Islam's Female Converts
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"In addition, she, not her father or male relatives, as had been the custom,
was to receive the dowry from her husband. She became a party to the contract
rather than an object for sale," Esposito wrote. "The right to keep and
maintain her dowry was a source of self-esteem and wealth in an otherwise
male-dominated society. Women's right to own and manage their own property was
further enhanced and acknowledged by Quranic verses of inheritance which
granted inheritance rights to wives, daughters, sisters and grandmothers of
the deceased in a patriarchal society where all rights were traditionally
vested solely in male heirs. Similar legal rights would not occur in the West
until the 19th century."
Esther Bourne, a 46-year-old accountant in Manhattan, was raised Catholic by
her American mother after her British father died when she was 6. Spiritually
inclined from a young age, she said she first read the Quran in her mid-20s,
because her former husband, a Muslim, owned a copy. "I would go in and out of
it," she said.
By her mid-30s, after ending an abusive relationship and enduring the tragic
death of a man she loved dearly, Bourne said she began a spiritual quest that
included classes on Islam at a mosque on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "When
the teachers would explain, my heart just accepted it," she said. "The heart
believed it."
In 1992, at the age of 36, Bourne took her shahada, the profession of faith
that is the first of the five pillars of Islam. "I don't have panic anymore,
and if some misfortune happens, I just accept the decree from Allah," Bourne
said.
"You slowly adjust yourself to an Islamic way of life, thinking about God,
doing good deeds,” Amatullah said. "Some days I do it better than others."
Amina Mohammed, a 58-year-old dental assistant at the Veterans Administration
hospital in St. Albans, has been a Muslim for more than 20 years. She was born
Doris Gregory, the daughter of an American Indian mother and a Jamaican
father, and was raised as a Lutheran. She said she stopped going to church
when she was 16.
Two years later, she began an active spiritual quest by reading about
Buddhism, Hinduism and American Indian religions, but, she said, none of them
was what she was looking for -- a way to pray to one God in one form. "I was
so disappointed," she said. "I knew that there was a correct religion, but I
just hadn't found it. But I believed in God -- I was no atheist."
In her mid-30s, after two failed marriages and two daughters -- who are now 27
and 33 -- she said she felt a desperate need for spiritual direction and
coincidentally was exposed for the first time to Islam. "This is what I had
always felt in my heart," she said.
For about three years she studied the religion; she began to cut down on
dating and to cover her head occasionally. Then she went to a mosque in
Manhattan and "saw women from different countries and from different races
praying together," she said. "I thought this is how it should be on earth."
Amatullah, who lives in St. Albans, has been married and divorced three times
since she converted to Islam. Her first husband was from Sudan, the second was
from Egypt and the third was Italian-American; all were Muslim. Allah gives
both men and women the right to divorce, she said, and she initiated each
split.
Although the Quran does not prohibit women from gaining an education or having
a career, the converts said, it is a woman's primary responsibility to take
care of her children.
"Look at the Western society of today with the breakdown of family, the mother
being out of the home and the children being alone," said Bourne, who is
single and has a 28-year-old son. "I had problems because I practically had to
raise my son alone."
Their faith, the three converts said, has not been shaken by the Sept. 11
attacks, carried out by men who said they were acting as Muslims. The
distortion of Islam by extremists and terrorists, the women stressed, should
not lead to the condemnation of a great religion.
"To kill innocent lives," Amatullah said, "is anti-Islamic."
Priya Malhotra is a freelance writer.
Copyright © 2002, Newsday,
Inc.
Source: http://newsday.com/features/ny-feat-fcov0216.story
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