why? Because the kitab says that if she divorces she gets money. So, in other words, to get money, she will be motivated to divorce. I would argue that by their logic, a kitab also encourages a woman to murder, because she will also get money upon the death of her husband—if she is not discovered. This is ridiculous.”
In its efforts to protect Muslim women, Karamah has started summer seminars at the University of Richmond to educate Muslim women community leaders about American law, particularly those on divorce and immigration. Dr. al-Hibri herself lectures widely to better educate American legal scholars and practitioners. She is also working to show how the Quran can be used to resolve disputes peacefully. In many passages, it promotes peace through problem-solving and dialog, she says. She has been using these passages when she lobbies for human rights.
And her message is heard. She has been impressed that some American leaders have responded sensitively when she and other Muslim leaders asked for help to safeguard the rights of Muslims during the tense time after 9/11. “Dialog works,” she concludes.
She is also ready to talk with Christian and Jewish groups about the origins their religions share with Islam.
“Let me tell you about our religion and yours,” she offers. “For you, too, come from an Abrahamic religion, which believes in loving even your enemies.”
Throughout her commitment to promoting human rights in the Muslim world, she has rediscovered her homeland and her faith. And she has found that time marches on. She is an American now—enriched by her Lebanese culture and Muslim faith, but an American, nonetheless.
She takes care to point out, though, that her “Americanization” was gradual.
“When I first came to study here, I did not want to become an American. I thought, I’m Lebanese. I’m going to study and go back home to Lebanon. What you soon find out is that your perception of the United States is changing, and that you too are becoming an American.”
47
DEEDRA’S DUTY
DEEDRA ABBOUD, glowing and gracious as she makes the rounds, meets with business and political leaders in the Phoenix area, greeting people by name in her soft Southern accent. She’s wearing a smartly cut business suit with her trademark hijab—elegant, but down to earth. She wants people to feel comfortable around her, and they do.
Her ongoing mission is to bring Islam and its followers into mainstream America. Until recently, she did so as the director of the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim human rights group in the United States. Now she serves as the Arizona director of the Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation, a national grassroots religious, social, and educational organization.
Most Muslim immigrants in the United States are already in the mainstream, Deedra says. They have adapted to American ways and, if necessary, have changed some of their habits. Take shaking hands between the sexes. In the West, it’s taken for granted as a friendly gesture or a way of cementing a business relationship. Muslims, however—especially newly arrived immigrants or exchange students—believe they are not to touch members of the opposite sex except their family members. Deedra assures them that it is okay even necessary, to shake hands, to limit misunderstandings. She’s observed that Muslim men especially don’t want to look chauvinistic by refusing to shake the hand of a female colleague, customer, or business acquaintance. In this regard, Muslim women are on safer ground, as etiquette books in the West say it is a woman who has the choice of extending her hand. Indeed, some Muslim women do not want to shake hands with strangers. Personally, Deedra believes firmly that she must and she does: she wants to give a good impression as a leader in the Arizona Muslim community.
She also wants to project a self-assured image to the public. She believes Islam has deepened the feminism first nurtured in her by her mother, one of the first women in Arkansas to become a law enforcement officer.
Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Deedra, now thirty-three, grew up mostly in the Little Rock area. “My mother got married when she was pretty young—eighteen. I was the youngest of four girls. My dad was abusive and he was also a cheater. We grew up in a chauvinistic society and family.”
Her mother was expected to ignore her husband’s transgressions—the womanizing, the fits of rage, even the beatings. Calls to police about domestic abuse sometimes went unanswered. Finally her mother gathered her courage and left her husband, despite her family’s disapproval. “I was two,” Deedra remembers. “I really didn’t miss him but my sisters did.” Although her mother obtained a divorce and won child support, there was no enforcement. Her mother had to assume responsibility for the girls.
That’s what pushed her to become a deputy sheriff in the Little Rock area. It was not only the good, steady pay; she felt she could make a difference and help make changes to benefit other divorced women and their children. Deedra’s mother spearheaded a state policy of garnishing the wages of noncustodial parents who failed to pay child support.
“My mom raised us to be very independent,” Deedra says. “She would tell us not to look for the guy on the white horse. He’s not coming.”
Instead, her mother promoted feminism. She urged her daughters to work together and help each other out. As a result, they were close as children, and remain close as adults.
Deedra’s introduction to Islam was not a good experience. Her sixth-grade textbook, discussing Islam in the context of the Middle East, mentioned the low status of women, and how wives were beaten by their husbands. “It made me angry to read how they were treated,” Deedra remembers.
As a deputy sheriff, her mother had her own stories about Muslims, of black inmates who became part of the Nation of Islam while in prison. They were violent, anger-filled men, her mother believed—dangerous to be around. She did not see anything positive in what she considered a strange
religion. Neither did Deedra.
School reinforced that impression, Deedra says. In seventh grade, one text referred to Islam as “Mohammedism” and described how adherents worshipped the Prophet and that women were forced to wear black and walk one step behind men. Her teacher warned that such people “were going to hell.” Deedra believed her.
During her senior year of high school, while still going to her traditional Pentecostal church, Deedra got to know some Malaysian students who were Muslim. She would try to “help” them by explaining how their religion was bad.
“I used to go up to them and argue they were going to hell, that the women had been treated so badly. They would say, ‘No, Islam doesn’t treat women badly. Maybe individuals do but they are not practicing Islam.’”
Deedra began soul searching, bought a book about Islam, then a copy of the Quran itself. To her surprise, she found she liked the faith and what it stood for.
She knew she wanted to become a Muslim but couldn’t see herself doing so in Arkansas. For one, she didn’t see how she could hold a job and wear a hijab. Through a fortunate turn of events, her mother invited her to accompany her to a convention in Phoenix—and Deedra fell in love with the Southwest. She felt she could move there and start over, that this was a place where she could become a practicing Muslim and comfortably wear the traditional scarf and clothes. In 1998 she packed all her things in a car and drove with a girlfriend and her older sister to Phoenix. She got a job immediately as a collections clerk. Soon she found herself a mosque, after it had held an open house to dispel anti-Arab stereotypes shown in a movie called The Siege.
There, Deedra met Yuko Davis (see chapter 25) who became her best friend. That year, Deedra formally became a Muslim, going through the Shahada ceremony. She began going to mosque regularly and wore the traditional clothes on more occasions.
“I wore a hijab, but not to work. Everywhere else but there,” she added.
When she was laid off, she told Yuko it was actually an opportunity to find a company where she could feel comfortable wearing a hijab. Coincidentally, a Muslim family-owned construction company needed a secretary. The owners, two brothers, preferred a woman who wore the hijab. Deedra was interviewed, and the job was offered to her.
She started work with one of the brothers, Ali Asim Abboud Al-Janabi, who was polite but distant. He spoke very little to Deedra, but that was okay with her. She liked her job, and the quiet office enabled her to get more things done. She thought of Ali as a nice family man—he had pictures of children on his desk.
“He was so respectful, I was clueless,” Deedra says.
But Ali had taken a fancy to the tall, blue-eyed Deedra. It turned out he was single: The pictures on his desk were of his brother’s children.
He went to Yuko’s husband for advice on courting Deedra, and was advised to do it the traditional way: Get to know her in a chaperoned setting. Yuko and her husband invited him to meet Deedra at their house. Meanwhile, Ali’s family was encouraging the would-be romance. His sister-in-law described what a great guy Ali was. Deedra listened politely. “I wasn’t getting it,” she now chuckles. “You would think I would put two and two together.”
When, finally, Yuko clued her in—within minutes before Ali was supposed to come and “meet” Deedra outside the workplace–Deedra flew into a panic. She had shown up at Yuko’s house wearing sweatpants, assuming she was only going to see her friend. But Yuko lent her proper clothing and Deedra met Ali as planned. She also began to view him in a new way—as a potential husband. They hit it off during their first chat but something occurred to Deedra. Ali was kind and amiable, but he was a secular Muslim, not a religious one. Like many born to the faith, he didn’t practice Islam. Nor did he pray.
Deedra was tactful, but she was also blunt: She couldn’t marry a nonpracticing Muslim. The Quran forbade it. She immediately gave up the idea of a courtship.
Later the next evening, Ali called her at home, to tell her he had prayed for the first time. Their relationship took off. In the end, it transformed both of them. Ali, for one, discovered Islam and began practicing it with the zeal of a convert. (“He definitely has surpassed me in piety,” Deedra now says.) As for Deedra, after their marriage, she began to feel the need for a job separate from her husband and his family. At the time she was helping start an Arizona chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, serving on its board of directors. When the group decided to hire staff, Deedra applied and became its director.
Although Deedra believes Arizona is a good home for Muslims, it has been a hotspot of sporadic violence against Muslims after 9/11. Tensions continued to escalate following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 2003, Deedra wrote to Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, asking her to “denounce all types of stereotyping, racial slurs, discriminations, violence, loss of life, loss of property, hate crime and other forms of intimidation.” The letter turned out to be eerily prescient: The day it was delivered to the governor’s office, four dry ice explosives were tossed into the backyard of an Iraqi family in Phoenix. Local police investigated it as a possible hate crime and the governor did denounce the attack. More incidents have occurred, including the spray-painting of a swastika and a thunderbolt-shaped “SS,” among other Nazi symbols, on a Tempe mosque. Deedra appeared at a press conference with other Muslims and Tempe police chief Ralph Tranter to protest the vandalism. Soon afterward, police arrested a suspect with a rap sheet who was picked up near the mosque, and conclusively linked him to the crime.
Chief Tranter praised Deedra for working with police while she worked hard to educate the public about Muslims. Nevertheless, Deedra says, her office continues to get hate mail.
But she sees the better side of America, and that’s what keeps her going. In her new job, she is encouraging Muslims to become more involved in American government and charity groups. It’s important, she believes, that Muslims become part of the system. “I’m out there meeting new people every day and I find those who hate are the minority.”
48
DALIA: STRUGGLING FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
MOST AMERICANS have either forgotten—or never knew—that in late 2002 hundreds of Middle Eastern men and boys in Southern California were arrested by federal immigration agents in one sweep. But not twenty-nine-year-old attorney Dalia Hashad, who grew up in California and is now the New York-based national advocate for Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians for the American Civil Liberties Union. The memory of those who were arrested haunts her, as does the thought of thousands of others who’ve been arrested, deported, or had their homes or businesses searched since the USA Patriot Act enabled heightened security policies and practices.
“It has happened to a lot of people,” she says. “Countless Muslims are quietly suffering.”
She doesn’t believe we are safer for the crackdown. Rather, Dalia believes, America is the weaker for it, thanks to an increase in racial and ethnic unease. “This dragnet technique used by the FBI is simple racial profiling and it violates our most cherished fundamental freedoms.”
ACLU executives hired Dalia to help fight what they believe are attacks on freedoms most Americans take for granted. Dalia lauds the organization’s new national director, Anthony Romero, under whom she works, for aggressively fighting restrictive policies at a time when dissent is often characterized as unpatriotic.
Dalia has been traveling around the country directing the ACLU’s national campaign against racial profiling and responding to the post 9/11 backlash against Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians. From coast to coast she addresses audiences on the dangers of newly enacted policies and practices, including the Patriot Act, that encourage negative treatment of Middle Eastern ethnic groups. She also helps recruit and train attorneys to provide pro bono legal services to those caught up in federal investigations.
“This is a huge problem and it is not just happening to the man from Jordan working at Dunkin’ Donuts on a tourist visa,” she says. “It is the idea that w
e can solve crime by going after people because of their ethnicity or religion.”
Her job as advocate is to make sure that Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians have the same rights as anyone else in the United States. However, not everyone supports Dalia’s efforts or agrees with the ACLU’s new emphasis on protecting immigrants and second-generation Muslims. In a 2003 article titled “The ACLU’s War on Homeland Security,” the conservative magazine Front Page said “many of these ‘unaccounted for’ visitors were already in violation of their immigration status when the [U.S. government’s] registration drives were launched.” Nor, it goes on to say, is the ACLU “interested in informing its followers that many of the Muslims and Middle Easterners it insists the government is targeting due to their race, religion or ethnicity were deported by the government as part of a year-old crackdown on at least 5,900 illegal aliens from countries where al-Qaeda is active. Most were targeted because they ignored deportation orders…. Thus, as realties demonstrate, federal agents fighting terrorism must now also fight the ACLU every step of the way.”
Dalia believes the U.S. government would be more effective in ferreting out terrorists if it didn’t throw out such a broad dragnet, which ensnares many innocent people whose cases clog up the system.
Racial profiling, she adds, is worse than ever. People’s fears after 9/11 only added to an increasingly unhealthy climate. In Dalia’s opinion, racism is still with us—only more subtle. The United States Senate no longer has the likes of the late Strom Thurmond thundering for segregation anymore, but many Americans now distrust numerous entire groups of people. “The discrimination against Muslims is intense,” she says. “I see it every day.”
As the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, Dalia considers herself a “brown” American. She grew up in California, living at times in the San Francisco Bay and Orange County areas. Her mother is a nurse; her father an engineer. They met in Kuwait, married, and emigrated to New York before moving to California.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 28