The Curtain of Awakening | Part 2

Shortly after publicly expressing the shahadah, I met an African American convert at a conference who told me, “Be prepared to lose your family and friends,” but I hadn’t really believed her. However, I was soon to discover that even good ‘liberal’ friends reacted badly to the news of my having become “Muslim.” I was staggered. My conversion was not about identity, ideology, or politics. It was simply where the rudder of my spiritual life had taken me. There was something about Islam that had provided me with the strength to put positive change into practice in my life without much effort. It put a full stop to many causes of suffering in my life. It was a personal, not a socio-political story, but everyone seemed to forget the former and dwell on the latter. I was naïve in thinking that Western society embraced the notion that spirituality and the well-being it begets differentiate no colour, creed, or country, especially, as I discovered, when it came to Islam.  If, inwardly, Islam figured for me as a practicable tool of self-development, outwardly, it seemed to propel in the eyes of others my erasure and defacement. I obviously knew discrimination existed. I had already seen racism’s ugly effects on friends’ lives, like the nasty name-calling and second-class citizen treatment inflicted on East Asian or black friends, but I had never really stood in their shoes. As a woman, I had encountered sexism and the discomforts of sexual objectification, but this was far worse. The discrepancy between what I was experiencing internally and how my own society and culture perceived me engendered a form of cognitive dissonance. Unaware that the Crusades and colonialism still mapped the world into ‘us and them,’ I was unprepared for the western world’s Pavlovian rejection of me and indeed all things related to Islam. As long as I wasn’t visibly Muslim, the situation was bearable, although discussions could get heated. I often find myself wishing that I had remained an unidentifiable Muslim. My life would have been so much easier, socially, professionally, and thus emotionally and economically, although I never would have known the flip side of white privilege, that is, the treatment often meted out on people of non-European descent. The icing on the acrid cake came in textile form. I would put on the hijab to go to the mosque, but I now wanted to wear it every day. No one had really told me to do so. I still had no Muslim friends and had had only a few classes on Islam where it was rarely discussed. However, I saw that many Muslim women covered their hair and I had undoubtedly read about the headscarf in my books on Islam. I thus acknowledge that unconscious influences can and do play a part in the choices we make. However, from the perspective of the story I tell myself, I donned the hijab full time due to a feeling pulling at me from the inside. I was uncomfortable without it. Perhaps I needed a ritual to mark the new chapter in my life, akin to the neophyte nun shaving her head. Both are, after all, performances symbolizing the privileging of the spiritual life over the physical one. I was again acting from inner calling rather than external religious ruling. Many Muslims consider the hijab a religious prescription. There’s plenty of material on the subject and the debates –or restrictive anti-veil laws— it provokes. What is forgotten though is how those women who choose it often find comfort in the hijab because it lessens unwanted attention by setting them outside of the mainstream’s oversexualization of women’s bodies, helps turn their focus inward or constitutes a form of spiritual discipline. After donning the hijab, the real trials then began. Like in a C. S. Lewis story, a square of silk transported me into a completely new, albeit ominous, world. I was swiftly transformed into the ‘other,’ a term which had until then only held positive connotations for me, referring to the self’s growth-inducing internal alterity as discussed by psychoanalysts like Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, or Denis Vasse. I had not yet been exposed to postcolonial theory aimed at overcoming the legacy of colonialism and the racist human hierarchy it had produced. However, it was life experience more than graduate school that made its importance come to light. To be clear, many non-Muslims have been nice to me, both embracing religious diversity and treating me like a full person and citizen. This is especially true in Ontario, the province where I was born and to which I have returned after over a decade in Quebec. However, the experiences of discrimination that have impacted my life in very practical ways, have left deep scars. Having people regularly insult you, give you the finger, spit on you, threaten you, or refuse to serve you in a shop, rent you an apartment, or sit beside you in a public space certainly makes its marks on the psyche. All of the above were an intrinsic part of my life as a young Muslim, totally at odds with my growing inner peace and love of humanity. Once a car swerved around the corner with men pounding on the semi-open windows and cheering, thinking they were going to hit me. I jumped back and the vehicle missed my foot by a millimeter. Another time, three young men surrounded me in an isolated metro station and began staring me down in a menacing way. Having no other solution, I remained calm and used Stanislavski method acting to get out of harm’s way. Unzipping my purse, I placed my hand on the well imagined gun and trigger, just obviously enough to convey “Be careful, I am armed.” Miraculously, it worked and the mid-twenty-year-olds moved away pretty swiftly. Although it was a frightening incident, I laugh when I think about it, not so much because I have never held a gun in my life and don’t look particularly scary, but because this is the only time when stereotypes about Muslims being terrorists actually served me and saved my skin! Islamophobic racism has also been rampant in my educational and professional life. In a graduate school language class, for example, I was marked differently and more severely than the other students. While the other students would lose only one mark for several mistakes, I would lose two for every mistake I made. I tried to chalk up the different treatment to the fact that the professor was trying to prevent me from getting a hundred percent because a full mark does not reflect well on teachers in the Humanities.  The professor could not know that my enthusiasm for learning Arabic and the intense hours I put in were accompanied by the mysterious fact that I would often dream the night before of which passages would be on the exam. However, also after I finished my Ph.D. course work and comprehensives, I was subjected to undeniable and explicit discrimination. Throughout graduate school, I had received great support and encouragement, and I still feel gratitude and respect towards several of my professors. However, this changed when the department was restructured and saw new leadership and professors come in. At the time, my whole life was geared to studying, besotted as I was by Islamic studies and art. Because my marks were very high and my dedication and intellectual curiosity obvious, my M.A. and Ph.D. were fully funded. Studying is heaven for me, and I would easily go back to do another three doctorates, aware that I would still only be dipping little more than my baby toe into the vast waters of the discipline of Islam. The point here is not to boast, but to set the context for what followed. I presented two Ph.D. proposals after the department’s restructuring, both diligently prepared, with one –a study still not undertaken until this day— having an especially strong external support from a well-respected British scholar. Both were rejected. No reasons were ever given in writing as far as I remember, but the committee had voiced the idea that the department had no specialists in my area, although I had been accepted into the program on the basis that I would be working on art. Moreover, in each case, I had found excellent external advisors. Despite this, the committee questioned the value of my research topics or my language capabilities, issues obviously addressed in my proposals.  One of the professors in the department, obviously a person of heart, took me aside a few days later and explained to me that it would be best if I changed departments as the faculty had decided not to ever let me obtain my doctorate. I did not even ask why as I already knew that a visibly Muslim woman, especially if she is confident or capable, disturbs. Most of my research since this period, including my Ph.D. thesis, written indeed in another department, probes, from many angles, the question of why the veil incites such strong reactions, with the sole aim of building bridges between cultural, racial, and spiritual communities. There was one other hijab-wearing student in Islamic Studies, and, I heard, that she too encountered difficulties around the same time as I did. Even meeting with one of the top officials in the university administration accomplished nothing. I discovered in the aftermath other cover ups and non-adherence to regulations at the university with at least one being much more shocking than my own. Nothing happened to the professor who openly mocked an Egyptian student’s religion, expressed a wish for his death, and told him, in a perfect example of western colonialism, “Your biggest and only problem with me is that you put your goddamn god above my whole god. It’s with your philosophy that you must respect me, and I don’t have to respect you.” It was all recorded, yet the university let it pass. I remember once phoning a university secretary to obtain some administrative information. Because 9/11 had just happened, I asked how she was and expressed how sad I was at the senseless deaths. She expressed her own bereavement, adding that she couldn’t tell the Muslim students how she really felt about them. Because my language isn’t ‘accented’, I was privy by phone to articulations and evidence of explicit and manifestly-accepted racism at the college. The list of such incidents in my life is endless, but hopefully, those evoked here paint a picture of life as a North American Muslim that will hopefully, at some point, reach positive transformation. Solidarity of human diversity will make a good life for all of us. These attempts to sabotage my education were traumatizing. I have spent countless hours wondering if there were other factors, beyond being visibly and spiritually Muslim, that played a role. Was it a personal issue? Did the new faculty simply not like me? Even so, such unfair, undemocratic practices in a reputable university would still be unjustified. If it wasn’t personal, could it be political I asked myself? All my life has revolved around the study of art, and I have never been overly interested in politics, but I do like to examine all perspectives on issues, and I am essentially a pacifist who hates social injustice. Even if I once expressed aloud to a fellow student in the department my disapproval of the war against Iraq, it would or should not justify the ruining of a student’s educational career. Or perhaps my covert expulsion from the department was due to the fact that I once questioned the views of a very high university administrator (avoiding names) who came to speak to the department’s students. When he stated that Islamic Studies was an odd discipline for a university to have, I asked him why he thought it was odder than French, German, Jewish, etc. studies, especially as one in four people on earth are Muslim, and peoples’ understanding of one another could create a more peaceful world. I received no verbal response, only a cold stare. In sum, I considered everything that I could possibly have ‘done wrong’ to the point of paranoia. I also hypothesized that it was because I was a loner and could not be “useful.” Other Muslims in the department had been asked to report if they saw anything suspicious within the community. No one ever asked me because I was too busy to have friends or attend Muslim Student Association events, and if I had time for coffee and chatting, it was just as likely to be with someone of another faith or even no faith. The heart and soul don’t need badges to be good or bad in my books. In short, my graduate school experience showed me how institutions could put up a shop sign reading “democracy” while systemically selling non-democratic, sexist, and racist wares. Ultimately, I was politicized by the political motives of those who rejected me, even if some of those who orchestrated it tout themselves as postcolonial scholars defending the voiceless and the oppressed. I have never spoken of any of these experiences publicly and I have tried hard to avoid the victim mentality by marshalling onward. After obtaining my doctorate, I did a postdoc, as well as some lecturing and consultancy work. I continued to write and began looking for an academic position. Finding a job in academia is difficult for everyone because of the corporatization of universities, leading to the proliferation of low-paid adjunct positions, and simply because of the increase in the number of Ph.D. holders. A doctorate is now like what a bachelor’s degree used to be. In short, I know it is tough to find a stable academic job. However, I was short-listed for one job I applied for that constituted an impossibly perfect fit of Islamic studies and art right down to the very last detail of the job responsibilities and requirements. I wasn’t chosen, leading the Associate Dean to phone me –I did not know her before the interview — to tell me that she was very sorry because the decision not to hire me was completely unfair, adding that because of this injustice she would support me 100% for any position I would apply for afterwards. I was very touched, although shy to take up her kind offer of providing an excellent reference. I found out later that the university hired an Iranian dissident who had, poor man, languished in an Iranian prison for many years and who wrote prolifically on politics, but not, I believe, on either Islamic studies or art central to the position. I should add here that secular Muslims who could, yes, sometimes face violence in their original homelands because of their views, have sometimes also discriminated against me, seeing me perhaps as a propaganda tool of Islam because of my hijab or, at least, as a reminder of something they would like to forget. If one solves one’s own inner issues, I believe, one accepts others’ life choices even if these encompass something we shun or have left behind. Racism and other forms of bias stem from refusing to examine one’s own contradictions, unknowingness, and faults, then projecting them onto others. I came to Islam largely through what is called Perennial philosophy that traces commonalities amongst spiritual traditions, but people just see the hijab and the automatic series of stereotypical evocations they have been programmed to see. It is a large cultural blind spot covering so much more than a woman’s hair. I searched for work outside of academia too, but again had no luck, although I know a lot of hijab wearer Muslim women –teachers, social workers, doctors— who thankfully have. I remain hopeful that the situation is improving. Encountering Muslims in daily life when they are your colleagues, caregivers, your children’s teachers, your accountant, and so on, will lead to appeased relations, even despite well-funded anti-Islam groups. To make a long story short, I only found work in my field as an art history professor far from Canada, in the Middle East. While my inner nomad has enjoyed it, I long to return to my Ontario home and I will, God willing, find a way to do so very soon, even if it means another career change as I edge closer to my sixtieth birthday. Each life possesses its own unique constellation and constitutes a kind of laboratory to understand life’s lessons and forge one’s character. Perhaps my constellation would have been different had I addressed some of my own inner issues earlier, but regrets are illuminations come too late, as Joseph Campbell put it so aptly. I am exceedingly grateful to all the people who have befriended and helped me, seeing beyond the cloth curtain, and they are many. I am also incredibly grateful to those who have seemingly hindered my path. Akin to Islam, Native American, Buddhist, and other traditions aptly teach that your enemy is your best teacher because enemies force you to develop uncanny inner strength and find the path to your true Self. I therefore bow to all the seeming obstacles. Stripping me over time of false dreams, they have prevented me from forgetting the essential and the main incentive for treading the religious path that Rumi describes so perfectly with his characteristic humility – “I am no lion to overpower my enemies; winning over myself, if I can, is enough.”  In addition to struggles, the most important part of my conversion to Islam is so beneficial. Because I consider it and experience it as the biggest gift in my life that took place 28 years ago, I am truly extremely grateful to our Lord, Allah. Reading the Holy Qur’an, praying very regularly, fasting, and trying to follow the laws of being kind to others and of giving money to those who need it make one’s life very good. I wish a good life -life is a challenge- to everyone. Amin.