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NRI woman stands for women's rights
Asra Nomani, believes marginalisation of women within the US Islamic society is worsening because of spread of strict Wahhabi and Shalafi schools of Islam.
Asra Q Nomani, a Mumbai-born Indian American who had been a Wall Street Journal reporter, believes that marginalisation of women within the US Islamic society is worsening because of the spread of strict Wahhabi and Shalafi schools of Islam.
Writing in Washington Post, Nomani cites a study conducted recently by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to contend that Muslim women are increasingly being denied the rights that their religion gives them.
"The practice of having women pray behind a curtain or in another room is becoming more widespread" in the US. In 2000, women at 66 per cent of the US mosques surveyed prayed behind a curtain or partition or in another room, compared with 52 per cent in 1994, according to the survey of leaders of 416 mosques nationwide, she writes.
Nomani, the writer of a forthcoming book "Daughters of Hajira", writes that orthodoxy was brought in the US by the strict Wahhabi and Shalafi schools of Islam which largely exclude women from public spaces and stack mosque libraries with books printed by the government of Saudi Arabia where Wahhabi teachings reign.
She also describes her own struggles against orthodoxy in America which she says has no roots in the teachings of the Prophet of Islam.
The orthodoxy is manifest in segregation of women in mosques, not allowing women to address the faithful by using the loudspeaker in mosques, and punishment of stoning to death for unmarried mothers, she writes.
Writing from Morgantown, West Virginia, where her father and some others founded the first mosque in the town she says, "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."
When men in the mosque objected, she told them that excluding women from the main hall and insisting on separate accommodations "ignores the rights the Prophet Muhammad gave them in the 7th century and represents 'innovations' that emerged after the Prophet died."
"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. When I became pregnant last year while unmarried, I struggled with the edicts of some Muslims who condemned women to be stoned to death for having babies out of wedlock," she said.
"I wrote on these pages about such judgments being un-Islamic, and my faith was buoyed by the many Muslims who rallied to my side. To raise my son, Shibli, as a Muslim, I had to find a way to exist peacefully within Islam."
She notes that according to Asma Afsaruddin, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, "women's present marginalisation in the mosque is a betrayal of what Islam had promised women and was realised in the early centuries."
