A Rebel in the Mosque: Going Where I Know I Belong
By Asra Q. Nomani (Page 1| Page 2)

Asra Nomani with her son, Shibli. Photo by Jackson Lynch

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- On the 11th day of the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in a pre-dawn lit by the moon, my mother, my niece and I walked through the front doors of our local mosque with my father, my nephew and my infant son. My stomach churning, we ascended to a hall to pray together.

Islamic teaching forbids men and women praying directly next to each other in mosques. But most American mosques have gone well beyond that simple prohibition by importing a system of separate accommodations that provides women with wholly unequal services for prayer and education. And yet, excluding women ignores the rights the prophet Muhammad gave them in the 7th century and represents "innovations" that emerged after the prophet died. I had been wrestling with these injustices for some time when I finally decided to take a stand.

I had no intention of praying right next to the men, who were seated at the front of the cavernous hall. I just wanted a place in the main prayer space. As I sat with my mother, Sajida, and my niece, Safiyyah, about 20 feet behind the men, a loud voice broke the quiet. "Sister, please! Please leave!" one of the mosque's elders, a member of the mosque's board, yelled at me. "It is better for women upstairs." We women were expected to enter by a rear door and pray in the balcony. If we wanted to participate in any of the activities below us, we were supposed to give a note to one of the children, who would carry it to the men in the often near-empty hall. "I will close the mosque," he thundered. My nephew, Samir, stared at man in disbelief. I had no idea at that moment if he would make good on his threat. But I had no doubt that our act of disobedience would soon embroil the mosque, and my family, in controversy. Nevertheless, my mind was made up.

"Thank you, brother," I said firmly. "I'm happy praying here."

In fact, for the first time since the start of Ramadan, I was happy in prayer. In the nearly two months since that day, I have entered the mosque through the front door and prayed in the main hall about 30 times. My battle has been rather solitary; only four women, including my sister-in-law, and three girls have joined me from time to time. And yet I feel victorious.

In a sense, the seeds of my rebellion go back to childhood. I am a 38-year-old Muslim woman born in Bombay and raised in West Virginia. My father and other men started the first mosque here in Morgantown in a room they rented across from the Monongalia County Jail. When we were young, my brother used to join them in prayer. I don't remember ever being invited. What I do recall is celebrating one Muslim holiday trapped in an efficiency apartment with other women, while the men enjoyed a buffet in a spacious lounge elsewhere. As I grew older, I felt increasingly alienated because I didn't feel I could find refuge in my religion as a strong-willed, open-minded woman.

When I became pregnant in Pakistan while unmarried, I struggled with the edicts of some Muslims who condemned women to be stoned to death for having babies out of wedlock. While I recognized that my action wasn't prudent, I chose to live honestly with my baby and wrote in the Washington Post about such judgments against unwed mothers being un-Islamic. I cited the efforts of human rights and women's rights activists in Pakistan protecting mothers and their babies against prosecution under the hudood laws that have landed hundreds of women in jail. My faith was buoyed by the many Muslims who rallied to my side to express their support. To raise my son, Shibli, as a Muslim, I had to find a way to exist peacefully within Islam.

I had tried to accept the status quo through the first days of Ramadan, praying silently upstairs, listening to sermons addressed only to "brothers." After so many years away, I felt I would be like an interloper if I protested. But my sense of subjugation interrupted my prayer each time I touched my forehead to the carpet. I lay in bed each night despising the men who had ordered me to use the mosque's rear entrance. "Your anger reveals a deeper pain," my friend Alan Godlas, a professor of religious studies at the University of Georgia, told me when I described the conflict I felt.

It was true. I had witnessed the marginalization of women in many parts of Muslim society. But my parents had taught me that I wasn't meant to be marginal. Nor did I believe that Islam expected that of me. I began researching that question, and I found scholarly evidence overwhelmingly concludes that mosques that bar women from the main prayer space aren't Islamic. They more aptly reflect the age of ignorance, or Jahiliya, in pre-Islamic Arabia. "Women's present marginalization in the mosque is a betrayal of what Islam had promised women and [what] was realized in the early centuries," says Asma Afsaruddin, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame.

And that marginalization seems, if anything, to be worsening. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has concluded, based on a 2000 survey, that "the practice of having women pray behind a curtain or in another room is becoming more widespread" in this country. In 2000, women at 66 percent of the U.S. mosques surveyed prayed behind a curtain or partition or in another room, compared with 52 percent in 1994, according to the survey of leaders of 416 mosques nationwide.

And yet, notes Daisy Khan, executive director of ASMA Society, an American Muslim organization, "The mosque is a place of learning. . . . If men prevent women from learning, how will they answer to God?"

The mosque was not a men's club when the prophet Muhammad built an Islamic ummah, or "community." Nothing in the Koran restricts a woman's access to a mosque, and the prophet told men: "Do not stop the female servants of Allah from attending the mosques of Allah."

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