There are about 285 mosques in New York City, according to nycreligion.info. In none of the NYC mosques is there a woman serving as imam. But the absence of women imams does not mean that women do not play leadership positions in New York’s Muslim communities. These are the stories of three such women. None of them want to be imams. In fact, none of them believes Muslims in New York are ready for a woman imam. Still, they are part of a network of Muslim women who have found opportunities to lead in other ways.
These are their stories.
#1
Daisy Khan is a leader of leaders. She is the founder of Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, WISE, which she calls, “a modern Muslim suffragette movement.” The organization promotes Muslim women leaders worldwide. Her organization is located in the Interchurch Center, in Morningside Heights. The office, consisting of two rooms, and no windows, is modest for a person with so much self-regard.
There are diplomas and clips from articles up on her wall, a photograph of Khan and Richard Gere, another of Khan and Bill Clinton. There is a Kashmiri rug on the floor, and a large table that almost inhabits the whole room -- the “conference room.” Khan sits at the end of the table, next to a side table full of tea and china.
“I was born as a leader,” Khan says. She was born in 1958, in Kashmir, in a valley named Srinagar, in the north of India, surrounded by mountains, in a region known for its beauty.
Khan is dressed in a white turtleneck blouse, with a colorful pattern. She wears a black jacket and gold rings. Her glasses sit low on her nose, far from her eyes. She often ignores her glasses, looks above them, raising her eyebrows and tilting her chin downwards, staring right at you with a gaze that won’t flicker.
She grew up in her grandfather’s house, with her mother and father, aunts, uncles, 11 cousins and 4 siblings. There was always someone in the house, “if your father wasn’t there your uncle was there, if your uncle wasn’t there your aunt was there,” Khan says.
Her family were devoted Muslims, traditional yet modern. “We were taught the religion of ethics, not so much the dogma,” she says. Kashmir was a melting pot of religion and culture when Khan was growing up in the 1960s and 70s. She went to a catholic school run by nuns. Her professors were Hindus, her friends were Sikhs and she was surrounded by Buddhists. “We were always told we were the forth last ten tribes of Israel,” Khan says.
It was an all girls’ school, divided into four houses, every house had its leader. “I remember calling everybody to come and follow me. I was good at rally people around me,” Khan says. She was appointed leader of the house named Peace, in English. Eventually she became captain of the school, and people would salute her.
She knew she didn’t want to be a teacher or a doctor, the two careers that were considered appropriate for women in Kashmir. She could see Mount Everest from where she lived. Her father used to point to the mountains and say: “If you want to climb that mountain, you can do it.” She used to dream about fighting evil. She would imagine herself as a superhero, who could fly in the sky.
“I was attracted to beauty,” she says. One day she watched her uncle drawing portraits, and though “I can do that, too.” She asked her father for paint and brushes, and he gave her a wall on which to paint. They removed the furniture and Khan began to paint. “I had no idea what I was painting, because I was never trained as a painter,” she says, “and I just started drawing images, and what turned out was a Picasso type of thing.”
Everyone in her family, she says, said: “She’s an artist, she’s an artist!” And it was decided by the family that it would be best for Khan to go to school in the United States, just as her father and grandfather had. At the age of 15 she was sent to her aunt and uncle in Long Island, N.Y. When she came to the U.S she changed. She used to be a leader, but in the U.S. she struggled.
At school her classmates wondered about her exotic past. Had she gone to school in an elephant? Did she worship snakes? Khan had never seen an elephant, and “’no, I didn’t’ worship snakes, I was a Muslim,’” Khan says. A fact that made her social studies teacher ask her to give a lecture on Islam.
“I realized in that very moment that I would speak on behalf of my religion,” Khan says.
She was no longer the popular girl, and she didn’t want to be a misfit. She thought of ways to being liked. Ruling out the option to be one of the beautiful girls, she thought, “Americans seems to value sports.” She asked the gym teacher if she could play on the field hockey team, the teacher asked if she knew how to hold a stick. Khan said she did. She played center forward and scored goal after goal. “In two seconds, I was a hero, they lifted me up on their shoulders and they forgot who I was, all they knew was that I was scoring.”
When Khan went to college at New York School of Interior Design, the Iranian revolution was unfolding. It was a hard time to be an unofficial spokesperson for Islam. People asked her why the revolutionaries, Muslims, were taking more than 60 American diplomats in hostage. Khan had no answer. She began to distance herself from Islam. And eventually she lived a secular life. She went out with her friends. “I had a busy schedule because I was a single girl, in a New York scene,” she says.
After college she got a job as an architectural designer, and her career was going well. When she was in her 30s she worked at the World Trade Center “I experienced being on top of the world, looking at the statue of liberty,” Khan says. But like the cliché, she couldn’t fill the empty void with success, and she began to question the meaning of her life. She visited her mother in Kashmir and confessed that she didn’t believe in religion anymore. Her mother said: “I will start pray for the day when you find God,” Khan says.
The trip had made Khan think that maybe God wasn’t the problem with religion; maybe the problem was what people did and said in the name of religion. It made her want to find God again. She began attending mosques. But all she found was scolding people, angry people, who urged her to sit in the back. She was hungry for spirituality, but didn’t feel welcome in Manhattan mosques.
One day when she was on her way home, she went down the stairs to the subway, and saw a neon sign saying “Sufi Books.” She went inside the store. It was full of calligraphy, woodwork and people reading. She opened a book and it had a poem that went something like this: I was looking for God, I went to a mosque, a synagogue, a temple, but I couldn’t find him, I looked in my heart, and I saw that he was always there. Khan had found a place with like-minded people, seekers, from various backgrounds and ethnicities, looking for spirituality.
Shortly after her reconnection with God, Khan met her husband, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who served as Imam at the Masjid al-Farah mosque. Kahn decided that his mosque would be welcoming to women, and she began assisting him in his work, especially after 9/11, when he was approached to speak more often.
At one time she had doubled booked him and to solve the problem her husband suggested that Kahn do one speech, at a church, and he the other, at a synagogue. And Khan remembered she had a voice.
A woman came up afterwards, and asked Khan about Muslim women’s rights. Khan began to explain that women had the right to divorce, the right to property, the right to inheritance, but then the woman said, “but what about that woman in Afghanistan who was shot in a soccer field?” (an image that had been circulation at that time.)
The woman’s question planted a seed in Khan’s head. And soon she realized that she wanted to create a modern Muslim suffragette movement, like the Christian suffragettes had done. She started to study the scripture, to prove that women had the same rights as men, and that it was society, not religion, that created norms of what women could and couldn’t do.
Although Khan says there is nothing in the Koran that says women can’t lead prayer, it shouldn’t be forced, “like a lot of media efforts, where a woman will lead prayer out of agitation, that type of person will never be accepted by the broader community,” she says.
Instead, women as spiritual leaders should come as a result of the community’s need. But before that happens Khan wants to make mosques more inclusive of women, and more women on board of mosques.
“A leader is like a shepherded who just takes his flock and leads them the way, and tries to keep the black sheep within the flock,” she says WISE has about 5,000 members around the world. It was founded in 2006. She says that she rather describes herself as a coach of a team. Her job is to find the best players, and figure out the position best suited for each person.
#2
In 2009, during a conference, Khan found a defender and friend, Mehnaz Afridi.
Mhenaz Afridi, is a professor in religion at Manhattan College. Khan says that Afridi is the kind of person who surprises you. Afridi is a good listener, but when she speaks, she is much smarter than one would think. “She is humble,” Khan says.
Afridi has red glasses and brown hair. Her office is spacious and the windows faces the campus yard. She has a desk and a leather chair, where a delicate scarf rests. The scarf is there as adornment, “it is beautiful, but more fore decoration” Afridi says, and gestures to a table in the corner of the room, with two ordinary chairs.
“Daisy has been trying to change the faith of Islam for a long time,” she says.
Afridi remembers meeting Daisy Khan when she was a kid, during a memorial -- “there was this couple that lost their son in the Kashmir war. I remember we went to the condolences and Daisy was there.” Although Afridi knew who Daisy Khan was, it was only years later, during a luncheon in New York about interfaith that they were first introduced. “I always thought of her as an aunt, in the community,” Afridi says.
Since the luncheon Afridi joined WISE, and together with Khan she wrote a booklet about ISIS. “What Daisy Khan is trying to do is hard, because she is a woman. Many Muslims have the impression that the Imam has the word. Somehow we are not….the same.”
Afridi was born in 1970 in Pakistan, where she spent her first five years, before she moved around the world. Her father was an international banker. He would be assigned a project that would usually take two years, then he would move on to the next; the family travelled with him, to Zurich, London, Geneva, Dubai, United Arab Emirates and finally the U.S., where Afridi decided to stay.
“My childhood was crazy,” Afridi says.
As a kid, Afridi was quiet and shy. She would sit for hours and play with her dolls, happy to be alone. In the mornings, Afridi would wake up before her parents, and put on her school uniform. She didn’t fight with her two-years-older brother, who would always tease her. She kept her room clean. She wanted to please her parents.
Afridi had an Islamic tutor growing up, he would teach her the Koran, or duffer, which is the interpretation of the Koran, as well as some Arabic. Her mother was more religious than her father, who would say, “oh, you should pray for me, and for my mother.”
In Geneva, she remembers that Americans would tease her. “It must have been turbulent at times,” she says. “I remember not wanting to go to school, I remember my father putting me in his lap and saying, ‘you are no different than anybody else.’”
But Muslims were few at the European schools Afridi attended. “There was always the international crowd,” Afridi says, but it was divided – the westerners and the rest. “I was kind of the outsider, or, we were.” She used to hang out with the Jews and the Hindus, the ones who differed from everyone else. “People didn’t want to know us, part of it was because we were different.” She would long for summer, and had a calendar up on her wall. She would count the days, for the time she would go back to Pakistan. “That’s where I felt like I belonged,” she says. “They spoke the way we spoke at home.”
She studies memory, “how do we remember our tradition, and bring it with us into the present?” Afridi says. She also studies nostalgia, the phenomenon of wanting what is gone. “I feel like people are looking back as if though they lost something,” she says. “And replacing it with a pure ideal, like the time of Muhammed, which wasn’t a good time.
“Even though, living in different cultures can be hard for a child, in retrospect, it can be a real gift.” She was pushed into many situations where she have to adapt, and that opened her mind to see other peoples’ points of views and their way of thinking. Afridi says that has helped her see things more clearly, “I can totally see through tensions between Muslim and Jews, or Muslim and Christians,” she says. And that is part why she got interested in Judaism. “I would like for Muslims to give Jews a chance to explain who they are.”
When she was 12 and lived in Dubai, she read Four Interpretations of Dreams, an ancient Greek book written by Artemidorus, and she got inspired to become a professor in psychology. At the age of 14 she moved to the U.S. She was stunned by the attitudes of her fellow students at Scarsdale High School, which she attended for two years before going off to college. The students walked in late, put their feet up on the table, in front of the teacher. And she was shocked by the wealth and people’s attitudes towards money. “They had no idea they were living in a bubble,” Afridi says.
In high school she stopped practicing Islam, and began considering herself a secular Muslim. She got interested in philosophy -- “still respected region, but I just didn’t really believe in it, or practice much.” Her life as a secular Muslim gave her a chance to rediscover religion on her own terms. She took a class in religion; it became a place where she would ask questions about life. “It made me curious about Islam, in a different way, it didn’t come from my parents” she says. “I really had to think about questions of faith.”
She went on studying religion, and started believing again.
#3
Afridi says that Sarah Sayeed is an activist. Sayeed works with Muslim outreach for mayor Bill De Balsio, and she has been on the board of Women in Islam. She is trying to make it easier for women to attend mosques, taking down the gender barriers, the curtains or walls that women must stand behind.
Sayeed is dressed in dark, except for the white head scarf. The white scarf is wrapped tightly around her face, enhancing her dark brown eyes and the features of her face. She is precise and direct. She says that she doesn’t always dress this plainly.
She was born in south of India, in a small city north or Bengaluru.
“Why did you leave?’ I ask.
“Well I didn’t really have a choice, when you are little you just go where your parents go, right?” she says and laughs at the question. She was eight, in 1976, when her parents decided she would leave India. Her father had left first, in 1969. He was a graduate student at Columbia University Teacher’s College. He studied child psychology. Left behind were Sayeed, her younger sister and their mother. They lived with their grandmother and aunt. “I don’t remember a lot of things because of the uprooting” she says. “I think there is a little bit of trauma entailed in moving such a long distance.”
In the U.S. the family grew. Her mother, who had been an English professor in India, at a women’s college, had four kids after she came to the U.S., “I guess as the eldest I was responsible for take care of the little kids. Babies needed to be changed or babies needed to be bathed,“ Sayeed says.
Her father was the authority figure in the house, and detached from their daily life. “But when there was a discipline issue he was involved, like a lot of dads I guess, maybe,” Sayeed says and laughs. He was a travelling Imam, without a congregation. He would deliver Friday prayers at different places in New York. And both her parents were involved in the Islamic Center of Long Island. Sayeed was, too. She used to teach the little kids Arabic.
Her family “were more Muslims than Indian,“Sayeed says. They didn’t spend time watching Bollywood moves, and her mother’s cooking wasn’t terribly spicy. Actually, Sayeed says she believes her parents have never seen a movie, except for documentaries. Her parents are observant Sunni Muslims. “We had to prey every day,” she says, “that was required and we were fasting.” They expected their children to dress modestly, but never said anything about whether they should cover their hair or not. Sayeed does, but her two sisters don’t. In Sayeed’s opinion her parents were more open-minded than many south Asian parents. For example, they didn’t expect their children to follow any particular career path.
Sayeed was growing up with contrasting worlds that she sometimes had troubles navigating: her Muslim home, “and then at school I didn’t have many Muslims around me, except my sister. I was living in the Bronx, just like a poor socioeconomic area, going to the Upper West Side where the very wealthy are.” In high school, Sayeed got into a private girl school on the Upper West Side, through a program called Prep for Prep. It took smart, minority children and placed them in private prep schools.
“I had a certain way of dressing that I think separates me from people around me,” she says. “I wouldn’t say I was the most popular person in the world. I had a few good friends. I am a shy and quiet person, and I didn’t look for a lot of friend to be honest.”
Sayeed and her sister shared a room. And her sister got into the all girls high school, too. “We had some rivalry, and we didn’t get along very well,” Sayeed says. They were only a year and a half apart. “I didn’t feel like I had my own space.” Her sister followed her to Princeton, where Sayeed studied Near Eastern studies. There, she became interested in interfaith during her religion class. She started to compare Islam to other faiths, and during her graduate studies she had contact with the Christian Association.
After college Sayeed and her sister went separated ways. Sayeed went to grad school, majoring in communication. In graduate school, she decided to go to India, where she hadn’t been since she was eight. “My parents didn’t go back, because the cost was really exorbitant, and they had so many kids, so we had my grandmother come visiting us. “
Afridi stayed for a summer, to reconnect with her roots.
She learned to appreciate Indian culture, the music, the food, the variety of cultures, the kindness of people. She met her family, aunts, uncles and cousins. She travelled, conducting research in the Delhi slums. And she fell in love. “He really wanted to marry me and I just though that the whole thing was really weird, because I had been growing up in the U.S., and he had grown up in India.” But they ended up marrying.
Sayeed says that their two different cultures was a problem, “My mother did a lot of the home work, so part of me was kind of fed up with that, and wanted something different, but I ended up marrying someone who had growing up every much entrenched in that kind of culture,” she says, where she was expected to work in the kitchen and take care of their baby, they had a son.
They tried to work it out, Sayeed says, “I think people in a relationship can change, but ultimately you have to go into a marriage thinking that the person you are marrying is not going to change.” They ended divorcing. He went to work in Saudi Arabia, and remarried. “He is civil engineer, so he goes from job to job to do different things. But we created a structure, so our son could spend time with him,” she says. “I\it wasn’t as much as I think either one of us wanted.”
Sayeed’s parents had an arranged marriage -- “for a lot of people in my generation who came to America, that was what the recommended pathway, you had your parents look for someone for you. “ Sayeed’s parents didn’t say she was going against their will; it was her decision, who she married. “They were extremely, very, very supportive, when I was going through the divorce,” she says. “I think that was also rare for south Asian parent at that particular time, there is a lot of stigma around divorce.”
Sayeed’s son is 18. He doesn’t date, nor she doesn’t expect him to before he gets married: “He says that he doesn’t think he is ready for that.” Sayeed says that the current generation of young American Muslims might be more open to hang out with people from the opposite sex, but she says, “they won’t have sex before they marry -- or if they do, they definitely marry.”
She wants her son to be, “thoughtful and caring and kind, and conscious, and do whatever he can to not replicate circles of gender oppression.”
Because, like Afridi, Sayeed, too, believe that women aren’t recognized for their work. “If you look at the ground of who is really doing work to make the world a better place that’s usually women. It is not just about getting credit it is about taking what women do seriously, and incorporating that into policy,” says Sayeed. “If you think about internationally conflict and diplomacy negotiations, women are not at the table, we need to have the halls of power acknowledge what women are doing,”
Sayeed lives with her parents, two of her siblings, her youngest brother was born when Sayeed went to college, and her son, who is taking a year off of college. It is a close knit family, although her other siblings are scattered across the country, “I don’t see them very much, but I think we are still pretty close, we are there for each other.”