Muslim Girl

by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

  It wasn’t until I got older that I started noticing that my dad exhibited the same type of behavior, that same type of internalized disqualification from the running. His own self-image could be considered a reflection of the immigrant experience, the most basic premise of which was the underlying assumption that if you left your home country for here, then your home country is inferior. Meanwhile, we have selective memory and conveniently forget that Western countries are often to blame for the issues prompting immigration in the first place.

  As Muslim Girl’s work started gaining more and more attention, I was invited to a beautiful event among prestigious company, and of course I invited my parents to join me and enjoy the night. (As the daughter of immigrants, I know my people feel me when I talk about how much it means to us to bring our parents along to revel in our success. My mother said, “I feel like God is rewarding me for the all the hardship I’ve been through.” That was enough.) At the end of what I thought was a really pleasant evening, we were walking to the car and my dad said, in a self-­deprecating tone, “I guess we were able to squeeze ourselves among company like that tonight!” My happiness that evening instantly deflated in that moment. His comment was steeped in what I thought was self-loathing, a sheer feeling of worthlessness and undeservingness by comparison.

  But the way I received his remark—with not just sadness this time, but almost with anger, with offense—hinted to me that I saw it as an insult to myself and my work. By extension, that revilement meant that somewhere deep down, I was starting to believe in my own worth, that I did deserve to take up this space, that my people’s accomplishments were worthy. And our self-esteem, the way we regarded ourselves as we navigated these spaces, was worth more than anything.

  * * *

  4Laura Bush, “Radio Address by Mrs. Bush,” The American Presidency Project, November 17, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=24992.

  5Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, May 10, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib.

  Chapter 4

  Reem, Diana, and I were eagerly counting down the minutes until it was iftar time—or time to break our fast after what we mutually agreed was a long Ramadan day. In the brief moments leading up to our first sip of water, Diana remarked, “This minute is longer than a minute on the stair climber,” and I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. We observed that this Ramadan was the longest fasting days that we had probably ever experienced. Reem and I graduated from high school together, and also attended Rutgers University together, where she became the vice president of Muslim Girl’s first collegiate chapter, founded on our campus. We had planned events together, and I always admired how much esteem Reem gave her leadership position. Not only did she pick up all the slack whenever something needed to get done, but her killer outfits on our big nights were second to none. I loved watching her shine.

  We were sitting in a booth in an Olive Garden in New Jersey, where we finally settled after dodging long lines at the Cheesecake Factory and a nearby Thai spot, and rushed to catch iftar (while we were waiting, we noticed droves of veiled Muslim women and their families file in, including two of our former classmates from college, who had been smart enough to make reservations ahead of time). Now we were squirming in Olive Garden’s leather seats, taking in whiffs of the delicious basket full of freshly baked breadsticks, until—finally—it was time.

  That’s how I ended up with a mouthful of breadsticks when a waiter from our section interrupted me: “Hey, excuse me, are you the founder of MuslimGirl.com?” Mid-chew, I responded, “Yes, I am,” kind of shocked that someone would recognize me from the website here in my hometown, even at dinner. It had been happening more and more recently, but I never took it into any account. My little brother Ameer told me about a recent encounter at the bank, when the teller asked, “Are you Amani’s brother? I recognize your last name.” When he affirmed and asked if she knew me, she said, “Oh, no, I just really love what she’s doing.” It started to hit me when I got invited to the Halal Guys’ grand opening, where the owners escorted me away from the line swirling around the block, introduced themselves, and fixed me and Ameer up with some free dinner. A couple of weeks earlier, I’d heard that one of my former high school teachers, who once said my writing was unimpressive, wanted to catch up with me. It was all pretty cool, especially since I’d started the website in high school, right here.

  “I was at Clinton Global Initiative University, I heard you speak,” the waiter said. “I thought you were amazing! The way you responded to Bill Clinton was just so cool. You spoke with so much power,” he went on. We had a conversation in which he told me he was part of a group that had been selected to attend, and that was how he ended up there, and how he didn’t think it was me because what would I be doing in New Jersey?

  “My family lives up the street,” I told him. Small world.

  We wrapped up our conversation and he politely allowed us to return to our dinner. Reem asked, “Does that happen often?” I told her it was starting to. I was increasingly astonished and elated that the conversations we were starting on MuslimGirl.com were reaching audiences far and wide—in this case, a millennial white Jewish man with blond hair and blue eyes, in the middle of suburban New Jersey.

  I was sitting on the carpet of my bedroom floor in June 2008 when I decisively registered a new LiveJournal community called MuslimGirls. I was picking out a graphic of the Muslim opening line of the Qur’an, Bismillah ir Rahman ir Raheem, or, “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,” to top our very first introductory post. Between an interesting geometric calligraphic design and an unconventional pink Arabic script that ­almost looked like graffiti, I went the unconventional route. It was important to me that every detail about MuslimGirls was unconventional: that it was unique and accessible to young girls and showed that Islam was cool and interesting. It had to be anything other than usual.

  I would stay up all night that summer, accompanied by one of my best friends from the mosque, Maha Zayed. We would exchange ideas on MSN messenger of what our first community members would enjoy, bonding over deliriously sleep-deprived jokes until 4 a.m. “Maha, are you sure I shouldn’t make the subject text PINK?” was the kind of question I would subject her to, alongside more characteristic ones like, “Not allowing guys is the best decision, right?” We were eager to create and nurture a space for ourselves, and we weren’t quite sure how many people it would attract after we launched. We endeavored to make the space available, and looked forward to building bonds with new members, whether they numbered 10 or 100. Maha and six other women would later make up the first seven bloggers to launch the Muslim Girl blog after almost exactly one year.

  The number one question reporters always ask me is, “How did you start Muslim Girl?” As one journalist from Playboy thoughtfully mentioned during a phone interview from LA, “You must get so sick of answering the same question, ‘as a Muslim woman,’ over and over again.”

  We started Muslim Girl much like millennials start anything these days: on the internet. I bought a seven- or nine-dollar domain name registration for a new website, my friend Erica from LiveJournal added it onto her hosting plan for free, I formed a virtual Muslim girl squad, and—voilà!—we started.

  LiveJournal was a very active blogging platform in the early 2000s. If you’re into internet legacy, or even just watched The ­Social Network, you might recognize LiveJournal as the site where Mark Zuckerberg (under his very fitting username “zuckonit”) live-blogged his hacking of Harvard University’s public student ­directory when he developed Facesmash, the early ancestor of what we now know as Facebook.

  Before I knew who Mark Zuckerberg was and before I was cool enough (or old enough) to have my own Facebook profile, I was a user alongside him, around the same time I started teaching myself code and how to build websites. I was preoccupied with creating the g
rungiest backgrounds for my blog and coding my own layouts with HTML and CSS, often seeking inspiration from the other, more experienced graphic designers on there. I remember when I taught myself how to make animated GIFs from my dad’s internet café on the boardwalk on the Jersey Shore, and spent weeks from then on obsessively trying to outdo my evolving skills to create cool user icons for my LiveJournal profile.

  I might have been eleven years old on there, passing myself off as old enough to befriend and be added to other users’ 18+ blogs. That was where I learned the concept of a pregnancy scare, an experience documented by a tall strawberry blonde girl I followed, who nervously asked her LiveJournal friends if she could get pregnant from having sex in the shower with her boyfriend. Always the sheltered and naïve one and far removed from developing a social life of my own, I deeply learned about relationships on ­LiveJournal, and intimately witnessed how insecurity was present within many of us.

  LiveJournal is where I was first exposed to feminist, self-­realized interpretations of Islam. At the time, bullying and ­anti-Muslim bigotry had stunted me so severely in terms of building connections that I eagerly sought those spaces online. I turned to the internet to discuss Muslim issues and search for a lived experience similar to my own. Mind you, I was a total loner. My days in high school were spent just short of being a solid outcast. I floated between different social circles without ever having one of my own. After school, I rarely—if ever—had any plans, except for that one year I decided to do winter track and got made fun of by the other prettier, thinner, faster girls in the locker room because I wheezed to keep up with them when I ran. Instead, I would recede to my LiveJournal when I got home, where I would chronicle the details of my life every single day. Most of the friends I had that I would talk to on a daily basis only existed online.

  LiveJournal had a feature called “Communities,” which were sort of like message boards you could become a member of to discuss specific topics with other like-minded users. There were few active Islamic communities on there, and I remember noticing that all the ones I could find were run by and comprised of Muslims much older than me, and usually had mixed memberships of both men and women. Very few discussions centered around women specifically, unless they were shallow conversations in which women were being mansplained to about how to practice Islam correctly in their gendered circumstances. It wasn’t different from many other spaces online for Muslims at the time: They were predominantly focused on jurisprudence—halal this, haram that—­regarding topics I simply could not relate to, especially as a teenager. The problems I was facing as a Muslim girl growing up in America went far beyond a superficial discussion of how I should dress in public and the proper way to wrap my headscarf.

  But then, one LiveJournal post changed everything. I remember stumbling upon a user post that was one of the few posted by a woman to start a woman-focused discussion. It raised the question of whether hymen restoration surgery was haram.

  The discussion was steeped with men’s opinions, naturally. I’ll be honest: clicking on it, I wasn’t too eager to see the responses. Of course, most of the discussion was framed around the false notion of the hymen being a signifier of virginity and, thus, purity. I already knew how the conversation would go and even internalized it myself: Of course she can’t, I thought to myself, a response conditioned by the patriarchal mentality that was all I had been exposed to. That would be going against God’s nature and be intentionally dishonest and misleading and whatnot. But then, one comment by a Muslim woman stood out among the rest, like a light tower beckoning me home. This phenom of a woman thoughtfully said, “Islam gives equality to men and women, and that includes privacy. Since it is impossible to tell from a man’s penis if he’s had sex before, then women should be able to have that privacy as well.”

  Set aside the hypersexualization of the hymen as connected to virginity or any signifier of sexual activity, the assumption that a woman’s sexuality is anyone else’s business, the cultural and often religious connection of virginity with chastity, and our obsession with chastity as being a reflection of a woman’s worth (and you would be crazy to think I’m just talking about Muslims, lest we forget every attorney’s favorite go-to tactic of slut-­shaming rape survivors). But, to me, reading that comment was like drinking from the chalice of liberation itself. Islamic interpretation had always, before then, seemed to me to be something that was exclusive to the learned men who spent years studying Muslim scholarship, who somehow possessed a greater authority to dictate our understanding of our religion with a reason that surpassed our own. The logic was that because they studied ­Islamic jurisprudence, they understood our religion better than anyone. But the thing is, that limitation automatically reserves Islamic interpretation to the most privileged facets of society: usually ­Arabic-speakers, usually affluent enough to attend higher institutions of learning, and usually men, whose viewpoints would inevitably be impacted by the patriarchal societies in which they were shaped. But, now, suddenly, I was reminded of the sheer accessibility of my religion—of our individual empowerment to use our God-given reason to determine for ourselves what our religion intended. That one comment opened up my mind to feminist interpretations of Islam, like I was at once introduced to the other side of the moon. I was hooked. There was another world out there, and it felt really, really good.

  My next foray into feminist interpretation became the topic of wearing nail polish for wudu, or ablutions. The established opinion among our communities was that wearing nail polish during prayer was haram because it created a physical barrier preventing ablution water from touching your nails, thus making your ablution incomplete, and your salaat, or prayer, invalid. Truth be told, the five daily prayers obliged of Muslims were ­always a struggle for me throughout my life. It was so hard for me to commit to them, and one of the reasons why was because I was taught a very demanding criteria for my worship to be accepted. Muslim women not only had to make sure they weren’t wearing nail polish or makeup (which could create a barrier from ablution water touching your face, or just straight-up make you look a hot mess when the water blurred your foundation or caused your eyeliner to run), but also they had to wear prayer clothes or otherwise be covered from head to toe and, as I was taught, had to be wearing a skirt or socks in order for prayers to count. The many gendered expectations placed on women to pray—when guys typically could just perform ablutions and drop down to their knees in salaat pretty much at any moment—almost made daily worship seem like a burden. Blasphemous, I know.

  The nail polish thing was the biggest discouragement for me. In the back of my head, I always felt guilt like, Okay, God has blessed me with so much and done so much for me—you’re telling me, Amani, that you can’t even be bothered to remove or sacrifice nail polish for Him?! After my LiveJournal discovery, I was emboldened to find an alternative opinion on what seemed to be an obvious topic of contention for me. And I did. I stumbled upon an article published by a woman—a seemingly random lone blog post—in which she argued her own opinion that it should be okay for Muslim women to wear nail polish while performing ablutions. She posited that wudu is meant to be a spiritual cleanse more than a physical one, and if the woman is still performing ablutions with her nail polish on, it’s not like she’s skimping on any necessary rituals prior to prayer.

  Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, even gave men who wore turbans at the time a pass during ablutions, suggesting they could simply wipe some water over their headpieces instead of completely unraveling and rewrapping them since that would be difficult and time-­consuming. If our religion gave that much consideration to men’s convenience regarding an ablution “barrier,” you’re telling me that women are not given that convenience regarding some nail polish, which has transformed into a gendered societal norm for many of us today? But then again, who were the ones issuing our fatwas and deciding on these interpretations that we were consuming? (Spoiler alert: men.) And if the whole point is prayin
g to God, then wouldn’t doing so with nail polish be better than not praying at all, instead of this zero-sum game imposed on women’s spirituality?

  It all suddenly made so much sense to me, and it was so liberating to see a regular Muslim woman exercise her right to logically interpret her religion for herself in a way that accommodated her gendered lifestyle. For the first time, I witnessed a compassionate interpretation of a contemporary issue for women that wasn’t the harsh, unnecessarily difficult or strict opinion of a male authority about how we should practice. While Islam itself already granted many exceptions and privileges to women, especially when it comes to worship, this took Muslims’ oft-repeated notion that men and women are “equal, but different” and flipped it on its head in undeniable favor of women.

  I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism.

  I craved more. The way Islamophobia squeezed me out of finding connections with my surroundings led me to searching for them online, seeking spaces for open and refreshing discourse that I couldn’t have anywhere else. I remember stumbling upon a blog called Muslimah Media Watch,6 one of the only websites of its kind at the time, which critically unpacked different portrayals of Muslim women in the media. It quickly became one of my favorites, and I felt it verbalized feelings that I’d always had but was never able to put my finger on. I acutely identified that I was leading a unique and trying experience as a millennial Muslim, the daughter of an immigrant and a refugee, born and raised in the United States—ostracized through bullying, heightened Islamo­phobia, and the difficult task of growing up as a young girl in a misogynistic and hypersexualized society. My life, and the lives of others like me, reflected a deeply entrenched double jeopardy to which Frances Beal first introduced us: the intersectional concept of being subjected to racism, and then further being subjected to sexism within that racist framework. While it refers to the unique and incomparable oppression of black women in the United States, Beal’s concept of double jeopardy can unfortunately be applied in varying degrees to the exacerbation of many Muslim women’s struggles in a post-9/11 era. Not only do we have to battle today’s modern assault on our religion, but we also have to defy its sexist application to us both inside and outside of our own communities, all on top of the preexisting anti-black racism that black Muslim women suffer from Muslims and non-Muslims alike.