Abercrombie hates your hijab

Thursday, Feb 25, 2010 16:16 EST
Abercrombie hates your hijab
A Muslim employee says she was fired for refusing to take off her headscarf
By Tracy Clark-Flory
Salon.com


Hijabs are sooo not hot this season -- or, like, ever -- if you ask Abercrombie and Fitch. A 19-year-old Muslim employee at one of the company's Hollister stores in Northern California learned that the hard way: losing her job. But now the Council on American-Islamic Relations has filed an official complaint on her behalf against the company.

Khan says she was promised her headscarf wouldn't be a problem during her interview for a part-time position in the stock room (which it's rumored is where they keep all the less-than-desirables) but trouble arose when a district manager visited the store this month. "The lady told me that my hijab was not in compliance with the 'look policy' and that they don't wear any scarves or hats while working," she told KTVU. "I told her it was for religious reasons and again she stated it was against their 'look' policy." Khan refused to go uncovered and she was fired on Monday.

This comes as no surprise, given that just a few months ago, a Muslim teenager sued the clothier for allegedly refusing to hire her because of her headscarf. It would be an understatement to say that the company isn't really into displays of modesty, no matter if it has a religious basis. Have you seen the half-naked beefcakes they put in the front of A&F's retail stores during the holiday season, or the innumerable naked romps models have taken through the pages of its look book? And, more important, Abercrombie has a storied past of discriminating against those who don't fit its narrowly-defined vision of all-American beauty.

Last year, a British employee sued A&F after her prosthetic arm was deemed inappropriate for the sales floor. In 2004, the clothier handed over $40 million to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that the company discriminated against minority employees. There are plenty of other cases of employment discrimination, not to mention offensive merchandise -- remember those racist t-shirts? In A&F's alternate universe, the men have washboard abs and crunchy highlighted hair, the women have freckled noses, tiny waists and perpetual beach-hair, and everyone has lily white skin (or at least they did before becoming regulars at the tanning salon). I wonder just how many lawsuits and complaints it will take to crush this false reality.

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/02/25/hijab_abercrombie_hollister_discrimination

Let These Women Pray!

DailyBeast.com

Let These Women Pray!
by Asra Q. Nomani
February 27, 2010 | 6:33pm

In an uprising reminiscent of the lunch-counter protests of the 1960s, women at one of Washington D.C.'s most popular mosques are copying the tactics of the civil-rights movement, and refusing to follow rules that ban them from praying with the men. Asra Q. Nomani on the arrest threats and outrage that followed.

Shortly after noon on a recent Saturday, Fatima Thompson, a Muslim convert, and three other women prayed in the men’s section of the lavishly decorated Islamic Center of Washington, in a moment akin to Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat.

A bearded, middle-aged man scolded one of the women. “Sister, go there!” he said, pointing to a back corner, dubbed the “penalty box” by one disgruntled woman. The seven-foot wooden barrier separated the men and women’s sections in a visual metaphor of gender apartheid. She ignored him.

Today, a mosque can’t tell a woman of color she has to sit separately because of her race, but it can banish her to a corner, as most do, because of her gender.

Defiantly, they continued to pray behind a row of men at the front of the mosque, when their numbers unexpectedly quadrupled. A tour group of about 100 Muslims, including about 30 women, from Hagerstown, Maryland, had hurriedly entered after the prayer had already began, unsuspectingly joining the protesters.

But the mood shifted when mosque officials called the cops.

The women’s prayer was a “Stand In,” a civil-rights protest against gender segregation in mosques, inspired by Black History Month. The 21st-century suffragettes are part of an emerging movement that challenges traditional interpretations of Islam—and questions the disturbing fact that women’s rights take a back seat to civil rights in America when freedom of religion is invoked. So, today, a mosque can’t tell a woman of color she has to sit separately because of her race, but it can banish her to a corner, as most do, because of her gender. Some even ban women altogether.

Police officer Barry Goodwin soon arrived and awkwardly walked over to the line of women—in his socks, because he couldn’t enter the mosque in shoes—to search for the organizers. It wasn’t long before it dawned on the visiting women that trouble was brewing.

Goodwin eventually found Thompson and her small troop of protesters. “I’m not a Muslim. I’m just here to do my job” he said politely. “Ladies, this is how it works. You have to obey the rules of the church here… I’m sorry. The church or temple. However you want to call it. You have to obey the rules.” He continued: “If they ask you to leave. You have to leave.” Failure to leave, he pointed out, would be grounds for arrest for unlawful entry. He said: “I don’t want to do that.”

Three mosque officials hovered over the women. What irked them, they later said, was that late-arriving men had to pray behind women. Their position was that the women could stay if they prayed behind the partition. “If you want to come here to pray,” one administrator, a woman, told the group, “you can pray. But you cannot come here and disrespect the mosque.”

What unfolded that day inside the mosque underscores a growing agitation inside the American-Muslim community by women frustrated by separate-and-unequal status. A survey by the Council on American Islamic Relations showed that two of three mosques in 2000 required women to pray in a separate area, up from one of two in 1994. In 2003, I challenged rules at my mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, that women enter through a back door and pray in a secluded balcony. I argued that, in the 7th century, the prophet Muhammad didn’t put women behind partitions, and the barriers were just emblematic of sexist man-made rules. The men at my mosque put me on trial to be banished.

To me, the women’s space in a mosque is an indicator of whether the interpretation of Islam being practiced is puritanical and dogmatic, or open and inclusive. This one choice is a harbinger for other controversial interpretations of Islam, including domestic violence, honor killings, suicide bombings, violence and interfaith relations. Just this week, a hard-line Saudi cleric issued a fatwa on his Arabic-language Web site calling for the killing of Muslims who don’t enforce strict gender segregation.

While highlighting deep-seated controversy within Islam, the incident at the mosque in Washington speaks to larger issues about the state of civil rights in America itself. While places of worship can no longer get away with racial discrimination and expect the benefits of nonprofit status, those same protections aren’t extended to women. So, as America sends thousands of soldiers overseas with a mission, in part, to improve women’s rights in Afghanistan, two D.C. cops were dispatched to a mosque just a mile from the White House to remove American Muslim women from the main prayer hall. Ironically, the weekend incident raises an important question about whether there truly is suffrage for Muslim women in America. It seems not.

Even conservative Muslim women are chafing. Recently, Ify Okoye, a Nigerian-American convert, wrote an article, “The Penalty Box: Muslim Women’s Prayer Spaces” on a mostly hard-line Web site, complaining about the separate and unequal space women get at most mosques.

The struggle is years in the making, though. In 2005, following public agitation on the issue, Muslim organizations, including CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America, issued a report on making mosques “women-friendly,” asserting women’s rights in mosques, including the right to pray in the main hall without a partition.

Back at the Islamic Center of Washington, I tried to put the women’s action in context for Police Officer Goodwin, an African American. “Think sit-ins, 1960s,” I said. If he appreciated my history lesson, he didn’t acknowledge it. He walked outside for backup. The conflict escalated when Police Officer R.S. Lowery, threatened to arrest the women if they refused to leave.

“The people here who work for the mosque don’t want you here. If they are asking you to leave, we have to ask you to leave. If you refuse, we have to arrest you,” he said.

“You will arrest me on mosque property?” Thompson, the protest organizer, asked.

“We will. Yes we will,” he said.

Thompson begrudgingly picked up her Liz Claiborne purse, and the group rose to leave amid calls of support from onlookers, including an Egyptian-American international human-rights lawyer and a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Muslim Christian Understanding

As the protesters stepped into the marble courtyard, they crossed paths with the Hagerstown group, who were also being shooed out—even though they expressed no solidarity with the protesters.

Indeed, I learned very personally that it isn’t always intuitive to think of women’s rights as part of a wider civil-rights mission. Children in the Hagerstown group talked about the protest at their Sunday school the next day; women at that mosque pray behind a see-through curtain.

On the drive to the mosque, I had explained to my 7-year-old, Shibli, we were going to a protest march like the ones Martin Luther King Jr. had led. He listened thoughtfully and then, alas, responded, “I don’t care about women’s rights. I’m a boy. I care about kids’ rights!” Sigh.

But on the drive home, I asked him what he’d thought about the women being kicked out of the mosque. “It’s not fair,” he said. “They could have just let them stay.”

The world may take longer, but an afternoon later, there was progress in the social conscience of at least one young boy.

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women’s rights at her mosque in W.Va. is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad, the first in a series of articles about “the gender jihad.”asra@asranomani.com

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-27/let-these-women-pray/

Muslims Won’t Play Together

February 28, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Muslims Won’t Play Together
By EFRAIM KARSH
The New York Times

London

WE may scoff at the idea that the Olympic Games have anything to do with the “endeavor to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace,” as the Olympic charter enshrines as its ideal. But at least nations across the world were able to put aside differences for two weeks of friendly competition in Vancouver.

A mundane achievement, perhaps, but it’s one that’s beyond the grasp of the Islamic world. The Islamic Solidarity Games, the Olympics of the Muslim world, which were to be held in Iran in April, have been called off by the Arab states because Tehran inscribed “Persian Gulf” on the tournament’s official logo and medals.

It’s a small but telling controversy. It puts the lie to the idea of the Islamic world as a bloc united by religious values that are hostile to the West. It also gives clues as to how the United States and its allies should handle two of their most urgent foreign policy matters: the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is not the first time that Arabs have challenged the internationally accepted name of the waterway that separates Persia (or Iran, as it has been called since 1935) from the Arabian Peninsula. Pan-Arabist thought — which dominated Arab political life for most of the 20th century — insisted on the creation of a unified vast empire “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arab Gulf,” provoking sharp confrontations with Iran since the late 1960s.

The Islamic regime in Tehran, which came to power in 1979 dismissing nationalism as an imperialist plot aimed at weakening the worldwide Muslim community (or umma), initially displayed less interest in the gulf’s Persian identity than in the spread of its Islamist message. “The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people,” insisted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”

Yet like Stalin, who responded to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 by urging his people to fight for the motherland rather than for the Communist ideals with which they had been indoctrinated, Khomeini reverted to nationalist rhetoric to rally his subjects after the Iraqi invasion of 1980. He also used the war to justify a string of military and diplomatic actions against the smaller Arab states like Qatar and Kuwait aimed at asserting Iran’s supremacy in the gulf.

In this history of a single body of water, one sees a perfect example of the so-called Islamic Paradox that dates from the seventh century. For although the Prophet Muhammad took great pains to underscore the equality of all believers regardless of ethnicity, categorically forbidding any fighting among the believers, his precepts have been constantly and blatantly violated.

It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased. Likewise, there has been no overarching Islamic solidarity transcending the multitude of parochial loyalties — to one’s clan, tribe, village, family or nation. Thus, for example, not only do Arabs consider themselves superior to all other Muslims, but inhabitants of Hijaz, the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam’s birthplace, regard themselves the only true Arabs, and tend to be highly disparaging of all other Arabic-speaking communities.

Nor, for that matter, has the House of Islam ever formed a unified front vis-à-vis the House of War (as Muslims call the rest of the world). Even during the Crusades, the supposed height of the “clash of civilizations,” Christian and Muslim rulers freely collaborated across the religious divide, often finding themselves aligned with members of the rival religion against their co-religionists. While the legendary Saladin himself was busy eradicating the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for example, he was closely aligned with the Byzantine Empire, the foremost representative of Christendom’s claim to universalism.

This pattern of pragmatic cooperation reached its peak during the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire relied on Western economic and military support to survive. (The Charge of the Light Brigade of 1854 was, at its heart, part of a French-British effort to keep the Ottomans from falling under Russian hegemony.) It has also become a central feature of 20th- and 21st-century Middle Eastern politics.

Muslim and Arab rulers have always, in their intrigues, sought the support and protection of the “infidel” powers they so vilify. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the champion of pan-Arabism who had built his reputation on standing up to “Western imperialism,” imported more than 10,000 Soviet troops into Egypt when his “War of Attrition” against Israel in the late 1960s went sour.

Similarly, Ayatollah Khomeini bought weapons from even the “Great Satan,” the United States. Saddam Hussein used Western support to survive his war against Iran in the 1980s. And Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Afghan mujahedeen accepted weapons and money from the United States, with the Islamic state of Pakistan as the middleman, in their struggle against the Soviet occupation.

Yet, since it is far easier to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty, Islamic solidarity has been repeatedly invoked as an instrument for achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaimed it. Little wonder the covenant of Hamas insists, “When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims.”

So, if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations, what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?

For one, it should give us more impetus to take a harder line with Iran. Just as the Muslim governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament, so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions, or even a military strike.

Beyond the customary lip service about Western imperialism and “Crusaderism,” most other Muslim countries would be quietly relieved to see the extremist regime checked. It’s worth noting that the two dominant Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been at the forefront of recent international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

As for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the idea that bringing peace between the two parties will bring about a flowering of cooperation in the region and take away one of Al Qaeda’s primary gripes against the West totally misreads history and present-day politics. Muslim states threaten Israel’s existence not so much out of concern for the Palestinians, but rather as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam.

In these circumstances, one can only welcome the latest changes in the Obama administration’s Middle Eastern policy, which combine a tougher stance on Iran’s nuclear subterfuge with a less imperious approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s two-track plan — discussion with Tehran while at the same time lining up meaningful sanctions — is fine as far as it goes. But a military strike must remain a serious option: there is no peaceful way to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stemming as they do from its imperialist brand of national-Islamism.

Likewise, there is no way for the Obama administration to resolve the 100-year war between Arabs and Jews unless all sides are convinced that peace is in each of their best interests. Any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is far less important than a regional agreement in which every Islamic nation can make peace with the idea of Jewish statehood in the House of Islam.

And that, depressingly, is going to be a lot harder to pull off than even the Islamic Solidarity Games.

Efraim Karsh, the head of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, is the author of "Islamic Imperialism: A History" and the forthcoming “Palestine Betrayed.”


Read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28karsh.html

More Muslims turning to home schooling

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 20, 2010; 11:57 AM

On a chilly afternoon in western Loudoun County, a group of children used tweezers to extract rodent bones from a regurgitated owl pellet. A boy built a Lego projectile launcher. A girl practiced her penmanship. On the wall, placards read, "I fast in Ramadan," "I pay zakat" and "I will go on hajj."

Welcome to Priscilla Martinez's home -- and her children's school, where Martinez is teacher, principal and guidance counselor, and where the credo "Allah created everything" is taught alongside math, grammar and science.

Martinez and her six children, ages 2 to 12, are part of a growing number of Muslims who home school. In the Washington area, Martinez says, she has seen the number of home schoolers explode in the past five years.

Although three-quarters of the nation's estimated 2 million home schoolers identify themselves as Christian, the number of Muslims is expanding "relatively quickly," compared with other groups, said Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.

They do so, he said, for the same reasons as non-Muslims: "Stronger academics, more family time, they want to guide social interaction, provide a safe place to learn and . . . teach them [their] values, beliefs and worldview."

Parents say it is an attractive alternative to public schools, with whose traditions and values they are not always comfortable, and Islamic schools, which might be too far away, cost too much or lack academic rigor.

If Muslims have come to embrace home schooling later than others, it might be in part because so many Muslims in the United States are immigrants who might not be aware of the option. In fact, for many immigrants, the idea of home schooling runs counter to their reasons for coming to America, which frequently include better educational opportunities for their children. And public school has long been seen as a key portal to assimilation.

When Sanober Yacoob arrived from Pakistan 13 years ago and began to home school her three children, she was the only immigrant she who was doing so. Others from Muslim countries "thought I was weird. One of them said to me, 'I hope you're not going to destroy yourself, and they will grow up ignorant.' "

Now, more are following in her footsteps, and many use the highly regarded Calvert curriculum for home-schoolers.

Maqsood and Zakia Khan of Sterling, who emigrated from Pakistan two decades ago, say home schooling has allowed them to enhance and internationalize their children's curriculum. Now, in addition to the standard subjects, their children, ages 15, 14 and 9, study the Koran for half an hour a day, one-on-one, with a female teacher who teaches them online from Pakistan.

"If they were going to school, we could never do that," Maqsood Khan said. "You spend any number of hours at school, you're tired, your brain is full and you don't want to spend hours with Islamic studies. But now it's part of their curriculum; we made it part of their time."
The food incident

The Khans decided to start home-schooling four years ago after a kindergarten teacher, unaware of the religious issues, told their son that he could not refuse school food in favor of the Islamic-sanctioned food he had brought from home. The food incident was small, but it highlighted the issues many Muslims say their children face every day as minorities who don't celebrate Christmas, Halloween or birthday parties, who don't eat pork and who fast during Ramadan.

The family did not consider Islamic schools, Zakia Khan said, because "they learn more at home than they learn at school."

By contrast, Abdul Rashid Abdullah of Herndon said he would have considered an Islamic school for his 11-year-old son, who was struggling in public school, if it weren't for the cost.

"My children are extremely aware that they are Muslim, and they are extremely aware that other people aren't," said Abdullah, whose wife, a Malaysian immigrant, started home schooling their son last fall. Two of the couple's younger children, ages 10 and 6, remain in public school; their fourth child is 3. "There is a mainstream culture, and my kids aren't a part of that mainstream culture . . . and to hear, 'We don't do this, we don't do that,' how are they feeling when they're sitting in that chair? Home schooling really takes the pressure off."

Martinez, a convert to Islam who is of Mexican descent and grew up in Texas, said that despite stereotypes of home-schoolers seeking to shut out the world, the point is not to restrict children from mainstream culture so much as to make sure they don't get lost in the shuffle.

"We don't isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and sit here at home just not being attuned to our community and our identity as Americans," she said. "But we're also not sending them to school where generally speaking they would have to leave most of their identity at the door."

There are also religious reasons. "We definitely do learn from a different worldview," she said. "Everything has God as its center. We don't just study the bee, but we study what the Koran says about the bee and the many blessings and the honey. . . . We get religious studies out of it, we get biology out of it and chemistry."
Former naysayers

The idea of teaching kids at home has found more acceptance in the Muslim community since Yacoob started doing it. Now, she said, former naysayers congratulate her on her children, who are pursuing college degrees. Her son Saad, now 21 and an English major at George Mason University, managed to memorize the Koran while being home-schooled. "The same person [who once criticized her] stopped me, and he told me, 'We are so proud of Saad!' "

As with home-schoolers of any affiliation, questions arise about socialization. Abdul-Malik Ahmad, a 34-year-old Web developer, was home-schooled in Beltsville in the 1980s and '90s. While he said overall it was a positive experience (he now home-schools his daughter), it had drawbacks.

"There were very few Muslims, and we were very scattered, and the community wasn't as developed as it is now," he said. "So we didn't have a chance to socialize as much as we could have now. It took a while for me to adjust once I got to college."

To ease that transition, some home-schoolers say they plan to send their children to public high school once their characters are more fully formed. "It's not that you don't want them to know the world," said Norlidah Zainal Abidin, Abdullah's wife, "but you want to instill certain values in them first."

Maqsood Khan said his children connect with the outside world through Islamic scouting troops and visits to the mall. "They're typical teens; they listen to the music full blast, but they listen to Islamic music."

His daughter Meena, 15, who attended Sterling Middle School until she completed sixth grade four years ago, was at home recently in a Redskins sweatshirt and black headscarf. She said there were things she missed about public school, including the Harry Potter club.

"I liked going. I got good grades," she said. "But we didn't get enough Islamic studies."

Many home-schoolers seek out social interaction in outside classes or group field trips. On a recent afternoon at the Cascades Library in Sterling, mothers in headscarves dropped off their children at a resource room where Jean McTigue was teaching art to Muslim home-schooled children. As the boys and girls looked at reproductions of Dalis and Goyas, McTigue, whose own children were in the class, said there had not been similar opportunities for her oldest, 15. "When Yusef was 6 years old he would have loved to do something like this, but there was really nothing."

Downstairs, among the waiting mothers, Ayesha Khan said that five years ago her friends and family back in Pakistan had criticized her decision to home-school her children, now 10 and 8. But when they see the children, they are impressed.

"Over there, it's like, 'Wow, your kids are going to American schools,' " she said. "I say, 'Yeah, we are giving our kids an American education.' "

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