From her unique childhood as a Muslim immigrant living in West Virginia, to her experiences as a journalist in Pakistan, Asra Nomani has come to realize that there is a delicate interplay between a religion and the people who practice it.
“I think the truth is, you can’t separate religion from people,” Nomani said on Thursday evening in a reception room at the Law Center before giving her speech in front of over 150 students, faculty and community members.
Nomani, a former journalist for The Wall Street Journal, visited the campus to discuss her book “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam” and the inspiration behind her writings on the difficulty of being a woman of Islamic faith in America.
Nomani, a self-described “Muslim feminist,” was born in Bombay, India in 1965. In 1975, she and her family moved to the United States, settling in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Recalling her childhood as a Muslim-American girl in Morgantown, Nomani said, “There were definitive lines for me growing up. It was a childhood of constant negotiation and resolution of these conflicts so you could live peacefully and not with conflict inside of yourself.”
Nomani said she lived a life separate from her natural-born American classmates.
She said journalism gave her a way to connect with the world, which she felt distant from.
“Being an immigrant kid, I didn’t have a passport into a lot of experiences in America, so journalism gave me a reason to talk to people I wouldn’t talk to otherwise,” she said.
Nomani went to the University of West Virginia, originally majoring in biology, which she said was thought of as “being a dutiful immigrant kid.”
She eventually dropped her science track in school for a degree in liberal studies and began working at the college’s newspaper.
“I was getting my degree at the college paper, and it became really obvious that that was my love,” Nomani said.
As Nomani was growing up, she felt a sense of sexism in her community.
“In our community the same ideology that was taking root throughout the world was coming into my hometown in West Virginia,” she said. “It was an ideology that practiced a strict interpretation of Islam that said we could no longer sit like you all are sitting today.”
Her struggle as a Muslim-American woman has continued throughout her life and after Sept. 11, she said she faced three major crossroads.
“September 11th just occurred; Islam was on trial in the world, the West felt like it was under attack. I jetted to Pakistan as a journalist, thinking that I could bridge this misunderstanding,” she said.
It was in Pakistan, in January 2002, where everything became real to Nomani because this was when her best friend, and fellow journalist, Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by members of the Taliban, a radical Islamic terrorist group.
After Pearl’s kidnapping, Nomani said she had to choose whether to stay in Pakistan with Pearl’s wife or to leave the country for her own safety.
“Danny came with his wife Mary Anne, her belly full with this baby inside of her womb. We were going to throw a party that night so that I could introduce him to my new friends. And as evening turned to night, turned to morning, it became more and more clear to us that Danny wasn’t coming back. That something had gone wrong with his interview, for which he had left,” Nomani said. “And so I stood there with Mary Anne, and I thought to myself ‘I have to decide what I’m going to do.’ And I went back inside and went through all the things that I could do as a fierce journalist.”
Nomani said Pearl’s kidnappers used their interpretation of Islam to justify their actions and began the hostage note with, “In the name of God.”
Four weeks into the search for her friend, Nomani discovered she was pregnant by a man whom she fell in love with in Pakistan, and when Pearl went missing, the man deserted her stating “he did not want to involve himself in the hostage situation that was making daily national news.”
“The day that Danny was kidnapped was the day he told me, ‘I cannot be here anymore,’ and he left out of fear of being involved in that international dragnet. So you can imagine the joy with which he received the news that I told him in that 4th week, ‘I’m carrying your baby.’ And he said, ‘I have to go,’” Nomani said.
She said that, in the area of Pakistan she was when she discovered her pregnancy, there were laws stating it was illegal for any unmarried woman to be pregnant.
“So secretly I went to get the blood tests. Secretly, I went to get a checkup with a doctor, so afraid that these records would end up in intelligence files,” she said.
Nomani said her experience being pregnant taught her to do what is right for herself.
“I realized that this thing called religion does need to punish us, it does not need to shame us, it does not need to turn a woman’s body into the politics of a society. That we cannot be our personal arbitrators of morality to be judged by others,” she said. “We can only do what’s right by us and then God is the judge.”
Following the birth of her son, Shibli, Nomani was faced with the tough decision of whether to raise her son as a Muslim. Soon after Shibli was born, she decided it was appropriate for her to go on Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, which she called her “Malcolm X Experience.”
“I could feel the pulse of these really powerful women who have walked the sands of that land,” she said referring to the wives of the prophets Abraham and Muhammed.
She explained how the second half of her book is “an effort to try to bring back these lessons of the pilgrimage, where women don’t have to take the back door, where women don’t have to have to sit in a corner, where you’re actually supposed to be the best you can be in society.”
Nomani said the pilgrimage made her realize that women are being denied many rights in the Muslim community.
“I came back realizing [Muslims] had to correct this imbalance,” she said.
Shortly after her powerful experience at Hajj, Nomani decided she would raise her son as Muslim.
“I decided because of this hope, because of this kindness that I could believe in, that I would. I would seek the best of our religion; seek the best of our community,” she said.
Nomani’s experiences as a Muslim woman have driven her recent journalistic endeavors and have led her to make several appearances as feminist Muslim activist. The first time Nomani decided to take action was on the first day of Ramadan in 2003 when she stood in front of the door to the new mosque in Morgantown and was told by male member of the mosque she had to take the back door to the prayer room because she was a woman.
“And so I had to decide whether to take the back stairwell or step forward. And in that moment, I knew that this was the choice that faced our Muslim community … I stepped forward. I stepped into this green door, into this new reality in which I became an accidental activist,” Nomani said.
Nomani’s presence at UT sparked some controversy and debate by those like Ovamir Anjum, a professor in Islamic studies, who said he did not agree with Nomani’s problem with Islam.
“I think she thinks personal interpretation of religion is above tradition. We need common authority, which is tradition,” Anjum said.
In response to those who disagreed with her, Nomani said, “Not everybody here is going to agree with the conclusions I’ve come to about the interpretations in which I believe. But to me, that’s not what we have to do. We have to simply allow this conversation to happen.”
Ben Pryor, chairman of the Philosophy Department at UT, said the presentation was important because Nomani encouraged opposing views to be voiced.
“I stand with anyone who stands for critical thinking,” Pryor said.
Nomani said it was an honor to come to Toledo because of the way the Toledo community deals with how Islam can be expressed in America.
“It gave me so much hope and made me feel I was not alone in thinking we can have common sense and rationality prevail in our Muslim communities,” she said. “What we have now is a living, breathing example in Toledo, Ohio, of a community of people who, to me, have created a city of light. This was the term of Medina, the first community that the prophet Mohammed made. And I learned about Toledo in my struggle because I learned there is a mosque where women sat side by side [with men] and where a woman was elected president of the mosque.”
Nomani has hope for the future of people of all faiths. Nomani said she hopes her story can be inspirational to everyone who attended the event. Colleen Eldridge, a junior majoring in linguistics, said she was moved by Nomani’s words.
“She is an inspiration to women finding their own place in their own faith,” Eldridge said.
“I just hope that my own story can stay with you at those moments when you hit those crossroads in your life so that you can seek knowledge, so that you can know the love around you and so that you can stand up with courage for justice,” Nomani said.
-Hasan Dudar contributed to this article
2 comments
Also: my comment on tradition was actually part of a larger argument not properly expressed by this article: I said that Nomani's well-intentioned critiques may lose their credibility because they are not grounded in an Islamic tradition--and that without a consistent method, we run the risk of saying anything in the name of religion, which is the same approach that some terrorists have used to justify their acts. A sophisticated tradition of reasoning provides the grounds from which to argue and propose reform. This argument has been totally missed in this otherwise informative article.