Asra Nomani helped organize the first time in centuries mixed-gender prayer service, led by Amina Wadud. She is advocating the Muslim woman’s rights to lead and give the khutba , or sermon, to men at mosques.
Nomani led mixed-gender prayers Brandeis University outside Boston. Two weeks later, in Tuscany, a woman applied to be the first female imam of her mosque.
So, who is Nomani, and why is she hated/supported by different groups?
Quoted from The Washington Post, please meet, Asra Nomani, Muslim, frustrated, unwed mother!
Why she is frustrated?
Nomani says. Dinner parties became segregated affairs, with the men hanging out in comfortable lounges and the women confined to cramped studio apartments.
She wasn’t allowed to date or go to high school dances. But she ran cross-country, and in school she was encouraged by her teachers to think and to speak out.
Staying at home, at her parents’ request, to study at West Virginia University and then leaving home to pursue a graduate degree at American University. When she was 27, she left her longtime love, an American who offered to convert to Islam, to marry a Pakistani who lived in Washington. They wed in a traditional Muslim ceremony that took place over days in Pakistan. The marriage lasted three months. It was shortly after her divorce, in 1993, that she met Danny Pearl.
Indeed, she says, she started her crusade because of Pearl.
Listen listen. Our modern Muslim Imam finally getting a date:
In January 2002, Pearl was investigating links to al Qaeda in Pakistan, where Nomani was covering the war on terror for Salon. There, she’d fallen in love with a young Pakistani man. Pearl came to visit Nomani at her rented house in Karachi, bringing along his pregnant wife, Mariane. They hung out, listening to music and talking into the wee hours. The next day, Pearl left for an interview. He never came back.
Three weeks after his disappearance, Nomani discovered she was pregnant. Her beau had already abandoned her. So there she was, single and pregnant. Shortly afterward, she found out that Pearl had been murdered by terrorists, forced to declare “I am a Jew” on videotape before he was beheaded.
She returned home to her parents’ embrace. On Oct. 16, 2002, nine months after Pearl’s disappearance, she gave birth to her son. She named him Shibli Daneel Nomani.
That’s not all. This Muslim feminist seem to have little or no understanding of Islam:
Nomani is not wearing a head scarf today, something she says irritates the powers that be here. (It should be noted that she is wearing a delicate white head scarf on the cover of her latest book, “Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.”) She does, however, cover her head by yanking her fuchsia hoodie over her hair, as she does whenever she enters the mosque.
What does prayers say about her:
She’ll get kicked out of a mosque in Seattle. An older woman will grab her by the arm and try to drag her out of a Los Angeles mosque. She’ll be escorted out of a mosque in New York. She’ll kneel outside, on the sidewalk.
And she wants to fight the powerful evil forces:
“I feel like I’m doing my heart’s work,” Nomani says. “I think it’s incumbent on Muslims with intellect, hope and love in our hearts . . . to go into the houses of worship and really try to transform the Muslim house from within. We have to take on this machine of extremism that’s trying to take over the world.”
And now comes the propaganda:
It was two days after she appeared on “Nightline” talking about her fight to change her mosque that the death threats began. The first call came on her cell phone. The caller left a message, in Urdu: “If you want to stay alive, keep your mouth shut.” Otherwise, he said, he would “slaughter” her.
See, I have nothing against Muslim woman’s rights. In fact I always try to be on her side or at least biased. But I think this lady is the worst example of a modern Muslim woman. She has a problem. The way she was raised, and the way she wants to live. Now she is trying to mix between both.
