Soldier of Faith

At one point, Shareda, now a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, questioned whether staying in the military was right, given that she has to go without the scarf when on duty. She decided to stay, but the tension between head scarf and beret remains. After two Reserve stints at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa this summer, she felt familiar pangs of conscience as she put her head scarf back on.

"There's a war that goes on in my head, because covering is the essence of being private and keeping my beauty for my home life, my family. And when I wear my uniform I can't be covered, because that's for the public," she explains.

"It's a big part of my journey and my struggle," she says. "I want to be true to both my career paths, my personality and my life. And in every way I feel integrated with both, going from one to the other, with the exception of not being able to cover . . . in uniform.

"This is where we would be using the 'jihad' word, but it would get misconstrued wouldn't it?" Shareda remarks wryly, referring to the post-9/11 reality that jihad's ancient meaning as a Muslim's inner struggle for spiritual growth has been all but lost.

Shareda has also dealt with community pressures regarding her military service. Not long ago, a man approached Shareda at the mosque and said, "I like you a lot, and I know your family and your husband, they're good people, and you should get out of the military because it's haram," meaning religiously forbidden, because she might be called upon to kill other Muslims.

"So I said, 'Well, if you have that perspective, you could say it's haram to even live in the United States because you're paying your taxes to support the military,'" Shareda recalls. "He just couldn't accept the fact that he was part of the machine."

By early 2001, Shareda and Jack had settled down in a close-knit, working-class section of Quincy, where she served for a time as a Republican Party activist and sold real estate. Even so, her life felt only partially fulfilling. She happened to see an article in the Boston Globe about the new Islamic chaplaincy program at Hartford Seminary. It quoted a Muslim veteran of the Marines about the need for female Muslim chaplains in the military. By coincidence, Mattson visited Shareda's mosque just days afterward to lecture about Hartford's chaplaincy program. A few weeks later, Shareda shipped out to Kuwait, where her aspiration to become a military chaplain turned from daydream to destination.

Then came 9/11. Her desire to integrate her faith with service to her country deepened.

Shareda first applied to be an Army chaplain in 2003. Informal feedback was negative. During a 10-month mobilization in Kuwait with her Reserve unit in 2004, she asked for a meeting with the Army's visiting chief of chaplains. She was given time with his aide instead.

"He pretty much said: 'Hey, we'd love to have you. We need you, but you can't lead prayers with men and women. So you can't come onboard,'" she recalls.

Although Muslim scholars are pretty much unanimous that a woman cannot lead prayers and deliver the sermon when the congregation includes men, Shareda argued that chaplaincy involves more than worship services and that she could ask any male worshiper to lead the prayers and deliver the sermon she had written. She also told the aide that, because of her military experience, she "could explain to the spouses, the women, the wives, this is what your husband is experiencing because I've lived the life."

Unmoved, the Army formally rejected her application in 2005. But Shareda holds out hope that the decision is not final.

ON A GOLDEN AUTUMN DAY LAST OCTOBER, Shareda navigates her teal blue BMW 325xi along the asphalt cow paths of Boston's financial district to the Boston Kebab House. "I'm hosting today's iftar," she says, referring to the evening meal of Ramadan when Muslims break their daily fast. It is part of her new role as Tufts University's first female Muslim chaplain, a job she assumed in September.

Shareda's trunk is soon loaded with aluminum tubs of steaming rice and kebab. Twenty minutes later, she arrives at the Tufts Interfaith Center in Medford, Mass. The food is arrayed on a table in the second-floor common room. Headlights of passing cars flicker on the floor-to-ceiling windows as about a dozen Muslim students perform the evening prayer before sitting down to eat.

Wearing a beige head scarf to match her ankle-length skirt, Shareda casts her animated brown eyes around the table, purposefully including everyone. Conversation, frequently punctuated by laughter, ranges from bargain-priced rides to New York on a Fung Wah Bus to upcoming activities planned by the Muslim Students Association. Shareda brings up a religious study group she is launching and asks one student what night he'd prefer to meet. "Would you want it Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday?" she asks accommodatingly.

"Say 'Wednesday!'" she commands before he can reply, sparking chuckles around the table.

As chaplain, Shareda advises the Muslim Students Association, counsels students, and organizes religious and social activities for them. "She's so understanding, and she's helped the community so much," says Tufts senior Danyal Najmi, adding that "she helped us get our act together" at the association and has "always been there for us."

After dinner, as Shareda and the female students talk about baseball and dress designs, she notices that all of the male students are having an intense discussion at another table. They haven't told her what they are talking about. But she can guess.

Unlike her male predecessor, Shareda cannot act as an imam -- that is, officiate at the students' Friday service and give the khutba, or sermon. So she is tapping a network of male imams to lead the service each week. But some students wonder how effective this will be. If there are different imams each week, will their khutbas be relevant to their lives? What if he gets snarled in traffic and is late?

"The thing is, Shareda is very good. We love her. But she can't lead the prayers," Shirwac Mohamed, co-chair of the Muslim Students Association, explains later. "We want the khutbas to address things that are going on with students on this campus. We don't want random 'Be good. Do this. Do that.' Students wouldn't get a lot out of it."

At the iftar, Shareda wonders why the male students did not bring their concerns directly to her. But she decides to be patient.

She is also trying to be patient with the Army.

COL. RICHARD PACE IS PERSONNEL DIRECTOR for the Army's Office of Chief of Chaplains and a Protestant chaplain who has served with the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq and Afghanistan. A small black cross, signifying his chaplaincy status, is stitched over his name on his green camouflage uniform.

Sitting in his 12th-floor Crystal City office, Pace explains that, unlike institutions such as hospitals, the Army has "the expectation and requirement when you come in representing a religious organization that you can function and conduct all the religious requirements of that organization." That is why, he says, the Army takes only priests -- and not deacons or nuns -- as Catholic chaplains because only priests can celebrate Mass.

This requirement makes female Muslims ineligible to be Army chaplains, he notes, because the "vast majority of the Islamic community" says women cannot lead services when men are in the congregation. Pace says he's aware that some Muslims are challenging that tradition and that if a new consensus emerges that "women indeed can perform these functions, then the Army's open to it."

In the meantime, he says, the Army, which has six Muslim chaplains ministering to an estimated 1,675 Muslims, 175 of them women, does not want to become "a forum for debate" on Islamic practices. "I really don't think the Army needs to be the place for the Muslim community to work out the role of female religious professionals."

Some Muslim leaders support Shareda's contention that her inability to lead prayers can be worked around. Mattson wrote the Army to say that her chaplaincy "would be an asset" to the service. And Maj. Abdul Rasheed Muhammad, who became the Army's first Muslim chaplain in 1993, applauded her courage in seeking the job. He said: "She doesn't have to lead men in prayer to be chaplain. That's the bottom line."

Shareda says she is seeking a reconsideration of her rejection but that, as of now, Army officials won't cooperate. She intends, she says, to "follow up if necessary with legal counsel."

"I don't feel resentment, or anger," Shareda says, just "disappointment" and "incompletion." These are new feelings for her, "because whatever goal I've set for myself, I've been able to achieve it. And, for this one, I don't have the final say."

ON THE DAY AFTER THE IFTAR MEAL, two students sit at a plastic folding table with Shareda in the sun-filled community room of the Tufts Interfaith Center. Muslim Students Association co-chair Mohamed is briefing the chaplain, who is perched on the edge of her seat. Having different imams each Friday will be "kind of hard for us," he says, because they won't get to know the students and their sermons won't "delve deeper into issues that concern us as Muslims." One suggestion that emerged from the students' informal meeting the night before, he says, is to have male students lead prayers on some Fridays and give a sermon they write with Shareda's help, or one that she writes.

"That's why I talked to others before I came to talk to you," he says.

"I think that's very valid," she replies.

She's happy to assist students who want to do this. Above all, she wants the sermons to be relevant to "the reality of living in this society," with its legal and political challenges to Muslims, who often feel their faith is under attack. Her inability to lead prayers, she says, is "a gift" because it gives the male students the opportunity to learn to lead services.

Earlier in the day, Shareda had prepared for Friday prayers by laying out two large blue plastic tarps to demarcate the worship space. She does not feel slighted at being unable to lead prayers, she says. But it bothers her that she can't deliver the sermons and "shape the message" she wants the students to get.

Then there are the logistics. That morning, the assigned imam had called Shareda to say he couldn't come because an eye problem prevented him from driving. In a panic, she enlisted Jack to pick him up.

Shortly before 1 p.m., the imam appears at the top of the stairs, and a visibly relieved Shareda greets him.

"Salaam aleykum!" she says.

"Aleykum es salaam!" replies Riaz Khan, a professor of management at a nearby university, who has a full white beard and speaks with the accent of his native India.

"I'm not an Islamic scholar," he tells a visitor. "You don't need special people for this. That is why there is no clergy in Islam . . . I'm just an ordinary common Muslim [who is] older than anyone here so they put me in front" to lead the prayer.

His sermon to the two dozen male worshipers dwells on how the Koran is God's revealed word to mankind, urging them "to follow this book of guidance as closely as possible, as sincerely as possible."

Today, Shareda is the only woman at the service. She stands alone in the back, her feet bare, her eyes closed, reciting the prayers of obedience and submission to God.

Caryle Murphy, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of Passion for Islam. She can be reached at caryle.murphy@yahoo.com.