Early last month, Anshu Vipparla, an Indian-American neurosciences senior at Duke University in Durham, N.C., sent me a warm invitation to speak on “The Paradox of Women in Islam,” on behalf of a progressive South Asian group at Duke called, Diya, which means “Light” in Hindi.
A South Asian student group at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called “Sangam,” a Sanskrit word that refers to an enlightened spiritual community in Buddhism, would cohost the evening. As an Indian-American, born in Bombay in 1965, I was excited to talk to the youth of our diaspora.
Though my talk would be about Islam, I had traveled through India and Nepal, bowing my head at Hindu temples dedicated to shakti, or female energy, and chanting with monks and nuns at Buddhist monasteries. Most of the students in both groups were Hindu and Buddhist, and I looked forward to talking with them about the universal need to reconcile the status of women in modern day society with the feminine divine power that is at the root of all faiths.
My activism, challenging rules that women enter through the back doors in mosques, “inspired” the leaders at Diya and Sangam, the invitation said.
I sent back an enthusiastic yes.
Little could I know that we would all be challenged in a very real way by the paradox of women in this world, key to the future but too often made invisible, sometimes by our own complicity, for a few weeks after the invitation, the South Asian groups decided to pull their invitation, Duke University then cancelling my talk. What had happened to douse the initial enthusiasm: the local Duke Muslim Students Association had said I was “controversial.”
My Duke experience goes beyond feminism to a broader debate over how too many Muslims are responding to critical conversations on Islam with snubs, boycotts and calls for censorship, exploiting feelings of conflict avoidance and political correctness in event organizers and prompting event cancellations. As a journalist for 30 years, I believe we must stand up for America’s principles of free speech and have critical conversations, especially if they make people feel uncomfortable.
And, in the face of calls for censorship, people outside the Muslim community must stand strong for free speech and civil discourse, rather than cower in fear, exhaustion or political correctness.
At the University of Michigan last week, administrators showed The American Sniper after first cancelling it amid protests from groups including the Muslim Students Association.
Last year, Brandeis University cancelled a talk by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born activist and author of a new book, Heretic, after protests from another American-Muslim organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Muslim Students Association.
Last week (APRIL 10), organizers of a conference on women and gender at the University of South Dakota defied pitched protests to screen a documentary, Honor Diaries, about crimes women, including in Islam, face, in the name of “honor.” The controversy has been “very upsetting,” writes University of South Dakota professors Miglena Sternadori and Cindy Struckman-Johnson, the event organizers, and the controversy underscores the battle over whose voices are “authentic,” they say.
Last year, in April, Honor Diaries wasn’t as fortunate as The American Sniper at the University of Michigan when administrators there cancelled a screening after protests from the Muslim Students Association and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the protesters using a social media hashtag campaign #DishonorDiaries to discredit the film.
The University of Illinois also cancelled an Honor Diaries screening after protests from its Muslim Students Association. Zainab Zeb Khan, a dynamic Afghan-American activist interviewed in the film, says, “It was a nightmare.” She organized a successful substitute screening at a downtown Chicago theater to allow for dialogue and advocacy. “They are using the same tactics of shame and intimidation used to silence people in our traditional cultures. We can’t allow it,” she says.
The trouble for me at Duke began when the South Asian group, Diya, sent the Duke University Muslim Students Association an email asking the group to advertise the event.
While it had initially sent out one notice, one week before the event, Shajuti Hossain, a Duke economics senior and president of the Duke Muslim Students Association, wrote to Diya organizers saying, “Thanks for sharing the upcoming event you are hosting with Asra Nomani. We are uncomfortable with directing people to this event because of Asra Nomani’s straightforward alliance with many Islamophobic speakers ([JihadWatch.com founder] Robert Spencer, [author] Ayan [sic] Hirsi, [HBO host] Bill Maher, [neuroscientist and atheist author] Sam Harris), as condemned by Omid Safi, the Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center, in an open letter.”
Hossain refused to comment.
Two years ago, the Duke professor, Safi, a founding member of the Duke Muslim Students Association, had written a shocking blog article at Religion News Service, “Open Letter to Asra Nomani: Stop Enabling Islamophobes.” He alleged I had “alliances,” the same word the Duke Muslim students’ group president repeated two years later, “with the most vicious of Islamophobes.”
I have no “alliance” with any “Islamophobes.” I am an independent journalist. Safi didn’t return messages seeking comment.
In the email, the Duke Muslim student leader continued, “We have already sent it out [sic] the name/location of the event our weekly email but we plan to send a follow up email to MSA with the message below: ‘DIYA has invited the speaker Asra Nomani to campus to speak on the topic ‘The Paradox of Women in Islam’. A few words of caution that MSA would like to add onto our previous email: Nomani has been noted for her controversial views, both political and religious, as well as being associated with Islamophobic figures, and students would be advised to read more about her before choosing to attend the event. Many thanks!’”
The Diya organizers were stunned and weren’t sure what to do, they say. They forwarded the email to Caitlin Shaw, assistant director in the Duke Center Activities and Events. She recommended they cancel the event, because they were so close to the date, they say.
Duke, which had booked me on behalf of the student group, told my agent: it was cancelling the event.
The young Duke student who had initially invited me later gave me a statement of explanation: “….after the initial publicity of the event had begun, students reached out to both Duke Diya and UNC Sangam expressing their concerns over the discussion. Their concerns were based on alliances they believe Nomani to have with individuals and groups known to have Islamophobic and controversial beliefs. Duke Diya and UNC Sangam are large student-led organizations that highly value student voices in order to best serve our respective student bodies.”
The statement continued: “After discussing these concerns, the executive boards of both Duke Diya and UNC Sangam decided to cancel the event. Both organizations believe in hosting events with different perspectives and ideals to challenge commonly held values, but we also want to foster an environment where student concerns would be heard and not be taken lightly. It became clear that the student interest in hearing Nomani speak would be minimal, and thus the purpose of having the event no longer existed. We do believe in open dialogue, which is why Diya and Sangam invited Nomani to speak in the first place. With concerns of a smaller turnout than what was initially anticipated, the dialogue would not have been as valuable as both organizations originally hoped.”
Alekhy Sure, an Indian-American Duke business major and the internal affairs president for Diya, the South Asian group at Duke, was apologetic. She told me later, “We were exhausted and didn’t feel like we could handle a confrontation. We know we did the wrong thing, and we apologize.”
The explanation from Duke Center Activities and Events: “some of your affiliations were proving problematic,” according to my agent.
I wrote Shaw and asked for evidence.
The next day, she responded to my agent: “We’ve reconsidered all of the variables and consulting with colleagues, we would like to honor the original contract to have Asra Nomani speak on April 7th at 7pm.”
I accepted. I was standing up to the forces in our Muslim communities that are increasingly using tactics of intimidation and smears like “Islamophobe,” “House Muslim,” “Uncle Tom,” “native informant,” “racist” and “bigot” to silence voices like mine. In a January Washington Post essay, I call these detractors the “honor brigade,” a loosely-knit group of academics, organizations, bloggers and writers, defending the “honor” of Islam.
Slurs, meant to discredit, have been used against Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, author of a new feminist manifesto, Headscarves and Hymens; Syrian-American physician and activist Zuhdi Jasser; Canadian-Pakistan activist Raheel Raza, a woman activist interviewed in in Honor Diaries, and many other writers and activists, in an attempt to disgrace them inside our communities.
Before I had arrived at Duke, a university spokesman, Michael Schoenfeld, told me: “Duke is strongly committed to free expression and open discussion of controversial issues….We regret, however, the misunderstanding among our students and staff that led to the series of events you describe….”
My elderly parents, whose ancestral homes are in Uttar Pradesh, India, drove four hours from their home in Morgantown, W.V., to meet me at my home in Great Falls, Va., and then drive together to Duke. “I’m afraid for you,” my mother said.
The night of the talk, I stood alone on the stage. I gave my son cash to buy me a bottle of water.
When I began, I told the students how excited I had been to get the invitation from the young women, though separated in age by decades with me, I felt connected to them through the universal struggle of all people to be self-realized and self-expressed.
As I stood on the stage, just a wireless microphone tucked into my pink kurta, no barrier between the audience and me, my voice trembling, I said: “I would have come here to speak to just one person. To me, it is simply a victory to stand before you.”
I looked out past the stage lights and said: “There are many who want to make us invisible. But I am standing here today because I believe that, if we try, we can be invincible.”
There were only two letters separating the words, I told the audience: “NC,” the abbreviation for North Carolina, and it was appropriate that, there, in that state, I was rejecting invisibility and standing up for invincibility.
The audience before me was small in number, but they were huge in their hearts. There were six young women students from the South Asian groups, Sangam and Diya, all strong women who later boldly discussed with me the touchy topics of skin color, parental expectations, arranged marriages, hopes, dreams and challenges they faced as women often ignored, dismissed or overlooked for the most unfortunate of reasons: standing too tall, standing too short, looking too dark or speaking too brashly.
On the edge of her seat sat my mother, Sajida Nomani, a woman who had worn the full-face veil and burka, or gown, as a young woman growing up in a conservative Muslim family in India, only to become a successful entrepreneur and boutique owner on High Street in downtown Morgantown as an immigrant to America.
There was my father, Zafar Nomani, a retired professor who later told the young women, with pride, “I am a feminist.”
And there was my son, Shibli, 12, who had made my PowerPoint slides for me on the drive to Durham, choosing Trebuchet MS as his font.
I might have been standing along on stage, but I was not alone in spirit. An Indian-American Sikh optometrist, Gurpreet Kaur Chadha, sat near the middle of the mostly empty theater. She had driven an hour to hear me talk. As I spoke about standing up strong in all of our faiths and non-faiths and in all of our families, she smiled and nodded her head in agreement.
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love and Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.
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