SCHENECTADY -- Ingrid Mattson is a former Catholic with a soft manner and a firm resolve for human rights. She also is the new leader of the Islamic Society of North America.
Her election alone -- she is the first woman to hold the post -- is a departure. But Mattson is challenging stereotypes and urging Muslim women to take on greater leadership roles.
Getting involved is key at a time when many Americans link Islam to terrorism.
In fact, “most Muslims’ lives are about family and community,” Mattson told Union College students in a small, afternoon gathering Tuesday. At 5 p.m., she gave a public speech to more than 100 people at the Nott Memorial on “The Challenge of Diversity in the American Muslim Community.”
The Islamic Society of North America is the largest organization of Muslim groups in the United States and Canada, with 20,000 members and groups from mosque boards to students. Up to 6 million Muslims live in America.
“I always get this question: Why are Muslims doing this? Why are they protesting what the Pope said? You get five Muslims somewhere in the world burning the Pope in effigy. Well, what about the 10 million others who didn’t do anything?”
Mattson, who was raised Roman Catholic in a suburb outside Toronto, said she was a pious child. But as an adolescent, she found the faith wasn’t fulfilling her spiritual quest, and she became an agnostic. In college, she studied Islam and converted. Her sister, Peggy, converted to Judaism before she married.
“It was about bringing God back into my life, that sense of awe and awareness of God’s wonder,” Mattson said. Today, when people see mercy or justice, or love and majesty in others, “we start to have a taste of what God is.”
Mattson volunteered in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, where she met her husband, an Egyptian engineer. She later became a professor of Islamic studies at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. The school also trains Muslim chaplains for prisons, hospitals and the military.
But even she faces institutional barriers. While she understands why women and men pray in separate sections, she said she finds it frustrating that some mosques deny women access or make their prayer spaces too “small and insignificant” to use.
“That’s not acceptable...there are struggles,” she said.
Mattson is “representative of the new generation of American Muslims,” said Union College student Naazia Husain, past Muslim Student Association president. “We are a very diverse group.”
Husain said she hopes Mattson inspires other Muslim women to ascend to leadership positions. “She’s a role model and there aren’t that many modern-day female role models in the Muslim world. There should be more women on the boards of mosques; there aren’t any right now.”
In fact, Muslim women have challenges “like all women who are struggling against patriarchal traditions,” Mattson said. Take American culture. Five Muslim-majority countries have had female heads of state, which still hasn’t happened in the United States, she said.
Actually, as war in the Middle East raises interest in the United States about Islam, more and more women are venturing out to give public talks to churches and schools, Mattson said.
“Now these women are starting to say to mosque leaders: ‘Hey, I’m representing your community. And I have a right to be here.”’
Gurnett can be reached at 454-5490 or by e-mail at kgurnett@timesunion.com.