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A WOMAN'S VIEW
In the summer, I taught an English class at the mosque, and
when the email announcing it went out, a Nigerian woman named
latifah wrote, volunteering to assist me. She would pull up in
her car at the last minute and put on her headscarf that had lain
on the front seat. She would rush into class hanging up her cell
phone, bringing with her a blast of energy and a 1000-watt smile.
At the end of summer, I invite her to lunch to thank her for her
help, and to ask her about her life as a Muslim in America. We
meet at Bombay Cafe, and she walks in dressed for an interview
in an elegant black dress suit, her hair in neatly braided rows. As
we dig into lunch, she talks about her background, growing up in
Lagos, the multi-cultural former capitol of the country. In Lagos,
she says, there are people from all over the world, and Islamic
dress is not dominant. It is easy enough to see women on the
street with covered hair in the traditional dress of their tribe, but
she herself does not cover her hair. She surprises me, though, by
saying that she believes women should cover up, and that culture
and modern values are not an excuse for reinterpreting the Koran.
“But you don't wear hijab," I say, pointing out the obvious.
“For me," she replies, “there are other things I need to work
on before I start covering up, such as praying five times times a
day—a mandatory obligation in Islam. First I have to work on the
inside before I worry about the outside things."
Shams and Yunus
She's lived a very cosmopolitan life. She came to Georgia to
take advantage of the American educational opportunities. She
obtained her undergraduate degree in a college in Atlanta after
which she worked for a few years in New York. While working in
New York, she took advantage of both the intellectual and social
life—exploring the city with her then-boyfriend. But after a few
years, she decided to pursue a higher degree. She is currently ob
taining a graduate degree from the University of Georgia. During
the last summer, she interned in Athens, volunteered at a women's
shelter and with the English class I taught at the mosque.
She is also seeing someone new now and unlike her ex-boy
friend. he is Muslim. “I thought Muslims couldn t date," I say. She
explains that it was different in Nigeria. "Where I'm from," she
says, "we don't do arranged marriages. I am responsible for finding
a man to marry, but I can choose to ask my family for assistance
in finding a man. Everyone believes that since you're going to live
with the man for the rest of your life, you're responsible for ensur
ing that he is the right one for you."
When she was first getting to know her current boyfriend, she
warned him about her secular ways. "I don't cover up," she told
Kim. "So you don't, that's okay," he replied. She told him she was
studying and she planned, to work. That was fine. Nigerians are
studious people, she says, and the Koran encourages rather than
forbids women to study as much as they can. "I don't pray five
times a day." she confessed. "It's okay, we can pray together," he
reassured her. But then she gave him the possible deal-breaker: "I
drink socially." "You drink alcoholT That almost ended things, but
then she said she .iardly ever drank, just an occasional glass of
wine, and she could stop doing that.
Now it's been a year since she's had anything and she uoesn't
miss it. "It's so much easier dating a Muslim," she says. Her last
boyfriend, a Christian, knew a lot about Islam, so it wasn't like she
had to explain things to him, but he didn't live it with her. It was
easy for her not to pray because the boyfriend didn't do it either.
Now she looks forward to being with someone she can grow with
religiously.
I am interested by how much she defends the rules that she
admits she doesn't follow, and she says over and over that her own
shortcomings as a Muslim should not be an excuse for her to say
the religion is too strict or too old-fashioned. "There is beauty in
Islam," she tells me, "and if you live the path, there are great re
wards both here on Earth and after."
A SUFI COUPLE
Back at the mosque, Hisham gives me the name of an American
Muslim, Yunus, who works at the University, saying, "I think he
will give you a different perspective." I send him an email and
make arrangements to meet him and his wife Shams, an alterna
tive medicine practioner, at Cups Cafe for an interview. It is a rainy
Tuesday night when I sneak out of the house so as not to wake
my toddler. I grab the last free table in the coffee shop and wait,
wondering if I will recognize them. When Shams walks in with a
scarf around her hair, I feel confident in calling her over, and soon
the three of us are sipping hot beverages and sharing life
stories. The first thing I learn is that they're Sufis, Muslim
mystics. Neither was born a Muslim—Shams grew up in
a Jewish family and Yunus' family was Pentecostal. Both
rejected the religion of their childhood and looked for sat
isfaction elsewhere, each pursuing mystical practices like
meditation and yoga until they found Sufism.
"So what distinguishes Sufism from, ah, regular Islam?"
I ask. Shams paraphrases a Sufi scholar, saying: “Without
Islam there would be no Sufism. Sufism is Islam." But she
admits that not everyone feels that way. and that there
are dissenters on both sides. There are American converts
who feel they could be Sufis without being Muslims, and
there are mainstream Muslims who agree wholeheartedly
that Sufis dc not belong to the fold. (Of course, where
I grew up, I knew Southern Baptists who considered
Northern Baptists godless heathens, and they all thought
Catholics were crazy, idol-worshipping boozers.) But Shams
clarifies that she and Yunus are 100 percent Muslims and
keep the five pillars that define the faith: pronouncing the
statement, "There is no god but God and Mohammed is his
prophet," the five daily prayers, the charitable giving, the
fast of Ramad’'\ and the hajj cr pilgrimage to Mecca. They
do this in addition to other practices that are distinctively
Sufi, such as the communal chanting of sacred words with
accompanying body movements and breathing exercises.
I ask about the traditional separation of men and wom
en in Islam and how that works for them as Americans.
Shams explains, "When I'm in a state of perceiving God's
spirit in everyone and everything around me, I don't see
gender, age, race, etc. I just see everyone as a holy child
or manifestation of Allah. If that's my state, I have no
problem touching men, but if I find myself aware of men
as separate and different than women, then I hold myself
back." Men and women participate in Sufi circles together,
but with some degree of separation: single-gender con
centric circles, or single-sex halves joining where married
couples hold hands.
The prayers that involve prostration are made separately, as in
any mosque, usually with women behind the men or in a separate
part of the building. Shams explains that women take the rear po
sition not because of inferior status but so that the sight of their
backsides in the air won't provoke, let's say, unprayerful thoughts
in the men. Yunus goes to Friday prayer at Al-Huda, but Shams
does not because of the lesser space allocated to women. (Mariam
had explained that, unlike men, women aren't required or particu
larly rewarded for praying in the mosque, so there is usually less
female participation.) I could understand Shams' point of view,
coming also from the culture where women have typically partici
pated in community religious practice more than men.
Although a minority here in Athe.is, Shams and Yunus are
hardly unique as American converts among other Sufis. Yunus ex
plains, "White Americans become Muslims through the Sufi path
in greater numbers than to any other form of Islam [although]
African-American Muslims are about 30 times as numerous." Why
the particular attraction of Sufism for white people? Many seem
to come to it from other meditative practices like zen or yoga in
pursuit of transcendental religious experience. As Yunus sums up,
"Sufi orders emphasize God's immanence—presence in the world
and human perceptioi —as well as transcendence, and show the
outer practices of Islam as real avenues of tasting God's presence."
They also stress that Sufism has many different paths, or Tariqas,
and they can only speak for their own. As we part, they invite me
to a dhikr, or remembrance~a Sufi worship celebration. That will
be the subject of Part Two.
Nancy Haigct
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