The New Untouchables

In Panchgani, a town outside Mumbai, my son surprised a friend of the family, a Muslim girl, on her 15th birthday with a gift from the United States: a dream catcher, a handmade web of thread and beads. Her nightmares would escape through the beads, I explained. The web would catch her dreams. "What do you dream for yourself?" I asked. She stared at me blankly. Her eyes downcast, she answered, "I don't have a dream."

The effort to build a women's mosque in that village in Tamil Nadu was an attempt to help the Muslim world's poorest demographic: its women. After announcing her plans to build the mosque, Khanam drew up a detailed budget proposal, estimating $110,000 for construction and an annual budget of about $75,000 to cover operating costs for the mosque and a women's shelter, including a salary for a female imam. She decided to name the mosque Halima Pengal Pallivasal, or "Halima's Women's Mosque," after her mother, Halima, whose name means "gentle" in Arabic. Khanam sold pieces of jewelry to raise money to buy the land.

She designed a path to the mosque that would be covered by a canopy of roses and jasmine. She and her supporters gathered petitions from women who oppose the all-male rulings they must live by. She went village to village, gathering donations. Together with her staff, she spent countless hours writing a funding proposal to the New York-based Global Fund for Women. It turned her down. A spokeswoman told me that the mosque plan didn't fit its "human rights" agenda.

But the lives of Muslim women in India are certainly a human rights issue. Many of the members of STEPS, the women's rights organization that Khanam founded, are former dalits, who converted to Islam because it doesn't have a caste system. When the government introduced an affirmative action program for the dalit class in recent years, these women found themselves barred from it. And they face the additional problem of having to live with sexist interpretations of Muslim law, which India allows to govern family matters.

Khanam's effort is part of a wider struggle by Indian Muslims to create an identity beyond the influence of extremism. But they are fighting against a tide of pessimism that offers an opening to conservative and radical clerics. In a crowded two-room office on the second floor of a dilapidated building in Mumbai, an aging Muslim scholar named Asghar Ali Engineer lamented the difficulties facing him and other progressive leaders in the Muslim community. "We are the minority within the minority," he said.

Late last year, conservative Muslim men in the village of Gingee in Tamil Nadu stormed the gates of a vocational school for Muslim girls not far from the construction site of the women's mosque. Saeed Amanullah, a native son of Chennai, had built the school after retiring from his 25-year career as a structural engineer for Los Angeles County. "The Muslim problem stands in the way of India being the power that people think it can be," said Amanullah's Hollywood-born son, Shahed, who was in India during the controversy. "These unresolved socioeconomic issues are going to be like chains on the country's legs. We won't be able to move forward."

Meanwhile, Khanam strives to keep her hope for a women's mosque alive. She wants the Sachar Committee report to result in political reforms such as affirmative action programs, but so far there hasn't been much movement in the status quo.

Last year, she paid her own travel expenses to New Delhi to testify at a meeting of the committee, which promised to reimburse her. Months later, she was still waiting for the check as she sat in the sunset watching wild peacocks wander where congregants should have been gathering in the mosque of her dreams.

asra@asranomani.com

Asra Q. Nomani teaches investigative journalism at Georgetown University and is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle

for the Soul of Islam."