c. 1998 Religion News Service

METAIRIE, La. _ One day in a Metairie supermarket Amal Ben Srieti noticed a man gawking at her hijab, the head covering common among women in her native Libya. “I stared back at him,” she said. “He said, `Women in your country don’t raise their eyes.’ I said, `People in your country don’t stare at other people!”’

Ben Srieti, 45, is a devout Muslim wife and mother. In her home, she responds promptly to the high-pitched call to prayer, a recording made in Mecca, sounding five times a day from an electronic clock. She fasts twice weekly, abstaining from food and drink and also from sexual relations.

“It’s purifying; it teaches me self-discipline,” she said. But she bristles at the widespread stereotype of Islamic women as voiceless and downtrodden, saying it is risky even to assume they are all conservative.

Indeed, Ben Srieti is part of a trend running counter to the Islamic extremism making headlines in North Africa and regions of the Middle East. She and others like her are liberated women, she asserts, even if some of them choose to live behind a veil. A resident of the United States for close to a quarter-century, Ben Srieti calls herself a bleeding-heart liberal. And as for the white, lightweight cloth she uses to cover her dark hair when she’s out and about, she says it obliges people to relate to her in a non-sexual way.

“For me, this is as unisex as it gets,” she said recently at her home, holding up her head covering like a trophy.

Ben Srieti and other immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia are not strangers to the kinds of oppression that figure in the stereotype of Muslim womanhood. Male chauvinism remains rampant in their homelands, a phenomenon Ben Srieti sees as an unwelcome legacy of the European colonial era.

Her teachers of European extraction back in Tripoli subtly reinforced the message that Islam requires subservience of its women. But when she started reading holy books for herself, Ben Srieti came to a very different conclusion: “Islam means to be subservient to one being and one being alone, Allah.”

Armed with that insight, Ben Srieti and others like her say resistance to their independence, both within and outside the faith, has only strengthened their commitment to Islam _ and to sexual equality.

The move toward independence among Islamic women is not limited to expatriates. In Asia, in the Middle East and in North Africa, the Islamic world has seen a massive invasion of the public sphere by women, said Fatema Mernissi, an author and sociologist at the University Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco, who is a visiting professor at Tulane University. Muslim women are advancing themselves and nurturing democratic societies through simple gestures such as asking for financial credit or criticizing public transport, Mernissi said.

They carry that same spirit with them when they resettle in America, but here the struggle is of a different order. Instead of needing to challenge an authoritarian regime that suppresses human rights in the name of Islam, they are battling the stereotype through which many Americans view them, she said.

Six large-scale organizations of Muslim women exist in the United States and they are all actively fighting for their rights, said Dalila Mekadder. A 32-year-old Algerian, Mekadder is balancing the study of women’s issues and French at Tulane University’s Newcomb College with her duties as a mother and the wife of a former imam, the Muslim equivalent of a priest, who supports her independence.

“Members of these organizations communicate on the Internet _ some are from the Middle East, some are natives,” she said. They include people from North Africa and the Middle East as well as African-American Muslims.

The rights the Koran gives to women sometimes have been thwarted by male domination, but this is changing as women become more educated, Mekadder said. She considers herself lucky to have been raised by parents who treated their sons and daughters with equal respect. She remembers that the fathers of some of the families who lived around them would not allow their daughters a higher education or a job outside the home. Ironically, when she arrived in New Orleans a decade ago, some people falsely assumed that her husband beat her _ simply because they are Muslim, she said.

“They changed their minds just by knowing me,” she said.

Chama Farooq, 19, of Pakistan, who attends a Tulane University class with Mekadder and who works at the women’s center on campus, said, “For some Americans, the stereotype of the Muslim woman is either the belly dancer or someone who’s covered from head to toe.”

While Mekadder does not wear the traditional Muslim veil, Farooq dons a head covering, although usually an abbreviated version during the heat of spring and summer. Islam teaches that a woman’s hair is a private part of her body, said Farooq, who was born in a northwestern province. But her reasons for wearing the hijab are chiefly political. In discussions in her international relations classes, she said, “I feel I represent Islam and I want to do it right.”

Khedidja Boudaba, 40, a former journalist in Algeria who encountered intense prejudice in a country where only about 12 percent of women work outside the home, said while Muslim women in America may have some problems, “Here, they get a break.”

Boudaba, who lives in New Orleans and is an executive assistant for a Metairie business doing quality control work on exports, said she knows two women from Algeria who at home had always lived with their in-laws. In the United States, they are on their own with their husbands and children and both work outside the home. “It’s a tremendous change in their lives,” she said. “Jobs lead to economic independence and women (who get them) become more assertive.”

END TREADWAY