Women, Islam, America..
Women, America, Myself And Islam
Welcome to all, it is a pleasure to have you visit my homepage concerning
many issues and myths surrounding the topic of Islam and women. It would be
best to introduce myself first. My name is unimportant, but what matters is
that I myself am a practicing Muslim and a Muslim woman at that. I was not
born Muslim; I came to the religion of Islam later on when I was an adult. I
am an American, with my family being in this country for several hundred
years and am of European and Native American Indian origins. Being a convert
(or as Muslims as myself prefer "revert") to Islam, I have had the unique
experience (as have the many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of
American Muslims)of being a member of two differing ideologies -- the
secular spirit of the West as well as a newly-discovered spirituality of a
religion whose origins lie in the East.
I was born in 1974. Five years following my birth, the Islamic Revolution in
Iran took place, followed by the hostage crisis, the conflict with Lybia,
the Iran Contra Scandal, and more recently, the Gulf War. With the spirit of
one who knows no better, I blindly accepted which I held to be honest and
true. I believed the myths and stereotypes common to many non-Muslims about
who Muslims were and what Islam was all about. I watched the movie Not
Without My Daughter with the belief that this was the lot of all women in
the Middle East. I assumed all Muslims were Arabic (Arabs constitute the
minority of Muslims today), that Muslim women wore black and walked five
paces behind their husbands, that they were in servitude and under the
thumbnail of oppression by a long-outdated patriarchy. If someone had told
me at the time that my assumptions were incorrect and that I was pre-judging
something I knew nothing about, I would have felt self-righteous and
offended. However, as things turned out, I myself was to become one of these
"mythical" icons of a widely misunderstood religion.
My story of becoming a Muslim is in many paralleled with other stories of
converts. Many of us found problems with our previous belief systems that
continued to be unanswered. In the spirit of mutual respect for other
religious beliefs, I will not go into an attack stance and criticize other's
theologies, but to put it simply, I was unsatisfied with not only certain
aspects of my previous religion (undefined Christianity) as well as many
aspects of my life that I was living in my own American culture. I was
spiritually and morally bankrupt. I saw very little use of any sort of rules
or regulations concerning how to live one's life, etc. etc. ...
What would ever attract an American woman to Islam? This is a question
oftentimes asked of me by non-Muslim Americans, as well as many Muslims. I
can only attempt to speak for myself, as other converts to Islam are drawn
to it from different points of view. For myself, I found in Islam a wondrous
encompassment of every aspect of life, a long-desired humanitarian outlook,
a system wherein race, ethnicity, class, and national origin meant nothing
in the eyes of God. I found, most importantly, that Muslims were required to
totally submit to God. Perhaps this sounds drastic to those with little
knowledge of Islam at first, but look at the spirit underlying this point --
with this submission to this higher power, comes the release of thinking of
oneself as being a "creator" and the acceptance that one is, in fact,
"created."
As a woman, I found out that many assumptions I held about Islam were false.
In Islam, men's and women's souls are regarded as the same. Women have
rights of property, inheritance, dignity, modesty, and her duties to Allah
(the Arabic word for God) are the same as her male counterpart. She has the
right to divorce, the right to an education, and the right to be treated
with the dignity imparted to her as an intellectual and spiritual being.
Many of these rights given to women by the divine laws of Islam were not
gained by women of Western origin until the 20th century.
In traditional Western society, women were regarded as chattel, or property.
When a woman was married, all of her material wealth was handed over to the
legal possession of her spouse. She was owned by her father and male
relatives, and later to her husband if she married. She did not have the
right to vote, spend her own money, to have custody of her children, to
initiate any legal proceedings without a male representative/guardian filing
the petition or suit for her, to initiate a divorce, to have any sort of
legal contract (unless she were a widow with no heirs), or choose her own
husband, education, or occupation in life. This presents a very dismal
picture when one examines the history of women in the West. Amazingly, at
the same time as these right were robbed of women in one part of the earth,
Islam gave women ALL of these rights.
Today, when one hears a "Middle East Horror Story," he or she thinks of said
story to be universal for all women in that particular region. I believe
that this stems from the ignorance resulting from a focus upon the negative
rather than the positive. A common saying says No News Is Good News . The
positive stories about Women and the religion of Islam are scattered and
few, and usually widely available within Muslim circles. However, Islam is
very real and a warmly realistic way of life, its effects becoming colossal
upon the rest of the world.
Islam is the fastest growing religion not only in the United States and
Canada; it is the fastest growing religion in the world. Millions of people
are born into it, and millions more are drawn to it. I suspect that most
people nowadays know or know of an American, whether male or female, who has
embraced Islam. It is necessary for us all, irrespective of religion, to try
and learn more about others in this world, and to discard the comfortable
xenophobia which is so easy to regress to. Islam is no longer a "foreign"
ideology, it is soon to be a native one. Muslims compose more than 20% of
World population today, in Asia, Africa, Europe, America, the Caribbean, and
the Pacific. In the spirit of mutual understanding, I urge everyone to try
and learn about what the truths are regarding Islam and Muslims, whether
Muslim or not.
If you take time to visit some of my favorite web sites, you may find a
wondrous store of information thanks to the technology of the Internet.
--ZAHRA3
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