As I noted on Wednesday, President Obama visited a mosque in Baltimore (see New York Times story here). At the time I thought that was, on the whole, a good thing to do, assuring nervous American Muslims that they have the government behind them, and that are just as “American” as everyone else. My only beef was Obama’s statement that “An attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths,” which I saw as a gratuitious bit of faith-coddling.
Since then I’ve found something else that’s disturbing: the mosque that Obama visited and addressed is segregated by sex, so that normally men can pray in the big fancy room (the musallah), while women are relegated to a drab back room. And even during Obama’s visit, girls were herded into the gym, while boys were allowed in the main room where Obama spoke.
(This reminds me of a time I took a female visitor to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn: she was not Jewish and I wanted her to see the frenetic davening and strange behavior of the Orthodox. While I was led onto the main floor of the synagogue, full of davening men, where I was quickly wrapped in a tallit, tefillin, and capped with a yarmulke, my friend was taken to the “women’s section”: a dark room above the floor where the women were forced to sit, watching the action below through a barred window.)
Apparently two-thirds of American mosques are segregated by sex. What kind of message, then, does Obama send when he visits one of them? If he’s arguing that Muslims hold to American values, well, that’s not the case when it comes to their houses of worship.
Were I Obama, I would have either visited a non-segregated mosque or had some public meeting with Muslims in another place. (I don’t expect that Obama will be visiting a Lubavitcher synagogue any time soon, though, on a per capita basis, America Jews suffer twice as many hate crimes as do American Muslims.)
In fact, in the New York Times‘s “Women in the World” section, two Muslim feminists, Asra Q. Nomani and Ify Okoye, objected strenuously to what they call Muslim “gender apartheid”, describing what happened during Obama’s visit:
The girls, shrouded in headscarves that, in some cases, draped half their bodies, slipped into a stark gymnasium and found seats on bare red carpet pieces laid out in a corner. They faced a tall industrial cement block wall, in the direction of the qibla, facing Mecca, a basketball hoop above them. Before them a long narrow window poured a small dash of sunlight into the dark gym.
On the other side of the wall, the boys clamored excitedly into the majestic musallah, their feet padded by thick, decorated carpet, the sunlight flooding into the room through spectacular windows engraved with the 99 names of Allah, or God, in Islam. Ornate Korans and Islamic books filled shelves that lined the front walls.
. . . President Obama should be aware that on any given day a woman or girl worshiping in the mosque would be dispatched away from the musallah where he will stand to speak out against “Islamophobia,” to the “prayer room for females,” as one worshipper described it. In much the same way that he wants to mitigate Americans seeing Muslims as the “other,” we have to challenge the Muslim systems that segregate women as the “other.” He should know that promoting women’s rights in mosques is a key part of fighting the ideology of extremism — a fight that he asked American Muslims to help wage in an address to the nation in December. A theology of Islamic feminism is our best answer to the extremism of ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Muslim militant groups. Even the most conservative of Islamic scholars acknowledge that, in the 7th century, the sunnah, or tradition of the prophet Muhammad, was to allow women to pray in the main hall of his mosque in Medina without any barrier in front of them.
. . . As women and girls, we should be supported by policies that allow us to be part of such conversations. The president can support this urgent cause by speaking out against gender segregation in American mosques. In the spirit of the civil rights moment when whites stood with blacks, we hope men and women will refuse the privilege that “interfaith” events give them, and, in act of solidarity, stand outside with us on Johnnycake Road and the other pathways leading to the mosques in our world, advocating for equal rights for all.
Among those Muslim feminists protesting on Johnnycake Road was a coauthor of the piece above: Asra Nomani, journalist, cofounder of The Muslim Reform Movement, and author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. Below is a video from MSNBC of Nomani debating the segregated-mosque visit with journalist and correspondent Jonathan Alter. I think Nomani won the exchange handily.
Alter says that the purpose of Obama’s talk was to tell everyone “what it means to be an American.” Well, one thing it should mean to be American is to reject women being given second-class status.
Really, what’s the difference between Muslim women being relegated to second-class space during prayers, and black people being forced to drink at separate water fountains during the era of segregation? The only difference is one is based on religion, and that one is still with us.
