Asra Nomani - Influence

Influence

In November 2003, Nomani became the first woman in her mosque in West Virginia to insist on the right to pray in the male-only main hall. Her effort brought front-page attention in a New York Times article entitled Muslim Women Seeking a Place in the Mosque. The article chronicled Nomani's "Rosa Parks-style activism."

Inspired by Michael Muhammad Knight's punk novel The Taqwacores, she organized the first public woman-led prayer of a mixed-gender congregation in the United States, with Amina Wadud leading the prayer. On that day, March 18, 2005, she stated:

We are standing up for our rights as women in Islam. We will no longer accept the back door or the shadows, at the end of the day, we'll be leaders in the Muslim world. We are ushering Islam into the 21st century, reclaiming the voice that the Prophet gave us 1400 years ago.

In his book Blue-Eyed Devil (p. 209), Knight recalls the event as follows:

Inside the chapel there might have been as many reporters and camera crews as there were praying Muslims. The imam of the day, Amina Wadud, was so distracted by the long rows of popping flash-bulbs that in the middle of the prayer she forgot her ayats. At PMU's first board meeting, Ahmed Nassef would read to us an email from Dr. Wadud that completely washed her hands of the event. Though she still believed in woman-led prayer, she wanted nothing to do with PMU or Asra Nomani... Wadud had drawn a clear line between the Truth and the media whores, and we knew that PMU was on the wrong side. To avoid public criticism, PMU's website made no mention of Asra's role in organizing the prayer. Asra complained of PMU shutting her out.

In separate developments, several major Muslim organizations in the United States, including the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, issued their first substantive work aimed at affirming women's rights in mosques, publishing Women-Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage. The booklet, written by long-time social activist Shahina Siddiqui and Islamic Society of North America president Ingrid Mattson, was successfully distributed to mosques nationwide. In addition to her books, she has expressed her experiences and ideas for reform in one New York Times editorial and in several other publications and broadcasts. She was a friend and colleague of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was staying with her in Karachi with his wife Mariane Pearl when he was abducted and later murdered by Islamic militants in January 2002.

In the movie based on the book, A Mighty Heart, by Pearl's wife, British actress Archie Panjabi plays the role of Nomani. The Washington Post published a review, by Nomani, of the film in which Nomani argued "...that Danny himself had been cut from his own story."