Click on over to the Love, InshAllah blog and join the conversation on talking to kids about sex. Because of the 800 word limit, I had to edit out some things that I wanted to explore more deeply in how my mother’s handling of the topic benefited me. God-willing, I’ll use this space to flesh that out more soon.
It’s been a while, so if you haven’t read part one or you just want a refresher, just click here.
“I’m a woman, phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman, that’s me.”
You might have noticed a sudden burst of media interest in Black American women. The NY Times, The Washington Post, CNN, they all want to solve the mystery. The world wonders at us it would seem. They ask, “How can those women, those ugly women, those manly women, those fat women, those inferior-by-all-standards-of-womanliness- women, how can they walk with such dignity, embrace themselves with such fierce love?” I’ll tell you. We are weavers. All African American women know how to weave. It’s a legacy from our earliest foremothers. We tenderly collect the shreds left after each assault on our humanity and weave together a new and stronger exterior to protect our vulnerable bodies, minds, hearts. Collect and weave, collect and weave, as shoulders tense, and backs ache and hands deform as years of other people’s hate and fear stick to our flesh, seep through pores and coagulate in the blood, so that what once ran smoothly can barely flow. It’s no wonder that stroke and heart disease are the #1 killers of African American women. Read more…
girl is so good at loving
everybody (but herself).
girl is so good at hating
no one (but herself).
of course you want to be loved.
everyone does.
but if your body is a home that even you refuse to live in, why would anyone else ask to move in?
(just temporary tenants where your thighs touch under your summer dress)
sweetheart, whatever you are running away from, we can all smell.
–Warsan Shire
Read Coming Into My Own pt. 1 here.
Writing autobiography is hard. I’m not old enough to have decades of distance between the most pivotal moments in my life and how they’ve shaped the woman I’ve become. I’m in the middle of this story. It’s happening right now. But like most writers, perhaps all artists, I write because I must. This is how I make sense of the world. I’m mining emotional spaces that are tender like burned skin, in hopes that looking very closely will somehow offer the equivalence– in healing and wisdom– of temporal distance. I’m sharing that journey with friends and strangers for catharsis, for understanding, as a challenge to overcome my own fears of vulnerability so that I can love more boldly, give more freely. It’s scary like the top of the roller coaster. You know the fall is coming and you know you’re gonna love it all the way down, or maybe you’ll only enjoy it once it’s over and you can claim victory over your fears; either way, the anticipation is terrifying. Who will relate and how will they benefit? Who will judge and how harshly? How clearly can I write this so that others understand?
There are so many events that shape who we are. I find myself trying to choose between equally powerful moments to form a coherent story that can put flesh on the bones of the original blog carnival. I’ve written part 2 twice, taking it in two different directions, each essential to the story, neither wholly satisfying on their own, yet proving so difficult to mesh together. I’m basically summarizing the entire decade of my twenties: love and loss, rebounding, marriage, miscarriage and motherhood, crises of faith, and so, so much more and trying to turn it into a few paragraphs. They were all life changing events. They each had powerful impacts on the woman I am today, shaped the ideal in my head who I am trying to be.
I thought I’d take the two unfinished posts I’d written, finish them up and then write an ending or two. I’d make it a choose your own adventure, like those stories I loved to read as a kid. How much fun would that be? I could offer my life up for complete strangers to digest as pure entertainment. So Gen Y. Honestly, I’d do it if I had the time to reflect and write as I really want. I don’t. What I have is the pieces I’ve put together, the parts that stood out the most, the places still a bit tender today. What I have is an analysis of the social and political forces that have shaped who I am as a descendant of Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas, as a woman boxed in by various forms of patriarchy, as a Muslim and a Shi’a from “dar al harb,” an overview of how one makes a life for herself when everyone wants her putting all her efforts into tiptoeing precariously across that bridge, “sharp as a sword, thin as a hair,” instead of shaping her own journey– insofar as we have agency is such things. Allah knows best.
So, tomorrow or Tuesday(God willing), I’ll share what I have (there are pictures!) and typing will probably bring me to a conclusion neat enough to feel I’ve done myself, my reader (readers? ;0) justice. But, you know, I’m still living this story. And, by God, I’m excited to see how it all turns out!
Surely the truth is heavy, but good for you, and surely falsehood is light, but harmful. — Imam Ali (as)
I’ve been watching, carefully, the American Muslim community’s response to Trayvon Martin’s death. I’ve been watching now, as I’ve watched for years. I’ve watched American Muslim activists who were children, teens and very young adults on 9/11 grow into dedicated advocates of civil rights and social justice for all Americans. But this awakening, as appetizing as it is to see, is difficult to enjoy; it’s alternating layers of bitter and sweet.
For me, seeing Muslims from a wide sampling of our incredibly diverse community call for justice for Trayvon Martin inspires hope that our community is maturing in our identity as American Muslims. While widespread calls for justice in young Mr. Martin’s death inspire hope, at the same time, I worry about American Muslims using his death as a means of furthering their own agenda. No doubt that justice for one segment of our society is justice for all of us. The struggle against Islamophobia and for law enforcement and our justice system to deal justly with the American Muslim community is a right cause, but Muslims must check their niyya, examine critically their motivations, as they link causes with the causes of African Americans.
No doubt, our faith calls us to justice. Not only is it an attribute of the divine, for many of us it is at the root of our faith (usool ud deen), and for all of us it is a mandate from God:
O, you who believe! Stand firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even if it is against your own selves, or your parents, or your relatives, whether rich or poor, Allah is a better protector to you both. So don’t follow [personal] inclination, lest you be unjust… Qur’an Ch. 4 verse 135
But this verse calls on us to be allies, not opportunists. We are obligated to stand firmly for justice no matter who we are standing for or against, “rich or poor,” even when there is no apparent self interest; in fact, even if it seems to harm our self interest. Because justice itself is always in our interest, both cosmically and, as many are now seeing, right here where we live.
Despite the fact that African American Muslims have been the majority of believers through most of U.S. history and now, depending on your sources, are either the largest or second-largest ethnic group in the American Muslim community, systemic racism and the human and civil rights violations that routinely result have been of little concern to our coreligionists from immigrant backgrounds. While Muslim communities have shown an impressive ability to rally round one another when an injustice is committed against immigrant Muslims because of race or religion, the centuries of racist abuse suffered by Black Americans, Muslim or otherwise, is rarely met with the same passion. This despite the fact that African American organizations are often first on the scene to defend Muslims, regardless of race, whose rights have been violated.
Most recently, across a variety of social media platforms, we’ve seen the linking of Trayvon Martin’s killing with that of Iraqi immigrant Shaima Alawadi. Shaima was allegedly murdered as an act of hate, though investigation is still pending. At a glance, the two cases seem similar: Trayvon was killed by a man with a history of racist zealousness in his position as a neighborhood watchman; A note demanding that Shaima go back to where she came from was found near her bludgeoned body. But the two killings are not the same. While racist violence has plagued this country since its founding, the violent targeting of black children, women and men has been a consistent part of the American story whereas racism against Muslims flares up and dies down with international events and political rhetoric. Where the El Cajon, CA. police department as well as the federal government quickly got involved and are investigating Ms. Alawadi’s murder, the Sanford, Fla. police department, and D.A. have done everything possible to protect and defend Trayvon’s killer.
In a society with an entrenched racial hierarchy that depends on White supremacy and Black inferiority, being not-Black affords privileges whether you desire them or not. For this reason, the immigrant and immigrant descended portion of the American Muslim community has benefited from the suffering of African Americans. While African American Muslims have long felt that our immigrant brothers and sisters in faith have cared little for, and often perpetuated the racism that so harms us, we unwaveringly stand beside them in struggles against Islamophobia because it impacts us as well. But African American civil rights organizations have reached out to and supported non African American Muslims in their time of need in ways that have never been reciprocated. Against this backdrop, attempts to link Trayvon Martin’s horrible killing to the brutal murder of Shaima Alawadi, or the deaths of Afghan children at the hands of an American soldier seem suspicious at best, opportunist at worst.
This post is my entry in Liberation Theory’s “Coming Into My Own” Blog Carnival. See her entry and the entries of other women here.
In Islamic eschatology, one of the trials of Judgment Day is crossing a bridge situated over hell. This bridge, called sirat, is so narrow and difficult to cross that it’s reportedly thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword. Believers will make their way to heaven or fall off for an appointed time in hell according to the degree of enlightenment they reached in this life. In my experience, crossing the sirat is an apt metaphor for American Muslim womanhood.
There are so many claimants to an American Muslim woman’s soul. Stakeholders from opposing ideologies contend for the right to mold our thoughts, actions, our very identities as if the fate of America, or Islam itself depends on their victory. A young American Muslima wielding her own agency to build the kind of life she envisions for herself finds that she must carry a lot of other folks’ baggage on her journey to womanhood. She carries the burden of beauty: a narrowly defined set of physical ideals that women are expected to meet at great cost, while appearing as if they’ve expended no effort at all. “Be beautiful,” American woman are told, just don’t look like you tried. She carries the burden of idealized identities that are at odds with one another, at once the patriotic American woman, uncritically proud of and unquestionably loyal to her country, and the high-achieving, pious, modest and self-sacrificing Muslim daughter, wife, then mother. And of each detail of our being. picked apart, analyzed and constructed for us by the claimants to our souls, none is so contentious as our clothing. Hijab or no hijab, how you hijab or don’t, details down to the way our scarves are pinned can be seen as a sign of support of one religious or political ideology or another.
The path is narrow and sharp. The burdens are many, and heavy. Voices call out in an endless cacophony from below, all saying the same thing, “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”
I’ve spent the 22 years after my conversion at 13 dancing across, balancing precariously on, and clinging mightily to this sirat. I’ve finally found the courage to hand the claimants their burdens, and firmly, but politely inform them that I own my own soul. The only thing I carry now is the parachute I strapped on when I jumped to peace. Heaven or hell, I’ve got to do it on my own and on my own terms, or else it will never be real.
And God says, “No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another. The human can have nothing but what s/he strives for. The fruit of his/her striving will soon come into sight. S/he will be rewarded with a reward complete. To your Lord is the final goal.” Qur’an Ch. 53 verses 37-41
Sexuality: Madonnas and Whores Between the Ornament and the Instrument
I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament. ~Alanis Morissette, quoted in Reader’s Digest, March 2000
I understood early that it was not enough to be chaste. As an American woman, particularly a black American woman, my default position in much of the American Muslim community is the whore. In order to secure legitimacy I’ve had to position myself, indisputably, with the Madonnas. Years of Catholic schooling had done a fine job of imprinting the Madonna ideal in my mind. Being soft-spoken, demure, self-sacrificing, maternal and pious came naturally, though not always easily. I interpreted the Qur’anic mandate to “lower the gaze and guard the chastity” quite literally and spent years interacting with professors, co-workers, sheikhs and imams– in short, all marriageable men– without ever looking one in the eye. I still find eye-contact with unrelated Muslim men uncomfortable, not for fear of transgressing ethical boundaries, but because of what I think they’ll think of me. In communities where the details of male/female interaction are so carefully scripted, subtleties hold a great deal of meaning. Eye contact, especially when held for a little too long, may be easily (mis)understood as flirting.
Maintaining the ideal has meant absolute vigilance over my every public move: I was mindful of what and how I ate in public, careful to avoid seeming seductive; I never laughed too loudly, or smiled without turning slightly out of range of any men who might have been close by. It was exhausting and it worked: My reputation has always been stellar. I’ve been told by the immigrant men and women who set and police the standards in conservative Muslim circles that I am “good,” “ladylike,” an “excellent role model.” Men sent their newly converted wives to befriend me, hoping their wives would view me as a model of how to do this Muslim woman thing right. I didn’t have a choice, I had to work 5 times harder than a woman born into a Muslim family to be considered half as legitimate.
Part piety and part feminist resistance, I played around with hijab at 15 and started covering consistently the summer before my junior year in high school. I was, as I shared with anyone who’d listen, “tired of boys and men staring my chest instead of my face when I talk.” I was a young woman with ideas and I wanted to be heard. I needed to be heard. It worked, for the most part, and my conservative interpretations of hijab– shapeless, wrist-covering, ankle-length dresses and large scarves covering the head, ears, chin, neck, shoulders and breasts–further secured my distance from the whore archetype threatening my place in the community of believers.
But I didn’t just live my life in the community of believers. I went home to a community of largely poor and working-class, African American, Mexican and Pacific Islanders struggling with the aftermath of the crack cocaine epidemic and the drug-wars playing themselves out in front of our pastel homes and carefully tended flower gardens. I worked for the most innovative companies in the mid-90s Silicon Valley, earning more than many of the adults I knew, even the college graduates. I didn’t just balance on the sirat, I pirouetted with a fierceness that’d make RuPaul blush.
I worked full-time, attended college part-time, taught Sunday school at the masjid, volunteered at the campus Women’s Center, and had an active social life centered on my relationships with other young Muslim women and men living different versions of life on the sirat. While I never so much as shook hands with men or looked them in the eye, I’d still managed to master subtleties that made me likeable and taken seriously to those who didn’t speak the language of conservative Muslim gender roles. A young, white English professor told me he’d never met a woman like me before. To which I responded that he must have met many other Muslim girls just like me. It was true, he said, that he’d had a number of soft-spoken hijabis with averted gazes, but he’d never seen one who was so confident and self-assured. I had somehow managed to do more than appease all the stakeholders in my identity, I’d impressed them.
But I was 19, I had no idea how much more they’d demand.
Today is International Women’s Day, and March is Women’s History Month, and as this lady has written, it’s tough out there for the ladies. American Muslim women are some of the most educated women in the United States. We have the HIGHEST degree of economic gender parity of any American religious group.
Bringing home the organic, halal/zabiha bacon! Ahmed, be a dear and fry that up.
We’ve achieved, and continue to achieve these things in spite of the fact that the majority of us are women of color with strange names and funny clothes, in a white-supremacist, patriarchal country, while worshipping in male-supremacist faith communities. There are obstacles aplenty, yet we are achieving with ingenuity, integrity and humor. Still, many of us can’t run for a position the board of our own mosque. We defend our communities in the media and the courtroom, save lives on the street and the hospital suite, run companies, raise families, but somehow having uteruses make us unfit for leadership in the mosque. Forget being on the board, we can’t even get equal-access prayer spaces most of the time.
Along with other American women we still face domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape, we struggle to find adequate, affordable child care and equal-access to vital health services. To this day, there are insurance companies that happily pay for a man’s viagra, but won’t pay for a woman’s birth control even if it’s to save her life. We are still, 4 decades after Roe vs. Wade, struggling to make sure that all women have access to safe, affordable abortion services.
We’re doing some great things, but in our own faith communities and in society we have a lot of work to do. So, March is a great month for a little activism.
1) Read The Qur’an
Yeah, read your holy book. Why? Well, because it’s the most authoritative source of Islam we have and it’s abused in ways that oppress women. If we are going to challenge those who would deny our human rights, we need to familiarize ourselves with their arguments, then counter those arguments with better ones.
2) Talk to your kids about sex
The sooner the better. Your three-year-old might be too young to care how babies are made but s/he is not too young to know that his/her body is precious and theirs alone. They are not too young to know that they have the right to say “no” to touch that they don’t like, and that adults must respect that “no.” That means you don’t have to hug uncle or give aunty a kiss, you have to be kind and respectful, but being kind and respectful to others should never mean you have to use your body in ways you find uncomfortable. It is never to early to establish a foundation of love and trust, of loving our bodies, trusting our instincts and respectfully establishing appropriate boundaries.
3) Read Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics & Islam
It may blow your mind. It may make you angry, or make you sad, or make you question your faith. None of those things is bad. Ignorance does not make us stronger believers, only faith rooted in knowledge will do that. It is time for a new sexual ethics that recognizes the full humanity and acknowledges the dignity of men and women (post coming, God-willing). Read it, talk to your male and female friends about it. What kind of romantic and sexual relationship do you want? Do your faith and culture as you understand them allow that? How can we make things better?
4) Get active
Volunteer at or donate to a woman’s shelter or Planned Parenthood. Invest in a woman-owned business at Kiva, or Kickstarter.
5) Contact a woman who has changed your life for the better and thank her
Write it on gorgeous stationary and mail it; email it; tag her in a facebook note; acknowledge her on twitter; follow her blog (upper left hand corner, just click follow, it’s so easy!); call her on the telephone even if it’s awkward. Women do more unpaid labor than men and that unpaid labor is often taken for granted. Take the time to think about the many things the women in your life have done for you, and thank them specifically for those things.
Want to read some inspiring books by and about women? Here are some of my favorites:
A Woman’s Worth, Marianne Williamson
The Price of Motherhood, Anne Crittenden
Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins
Anything by Susun Weed
Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power in a World Without Rape
What will you be reading and/or doing in honor of this month?
I admit it. I ignored the numerous requests I received to contribute to Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi’s “Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women.” After deleting requests and forwarded requests from my inbox for months, I received a request from a friend and mentor. I felt I had to respond. “It’s too personal,” I whined. She confessed that she also felt what the editors wanted was too personal. For me, it still is. I have neither the courage nor the conviction to out any of my moments of love, lust, romantic doubt or disappointment even while I admire and respect the 25 funny, talented and courageous sisters who shared their stories with us in this anthology.
If you buy the book– and you should buy the book– you will want to be prepared: bring tissues. There will be tears. There may be snot. It could get ugly. There will also be laughter and there may be tingly feelings in your lady bits, but I don’t know anything about stuff like that. I’ve only heard about it from ladies less ladylike than I. Read more…
