Standing Alone in Mecca by Asra Q. Nomani. $24.95. Harper SanFrancisco
A Book Review by Jawahara K. Saidullah



The journey to Mecca and standing alone at the birthplace of Islam is a running metaphor in Nomani’s book. She is always alone, or so it seems, on the other side of most Islamic issues.

An American Muslim and the mother of a child born out of wedlock, she travels to Mecca for hajj, with her parents, her niece and nephew and her baby. Her single state and the parentage of her child are also themes in the book.

She stands alone before Allah in Mecca, following in the footsteps of other Muslim mothers before her, notably Hajar, Khadija and Fatima. She feels closest to Hajar whom she calls “Islam’s first single mother.” Mecca is both her journey and its end. She is transformed by it and then embarks on a quest to fight for her rights where she lives and prays.

From Mecca begins her journey towards self-acceptance, her fight to gain respect among the conservatives in her mosque in Morgantown, W.VA. We also get glimpses into her relationship with her parents. Her parents, notably her mother, taught her to follow the rituals associated with Islam. Later, they also helped her in her struggle to attain a place for women in the local mosque. She was one of the leaders of the movement that held public prayers led by a woman.

As a memoir of a woman trying to find herself through what is most familiar her story resonated with me. As a book about religion I found it somewhat wanting. The tale of a woman who tried to make peace with her self-image, her family and the world into which she brought her child was universal.

However, I found her pick-and-choose brand of religion about as much without foundation as that by mullahs who pick and choose their draconian Islam, against which she rails. I would have found it more palatable if she had said she was in favor of creating a new version of the religion, a new sect. Her insistence that this was the real Islam that she had somehow found all on her own, was rather irritating. Indirectly, she refers to herself as Martin Luther, the father of Christian reformation. History and this reviewer reserves judgment on that assertion.

The author gains strength from the Muslim mothers who came before her. They are her spiritual guides. However, she misses a crucial point. Two of the women and their accomplishments to which she constantly refers, were from Pre-Islamic times.

Hajar, Abraham’s concubine, abandoned in the desert with her infant son, lived centuries before the advent of Islam. Khadija, the wife of the prophet was an independent businesswoman much before she asked him to marry her. Before she converted to Islam.

Nomani rails against the rise of Wahhabism in mosques in North America that have been taken over by hardliners. This troubling trend can also be seen in India and Pakistan. Her father was involved in the building of the mosque in Morgantown that relegated women to hidden quarters and did not allow them to enter from the front door. Nomani’s father is quite troubled by this and fights for his daughter’s rights. The question I had was, why he was involved in the creation of the mosque in the first place? If he disagreed so vehemently with its policies why be involved in it anyway? Why did he not involve himself in a more inclusive mosque? Why did he not create another mosque that opened its doors to everyone?

Essentially, this book seems to have been a way for the author to make peace with her religious heritage and the choices she has made as a Westernized, professional woman and single mother. At midlife when identity-quest becomes obsessive, she is trying to shoehorn one from a way of life from which she had earlier strayed. This is as frightening to me as the zeal of the new convert.

This book is obviously written for a western audience, the primary world of the author. The subtitle “An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam,” makes this apparent. She tries too hard to make this identity apparent. There are times she comes off as disingenuously ignorant, almost as if by doing so she will make herself more like her audience, so that they will relate to her more. This is done by over-praising the United States and its stances on individual liberties and human women’s rights. She totally glosses over the human rights abuses (including its turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabian women’s rights), the creation of the Taliban, CIA interventions, funding of wars and assassinations by the US. The book, therefore, comes across as simplistic and one-track.

It is also repetitious. For instance, she repeats ad nauseam that women in the prophet’s time were free to pray together. We read after every few pages that when she was in Saudi Arabia for hajj she mingled freely with men and that she was surprised at the mingling of the sexes in that country. In the first half of the book, her hajj experience, she repeats every few pages that the very existence of her child is proof of zina (fornication) against her, that she could be killed in Saudi Arabia for that crime. We are supposed to cheer her as a heroine. I would have, if she had gone there proudly and openly as a single mother, asserting her right to do hajj. She did not. She hid the fact, which was probably a smart thing to do. But that does not make her brave. It merely makes her practical. Later, almost at the end of the trip, she does tell a couple of people in her hajj group whom she trusts (other American Muslims) about her single state and that her son’s father and she were never married. They are understanding and sympathetic and she feels vindicated.

My faith in her credibility was challenged in the first few pages. The book begins in Allahabad, during the Kumbh Mela. Presumably for her Western audience, Nomani talks of Allahabad being “the city of Allah.” Anyone from Allahabad (like me) or anyone who has studied even rudimentary history of medieval India knows that Prayag was re-named by Emperor Akbar after his newly founded religion, Din-I-Ilahi.

Just a few pages later she recounts meeting an old Hindu woman named Mrs. Jain. Anyone with the last name of Jain is…well…a Jain. Also, disturbing for an ex-Wall Street Journal reporter, she claims she did not even know where Saudi Arabia was on a map. For someone whose mother taught her to say her prayers, for someone who spent so much of her childhood in mosques this seems rather ridiculous. It seemed designed to illustrate how western she is and to over-dramatize her journey back to Islam.

When one is writing a book that relies heavily on historical and factual sources to prove one’s point, two errors in the first few pages makes the reader question the veracity of other facts presented in the book. A book that strives to disprove the predominant version of Islam, to sell her version of a kinder, gentler, more inclusive and forgiving Islam, this is downright negligent.

The author bases her assertion on equal rights in Islam on early Islam. She glosses over the later changes that solidified women’s role in the religion. I would have liked to see her tackle the issue of hijab more deeply, keeping in mind the later verses, when wearing the jalbab (a garment that covers the body from head to foot) and the khymar (a covering for the head and chest, excluding the face) became recommended, almost mandatory, for women.
Islam means submission. Despite the tradition of ijtihad (both her and Irshad Manji’s favorite) there are some things that cannot be questioned. In my opinion, you cannot submit and question at the same time.

What made this book frustrating for me was that I wanted to like it, to unequivocally like it. A book about women’s rights, Muslim (an ethnic, socio-cultural identity, not necessarily an Islamic one) women’s rights in particular, is of interest to me. While a part of me cheered for a woman fighting for her rights, another part was angry with her, for not doing her homework. In the end she wrote a book for Western Liberals and was preaching to the choir.

They got enough to feel appropriately global and informed but not enough to feel uncomfortable or to ask real, deep, fundamental questions.

This seemed a wasted exercise since one of the stated goals of the book was to mobilize American Muslims, especially women, to take back their rights from the ultra-conservative Wahabbis in the US. Most Muslims (practicing and otherwise) are likely to be turned off by this book. And that is a tragedy during a time when more, credible, well-researched and diverse information about Islam is needed.