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What I Learned From The Mosque in Morgantown

by Dylan Chambers

Asra Nomani is a woman with a mission.  She wants to equalize the role woman play in the Muslim community.  Also she wants to pray next to men in service and be in the same room during celebrations such as Ramadan.  Others may say that it goes against tradition but, in Asra’s defense, in the Qur’an, just like the Bible for Christians, it never states that a woman cannot sit next to a man.  It seems all these rules were manmade and are not against any spiritual rules.

As an eleven year old, I don’t understand why something like this causes such an uproar.  It seems like it shouldn’t matter. From watching the program, I don’t think that a woman praying next to a man would change or worsen the experience when at service.

As some of you may know, Asra was an amazing reporter for the Wall Street Journal for fifteen years.  And she worked alongside a very honorable man named Daniel Pearl, a man who was kidnapped by Muslim extremists and killed.  The footage of him being killed was sent to the U.S to watch.  Asra was one of the last to see him and saw him the day he was kidnapped.  It is a very sad and tragic story.

She now has also written two books and has gone on at least one book tour.  When on this tour, she met some very supportive and unsupportive people.  At one stage of the tour, Asra went into a mosque and sat next to some of the men there.  Some people asked her what she was doing, and she simply stated that she was praying.  After talking a while they threatened to get men to pick her up and take her outside.  Finally, they gated off that section and brought other women over there.

After the service she talked to some members, among many things a woman said ‘”You should be ashamed of yourself!”  Asra replied by saying, “ I pray for you.”  The woman said, “I do not need your prayers.”  I find this to be quite rude.

I have learned a lot from Asra and THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN, and I would recommend it to people of all ages.  To me, Asra is an amazingly kind and wholesome person who is definitely one of my heroes.  I feel like I have met her through the documentary and that is truly an honor.

I would like to leave you with one final but very important thought about my faith.  While Catholics may get to sing, sit, and celebrate together, we are still not fully together.  I don’t mean to question anyone’s faith, but if Asra can try and get woman to have a higher place in her religion, why do so many Catholics believe that women can’t be priests or other higher members of the church?

After all, I believe good people all go to heaven.  Maybe we need someone as brave and courageous as Asra to lead us.  While Asra is still fighting, I pray she will succeed.  My question is, why can’t we all be equal?  And, yes, I am a boy.

 

Dylan Chambers is an 11-year-old aspiring writer living in the Cincinnati area.

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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.

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Seeing the Film in Morgantown

by Parween Mascari

I am an Afghan-American woman born in Parkersburg, WV, and now living in Morgantown, WV.  Jokingly, I call myself a “halfghan.”

I went to the Morgantown screening of THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN with the hope of learning more about Islam, the religion of my father, and also gaining more of an understanding of Asra Nomani’s struggle here in Morgantown.  Aside from the religious issues, I was also interested in how our small town would be depicted in a film involving such national-scale conflict.

What I got was a better understanding of Islam and of Asra Nomani’s struggle — and I left with a dedication to do whatever I can to improve the condition of women in Afghanistan, the land of my paternal ancestry.

I left the screening with tremendous respect for Islam and its practices, its focus on family, its eloquence and its traditions.  For the first time I thought about its strength and the struggle to hold onto its identity and its traditions in the face of the tremendous pressure of American pop culture.  I also left with a better understanding of how our particular mosque in Morgantown faces even greater challenges because of the great diversity of cultures, backgrounds, ideologies, and even languages of its membership.  I also realized that I have something in common with many members of the mosque solely by virtue of my Afghan appearance.  I can relate to the fears expressed by the panel members as a result of perceptions and fear in our post-9/11 society.

I also left the screening with tremendous respect for Asra Nomani.  Personally I felt a great empathy for what she went through not only in Pakistan with the death of her friend Daniel Pearl, but also in returning “home” and finding herself a young mother unwelcome in her own house of worship.  Being from West Virginia, and loving to call West Virginia home, the one thing I can always count on is that welcoming feeling I get when I arrive home safe in the mountains of WV.  That is such a special feeling and I’m not sure others from outside of West Virginia can quite understand the magnitude of it.

I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for her to come back after her tremendous personal ordeal and be denied much-needed refuge and sanctuary in her beloved “Almost Heaven West Virginia.”  It was clear from the film that she expected to be welcome in the mosque her father had helped to found but was instead told to enter through the back door and pray in a separate room.  I cannot imagine the disappointment I would have felt coming back to Morgantown and feeling unwelcome and segregated in my own church.

Learning about Asra Nomani and her work and recently meeting several brave Afghan women has inspired me to work to improve the condition of women and children in Afghanistan.  In January, I had the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. to help host a visiting delegation of Afghan Judges and lawyers.  We met with great American women leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

The Afghan women were so brave and inspiring.  Like Asra Nomani, they followed their beliefs and their conscience and sought to make change in their country, often at great personal risk.

The Afghan women judges and lawyers I met talked about the need for chairs in their schools because the children, too tired from standing, couldn’t learn.  I vowed to do what I could to help when I returned to West Virginia.  In March, I formed a company called Sultan’s Daughters, and I have been selling pashmina shawls to benefit construction and furnishing of schools in Afghanistan.  My company has already raised enough money to fund 10% of the construction and furnishing of one school in a village called Pagisam.

The Morgantown community, as it always does, has come out in support of this worthy cause and of helping others in need.  On June 26, 2009, a young professionals group here in the Morgantown community, Generation Morgantown, will host a fundraiser at a local restaurant, Cafe Bacchus, to benefit the school project in Pagisam village, by a nonprofit agency, the Nooristan Foundation.  That project will construct and maintain the village school in the Nooristan region of Afghanistan.  It will also raise awareness and hopefully make people want to be more involved in making a difference in Afghanistan’s future.

THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN inspired me in several ways.  First and foremost, the film is really about having the courage, drive, and strength of character to follow your conscience.  People can debate on Asra Nomani’s tactics — and I think rightfully so — and whether she went about things the right way.  They can debate about the merits of the respective positions about the logistics of the mosque services, and I heard valid points on both sides of that debate.

But the larger point is that she took a stand for what she believed in.  For that, Asra Nomani is a role model for myself and for my daughters.  I will teach my daughters to listen to their conscience and if they do that, like Asra’s parents in the movie, I will be behind them 100%.  I will teach them, as I have always taught them and as my parents taught me, that with hard work and perseverance they can achieve anything.  I will teach them not to let gender-based stereotypes or limitations get in the way of achieving their goals and that they deserve to be treated equally to men.

The movie also inspires me to learn more about Islam.  Growing up Catholic, the religion of my mother, and attending Catholic school I didn’t learn anything about Islam other than it existed, that it was one of the three monotheistic religions because of the belief in one God, Allah, and that we share the same old testament.  Although I am not Muslim, I am inspired by the film to educate myself about Islam.  I am also inspired to visit the mosque in Morgantown and actively try to meet Muslims living in this community.

One final point I will make is that this film is inspiring for what it says about the country we live in and the freedoms it affords all of us.  When people didn’t agree, Asra took a stand, the media was called, the media was granted access, there was controversy, there were demonstrations, elections, and even a trial.  Then a film was made and it has provoked open discussion in Morgantown and now a national debate on this website about sensitive issues where people can speak freely without fear of retribution.

When the film started the mosque was in its infancy.  Now the mosque has regular elections, a new constitution, and women in leadership position.  The controversy at the mosque wasn’t handled by physical violence or by guns or tanks in the streets but by dialogue with both sides zealously advocating their respective positions and the occasional shouting match.  This really is a beautiful country we live in where we are permitted to speak our minds and practice whatever religion we choose.

 

Parween Mascari is an attorney living in Morgantown, WV.

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Community Stories

Bringing Out the Best in Our Communities

by Mark LeVine

In watching THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a quintessentially American story of religious progress.  In many ways, this country was born out of a desire to reshape existing religious traditions to fit changing realities and beliefs.

Indeed, there is little that is unique about Asra Nomani’s struggle to achieve equality of worship for herself and other women in the Muslim community of Morgantown, West Virginia.  American Christians and Jews have been fighting similar struggles for well over a century as members of both faiths struggled to create a “positive historical” form of their religions based on a willingness to reexamine what were previously fundamental tenets of their faith on issues regarding the infallibility of religious texts, gender relations, relations with other faith communities and, most importantly, equality and justice within their communities.  To quote one of the leaders of the mosque, Christine Arja, “I want [an Islam] that fits in with my culture too.”

Crucial to creating such an Islam is Nomani’s realization that much of what her fellow worshippers have assumed was inalterable doctrines of their faith, such as women praying separately from men, are in fact not mandated by the Qur’an and therefore could be challenged by women and men who want to pray and celebrate together inside the mosque.  More difficult, but equally important, is the willingness by Nomani and her allies to confront verses in the Qur’an that have traditionally been interpreted as mandating the hitting of disobedient women, avoiding friendships with Jews and Christians, or violent holy war.

The conflicts within Morgantown’s Muslim community are not unique to American Islam — the same issues are behind attempts to re-imagine Islam in the Muslim majority world and Europe as well.  They are part of the larger process whereby members of all the world’s major religions are slowly understanding, in the words of the Swiss Islamic theologian and philosopher Tariq Ramadan regarding his religion, that “in the global era, what’s good for Islam must be good for the world, and what’s not good for the world can no longer be considered good for Islam.”

Some of the particular issues of the debates within the Muslim community of Morgantown are particularly relevant to the larger issues of Islam’s relations with other cultures and faiths.  The first is the supposed link, clearly espoused by Nomani, between the cultural and religious conservatism of many mosque members and political extremism.  For her, there is a direct link between the unwillingness of the (largely) Arab-born leaders of the mosque to allow woman to worship next to men and the purportedly expressed views by these members in support of hate-filled rhetoric or even violence.  Yet others in the mosque — both those who oppose her agenda and those who generally support her goals — disavow such a link.

There’s not enough evidence presented in the movie to determine which side is right, but here again it’s worth noting that conservative Christian and Jewish communities in the U.S. are similarly among the most antagonistic towards other faiths, and willing to sanction negative views and even violence towards others.  Indeed, as I watched the film I couldn’t help wondering how many Christians and Jews in Evangelical or Orthodox congregations have been as willing to take on the patriarchal, xenophobic and even violent theology of their co-worshipers?  Not enough, that’s for sure.

As Nomani put it, “It’s not just about women’s rights, it’s about a greater intolerance.  We have to have zero tolerance for the kinds of words spewing out of our pulpit.”  It’s hard not to say “Amen” to such a sentiment no matter what your religion.  At the same, however, one can understand the misgivings and even anger of some of the more progressive members of the mosque towards her rabble-rousing tactics.  More than one argued that much of what Nomani wanted could have been achieved even more quickly if she worked within the mosque rather than making her fight so public, using, in another member’s words, “silent persistent activism.”

I’m not sure I buy this argument, however.  Communal change rarely happens without people willing to risk their position inside the community to force other members to confront injustice and oppression within it.  As one of the more liberal members of the mosque, Ihtishaam, argued, “It might not be politically correct, but those laws are what make Islam, Islam.”  But the point is that the vast majority of the laws Nomani and other progressives are fighting against are not from the Qur’an, but rather human interpretations that are historically grounded and can and should change with the times.

In fact, some members began this film vehemently disagreeing with her only to admit later that once they had looked at the sources themselves they realized she was right.  While it’s true that the mosque gradually opened up during the several years covered by the film despite many members wanting to ban her, it’s hard for me to imagine these changes would have occurred anywhere near as quickly if Nomani hadn’t pushed the agenda and forced the community to confront its problems “from the outside,” as one of the other members of the mosque lamented.  Rarely can groups or communities move forward enough unless some members are willing to go too far to, in Nomani’s words, “Push and push and push until we turn the corner and let the best of Islam shine through.”

THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN shows the struggles one small Muslim American community is going through to create a truly American Islam.  It’s a story that should resonate with Christians and Jews who are still struggling, sometimes against great odds, to bring out the best in their religions.

 

Mark LeVine is Professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture and Islamic studies at UC Irvine and author or editor of more than half a dozen books, including Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House/Three Rivers Press, 2008), Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009) and Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005).

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