laura.fo

AS WE ALL KNOW, veiled women are a dowdy, dumpy bunch. They are women with no thoughts or opinions of their own, women who can't so much as shut the bedroom window if they're getting a draft without first consulting a man and asking his permission. Maybe, back when they were three or four years old, they dreamed of grander things from life, but now that they are adults they’ve been forced to wear the shroud, walk three feet behind their husbands, and stifle whatever hopes and feelings they used to call their own under the guise of being hapless helpmates to domineering men.

Right?

Then again, we ALSO know that unveiled women are wanton sluts, women who require nothing more than hearing a man call “hey, baby” on a street corner and suddenly they’re in the backseat of his car, throwing their legs in the air while shrieking whee, I love Satan!

At least that’s what we’ve been told. I heard it on television and read it on the internet, so it must be true.

Or wait, did I get it wrong? Perhaps it goes like this:

Bare-headed women are liberated and free, sure of themselves, comfortable with their sexuality, a page straight out of Cosmo. They are women whose lives are filled with meaning and purpose; above all, they are modern — unlike backwards veiled women, who wouldn’t recognize their own oppression if it hit them on the head with a slipper.

Or no, wait, what I meant to say was that veiled women are the true feminists, women who are secure enough in their sexuality that they don’t need to engage in some base attempt to advertise it — unlike their sell-out sisters, who are so desperate for attention that they will abandon every iota of self-respect in a sad attempt to grovel for male approval. (“Tee-hee-hee, have you seen my belly ring?”)

Right?

Well. Maybe not. To all of the above.

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A Saudi friend of mine once said that "the only thing more cliché than talking about the veil is apologizing for talking about the veil." She’s right; the subject’s boring, long-exhausted. Yet, for Muslim women, it’s one subject that won’t go away. Here’s an insider tip for my male Muslim friends, even the so-called progressive ones who say they don’t care whether women veil or not: the difference between you and me is that you’ve never had to make this decision. And as much as we love you — plural — for claiming that you don’t care what conclusion we come to, the fact is you will never have to be in this position. And that, right there, makes your experience of Islam different from ours.

This is especially true in the United States. Which might seem odd, because we have no laws about veiling here, but that’s part of the reason the issue is so contentious.

In Iran, because veiling is mandated by law, a woman must be especially progressive to wear it in a lax and casual manner (in public) or forgo it altogether (in private). Veiling is the norm, so she’s well aware of the statement she’s making when she rejects it.

On the flip side, in France or Turkey — where there are laws against veiling inside various public institutions – a woman is, presumably, especially religious if she decides to take it up. Since not-veiling is the default, for Muslim and non-Muslim women alike, going against the grain of public opinion requires a commitment to Islam that most observers would understand to be something over and above the mere coincidence of being born into a Muslim family.

In the United States, however, it is precisely the freedom of choice I so cherish that makes this such a complicated decision for the Muslim women who live here. The cultural norm – the “average American” woman – is unveiled, but the predominant image of a Muslim woman, even among non-Muslims, is that of a muhajabah. Therefore a muslimah who decides not to veil is seen as transgressing against her community and will have her commitment to Islam doubted, while the woman who does decide to veil is seen as rejecting everything about American life save for her religious practice. We can’t win; there is no middle ground. Being 51% one way or the other is seen as a complete rejection of the other side.

In case you weren’t listening the first time around, let me be clear: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m opposed to both the French ban on veiling and the Saudi mandate for it, and listening to the Dutch whine about the loss of their Pure Dutch Culture [sic] in the face of all these – gasp – immigrants is one of the few times I’m proud to be American, where multiculturalism is an established fact, however imperfectly it’s practiced.

But I also remember living in a country where the signifiers weren’t so strong. I’m told it’s different in Egypt now — that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of Cairene women now veil — but when I was living there, in the early 1990s, it was closer to 50/50. I loved that. I loved, especially, that there was no great social divide between veiled and unveiled women; you’d see differences of opinion even within a single family. One of my sisters-in-law veiled, one did not, the third took it up for a few years and then changed her mind and took it off. None of this was a matter of any great controversy. It didn’t even merit much discussion.

This is not to downplay the choices Egyptian women had to make. One friend of mine at the university said her father never forced her to veil, but it was only after she decided to take it up that he allowed her study late at the library, walk home unattended, and otherwise participate in public space in ways he wouldn’t have permitted without her willingness to adopt the hijab and, accordingly, serve as walking symbolism for everything the hijab represented in the popular imagination. On the other side of that spectrum, there was another girl I knew, also Egyptian, who said she wanted to veil but worried it would interfere with her career as a journalist. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and she was afraid people would read so much into her scarf that they wouldn’t get around to reading her words.

Can the choice to veil or not veil in such a context truly be considered “free”? I don’t know. Then again, I know plenty of American women who will tell you no one forced them to diet, but they believed that being thin facilitated their right to speak with authority in a manner they’d have lost if they had to confront the bias against fat women in a country where being heavy is equated with a loss of self-control and a where a loss of self-control is considered shameful, if not downright sinful. My point here is not to excuse the former because of the existence of the latter: only to argue that there is nothing uniquely “Islamic” about a woman negotiating with the patriarchy, nothing specifically “Muslim” about a woman who trades in Her Personal Ideal in favor of getting what privileges she can with a minimal amount of compromise. We ladies, the world over and religion notwithstanding, have been doing that for thousands of years.

I wonder, though, if our notions of “Islamic dress” had evolved in such a way that the turban (for example) was considered as mandatory for men as the hijab is for women in some circles, would Muslim men in the West expound on the subject with the same confident manner they do now, one that is as flippant as it is self-assured? I’m sure 10% of men would wear it everywhere without a second thought, and another 10% would scoff at the mere idea of it. But for the majority, those in the middle, it would (I would hope) elicit a little more reflection. Do you risk community censure for being one of those “non-turban guys,” knowing that – before you even open your mouth – your bare head will be considered, by some, proof that you eat pork, drink alcohol, never pray, love capitalism, support colonialism and the war in Iraq, neglect your children, and cheat on your wife? Or do you take it up, knowing that, in different spheres, it will brand you as ignorant, ascetic, oppressed, and/or radical? Be careful! Remember, you don’t get to choose how you want to be seen at this event, or with that crowd of people: the choice you make has to be applicable for all times and circumstances. No fair picking one option for a family reunion or protest march, and another for your first nervous job interview at Chase Manhattan.

For a while, in Cairo, I lived across the street from a girls’ high school and would watch these young scholars stream out of class after the final bell. There would be the same roar of high-pitched laughter I recognize in teenage girls anywhere, in any country, as they coagulated in groups in the garden, or at the front gate: veiled girls interlinking their arms with girls who wore their hair uncovered, occasionally leaning over to whisper some secret that necessitated pushing back a girlfriend’s headscarf or ponytail, depending, in order to have access to her ear. The intimacy of girls that age is always charming to me, but it seems even more endearing in retrospect, knowing that they were doing something that, in so many parts of the world, would be considered a radical act: ignoring the politics of the veiled/unveiled split in favor of interacting with the human being inside.

I was mentioning to someone yesterday how much time I spent in church as a kid. I think he was startled: first by the sheer number of hours I logged there, and second because I know so little about Christian history. You'd think there would be a contradiction there, no?

So now I'm trying to remember just what we did all that time in church. I know we sang, a lot, the same children's songs over and over again. We said the Lord's prayer. We put on a play about Noah's Ark once in third grade, and did nativity scenes every Christmas. We visited the nursing home every couple months, and wrote letters to members of the church who were in the hospital. We decorated the church for holidays. We colored pictures of Jesus. We gave out Christmas trees to "poor" families ("poor" in quotes, because it was a small working-class town without much wealth disparity, so the "privilege" we're talking about was there by a pretty slim margin). We collected canned goods. We took turns handing out communion wine and lighting the candles on the altar. We learned little stories — Noah's ark, Moses, Adam and Eve, Jesus's birth — but never discussed them except in the most obvious terms: love is better than hate, being good is better than being bad, freedom is better than slavery. We said prayers for sick people. We made crafty items for our parents out of glue and yarn.

In short, it was a service agency. Not a religious education. I'm not sure I have a problem with this — I'm just calling it what it is.

By junior high it became a sort of extended guidance counseling session. We talked about our friends and the tyranny of popularity and our relationship with our parents, what we wanted to be when we grew up, and all the Big Issues of '80s like suicide and AIDS. That sounds nice, doesn't it? I remember it as excruciating. Being forced to discuss matters this private with a community I had not chosen was hell on earth.

And again, not a religious education.

The mosques in this area have an entirely different view toward children. There's no singing, period; a lot less art and a lot more rote memorization of Qur'anic verses and the Arabic alphabet. I don't like this approach, either. The Arabic I like in theory, but in practice it favors the kids who speak it at home and ends up alienating those for whom it's a second or third language. And memorizing the Qur'an in Arabic without learning the translation and without discussing the meaning is something I've never understood. What's the point? I know it's beautiful to listen to a child say a surah, but to them it's just the babbling of nonsense words until they sort out the meaning and the context.

I don't have any better ideas. Just something I'm thinking about today.

My Sister's Keeper: A sibling converts to evangelical Christianity. "No one close to me had ever been committed to placing religion or spirituality at the center of their life before."

I like this piece a lot, because the author (mostly) realizes she can't take her own pre-conceived ideas of what a born again Christian is and plant them on her sister simply because her sister claims that label. It's why I am so, so picky about who I discuss this stuff with. Back in my more atheist days I used to be one of the worst offenders in this regard. Worse, I often thought I was being respectful when I did it. ("Oh, you're a Muslim? Then I won't serve pork! Look at me, I am so sensitive.") It's one thing to err on the side of caution — you know, don't throw a party, invite 30 Muslim friends, and serve nothing but beer and ham sandwiches — but I now understand how annoying it is to have people take what they know about Belief System X and apply it to you wholescale. Christians must get this even worse than I do. At least Islam isn't tagged with being anti-science.

It's been a week. Results mixed at best.

Being a female (particularly a female raised in the U.S., though that part's not as crucial as it used to be), I'm discovering how hard it is for me to think of food in terms of moderation. I've never had an eating disorder, though I've been told I "eat disorderly" — never cooking, forgetting lunch, then suddenly realizing I'm ravenously hungry come late afternoon and need to skip class in order to find a taco before I die. But my relationship with food, as well as all the other things I'm supposed to be avoiding during daylight hours, is pretty black and white: something is either Good For Me or it's a shameful indulgence. Thinking of salad and broccoli at noon as "bad," while potato chips are okay as long as I wait until it's dark outside, is all sorts of mixed-up and backwards for me. (Yes, I know, ideally this should be a time when I lose the chips as well. But I need an illustrative example, so work with me here.)

I really do like this aspect of Islam, though, and the way that attitude permeated Middle Eastern culture was one of my favorite parts of living there. "There is nothing shameful about appetite and desire, so long as they can be channeled productively. Control over our instincts is what separates us from the animals." That kind of thing.

Then why is it so hard for me to put it into practice? That much eludes me. Well, except for all of the obvious reasons. Like the fact that I'm weak.

I remember being at my dad's a couple years ago and watching his dog run around, tongue hanging out, knocking over flowerpots and tramping through the garden, then suddenly stop, in the middle of the yard, to enthusiastically lick his nuts. "Whatever Islam is," I remember thinking, "it's the opposite of that."

I think one of the reasons I loath the folks who argue so strenuously about following the most obscure hadiths right down to the letter is that they seem like the opposite of the same nut-licking coin. It's not so much that I take issue with their conclusions, but that ultimately I see their zealotry as coarse, undignified.

But I'm not one to talk. The freedom to worry about the use of the right hand verses the left or how many times one knocks on a door before entering or if the pan that cooks your lamb at a restaurant was once used to make bacon are things you don't start thinking about until you've got your five pillars covered, and I am so not there yet.

I sometimes wonder if I'd be in this place had the mother who raised me been the same person she is now. Today my mom gives guest sermons to her congregation and leads them in religious retreats. Her closest friends are ministers and missionaries and all of them have a liberal humanitarian view of the world that goes hand-in-hand with their faith. They travel to Honduras, protest The School of the Americas, and fight to have their churches designated as "open and affirming," code for inclusive to gays and lesbians. Recently she began donating money to the YMCA in Palestine, but before signing a check she called their headquarters to ensure that her contribution would go to Muslim children as well Christians.

It was not always like this. My grandfather was an atheist, almost belligerently so, and thus my mother was raised in a climate of sarcasm and dismissal toward all things that reeked of godliness.

"See that thar steeple?" my uncle — my grandpa's brother — once asked as we were driving his rusty Studebacker to the post office. He pointed at some Mormon temple over in the distance. "It points right up to Brigham Young!" My uncle lived in the backyard canyons of Wyoming, which he liked, on the state's border with Utah, which he resented. We passed a car with a Utah license plate driving twenty miles an hour, a speed the Sudebacker was only barely able to best. "Goddamn Mormons," my uncle muttered, and then, approvingly: "My pa used to be a Catholic, but he whupped it."

I was sixteen at the time and envied my mother for growing up in such an environment. My mother did not spend her childhood rooted to hard wooden pews, wearing itchy tights and circling the vowels in church bulletins because under the circumstances it was the most compelling diversion she could find. She did not grow to hate the sound of organ music or dread the thought of Sunday mornings, when she would be arbitrarily robbed of several hours of her day for the pleasure of sitting still and liking it. Because my mother was not raised with religion she had little reason to identify with my own hatred for it; I believe she saw the very act of going to church at all as an act of independence, something she was allowed to do now that she was an adult and could make her own choices.

We started our foray into the land of the saved when I was three and we moved to a new house three doors down from the local UCC church. In pre-school I attended Sunday School and then church services; by seventh grade I was spending two hours at church on Sunday mornings, staying all afternoon for youth group, and had hour-long confirmation classes on Thursday nights (which I mainly remember as the reason I missed two full seasons of The Cosby Show). We went to Bible School in June, church camp in August, and various other programs around Christmas and Easter. Next to school, church was the place I spent the most of my time growing up, and mind you not one minute of it was done voluntarily.

Looking back I'm amazed that my parents managed to keep me involved in something I so thoroughly loathed for ten entire years, but somehow they did. I like to think my mother wouldn't have forced me to go through with it if she'd known how much being forced to attend church would eventually turn me off to Christianity entirely. (For my father, on the other hand, that was undoubtedly an irrelevant data point. Kids should do what they're told. Because I said so, that's why.) The only good thing I can say about the experience is that going to church taught me to endure the most excruciating form of boredom imaginable, which came in handy later both in school and at work. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, old enough that I might have gotten something out of the sermons, I had so effectively trained myself to ignore what was going on behind the pulpit — to just silently endure — that I wouldn't have known how to pay mindful attention had I tried. Luckily my church considered confirmed teenagers adults in the eyes of God, and I guess if that was good enough for God it was good enough for my parents, for after that point I was allowed to make my own decision. I turned fourteen, left the church and never went back.

A few years ago my mother told me that she regretted this. "I wish," she said, "that we'd either gone and took it seriously and talked to you about it at home, or not gone at all. It seems like we sent you mixed messages." Given the hours my family logged in the house of God one might think Christianity would have been a point of discussion at home, but in fact it wasn't. As a child I assumed the only reason we went at all was to appease the folks in our small town who looked askance at heathens. I think my father shared my opinion, but since he was a man long accustomed to getting up in the morning and doing things he didn't want to do, church was something he engaged in with dogged determination, if not quite enthusiasm. I was the only one complaining.

My mother's commitment ran deeper, something I only realized several years after I left home and she began attending church on her own, in another town. Clearly it was not something she was doing just to save face. She was going through a difficult time in her life and claimed she needed the community, and I'm certain that's true, but I wonder, too, if there wasn't a part of her raised-in-atheism self that was still unsure about admitting that she was there in part because she simply believed. It took her several years to emerge as a spiritual person, or, at least, several years to declare her spirituality openly.

What's interesting to me now is that both my mother and I rejected the religious beliefs we were raised with (or without, as the case may be). Most of my friends, religious and secular alike, agree that forcing dogma down a child's throat is unacceptable and that any child raised with an inflexible belief system is likely to abandon it in adulthood. Of course when it's phrased like that, how can you argue? Talk about "exposing" a child to religion (preferably a variety of them) is much more fashionable, but is that really so much better? Can a child learn, in the course of a church service or two, a trip to the mosque here, the temple there, enough about the deeper value systems of these beliefs to truly appreciate them? And if not, what's the point?

My mother wanted me to have a religious education but was politely silent when it came to pushing any of her own ideas on me, which I believe was her attempt at a compromise between those two extremes. And there were advantages to this. I never developed a shame-and-guilt relationship with God, didn't spend a lot of time lying awake worrying that I'd spend eternity in hell for the smallest of sins. Children are superstitious creatures by nature, ones who look to authority figures for cues, and I'm thankful that my parents didn't paint for me the picture of an angry, vengeful almighty before I was old enough to appreciate a forgiving one.

But in some ways I think my mother's silence did me no favors and I could have benefited from witnessing her evolving relationship with God. What bored me to the point of tears growing up is that I never knew why we were sitting there on those hard wooden pews. The Biblical verses we heard and the hymns we sang might have been relevant to my life had I been, say, a shepherd, but since I was in fact not a shepherd I couldn't see the connection between the questions posed by ancient dudes with beards in Babylon and my own life as a fifth-grader preoccupied mainly with the fact that I wasn't allowed to wear lip gloss or have friends over on a school night.

My initial attraction to Islam was, unquestioningly, its clear and easily articulated relationship to modern politics. I'd originally pegged my opposition to Christianity on my opposition to deism in general (well, that and the organ music thing), but as I learned more about Islam I realized I'd simply seen the notion of divinity as irrelevant to modern life. Among Muslims this connection was debated with a roaring sense of urgency, and I was excited to take part in such discussions.

And, in learning to appreciate Islam, I learned to appreciate Christianity retroactively. Talking to my mother, who was undergoing her own transformation, was a crucial part of this process; her expression of her faith, particularly in the wake of 9/11, was becoming less private and more political. A religion I'd once seen as a series of meaningless stories about guys who hung out inside whales or a twin who trades his birthright for a bowl of soup (huh?) became, in my eyes, like Islam, a value system that first and foremost rejected oppression and dehumanization, part of a Middle Eastern conversation with monotheism that has been going on for thousands of years. Fascinating stuff.

Still not cool with the organ music, though.

Uneventful Eids, Present and Future: An American convert talks about the lack of fanfare around Ramadan.

Many of us in the US were raised with the typical western/Christian holidays and the traditions that go along with those run deep. In my many years as a Muslim, I honestly have yet to have an Eid that I’ve truly found to be a special event, and believe me I’ve tried…

Sing it, sister. Some psycho behind my house has put up his Christmas lights already, probably as a joke. I find it festive, if a bit over the top. It's not even Halloween.

Rest assured we will receive Halloween cards. We'll get cards on Valentine's Day, too, as well as Easter, no matter how many times I try to explain that Christmas is okay but Easter not so much. Even St. Patrick's Day is hard to miss, at least in Boston. But Ramadan? That could pass by undetected. I had to e-mail my sister-in-law in Cairo to ask her when it began. She looked it up for me, in Arabic and then in English. (Who knew there was a whole web site devoted to moon sightings?)

I remember the first day of Ramadan last year, I was in a hotel in Phoenix where they didn't start serving breakfast until 6 a.m. I set my alarm for 5:45, ordered early, but even so the sun was creeping up by the time I'd poured syrup on my pancakes. What to do? Abandon ship? I finished quickly and told myself the letter of the law was less important than the spirit of the thing, a rationalization I will use again and again as I try to shake off old habits. Lunch that day — I was at a conference — was heavy on the ham and bacon, and I sat outside doing my best to ignore the smell. Bacon has positive connotations for me, breakfasts with my family on mornings relaxed enough that someone bothered to cook. I like the sound of the sizzle.

Strange the things that can make you feel guilty.

There were 450 people at the conference. 448 of them inside, 2 outside: me, and the keynote speaker, who was sitting across the garden going over his notes. He was a light-skinned African-American man, early 40s, wearing a baggy white shirt. I tried not to eye him over the brim of my book. Suddenly he stood up, gathered up his papers, and as he walked inside he stopped in front of me.

"Sister, why do you look so sad?"

"Sad?" I asked, startled. I wanted to explain that I wasn't hiding, that I was fasting, that I was new to this, doing my best. But I didn't want to have to explain that it was Ramadan, didn't want to get into a defense of Islam, a description of the thirteen years spent as Interested Observer and why and how that changed last April, a justification of my non-veiled white girl self sitting on a bench flanked by plastic plants. Too much detail, and at any rate I am not a good ambassador for this particular cause. Would he even know what Ramadan was?

He held out his hand and I took it. "It will be okay," he said, and squeezed my wrist.

I followed him inside, watched him climb onstage, and as the din of the room quieted he took up the microphone and greeted his audience: "Salaam aleikum," he said, almost under his breath, and then began his speech in earnest.

I had apparently misjudged him.