A woman's battle for the soul of Islam

Your story went from being a personal journey to being a public, social movement. I wonder now that you've reached that other threshold, what kind of response you are receiving from the wider Muslim community? You must be getting some very supportive responses as well as threats.

It's amazing the hunger in the Muslim world for leadership that will actually represent the real principles of Islam. September 11th changed the face of our generation, and the next generation, and the generation after, and put a lot of responsibility on Muslims, which I have taken. At the beginning, the reason why I wrote about this from a personal perspective was that I couldn't find women who were willing to really stand up and testify with a strong voice to the inequities they were facing, so I wrote about my own experience. Since then, though, I see that it is really just the tip of the iceberg -- so many women and so many men are fed up with the iniquities that betray Islam, so we're coming together. And we're doing it for love of the faith, not anything else.

What is so amazing is that the community that has come together around this -- over the Internet and long-distance phone calls -- is so wide, and we are all just hungry for a community that is loving and kind. We joke that we want to take the "slam" out of Islam -- that's our American generation's way of understanding it. But it's really that simple; we're just so tired of going to our mosques and feeling unworthy or worthless or less than faithful. It said in the Koran, "There is no compulsion in religion," and yet the fanatics in all religions want to make it compulsory that you follow their path of faith.

Our guiding principle is that religion isn't meant to destroy people; it's supposed to uplift people. We anger the fundamentalists who think that there is an algebraic formula to faith, because we believe in a much more creative and inspired recipe for happiness. That is the choice that I made in those first moments when I saw Shibli for the first time, and I remain committed to it because I know that the alternative is what the wife of the man who killed Danny faces. Her husband chose destruction, and at the end of the day I don't ever want to live that life, I don't ever want to feel responsible for destroying another person or allow my religion to be used to do that.

The March 18 woman-led prayer, is that part of the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour that you launched this month?

Yes. On March 1, the start of Women's History Month, I began the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour by posting a message titled "The 99 Precepts for Opening Hearts, Minds, and Doors" on the door to my mosque. I attached to it a bill of rights for women in the mosque and a bill of rights for women in the bedroom, and we are going to assert those rights in New York on March 18.

Basically, the men in my religion have certainly made a mess of things, and we want to go from the back rows to the front rows -- we want to go from the back of the mosque to the front of the mosque. We believe that we are fulfilling Islam's teachings that men and women are spiritual equals -- and we don't have to just sit deaf, dumb and blind in the mosque and the community while Osama bin Laden defines our religion for the world. The exciting thing is that we are actually reaching back to the seventh century for a model of the community that we should be building now. The seventh century Muslim community had a place of value and worth for women, and that's what we're trying to reclaim.

Considering your past as a journalist, and now your present as an advocate, do you think there is a way for you to go forward and do both? Because the two are not necessarily complementary.

I struggled with the question of how I was going to maintain my trained objectivity as a journalist in a cause where I definitely had an opinion, but then I just looked back to history. I saw that basically the battle against slavery was won by the pamphleteering of folks who wrote about emancipation. Basically, like most journalists, I got into the field to make the world a better place. I can't think of any way to better use the skills that I've gotten as a truth-teller than to bring about some sort of fairness and equity and inclusion in the world. I think when I really reflect on it, I became a solid journalist, I think, because of the principles that my parents taught me as a Muslim; integrity and ethics are vital to being a journalist. So I simply want the same principles to be practiced in my Muslim world, because I've seen the alternative.

Sometimes people say that I'm impatient, I speak too loudly. But here in Morgantown, at the college newspaper that I worked on, I grew up with the saying that "little good is accomplished without controversy." I think the two are mutually compatible, and maybe the only thing I am missing is a law degree. I play with that idea because at the end of the day, I believe that the law is so critical in bringing about social change. But, even lawyers have told me that public discourse and truth-telling have to come first. I could never have predicted this for my life, but I feel like I have been training all my life for this moment.

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