Nomani led mixed-gender prayers a week later at Brandeis University outside Boston. Two weeks later, in Tuscany, a woman applied to be the first female imam of her mosque. Another led a prayer session in Toronto before a group of men and women April 22. Meanwhile, Jihadist Internet message boards lit up with calls for Wadud's murder and the deaths of all who participated in New York.
Danny Pearl
Morgantown is a small university town, and in small towns conflicts often take on Wagnerian proportions. Many of the mosque members are immigrants who are affiliated with West Virginia University, a long way from home and looking for a little bit of the familiar in an unfamiliar place.
Nomani moved to this country in 1969, when she was 4. Her family moved to Morgantown when she was 10, settling into an apartment near the mosque. Back then, she recalls, the Muslim community was tolerant and respectful, with men and women mixing freely at dinner parties. Gradually, that changed. Students from more conservative countries came to the university, importing their values with them, Nomani says. Dinner parties became segregated affairs, with the men hanging out in comfortable lounges and the women confined to cramped studio apartments.
Recalls Nomani: "The men would put food in containers, put it down, knock on the door and run away as if seeing us was blasphemy."
She wasn't allowed to date or go to high school dances. But she ran cross-country, and in school she was encouraged by her teachers to think and to speak out. She tried to meld her Eastern side with her Western sensibilities, staying at home, at her parents' request, to study at West Virginia University and then leaving home to pursue a graduate degree at American University. When she was 27, she left her longtime love, an American who offered to convert to Islam, to marry a Pakistani who lived in Washington. They wed in a traditional Muslim ceremony that took place over days in Pakistan. The marriage lasted three months.
It was shortly after her divorce, in 1993, that she met Danny Pearl.
Indeed, she says, she started her crusade because of Pearl.
They became friends, platonic buddies who bonded while working for the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau and they kept in touch after each moved on. She traveled the world, exploring Buddhism and Hinduism and Tantric yoga. (She is also the author of "Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love," published in 2003.)
In January 2002, Pearl was investigating links to al Qaeda in Pakistan, where Nomani was covering the war on terror for Salon. There, she'd fallen in love with a young Pakistani man.
Pearl came to visit Nomani at her rented house in Karachi, bringing along his pregnant wife, Mariane. They hung out, listening to music and talking into the wee hours. The next day, Pearl left for an interview. He never came back.
His story dominated the news as Nomani and Mariane Pearl frantically searched for him.
Three weeks after his disappearance, Nomani discovered she was pregnant. Her beau had already abandoned her.
