As a screenwriter working on a revision to my Islamically based screenplay, I’m constantly searching for perspective from the Muslim world. Brittany Huckabee’s documentary THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN was my most recent chance to gain insight. I sat down with a group of high school and college aged Muslims and their parents to discuss the issues in the film and gauge its relevance to their lives. All live in the Dallas and Houston areas, and their nationalities range from Pakistani and Indian to Palestinian, Turkish and Lebanese.
The election of Dr. Hany Ammar as president was the most important problem for the youth. “This is why I stopped going to the mosque,” one college-aged Muslima announced. “We have a mullah just like him at the Islamic Center and once he was elected he cut out all the youth activities,” said Amna Hasan, the only high school student in the audience. She continued by saying, “Going to mosque to watch movies and talk about the issues facing us like dating, wearing hijab and socializing with non-Muslims was important to us. What are we supposed to think when that is taken away?”
The older generation took issue with the leaders at the Morgantown mosque. A Muslim father questioned the initial dialogue, saying, “If Hazem Bata felt so strongly about Hany Ammar, why didn’t he call meetings protesting the election?” Another Muslim elder said, “A silent activism never works. As Muslims living in the post-9/11 world we strive to correct the false stereotypes associated with Muslims. Why did it take Asra’s protests for the mosque in Morgantown to open their doors to the rest of the community?”
When asked what the audience thought about the Yusuf Estes confrontation and the MSA’s failure to have a question and answer session most were in support of Asra. “I think the lack of Muslims in attendance speaks to what we think of Yusuf Estes,” said one Muslim parent. “And if that girl thinks being smacked in the head with a newspaper doesn’t hurt she’s welcome to visit my house,” he added.
While most supported the heart of Nomani’s ideas, not all of her actions were supported by those I spoke with. Most felt Asra was out of line when she visited the “progressive mosque” and demanded to pray along side the men. “She’s a guest in their mosque, she has no right to be disrespectful regardless of how valid her point is,” said a grandmother. When someone supported the claim that Asra’s actions were self promoting and used to increase her book sales, a debate broke out between “generations” over how to promote change. One Muslim girl said, “Without Asra’s action’s we wouldn’t be here trying to fix our community.”
As the dialogue came to a close I asked for final thoughts on Brittany Huckabee’s film. When asked if the film was positive for the Muslim community, everyone raised their hand. One mother said that the documentary was a step in the right direction to move on from the stereotypes associated with 9/11. “Since 9/11 the only issue associated with Muslims is terrorism. Now people have an inside look of REAL issues we struggle with on a day to day basis.” When asked to see a show of hands that wanted more documentaries and films like this one, not a single hand was left down. “The only way we are going to make progress is if we bring these issues to the forefront. Asra’s tactics may have been at times out of line but she got people talking and taking action,” a former leader in the Muslim community said.
Chris Morrow is a screenwriter based in Texas.
Tags: 9/11, American Muslim Identity, Asra Nomani, community
Community Stories
Evil Among Us
by Brittany Huckabee
Originally published at The Huffington Post on June 15, 2009
“I think Eldred Sasserine is the devil. I see it in his eyes.”
A friend whispered those words to my mother more than twenty years ago, and she says they still send a chill down her spine.
Eldred Sasserine was a retired cattle rancher from Oklahoma who had made it his mission to depose the new minister in our small-town Colorado church. Sasserine and his partisans said that Glenn Greenwell wasn’t preaching enough hellfire-and-brimstone, staples of Sunday sermons before he arrived. Moreover, he was “fellowshipping” with other Christians in town, flouting the received truth that our denomination stood alone on the path to heaven. I remember the day Glenn submitted his resignation.
I was about ten years old. My family attended the local Church of Christ on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights and Wednesday nights, so what happened there left a deep impression on me. Looking back, I realize I was seeing the clash between tradition and modernity that plays out in so many religious communities, written small among the red canvas pews of our little brick church next to a horse stable.
Years later, the conflict seeped back into my mind when I heard about another clash in another religious community. This one was in a mosque in West Virginia.
A colleague told me about an old friend who had just returned to her hometown mosque and found it had been taken over by a conservative clique — extremists, she called them. These men were excluding women and families from the mosque, and their sermons lashed out against the West and non-believers. It all sounded familiar. I wondered, were these Muslims really any more exotic — or dangerous — than the Oklahoma cattle rancher who wanted to control my childhood church?
After all, I grew up to a soundtrack of sermons that painted mainstream American culture as an evil, corrupting force. We were to be “in this world, but not of it.” The devil was out there tempting us at every turn, not least of which in the rock music I’d already learned to love. School dances, evolution, bikini swimsuits and television shows like Cheers and The Golden Girls were also his domain.
And at our church, too, women could not hold leadership positions. My mother lost a bid to teach our Sunday school class because women were not permitted to instruct a “baptized man,” even if that man happened to be a ten-year-old boy.
Most sermons before Glenn arrived focused on the difficulty of achieving salvation. People of other faiths — and Christians of other denominations — were seen as irredeemable sinners. As my brother overheard a family friend telling my grandfather in the car, “Clarence, I’m concerned for your soul.” The problem: our grandparents were Baptists. My brother remembers crying because Grandmom and Granddad were going to hell.
When he was hired as preacher at the age of 31, Glenn Greenwell tried to change the culture in the church, to create a religious narrative more useful to daily life. He entertained us with stories and tied them back to scripture. He encouraged us to ask questions. He organized breakfast meetings with other local pastors. He emphasized grace over condemnation, and he said we were not the only ones who would be saved. But the hold of tradition was strong, and Eldred Sasserine’s complaints fell on receptive ears.
Half the church remained neutral in the conflict. The other half was almost equally divided between the two factions. My mother says Glenn resigned to save the congregation from splitting. But right after his departure, Sasserine and his partisans split anyway and the church was left adrift. Our family moved away a couple of years later.
My brother doesn’t remember much of that. As he puts it, “Long car ride; you get there and it’s all old-lady perfume and ‘you’re going hell,’ so I just tuned it out. I went to sleep.”
I did my share of sleeping in church, too. But I couldn’t quite tune it out. A desire to explore that divide between tradition and modernity animated my aspirations as a documentary filmmaker, and eventually led me to begin filming in Morgantown, West Virginia in 2004.
What I found there was a lot of similarities — and some differences, too. In Morgantown, as in Colorado, the struggle hinged on competing notions of scripture as seen through the lens of cultural tradition, underlined by an old-fashioned power struggle. In Colorado, the divide was largely on generational and educational lines. In Morgantown, it came down to those who sought to forge a distinctly American Muslim identity versus those who preferred to cling to the practices of their home countries.
And I can’t ignore an obvious difference: Islam is now fraught with heavy political baggage. After 9/11, language about the evils of American culture and the irredeemability of non-believers took on a much more sinister cast. And indeed certain supposedly traditional beliefs have been harnessed to violent political ends. But ultimately I don’t believe the sermons given at the mosque in Morgantown represent anything more or less dangerous than those I heard in my church. They reflect the universal fare of conservative religion.
In Morgantown the mosque didn’t split. Moderates and progressives in the community pushed back, until the mosque finally began to grow into a more inclusive institution.
Tradition is a force of nature. It will always serve as a counterweight to the destabilizing push of modernity. One can argue that its adherents in Morgantown were rigid or small-minded, but they were not evil. And neither, I suspect, was Eldred Sasserine.
Brittany Huckabee is an independent filmmaker and the director of THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN.
Tags: extremism, interfaith parallels
Community Stories
Pushing the Envelope Without Breaking It
by Shahed Amanullah
What is the best way to affect change in a community under siege?
As a believer in the greater inclusion of women in Muslim institutions in America, I have long been supportive of efforts to bring attention to gender inequity in mosque life. The reality of this aspect of our community became impossible to ignore when, in the course of my work in promoting transparency of Muslim institutions through use of the Internet, I found that a substantial number of comments at my mosque review site salatomatic.com were written by women detailing the indignities they had faced at neighborhood mosques. The stories — ranging from exclusion from board politics to separate (and unequal) prayer spaces — were a stinging indictment of the larger community’s ignorance of, or inability to rectify, a situation which I believe has no religious sanction within Islam.
A widely publicized example of this can be seen in THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN, which details the efforts of journalist Asra Nomani to forcibly level the playing field at her local mosque. Ms. Nomani, whom I consider a friend and colleague, deserves credit for bringing light to this issue and calling on Muslims to rise to a higher standard when it comes to the treatment of women in community circles. It is partly in response to her very visible actions that mainstream Muslim leaders, including ISNA President Ingrid Mattson, put forth measures to educate Muslim communities of the responsibility they had, both under the law and Islamic teachings, to create a safe and equal space for women in mosque life.
But while there is widespread agreement among Muslim leaders for the need for change, what is the best way to create it? As THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN illustrates, confrontational action can sometimes be useful in jarring the conscience of a community. However, it can also shut down dialogue and cooperation if improperly applied. To know when or if such measures can be effective, one must first understand the history of mosque life in America, both at a national and a local level.
Since the events of 9/11, many mosques in the US have felt under siege. As the most visible representations of Islam in America, mosques have been host to protest marches, media spotlights, vandalism, and even violence. The resulting defensive postures by mosque patrons leave them particularly sensitive to confrontation, even when coming from within and with a message that otherwise would garner wide acceptance within the community.
Also, mosques differ widely in their accommodation of women. Some mosques with large concentrations of immigrants often bring with them imported cultural norms regarding women. Other mosques, particularly those with African-American and Sufi congregations, are more egalitarian in nature. And to the extent that American-born or raised Muslims begin to take their place in mosque leadership, mosque policies regarding women have begun to mirror those of other American institutions.
During Ms. Nomani’s journey across America to confront gender inequity in a manner similar to her actions in Morgantown, she made a stop at the mosque that I grew up in, the Islamic Center of Southern California. The Los Angeles Times article that covered the incident carried a photo of Nomani refusing to move as directed by Ms. Azmeralda Alfi, one of the matriarchs of the mosque.
Azmeralda Alfi
(Francine Orr/LATimes)
For those who are not familiar with this institution, the Islamic Center of Southern California has been one of the most gender-inclusive major mosques in the United States. Its Board of Directors has had women on it for over 30 years, at times making up a majority of the leadership. Women have been encouraged to participate in all areas of mosque life regardless of their personal dress code. Ms. Alfi in particular is one of the mosque’s most active and effective leaders, directing policy at the highest of levels, founding one of the nation’s most progressive and egalitarian Islamic schools, and inspiring a whole generation of Muslim women to believe that mosque leadership is their right.
While I was growing up, women prayed inside the main hall of the mosque at all times, even for Friday prayers. As the Friday prayers got more crowded, many women began praying in an area behind the main hall, but open to it. At all other times, however, women pray in the main hall and “own” it every bit as much as the men. At no time was the main hall ever designated “the men’s area,” and there is no ideological disparaging of women. In fact, the crowding at Friday prayer has resulted in the overflow of men going into the parking lot to pray rather than the women—probably one of the few mosques in the country where this happens. The Islamic Center of Southern California isn’t a mosque to be protested, but encouraged as a model.
Confrontation is a powerful and sometimes necessary tactic that is appropriate when a social problem is particularly entrenched. In other cases, such as with Ms. Alfi at my hometown mosque, it serves to alienate potential allies and create the perception that Asra’s cause is a fringe one, when it is most certainly not. Change is best affected when it is done with care and nuance, even when the issue carries a sense of urgency. And what’s right for Morgantown may not be right for your local mosque.
As editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com, Shahed Amanullah is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly about the challenges and opportunities facing Islam in America. Shahed is also a contributor to Progressive Revival, a new Beliefnet.com blog. Named one of ten “Muslim visionaries” by Islamica Magazine, Shahed’s work and writings have been featured in magazines (Newsweek), newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune), radio shows (BBC News, National Public Radio), and major websites (BeliefNet.com). Television appearances include Nightline with Ted Koppel, CNN Headline News, the Today Show, and Hannity & Colmes.
Tags: Asra Nomani, gender and Islam, Ingrid Mattson, Islamic Center of Southern California, Islamic Society of North America, social change methods
The Mosque in Morgantown is a production of Version One Productions, Inc., in association with WGBH. It is a presentation of the Center for Asian American Media with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding was provided by the LEF Moving Image Fund. PBS broadcast is presented by WETA-TV, Washington, DC. © 2009 Version One Productions, Inc.
