Standing alone in Mecca : an American woman's pilgrimage into the heart of Islam / Asra Q. Nomani.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

As President Bush is preparing to invade Iraq, Wall Street Journal correspondent Asra Nomani embarks on a dangerous journey from Middle America to the Middle East to join more than two million fellow Muslims on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca required of all Muslims once in their lifetime. Mecca is Islam's most sacred city and strictly off limits to non-Muslims. On a journey perilous enough for any American reporter, Nomani is determined to take along her infant son, Shibli -- living proof that she, an unmarried Muslim woman, is guilty of zina, or "illegal sex." If she is found out, the puritanical Islamic law of the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia may mete out terrifying punishment. But Nomani discovers she is not alone. She is following in the four-thousand-year-old footsteps of another single mother, Hajar (known in the West as Hagar), the original pilgrim to Mecca and mother of the Islamic nation.

Each day of her hajj evokes for Nomani the history of a different Muslim matriarch: Eve, from whom she learns about sin and redemption; Hajar, the single mother abandoned in the desert who teaches her about courage; Khadijah, the first benefactor of Islam and trailblazer for a Muslim woman's right to self-determination; and Aisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam's first female theologian. Inspired by these heroic Muslim women, Nomani returns to America to confront the sexism and intolerance in her local mosque and to fight for the rights of modern Muslim women who are tired of standing alone against the repressive rules and regulations imposed by reactionary fundamentalists.

Nomani shows how many of the freedoms enjoyed centuries ago have been erased by the conservative brand of Islam practiced today, giving the West a false image of Muslim women as veiled and isolated from the world. Standing Alone in Mecca is a personal narrative, relating the modern-day lives of the author and other Muslim women to the lives of those who came before, bringing the changing face of women in Islam into focus through the unique lens of the hajj. Interweaving reportage, political analysis, cultural history, and spiritual travelogue, this is a modern woman's jihad, offering for Westerners a never-before-seen look inside the heart of Islam and the emerging role of Muslim women.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Standing Alone in Mecca An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam Chapter One The Dalai Lama and the Seeds of A Pilgrimage Allahabad, India -- One hot winter afternoon, I was lost in India on the banks of the Ganges, a river holy to Hindus. I was meandering with an American Jewish friend on a road called Shankacharaya Marg. By chance, my path intersected with the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, the Dalai Lama, inside an ashram, and he set me off on my holy pilgrimage to the heart of Islam. It was January 2001, and I was, quite fittingly, in the city of Allahabad, "the city of Allah," the name by which my Muslim identity taught me to beckon God. In Islam, Allah is our Arabic word for God. Born about a thousand miles westward along the Indian coastline in Bombay, India, I had evoked God with this name from my earliest days. Although a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama, like millions of Hindu pilgrims, was in a dusty tent village erected outside Allahabad to make a holy pilgrimage to the waters there for the Maha Kumbha Mela, an auspicious Hindu festival. He joined the chanting of a circle of devotees dressed all in white. When they had finished, I followed the Dalai Lama to a press conference in a building surrounded by Indian commandos and his own bodyguards. Religious fundamentalism and fanaticism are wreaking havoc throughout the world, and in India they are redefining Hindu and Muslim communities that used to coexist peacefully. The demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque called Babri Masjid sparked one of India's worst outbreaks of nationwide religious rioting between Hindus and the Muslim minority; two thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed. The cycle of hatred continued until that day when the general secretary of the sectarian World Hindu Council, Ashok Singhal, called Islam "an aggressive religion." At the press conference an Indian journalist raised his hand. "Are Muslims violent?" he asked. My stomach tightened. This question reflected a stereotype of the people of my religion, but, alas, the national flag of Saudi Arabia, the country that considered itself the guardian of Islam's holiest cities -- two historical sites called Mecca and Medina -- includes the sword. The Dalai Lama smiled. "We are all violent as religions," he said. After pausing, he added, "Even Buddhists." We all smiled. "We must stop looking at the past," he continued, "and look at the present and the future." I sat near the back, my usual spot at press conferences, and pondered his words. I had spent a lot of my life trying to understand my past. My mother and father, Sajida and Zafar Nomani, were children of India when it was still under British colonial rule. I was born in Bombay in 1965, after the country had won liberation. My parents left for America when I was two so my father could earn his PhD at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. My brother, Mustafa, my only sibling, and I stayed with my father's parents until we boarded a TWA jet in 1969 to JFK Airport in New York to be reunited with our parents. I became a journalist, landing my first job at the age of twenty-three with the Wall Street Journal. Despite my apparent success, I had difficulty expressing my voice. I wanted to raise my hand, but even though I had been a successful staff reporter for one of the most powerful newspapers in the world for over a decade, I could barely muster the courage to ask questions at press conferences. To justify my fears, I accepted the rationale passed on to me once by a senior journalist at the Wall Street Journal: "Don't ask any questions at press conferences," she had told me over the phone as I reported from the scene of a United Airlines plane crash. "That way, nobody will know what you're thinking." Inviting and beaming, the Dalai Lama triggered something. All of a sudden, I wanted to let others know what I was thinking. I realized I had a responsibility to speak up. As long as I called myself a Muslim, I had to try to bridge the schism between my religion and others. I tentatively raised my hand. To my surprise, the Dalai Lama gestured eagerly at me. I began to speak my thoughts, marking a turning point in my life as I did so. "Through personal meditation we can transcend ego and power in our own lives," I said. "What is it that our leaders can do to transcend the issues of power that make them turn the people of different religions against each other?" He looked at me intently and said: "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." I nodded my head in understanding. I, a daughter of Islam, was in the midst of the Hindu pilgrimage. I had grown up with a mocking understanding of the deities to which Hindus bow their heads, but sitting in a retreat colony amid simple devotees like an elderly Indian Hindu woman named Mrs. Jain, I understood that the spiritual intention of a polytheist is no different from that of a monotheist who prays in a synagogue, church, or mosque. Just months earlier, I had climbed into the Himalayas at India's border with China and joined about twenty thousand Buddhists in a pilgrimage led by the Dalai Lama. On the last day I had tried to resuscitate an elderly Nepali Sherpa who had gotten caught in a stampede by pilgrims rushing to witness a holy religious sand creation called a mandala. He literally died resting in my hands, and I knew at that moment the universal phenomenon of faith that defines all religions. I had just spent two years speaking to the scholars of the faiths and reading their texts. I had read the teachings of the Buddha. I had read the Bible. I had sat at the feet of a pandit, a Hindu scholar who comes from the upper Brahmin caste of Hinduism. As a woman, I was trying to grasp the role of women in the faiths. I learned that sacred goddesses were integral to early civilizations, such as the Indus civilization from which India sprang ... Standing Alone in Mecca An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam . Copyright © by Asra Nomani. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam by Asra Q. Nomani All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Nomani has invented her own nonfiction genre: gender-sensitive Muslim travel writing. An excellent companion to Nomani's first book, Tantrika, this memoir treads similar ground, chronicling her pilgrimage to Mecca, or hajj, in 2003. Throughout the book, Nomani is filled with self-doubt and healthy frustration with her Islamic faith. The portions describing hajj, particularly the other pilgrims' warmth to her infant son, are original and enjoyable. But the book also points to the incongruity of how the same Muslim community-or ummah-can condemn Nomani for having her son out of wedlock, in a clear case of extramarital sex. The second half of the book records Nomani's pioneering struggle at her mosque for equal treatment of women. Daring to enter the men's door at the mosque, Nomani is repeatedly ostracized, and her father-a founder of the mosque-vilified by his counterparts. Nomani decries the Wahhabi takeover of American mosques and demands reform-a call that will resonate with the average American Muslim. The stories of her preteen niece and nephew introduce readers to a new generation of Muslims who are American and equality-minded. Through memorable personal narrative, Nomani gently instructs readers about modern Islam and her role as a woman within it. (Jan. 18) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Even as she struggled to reconcile her quest for love and equality with her desire to be a good Muslim, Nomani never intended to become an activist dedicated to freeing Islam from the ideologies of misogyny and hate. But she had traveled the world as a Wall Street Journal correspondent, stood by helplessly while her close friend and colleague, Daniel Pearl, was murdered in the name of Allah, and then became a single mother, thus a criminal in the eyes of conservative Muslims. Determined to find the true spirit of Islam, Nomani travels to Mecca on the holiest of pilgrimages, the hajj, a life-changing experience she chronicles with compelling detail, candor, and passion both intellectual and spiritual as she also explicates Islam's intrinsic respect for women as embodied in such figures as Hajar (known as Hagar to Jews and Christians). Inspired by her discoveries, Nomani returns home to Morgantown, West Virginia, and courageously launches a protest against her mosque's sexist policies, an effort that, thanks to her resounding eloquence and investigative expertise, has had global consequences. Ultimately, Nomani's riveting, cogent, and inspiriting account urges the moderate majority in all faiths to rescue their traditions from those who twist religion into a weapon of mass oppression and terror. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist