Asra Nomani
On reformist Islam and A Mighty Heart.
By Dorna Mohaghegh, University of Pennsylvania
August 8, 2007
From her work as a reformist-activist within Islam to her writings as reporter and author, Asra Nomani has always made her voice heard even when her ideas faced strong opposition. In her hometown in West Virginia, her attempts at bringing about gender equality and tolerance within her mosque were met with hostility. She received criticism from several sides because of her op-ed in the Washington Post criticizing the treatment of her close friend Daniel Pearl in the film A Mighty Heart, in which her character was portrayed. Yet throughout the controversy surrounding her career, she has remained a widely published and respected journalist, spending 15 years at the Wall Street Journal and working as a correspondent for Salon. She has also written for the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time, The American Prospect, Slate and Sojourners magazine. She has published two books: Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam and Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love, and is co-founder of the organization Muslim for Peace. This fall, she will join the faculty of Georgetown University as a visiting professor in journalism, where she will head a faculty-student initiative known as the Pearl Project, dedicated to further dissecting the complicated series of events surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl.
Campus Progress had a chance to speak with Ms. Nomani on the phone about the Islamic Reformation, establishing oneself as a journalist, and the controversy surrounding her participation in A Mighty Heart.
Campus Progress: You’ve focused on many areas in your career as a journalist, from the airline industry and international trade to the continuing developments in the Middle East. How do you pick the issues you want to cover?
When I was an intern at the Wall Street Journal, it was 1988, and my bureau chief at the San Francisco bureau, a man by the name of Greg Hill—his nickname was Mad Dog—told me to write about that which you know. This is a precept in old school journalism, to write about the issues that you care about, and when I was working at the Wall Street Journal, you can’t often times pick your beat, but when you’re on your beat you can write about the kinds of things that interest you.
When I wrote about the airline industry I really did want to understand why every airline’s airfares are all the same. I was naturally curious about it and I think that kind of quality drives you in any profession that you choose. For me, that led me to find out the secrets of how the airlines signal each other through the computer database system.
Fast forward 20 years and I end up in Pakistan after September 11th because I care about bridging the supposed gap between the Muslim world and the West. My work today in the Muslim world, writing about issues of women’s rights and issues of tolerance, is all work that comes from the heart.
When we were in orientation at the Wall Street Journal you learned the art of interviewing, the art of sourcing, ethics, and to me one of the things that I have sort of learned on my own but with really great teachers along the way, is that you also have to learn to just sit and reflect on what you care about so that your work can then follow, and that’s what it’s been like for me.
From your writings on feminism in Islam to your own activism in your mosque at home, you’ve become one of the strongest proponents of the Islamic Reformation. What do you think are the prospects for progress?
I think the prospects for progress in the Muslim world are great. We started with a really progressive religion in the 7th century. It was progressive for that time, and some people along the way decided that we were just going to dig in our heels and stay the way that they believed the religion needed to be interpreted. It’s almost as if we sank into quicksand.
I’ve see in my lifetime people challenging puritanical, rigid, interpretations more than I ever did before. I see the internet organizing people like we’ve never been organized and scholars like Reza Aslan and so many others here in America and elsewhere give somebody like me the intellectual fodder we need to take action. I see women claiming rights that they would never have bothered to try to claim a century ago or even a decade ago. I see actual change and progress. From the political and personal and vice versa and in my own life I’ve seen progress.
Are you talking about Muslim communities in the West or do you think in Muslim countries the prospects are great? You mentioned the internet as empowering women and other progressive forces in Islam, but there’s also been a lot of discussion of how the internet has allowed extremists to link up with each other and gotten teenage kids poking around online involved in the West as well as in the Middle East.
I definitely think that progress is inevitable not just in the Muslim communities in America but around the globe. I see it in Pakistan in the way that Musharraf is negotiating this power sharing agreement with Benazir Bhutto, who is a modernizing progressive element in our Muslim world. I see it in the actions of women and men throughout the Arab world to challenge traditional interpretations. Then what happens is that their challenges push the conservatives to open up also, to become more progressive. So we have fatwas coming out of the Al-Azhar University in Egypt that are more liberalizing. We’re hitting tipping points all around the globe.
It’s definitely a war of ideas in our Muslim world and conservatives and radicals have learned to use the internet to mobilize, just like Moveon.org and Campus Progress and all of the other progressive elements in American politics are trying to counter conservatism and narrow interpretations of not just law but religion and other issues. I think progressives in the Muslim world are not as organized as conservatives and are sort of in the preliminary stages. But I have hope that progress is inevitable so I feel that their eventual success is going to play out over the next decade. I don’t think it’s going to take centuries. I think that in our lifetimes we’re going to see new communities where there are mosques where there are better rights for women and even stronger organizations that represent progressive values in the Muslim world.
My challenge to the progressives in other communities is to transcend these ideas of cultural relativism so that they aren’t able to paralyze them in trying to ally with Muslim progressivism. So often, because of political correctness, folks don’t want to challenge conservatives in religious communities. But really, progressives in the Muslim communities are out on a limb on their own and it can be pretty lonely. A lot of social change has happened from folks who have been lonely at times and then movements have developed. We need to see the kinship and use it to bring about change.
I think hope is an essential part of social change. Without hope, we can’t stay motivated. Whenever I see myself sinking into anger or hate even, I pull back because I believe we can only be motivated in this kind of work through hope and optimism and not rage. Rage can be a motivating factor, but if we’re going to stay true to progressive values then we want to do it from a place of good intention.
You’ve taken some risks while covering stories of personal interest. Do you ever worry that something might happen to you or your family because of the unpopular positions you take?
So much has already happened to my family. Not in the form of physical assault, but my family has stood by me while they’ve been stigmatized in our community and faced all sorts of social pressures to back down. My heart just goes out to them for never ever turning on me, and never saying that the costs were too great. We’ve always tried to stay physically safe.
The West being a civil society allows protection through the police and law enforcement, and I take advantage of that. I don’t allow any threat to go without documentation and follow-up because I am able to do that in this country. I’m very vigilant and watch my back all the time and try to look out for my family.
It’s almost to the point now that I feel like it’s a cliché. Death threats have become a cliché in the Muslim world, and they’re used to intimidate people into silence. It’s not easy for anyone when they are challenging the status quo. It gets a little bit ugly right now in our Muslim world but people have gone through hell since the beginning of time whenever they’ve tried to bring about progress.
You worked in Harper’s which is pretty lefty, and then you were at the Journal, which is rigorously non-partisan in its reporting. Do you have advice for young progressives who are interested in journalism about whether they should work in the more objective media for the experience or to establish their non-partisan bona fides, or do you think you can affect social change more through the progressive opinion work that they do at places like Harper’s?
I think at a place like Harper’s you can’t get published there until you’re established, and I don’t think you can be established unless you work at a mainstream place. That’s just the politics of the media world. Now, for sure you can be established in progressive media and then write op-eds later in mainstream media because you’ve established yourself on an issue, but personally I would advise somebody to go mainstream and build their credentials and also their expertise.
I couldn’t have had better indentured servitude than 15 years at the Wall Street Journal. I arrived there at 23 as an intern and they hire young because they train you and you’re cheap. I wasn’t changing the world covering the airline industry or international trade the way that I had planned on doing it when I got into journalism. But because it skilled me in interviewing, reporting, documentation, and all the skills of investigative journalism, I was then able, 15 years later, to take good notes and records at my mosque in Morgantown.
I was able to document the sermons that were troublesome in a way that I feel was completely solid. Nobody could challenge the facts of what I was presenting. Everybody could challenge my analysis, definitely, and the conservative Muslims have. But everything was airtight in my reporting. I feel like you can only do good in the world with the facts. I do believe that truth prevails and that the skills of journalism you learn: how to write, you learn to get anecdotes, you learn how important it is to personify an issue instead of making it cold fact. You learn how to make people care, how to bring otherwise dry issues, from the environment to politics even and war, to life so that people actually care.
The sad thing for me is that the WSJ just got bought out and that’s a tragedy to me. It’s not going have its independent ownership anymore. I was devastated. What’s sad is that there are fewer and fewer places that offer young journalists the same opportunities that I had 20 years ago. But they’re still out there and they’re definitely there, from regional newspapers to national newspapers and magazines, and radio stations and multimedia ventures that are far beyond anything that I was trained to do.
I think it’s really important to establish your credentials in order to impact change. It was not by design; I never intended to take a position on anything in this world. I thought that I would do really great investigative journalism. I didn’t think at all that I was going to be doing commentaries. I know that when I’m able to say that I’m a former Wall Street Journal reporter people will know that I’m for real. That’s what I think is important, and unfortunately institutions give us credibility.
You wrote a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post following the release of A Mighty Heart in which you accused the filmmakers of forgetting who Daniel Pearl was in the midst of creating a Hollywood blockbuster. Why do you think that although you and several of Danny’s friends made this objection to the film, his wife still supported the movie?
I think that from my conversations with Mariane, she believed that doing the film, even in the way that Hollywood created it, would honor Danny. We just have a difference of opinion on that, and that’s what’s going to happen whenever anything gets created. There’s going to be a difference among people about how you accomplish various goals.
I sort of hinged my participation in the project on that assumption; that even though the story would be told through this narrative of the struggle to try to find Danny he would still be present in the movie and in the narrative. That was what my hope was for the film, and that’s what I was told. The mantra was sort of that this was for Danny. But at the end of the day I ended up writing that piece for the Post as my mea culpa because I didn’t believe that it fulfilled that goal.
We just had a difference of opinion on whether that goal was accomplished or not and whether it could be accomplished through the narrative that they were trying to tell, because I had my doubts and I definitely was a skeptic about it, but I surrendered to the process and hoped for the best. It’s just like how two people walk out of a movie with completely different opinions, and Siskel will have thumbs up and Ebert will have thumbs down. That’s exactly what happened here.
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