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FEATURES |
After finishing production of the weekly Mocha Moms talk show at National Public Radio (NPR), writer Asra Nomani walks to her car in the NPR parking garage on Massachusetts Avenue, brainstorming with her cohost. “How about a show on activist Moms?” says Nomani, SIS/MA ’90, who has raised her son, Shibli, alone since his birth five years ago. “Being a Mom can inspire you to take a stand in the world.” It certainly has for Nomani, whose motherhood and activism became enmeshed in the tragic 2002 slaying of her Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl. Pearl had stayed at her rented house in Karachi, Pakistan, the night before he was abducted and later decapitated. As detailed in the film A Mighty Heart, Nomani assisted Pearl’s then-pregnant wife Marianne and Pakistani authorities as they searched the South Asian terrorist netherworld for him. They were too late. During the tense month-long search for her friend, Nomani discovered that she like Marianne Pearl was pregnant. The Muslim community has little tolerance for single mothers, and her boyfriend, who feared the international attention surrounding the Pearl investigation, wouldn’t commit to marriage; he abandoned her. Nomani refused to have an abortion and made the difficult decision to raise Shibli on her own. She returned to her parents’ home in Morgantown, West Virginia, to give birth to her son. “As a journalist, I recall challenging the airline industry on price-fixing, but I wouldn’t take a position that mattered personally,” says Nomani, 42, “but after Danny was killed, the political became really personal. I decided to take a stand.” Her first public stand came as a 2003 opinion piece written for the Washington Post, decrying the death sentence by stoning handed down under Islamic law to a Nigerian woman who allegedly had sex outside of marriage. As a single woman, struggling to find her place in the Muslim world, Nomani’s energetic toddler was living proof that she, like the Nigerian woman, was guilty of zina, or illegal sex. Growing Activism Nomani’s personal and public stands against Islamic views of sex outside marriage clearly set her on the path toward becoming an outspoken advocate for women’s rights within the male-dominated Muslim culture. But it’s in her second book, Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, published in 2005, that the conflict she felt between her role as a Western professional woman and her role as an Islamic woman in the United States unfolds. As a professional she is an equal to men and has interviewed luminaries around the world, but as an Islamic woman she is not allowed to pray in the main halls of mosques or lead prayer services. These rigid strictures so offended her that, like some modern day Martin Luther, in 2005 Nomani posted a 99-item manifesto on the door of the Morgantown mosque her father had founded, promoting women’s rights from the mosque to the bedroom. She also entered her hometown mosque’s main hall to pray and later fought attempts to bar her from the house of worship. On her subsequent Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour, Nomani practiced acts of civil disobedience, such as organizing female-led prayer services in Manhattan and visiting the main hall of the Islamic Center of Washington, where during her years at AU, she’d been relegated to the annex to pray. Her campaign met with mixed response. The Morgantown mosque eventually relented and allowed Nomani to pray in the main hall if she remained in the back. However, AU professor Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, who conducted an hour-long C-SPAN interview with Nomani, thinks she is picking the wrong fight. “In most mosques, women either pray behind the men or have their own balcony or room, so they can preserve their sense of modesty. Women are facing such problems in the Muslim world. In some countries, they don’t have inheritance rights and are swindled out of property by their uncles and brothers. The last thing they need is to stand in front of men to lead prayers . . . What does it get them?” Nomani rebuts, saying that women will never gain their rights in the Muslim world until they are on equal footing in the mosque. “The men can’t expect us to win our rights by having us sit in the basement or balcony,” she says. “It’s not right for the Muslim leaders to protect this medieval practice. Women can’t get a seat at the table in our society unless we get a seat in the mosque. It’s a direct correlation to empowerment.” Roots of Independence Certainly Pearl’s murder and her own pregnancy were turning points in Nomani’s activism, but she’d challenged Muslim orthodoxy even as a youngster. Born in India, she immigrated to New Jersey at age four to join her father, who was pursing a PhD at Rutgers University. While in junior high, she convinced her mother to let her learn square dancing, despite Muslim proclamations against public dancing. During college, she heeded the Muslim custom that women live at home until marriage, commuting daily to West Virginia University where her father is a professor. Her parents, however, did let her take a summer internship at Harper’s magazine in Manhattan, and when she was admitted to AU’s graduate program in international communications, they agreed to her move to Washington, D.C. That move helped launch her career in journalism. While at AU, Nomani covered the Capitol for the Reuters international news service. Then, degree in hand, she landed a job at the Wall Street Journal—a heady leap for a 23-year-old fresh from grad school. There, she wrote about the commodities market, international trade, the airline industry, and corporate America. In 1993 she met Pearl at the Journal where the two Washington bureau reporters became good friends—playing volleyball, organizing office Halloween parties for their colleagues’ children, and challenging each other to write unconventional stories for the Journal’s front page about such off-beat topics as demolition derbies and the mile-high club. In 2000, Nomani took a leave from the Journal to write her first book Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love, which chronicles her journey halfway around the world to research the sexual secrets of the Hindu practice of tantra. She was writing Tantrika in Karachi when Pearl visited. The book ends with the tense search for Pearl. Charting a Confident Course After living in West Virginia for several years, in August 2007 Nomani returned to Washington to pursue the truth about her friend’s murder. She is teaching the Pearl Project, a seminar in investigative journalism, at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies. “For the five years since Danny was killed, I have wanted to find out the full truth behind his kidnapping and murder,” she says. “We need to figure out all the relationships. And like all good journalism, it’s a treasure hunt.” While her students look into Pearl’s murder and the investigation that led to the conviction of Muslim radical Omar Shaykh for kidnapping and murder (a task complicated by the March 2007 announcement that Sept. 11 terror suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had also confessed to the murder), Nomani continues her own explorations. In early October, she was in conversations with a former FBI agent about transcripts of interviews with suspects in the Pearl case; she was helping her students shape their research projects that she hopes will be published; and she published an opinion piece in the British press railing against A Mighty Heart, as the film opened in the United Kingdom. Nomani maintains the film mischaracterized her colleague as a “nerdy, dull reporter” who didn’t heed warnings not to conduct interviews at private locations. “The celluloid Danny doesn’t resemble at all the dynamic, colorful, and judicious reporter I knew as a friend and colleague for nine years,” she says. While they wait to see the doctor, Shibli plays with chairs, setting three of them up in a row. Then he sits in the center chair and declares that he is king. For Nomani, this is a teachable moment, a chance to make a point about gender roles for her Muslim boy, growing up in the patriarchal Muslim world. “So Shibli, there are all kinds of kings in the world,” she says. “There are kings who are dictators and kings that are kindly. Which kind will you be?” Says Shibli, “I want to be a kindly king,” and Nomani beams.
Photos of Nomani and her son were taken at the Islamic Center of Washington. |
