When journalist Asra Nomani returned to Morgantown, W. Va., she was hoping to find a calm, welcoming place to recover from turbulent life events. An unplanned pregnancy, a partner who was not willing to be the child’s father, and the murder of her good friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, had left her reeling with confusion and pain. She left Pakistan, where she had been working as a correspondent for Salon.com, and sought to regain her balance in the peaceful university town in the Appalachian Mountains where she had grown up.
A Muslim born in Bombay, Nomani was naturally drawn to join the community of her local mosque. But, she says, the place of worship that her father had helped build was now heavily influenced by the attitudes of men she saw as extremists, men who discriminated against women and were intolerant toward non-believers. Believing that intolerance within a religion often leads to violence and must therefore be confronted, Nomani opted to fight for the rights of women within that mosque and, by extension, in Islam. Her story is explored in a new documentary, “The Mosque in Morgantown,” which airs June 22 on KQED.
The documentary, unsurprisingly, has stirred up some raw feelings. In the forum section of the film’s website, some members of the Morgantown mosque, along with other posters, say they believe Nomani’s methods were overly confrontational and that she was primarily interested in promoting herself and her books. For its part, the mosque’s website states that the “various issues such as gender roles, cultural divisions and interpretation of our beautiful religion” documented in the film have since been addressed, noting that “The Mosque In Morgantown was made in 2003-04.”
Nomani, author of “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam” and “Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love” is now a visiting journalism scholar at Georgetown University, leading the Pearl Project, a faculty-student investigation into the journalist’s murder at the hands of Muslim extremists. She is no longer a member of the Morgantown mosque. I spoke with her by phone about current affairs, disturbing the peace, feminism in Islam and new ways of building religious communities.
I assume you heard President Obama’s speech in Cairo this morning (note: this interview was conducted on June 4). Did his words resonate with you in terms of your own activism?
Well, I really appreciated his quotation of the Koran that says, “testify to the truth,” because that’s the bottom line on everything that’s inspired me. I just want to talk about what’s important, like do we want our little girls told to feel like they are not equal to their brothers? In public school in America, there is no difference in what they are going to know or the services they are going to get. Yet when they come to Sunday school at the mosque, we tell them that things have to be different because they are girls.
In the year after my son was born, I did a lot of soul-searching, and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca that really challenged some of the things that I had always been told about Islam, just simple things like the fact that Hagar (Abraham’s wife) had run between these two hills that we are supposed to run through but my little Saudi prayer book told me I can’t run, because it’s too titillating for any man that might be witnessing my running. (Note: part of the Haji, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, includes a ritual reenactment of Hagar’s search for water, during which the pilgrims run seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah.)
And there are so many things that are a departure from what history tells us happened in the seventh century, like women freely wandered around the mosque of Medina, right? But now there is a partition. And [when I was there] there was literally a women’s hour when you could walk into the original mosque, but I didn’t get to see it because when we arrived they had shut down the women’s hour early.
What prompted you to cross the line between being a journalist and an activist?
I suppose I sat in too many study circles in Islamabad, Pakistan, where there was this dogmatic, literal reading of the Koran, and I knew intimately that some Muslims have a moderate view but don’t really express it. They just sort of live the easy life. I saw the consequence of that in the murder of Danny [Pearl]. And I felt the shadow of that come over me because I was a criminal in the name of these laws that had been passed in Pakistan calling sex outside of marriage a crime.
A year after my son’s birth, I went ahead and gave him this Muslim-naming ceremony. I had come out of the closet about his conception, because I wanted to stand up for other women, in villages in Nigeria and Pakistan, who are sentenced to death or for punishment for having babies without being married, and so I when I first went to the mosque in Morgantown, I honestly went to the front door as a mom.
Your father helped found the mosque in Morgantown. Were you a member when you were a kid?
No. There was never room for the girls or women at the mosque when I was a kid.
My older brother would always run to Friday services with my dad, but I never went -- except once. They had had a separate room [for the women], and it was depressing --like filing cabinets falling over and dark, soiled carpets. It was just ridiculous, because the men were reading the Koran in the other room -- it was piped in over this crackling loudspeaker -- and I was staring at a wall, just completely disengaged and cut off.
Then you knew what you were getting yourself into, with segregated services and things like that. Why did you want to join when you came back home?
They had built a new mosque that was about 10 times the size of the old mosque. And I actually thought that there was going to be integration in this new mosque because there was going to be more space. They always used this excuse, that there wasn’t enough space for the women, to keep us separated. And I thought that they could actually accommodate us now. But I learned that the bottom line was theology. It wasn’t a logistical problem.
And so you took a pretty confrontational stance, and decided to do something about that.
Well, it’s presented as confrontational, but I don’t think of it that way. I never yelled at them; it never came to blows, even though they tried to get aggressive and violent, sometimes. It wasn’t as if I was asking to sit on their laps, you know? It was this big gigantic room, and for them it was confrontational for me to just be there. But to me, it was just common sense. There is this huge room. Why can’t we like sort of figure out how to share it?
You did invite reporters into the mosque to help publicize your cause. That’s pretty confrontational.
I’m a journalist. I knew there was a message to get out, but I’ve never been a flack [PR person]. And I wasn’t saying to reporters, “Let’s come and make a mockery of things.”
It seemed like many of the women at the mosque who were interviewed in the documentary were very critical of your efforts to change things. Why is that, do you think?
For a lot of these women, their identities are associated with this very traditional interpretation [of the Koran], and to go along with challenging that interpretation means basically challenging their entire being. Some of them also accept this notion that they are protected by being [praying] in a separate space. I hear that over and over again -- a lot of their self worth and self-esteem is associated with this feeling that they are protected, whereas for me that’s just a sham.
I have heard some Muslim women embrace the separation of the sexes, and the Hijab, because it offers freedom from Western expectations about women’s appearance and privacy. What do you think about that perspective?
That’s the beauty of freedom. You have that choice to be separate, but give us the choice to be integrated as well.
Were there some women who felt the same way as you?
Sure. But a lot of those women had given up. Like my mom completely supported me, but there was no way she wanted to give one ounce of energy towards changing the scene there because she felt like she had better things to do.
Do you think that a partial solution to the problem, perhaps, would be for Muslims who feel the way you do to found their own mosques? There are mosques in America where women and men are not segregated, right?
Yeah. There are some where they are not segregated. There’s one in Toledo where it’s right/left, one in Toronto where it’s also right/left, but, yeah, I absolutely think that the solution and evolution is for the literal construction of new Islamic centers that don’t have these kind of traditional rules. And while I protest these different ideologies, especially when they become violent or sanction violence, I get that there’s a place in this world for traditionalists. It’s just that I don’t want them controlling all the rest of us.
You identify yourself as a feminist. Are there many Muslim feminists in your experience? And can feminism truly exist within the bounds of Sharia?
To me, Sharia is just a matter of human interpretation. Sadly, it’s been largely a male interpretation, man-made rules, and so most interpretations of Sharia are very much incompatible with feminist ideas of equality and social justice. The puritanical want to say that Sharia is God’s law, but it’s clearly an interpretation of the law.
Awhile back I was doing a big story on price-fixing in the airline industry, and I learned there’s a University of Chicago school interpretation of antitrust law, and there is a Harvard school, and they are different. Well, it’s the same thing with Islamic law and Sharia. There are different schools. And the prevailing ones have been quite dogmatic, and, I think, misogynistic in the way that they interpret things, but that doesn’t mean a new school can’t emerge.
At the end of the documentary you leave Morgantown, and you go to Washington to run the Daniel Pearl Institute. The film’s credits say that you are praying on your own now, rather than at a mosque. Is that still true?
Yes, the mosques are pretty conservative around here, and I knew that every day would be a conflict like it had been in Morgantown, and it was just too exhausting. Plus I give my dad the run of the Northern Virginia mosques now, because I’ve basically taken from him the community he had known in Morgantown.
He couldn’t be a member there anymore, because of his relationship to you?
He couldn’t keep his daughter in line, so he lost his status. He stepped down from the board, because it was just so hostile to him. I think it was because I didn’t have a husband to keep me in check, so they’d go to my dad, and he would say: “I’m sorry. This is her choice. And I also believe she is right.”
Do you ever wonder if your tactics were a little over the top?
I’ve wondered about that, but I’ve concluded that they weren’t for me. For other people they might have been. I really do believe that we need to shake up our communities. We have to emerge out of complacency and lethargy. We can’t just say that it’s not the right time.
But did it really achieve the result you wanted? I mean, you left the mosque, your father had to leave, too, and yet women are still not allowed to pray with the men. Are they really better off?
I think they are. Partly it’s that any woman who wants to participate in the mosque is seen as better than that crazy Asra, you know? And I don’t mind playing that role. I mean, I wouldn’t wish for anyone to go through what I have gone through, but I hope that they can be the beneficiaries.
Now that you’re on your own, do you expect that you will go back to a mosque at some point? And can you really be a Muslim without joining a mosque, without a having a community?
I have a community. It’s virtual, and it stretches from Malaysia to Atlanta. That’s the beauty of Facebook and Listserves and all of that online stuff. There are women and men I’ve met who are basically the thorns in the sides of their local communities, and I find real kinship in them. We communicate every day in some form, and we meet at different events. So yeah, I do think religion is about community, but I don’t feel lonely or like “woe is me.” There are so many cool, awesome people in the world. I don’t feel like I’ve got to find community anymore inside four walls.