Community

Recently, a friend shared with me that her undergraduate Muslim student group had declined to cosponsor a Take Back the Night event – an internationally held rally or candlelight vigil that speaks out against rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse. The reason given was that a Muslimah in the group felt that it would be “endorsing the way these women dress and behave.”

The Ummah at inception, a community that could easily fit in the palm of Medina, was an entirely different creature than the Ummah today, a burgeoning population of nearly two billion. Although we are “one body,” we must recognize each of the “limbs” as truly independent bodies in their own right; only when we understand each geographic unit of the Ummah as distinct, can we begin to intelligently attend to the needs of each limb.

On April 22nd, 2011 Pakistan’s Supreme Court struck a death knell to the rights of women in a country whose rape rates jumped by double digits last year. In the face of overwhelming evidence, hundreds of witnesses, and even a signed confession, the court, all men, acquitted five out of the six men convicted of the gang rape of a lone woman. The decision marked a bitter end to the victim’s decade long struggle for justice, during which time she endured harassment, illegal detainment, and psychological torture.

“If there’s no religious restriction on women barring them from visiting markets, then there should be even less challenges for women to visit and participate in mosques.” The logic of Georgetown chaplain Imam Yahya Hendi is flawless, but nonetheless, American mosques continue to fail to put his instruction into practice. To explore why the mosque, a public space that one would assume opens its doors to all, is often hostile and unwelcoming to its female visitors, my research partner and I administered an anonymous online survey.

“God created this earth with men and women. If God wanted them to exist in different realities, we should divide the Earth in half: men on one side, women on the other,” says Georgetown’s Imam Yahya Hendi, the university’s first Muslim chaplain. “But God wanted them to exist to be social with each other.” While suggesting that we draw a chalk line down the center of our globe might cause a chuckle or two, when it comes to mosques in the United States, there does, in fact, exist a palpable phobia of the two genders freely mixing.

“Muslims kill Christians every day. How do you defend that?” the pastor demanded to know. The Muslim man smiled and repeated a story about the hospitality of Muslims towards travelers and guests of all faiths during the blessed Prophet’s days. I put my hand up to respond to the pastor’s combative rhetoric saying, “Muslims deplore killing! Many of us participate in human rights organizations to fight against such violence.” But neither perceived “leader” extended the courtesy of engaging me in polite conversation since, to them, I was only an American born Muslim woman whose presence was unwelcome.