Standing Alone

By Asra Q. Nomani
http://www.asranomani.com/mecca/archives/reclaiming_womens_rights/index.php

Incredible book of a muslim women's spiritual journey (Her pilgrimage to Mecca) and her activism that resulted from that journey. I thought I'd share a couple of paragraphs that gave me chills. The setting for these paragraphs are the author desperetly trying to find a place to nurse her son, stuggling with restrictive clothing. She found a way.

"As Shibli suckled, the sounds of the morning call to prayer erupted into the cool air and reverberated in his ears. It was the same azan, the same call to prayer, that my father had whispered into his ear at his birth. In the holiest place for Muslims, Shibli was hearing the call from the muezzin, the person who makes the call to prayer, of Mecca. There is only one line added to the morning azan: "Prayer is better than sleep"
That moment meant so much to me. I was in Mecca, a criminal in the land for having given birth without a wedding ring on my finger. And I was nursing my son at the holy mosque of Mecca, overlooking the sacred Ka'bah. This was nature's law expressing itself, more powerfully than man's law. I drank the sacred water called zamzam. From me, it flowed into Shibli. I recognized then the great lineage I had in Islam. I was a daughter of Hajar. I looked up into the sky with one thought: blessed are the daughters of Hajar."

She made the pilgrimage in a land where you can be arrested for showing a strand of hair as a women. Bush was getting ready to invade Iraq. She paints herself as a spiritually conflicted women because of her gender and her sexuality. She found the feminist roots in Islam.

In a nut shell-- according to the author, Hajar, the concubine of Abraham was taken as a slave to bear a child since his wife, Sarah was "barren" (word always annoyed me, the old boys sperm count was probably in the cellar)After the birth of her son Ishmael, Abraham rejected Hajar and the child after a while (Sarah gets the blame--jealousy) took her and the baby to in the spot where Mecca now stands with a little food and water. To die- since there was little option. She survived, single and abandoned and very detemined. She became the mother of the tribe that would untimely produce the prophet Muhammad. Of course, she is nearly completely ignored in both the bible and the Qur'an.

Very powerful book. At the end she includes "An Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques" and "An Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in The Bedroom" (number 5 on that last one--Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about contraption and reproduction)