9 Things You Should Know About the Women's Mosque of America -- and Muslim Women in General

posted on: May 22, 2015

This past January, as global praise and media coverage poured in surrounding The Women’s Mosque of America’s first Friday jumma’a (congregational) prayer services, I started to pick up on something hidden beneath all the congratulations: “Good for you! It was a long time coming! You finally showed them!”

Hold up. Who the heck is “them?!”

Instead of being seen as a celebration of Muslim women, the Women’s Mosque of America was erroneously being framed as a “liberation” from Muslim men. As tempting as it may be to believe that we Muslim women are a monolithically oppressed group of Jasmines waiting to be saved from big bad bearded Muslim men, this couldn’t be further from the truth. This sensationalized narrative about the mosque’s creation revealed just how pervasive misinformation about Muslims is.

I spent my teens volunteering in the civil rights department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles (CAIR-LA) post-9/11, a period when hate crimes against Muslims in America rose 1600 percent. As victims of death threats, harassment, and other hate crimes stepped into our national offices week after week, I learned firsthand that harmful stereotypes don’t just stay on the screen; they have a direct and powerful impact on the communities they misrepresent.

It was at CAIR that I decided to pursue a career in media, to take ownership of my narrative as a Muslim woman. More than a decade later, as I watched the way the Women’s Mosque of America’s narrative was misinterpreted and reframed according to preconceived notions about Muslim women and Islam, I realized that I needed to share our story again — in my own words as the mosque’s founder.

Here are 9 things that you should know. (Please note: my views are my own):

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com