Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam
By Asra Q. Nomani
Harper SanFrancisco, 306 pages, $24.95
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran
By Azadeh Moaveni
Public Affairs, 249 pages, $25
Journey From the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
By Roya Hakakian
Crown, 245 pages, $23
Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate
By Amitava Kumar
New Press, 301 pages, $24.95
All religions preach compassion and understanding. From time to time they also preach that other religions are lesser religions. Our prospects for a peaceful existence may lie in the choice between these messages. As long as we believe that Islam is a barbaric creed whose devotees are driven by murderous envy, there seems little hope for peace.
Yet how are we to break down the barriers between creeds and between peoples? Travel in Muslim countries, as a source of greater understanding, is out of the question for most Americans. But we can read, and while government and network TV seemingly lack the courage to familiarize the public with Islamic life, publishers are leading the way.
Each of the four books under review is a memoir, more personal than analytical, but each one takes us on a clear-eyed, finely written journey though the world of Islam. Each author has a foot in the Muslim world, whether by birth or upbringing (or by marriage, in the case of Hindu author Amitava Kumar), and each one lives and writes in the U.S., publishing commentaries in Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s and other mainstream outlets. As a result, there is a great deal of literary and journalistic savvy in these books, and a comfortable tone of voice that knows how to speak in America, to Americans. In all four cases there is also a divide to be crossed, a sense of tragedy and of historical ironies as the authors’ lands of origin change before their eyes, even more quickly than their adoptive U.S.
For the reader new to the subject, Asra Nomani’s “Standing Alone in Mecca” is the ideal introduction to contemporary Islam. She broke away from the hudud, the rules of her Muslim culture, as she entered adulthood, seeking social, sexual and religious independence. Nomani followed many paths before a chance encounter with the Dalai Lama, in the course of a Hindu pilgrimage, inspired her to re-examine her heritage as a daughter of Islam. When she asked the Dalai Lama what could be done to help transcend the quarrels between religions, he replied:
” ‘There are three things we must do. Read the scholars of each other’s religions. Talk to the enlightened beings in each other’s religions. Finally, do the pilgrimages of each other’s religions.’ “
Nomani, searching for understanding, had already done the Buddhist and Hindu pilgrimages, and now, as she heard the Dalai Lama also warn of the danger of losing sight of one’s own tradition (” ‘I always believe it’s safer and better and reasonable to keep one’s own tradition and belief’ “), Nomani realized that what remained in her life was to do her own pilgrimage, the Islamic hajj.
Nomani’s book is a stirring account of her journey to Mecca on the hajj, revealing for us what that ancient pilgrimage requires today. Her tale is made doubly illuminating by her courage in making the journey as a single mother alongside her infant son, and by the fact that in the course of her journey she rediscovers the formidable roots of Islamic feminism. These two aspects of her hajj are inescapably intertwined. As a single mother, she is at mortal risk in a fundamentalist Islamic setting. Yet the lessons she learns about the prophet Muhammad’s true preachings–by contrast with the hijacking of Islam by subsequent clerics–bring her the courage to stand by her independence.
No prophet of the ancient world was a more passionate advocate of women’s rights than Muhammad, who offended and alarmed the people of Mecca with his insistence on a woman’s right to inheritance, career, political assembly and marital respect, as well as the right to divorce a husband. The rediscovery of these and many other aspects of what is truly fundamental to Islam, as Muhammad preached it, guided Nomani’s steps to self-understanding as a Muslim, as they should be guiding Western readers today.
Similarly, “Lipstick Jihad,” Azadeh Moaveni’s memor of “Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran,” takes us on a steep learning curve, as Moaveni puts her California upbringing behind her to move from a highly Americanized Iranian emigre world to Tehran in the grip of revolutionary fervor. As a Time journalist, she arrives as the reform-movement supporters demand an end to Islamic extremism. “Lipstick Jihad” is as hip as the promise of its title, insightful, smart and often profoundly moving when describing the lost lives of Moaveni’s emigre relatives, dwelling in California but living in the past. Moaveni writes stunningly well, yet with that high-gloss whimsicality traditional to Time journalism, a synoptic style intended to disengage, at the same time it engages, the reader of magazine articles. When extended over a book, this tone remains witty and, in Moaveni’s clever hands, winning. But when used in a guide to the Islamic world, this chirpy Timespeak leaves the reader feeling all too safe, grateful that we could be back in California at the drop of an American Express card.
By contrast, Roya Hakakian’s “Journey From the Land of No” (due out in paperback this month) leaves no such sense of easy commerce between worlds. Hakakian describes the Khomeini revolution from the point of view of a 12-year-old Jewish Iranian. Her ancestral roots in the country are more ancient than Arab ones, yet within months of the revolution, her co-religionists, the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, were being driven from their homeland. It availed Iranian Jews nothing to distance themselves from Zionism, to praise Islam and offer themselves as model citizens of the new Iran. Had Khomeini not promised tolerance? He had, but the widespread Iranian faith in these promises were soon revealed to be a monument to self-delusion.
Hakakian left Iran as a teenager. Her book looks back at the turmoil in her family life as Khomeini’s rule began, 25 years ago, and describes it in vivid detail. Disappointingly, the clarity of Hakakian’s memory is applied more to the merriment of family life, the coltishness of youth, the eccentric charm of uncles and the vagaries of parents than it is to the retrospective analysis of political innocence and its brutal disenchantment, a subject that flickers into life only to be extinguished by harmless family or classroom anecdotes.
As true as this may be to a 12-year-old’s experience–and alas, there are times when the book could have been subtitled, “How to Live Through a Bloodbath Without Really Noticing”–it’s a great pity that either Hakakian’s own forbearance or her publishers’ loss of nerve prevailed, because she writes with exceptional grace and eloquence. Her book, indeed, is worth reading for the sheer magic of her prose, rather than as a page of contemporary Islamic history.
Amitava Kumar, the titular spouse in his book “Husband of a Fanatic,” is not married to a fanatic–simply to a Muslim, a condition causing ambivalence in his Hindu family and disquiet among acquaintances of both faiths. Kumar’s wonderful book brings alive the pain, dilemmas and absurdities that attend encounters with bigots when you are their natural target. It will not help you to be, like Kumar, a professor of English at an American university and the author of a number of masterly and well-received books about East and West. To a bigot you are the husband (or, as it might be, the wife) of a fanatic. With a modest candor that is peculiarly his own, Kumar describes incidents that occur during his studious pursuit of bigotry in its seemingly foolish forms and in its terrible consequences.
Kumar travels across India encountering victims of persecution–both religious and secular– in cities and villages, in classrooms and even in a psychiatric ward. Kumar visits Bhagalpur, familiar to him from childhood trips and rendered notorious, in 1980, for a singular atrocity: 25 prisoners, the nation learned, had been blinded by police using cobblers’ awls. The police officers had then poured acid into the wounded eyes. This action was taken, as Kumar’s father and uncle assure him, with the support of the local public, since the victims were all “notorious criminals.”
When Kumar meets a group of the surviving victims in the house of his uncle’s brother-in-law, the scene comes alive with a characteristic touch of the author’s pen:
“The blind men were seated in the shaded verandah of Raman’s house. When we stepped into the verandah, they shook their heads in the air like cattle, trying to catch what we were saying.”
Like cattle. The phrase is exact, and appropriate, a testimony to Kumar’s use of the gift of sight, to his capacity to see with his heart, in a world where people are treated like cattle and slaughtered like cattle, and where blindness is not only the result but the cause of so many human woes. Kumar’s magnificently quiet, poetic and observant book is itself the model of a different way to look at the world. It deserves a place on every reader’s bookshelf.
