Mumbai-born writer and the voice of the Islamic feminist movement, Asra Nomani, 40, has made global headlines since she tried to reform the practices of her mosque in West Virginia, and then last year conducted a mixed-gender congregation in a mosque in Manhattan, where for the first time in centuries a woman gave a sermon. She has led a controversial life, including having a baby outside wedlock in Pakistan while on a visit there, which is considered ‘illegal sex’ in Islam. She wrote her memoir Tantrika detailing the life she led, which incensed many traditionalists in the Muslim world.
Normani, who is also the author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, and Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Bedroom, was a staff reporter with the Wall Street Journal for 15 years. She has also written for The New York Times, Salon, Time magazines and The Washington Post.
Declared the recipient of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) reporting Fellowship for 2006-2007, last week, she now plans to visit Tamil Nadu, India, for her project on the building of a women’s mosque titled: Progressive Jihad: A Woman’s Mosque Goes Up in an Indian Village Despite Protests.
Excerpts from an interview with Sujeet Rajan, where she talks of how her life has changed since she embarked on the reformist movement in the West, and if she would indeed be able to stay only as a commentator on her volatile project in India:
Last year you and your parents got death threats for you trying to change your mosque’s practices in Morgantown, West Virginia. Do you still get them? Did the FBI make any headway into who issued those death threats?
The FBI traced the phone call to the cell phone of a young Cambodian ‘gang banger,’ as he was called, who lived in Chico, California, when he wasn’t in jail for various charges from running drugs to carrying weapons illegally. Interviewed in jail, he responded, “I’m a Buddhist.” Needless to say, the FBI told me, “If a stocky man of about 5’5” with a three headed elephant tattoo on his arm rings the doorbell, don’t answer it.” Later, I received another death threat, this one by e-mail from a person who identified himself as ‘black mullah.’ The FBI traced that e-mail to the account of a Muslim woman from Somalia living in the Seattle area. In both cases, the FBI never came back to me with charges against anyone.
Has the mosque in Morgantown changed its policies after your reformist movement?
Seven months after my mother, niece and I entered through the front door and prayed in the main hall, in June 2004, the mosque made its first public statement affirming the women’s right to the front door and main hall. The first woman had just been elected to office in the mosque’s 20-odd years history. That woman quit not long after in frustration with internal dogmatism impeding change. Another woman was elected into office, and women have had the greatest presence they have ever had at the mosque – but that still includes very few women.
There are jihadist messages posted on websites which want a fatwa issued against you for initiating mixed-gender prayer congregations in mosques. Do you fear for your life?
I very much watch my back, look for danger in the shadows and always carry my cell phone, fully charged.
How has your life changed after you took this crusade for reforms in mosques?
My life has changed completely with a level of engagement and activism in society that I never had before. But my mother tells me that the thread for my current incarnation wove its way through my life to my youngest days, when, for example, on a summer visit to India as a young girl I asked my mother why my brother could freely play outside but I, as a girl, could not. As a girl, I came home from an Eid celebration in the community and I wrote into my journal that being relegated to cramped space with other women and girls, while the men enjoyed a spacious lounge, felt like being in a prison. Our heart speaks honestly to us on issues of social justice. It is our choice, I think, to decide whether we are going to take action to correct injustice.
As part of your Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour, you helped organize a mixed-prayer service at a mosque in Manhattan, the first time in centuries that a woman publicly gave the khutba, or sermon, before a mixed-gender congregation, according to experts. It started a spate of such mixed-gender prayers and even women applying to become Imams. Have you achieved what you set out to do?
My hope was to set us on the path to creating a new reality for the way organized Islam is expressed in the world. We did that. We created a new reality and started conversation on a forbidden topic. Mostly, I wanted young Muslim girls to know that they could stand at the pulpit of our mosques so that they would not experience the same crisis of faith that I and so many women had known. Now, they know they can step forward.
How do you react when you hear that in Virginia, a 13-year-old boy, Aman Chhipa, who is of Indian origin, leads a prayer in his mosque, as there is a dearth of Imams in the United States, but Muslim women still cannot pray alongside men in mosques?
I want all children, including boys and men to be empowered by visionary leaders in the community. But I certainly do not believe we can exclude girls and women from this role. I have always been struck by this irony, as we talk about it in our circles: a young boy with a runny nose can lead prayers but a wise and learned woman cannot. This is an injustice and an inequality. To me, a person’s ability to lead is not determined by what they have between their legs, but what they have between their ears and in their hearts.
You are also a fierce advocate of women’s rights in marriage. What are some of the laws that you would like to see changed, which you think will benefit Muslim women in the United States? What do you think of the triple talaq system in India?
I firmly believe that we must overhaul Islamic laws from the mosque to the bedroom, reclaiming rights Islam gave to women, but men have literally denied us. We have not continued the progressive spirit with which Islamic law was practiced in the 7th century. The laws we have inherited in the Muslim world of the 21st century – from marriage to the grave – are the result of unjust interpretations of men. Cutting-edge Islamic scholars give us a scholarship to rewrite Islamic law so that, among other things, non-consensual sex, or marital rape, is illegal; marrying a second wife is illegal; emotional and physical intimidation or abuse, of any form, is illegal; women can marry men who are not Muslim; and women can pay their condolences at cemeteries.
What I assert here are the theological conclusions of courageous Islam scholars whose analyses, sadly, have not yet gone mainstream, but I am certain that they will. Progress is inevitable.
In a talk on PBS, you spoke of ‘ideological terrorism’, spread by people like Osama bin Laden who is trying to grab the hearts and minds of Muslim youth. Five years after 9/11, are the majority of the Muslim youth of this country swaying away from this concept, or steering towards it?
Ideological terrorism in the Muslim world is still very much alive in the way that extremist, puritanical interpretations of Islam are shoved down the throats of Muslims worldwide by mullahs, clerics and state-sanctioned publishing houses and theology. To me, U.S. foreign policy sadly and increasingly feeds the divide between ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ both among the youth and their elders and sets back advances by progressive Muslim theology that preaches peaceful coexistence.
Among the world, including in the Middle East and in Pakistan, are the minds of Muslim youth swayed more by the preaching of bin Laden or embittered by what they think is unnecessary United States intervention in global affairs?
It seems to me that embitterment towards the United States foreign policy is stoking sympathies for Osama bin Laden.
Coming to the SAJA award, when do you plan to go to Tamil Nadu in India, as part of your project?
I hope to go to Tamil Nadu in December, and I am extremely excited about this project. I believe I have come full circle, the four-year-old girl who left India for America in 1969, no knowledge of English upon her tongue, returns in 2006 as an empowered journalist, hoping to share with the world the powerful stories of the women of our villages in India. I cannot tell you how honored I am by this opportunity.
What exactly do you want to record of the struggle for a woman’s mosque in that state?
I want to bring the struggle to life through the stories of women who are spearheading this effort. Their experience is a window into the larger struggle, I believe, to realize progressive interpretations of Islam in the world. I am so excited as a daughter of India to return to my birthplace to practice the journalism that I learned in America. It is my honor.
You are not only a journalist and a writer, but an extremely lively activist, with a tendency toward starting pioneering movements. Do you think it would be possible for you to be a mere commentator; and not be part of the struggle by Muslim women to start a mosque for themselves in Tamil Nadu, and elsewhere in India? A case in point is in Kerala where there was an agitation against allowing women to pray in a mosque on Fridays.
The point you raise is a very good one, and it’s a challenge that I have long pondered upon, but I know that the amazing skills that I learned as a journalist at The Wall Street Journal will allow me to report the story fairly. I have faith in my ability as a journalist to talk fairly to all.
Religion being the volatile subject it is in India, how would you go about transcending the fine line of writing purely about a struggle in a state vs. religious friction and dialogue which that struggle is bound to bring about in the country?
To me the local story is part of a larger global story. I see the two as part of a continuum. And I hope to draw upon the experiences of Muslims throughout India to put the struggle of the women in Tamil Nadu into a larger context.
Male chauvinism is tradition in the Muslim community, especially in Asia. How do you envision a women’s mosque run exclusively by women, without causing friction in their families? If it comes to be, what would it achieve?
Your questions are very good ones, and ones that I will carry with me to Tamil Nadu. What I have learned is that whenever anyone challenges the status quo in power and in control, there is always friction. I have faith in families and our world to go through the process and evolve. Not that the process will always be pretty.
In an ideal world, do you envision mosques which are run separately by men and women, or mixed congregations and Imams of both genders?
In the mosque of my dreams, we would have something some of us call Meccan salat, or the type of prayer we have in Mecca, where women and men can pray wherever they want, men and women who are related to each other praying beside each other comfortably. In the mosque of my dreams there would be a section for men on the left, Meccan salat in the middle for those who are comfortable with it, and a section for women on the right. That kind of organization is how worshippers fall into place naturally in Mecca. If it’s good enough for Mecca, I think, it must be good enough for the rest of the world.
