Not Running Alone: A Review of Farah Nousheen’s “Nazrah”

By Patricia Dunn

On our first turn of a 1.1-mile loop, a new running partner asked me when it was that I became Muslim. As we pounded our feet into the ground, I shared the litany that led to the moment I made my shahada. My conversion, as so many have assumed, happened after I met my husband, a fellow social justice activist and a Muslim, though he didn’t expect me (at least he never said he did) to convert when we decided to take our friendship to the next level. It also followed my Palestinian solidarity and anti-war (Iraq, the first time) work; my hearing the call to prayer five times a day during several trips to the Middle East; my readings of the Qur’an in translation; my studies of how Islam at its core is liberating for women; my encounters with Sufism and my sense of social justice.

Six miles later as my friend ran in the direction of her car to get back to her husband and four kids before 7 am and I decided to do another loop (my husband and son are not earlier risers), I felt like I had given her the wrong answer.

It was clear to me that I cared less about her knowing when or even why I became a Muslim than I cared about her understanding what its like for me to practice a religion that is misunderstood in the country where I was born and raised. I wanted to tell her that since September 11th, I yell out my son’s Muslim name in the supermarket with reservations and how now I am forced to wonder if my personal choice to keep my non-Muslim name and my American clothing is a copout. I wanted her to understand me. I wanted to not run alone.

When the editor of MWU! asked me to review a film about Muslim women in the West, I agreed. I owed him one. Actually I owed him at least two. Still, I told him he couldn’t have picked a worst choice. “But you’re a writer and a western Muslim woman,” he said. Exactly, I said.

When I popped “Nazrah: A Muslim Woman’s Perspective” into my VCR, my eyes were already in their rolled back position. If I couldn’t relate my experience as a Muslim woman in the time it took to run 6 miles at a 10 and half minute pace in a way that satisfied me, there was no way some filmmaker was going to do it in less than an hour. I hit play and I braced myself for the same old thing--ad nauseum debates about whether Muslim women should or shouldn’t cover their hair. But minutes into the video writer, director, and producer Farah Nousheen does the unexpected, and what very few western filmmakers have done before her. She shows that Muslim women do not live by Hijab alone.

“The most important thing that Muslims have to do today is to speak up.” Some of the first words we hear at the start of the video. Obviously by making this film Nousheen is speaking up and providing a forum for other Muslim women to speak up. But to speak is one thing, to be heard is another, and it’s Nousheen’s modest yet bold style that creates an intimacy in which I have no choice but to listen, and trust.

Before we meet the voices we see Nousheen writing. The experience of watching Nousheen’s work is like reading a friend’s personal journal where heart not only influences but becomes form. At the same time, the experience of watching this film reminded me of the times I met friends and drank coffee and tea with lots of sugar in a Cairo Café, or met friends and drank a non-fat café latte, with no sugar, in a Seattle coffeehouse. (Seattle by the way is where the video was shot.)

Places for friends to sit and exchange ideas are valued, expected, and very hip. (Tragically, it can now be dangerous.) What a relief it was for me not to see a panel of experts (though many of the women are scholars and all of the women sure as heck know what they are talking about) sitting at some dais passing a screeching mike and taking turns trying to shove down the viewers’ throats the quintessential view of Muslim women in the west.

Talking in this video and exchanging ideas are community activists, lawyers, mothers, teachers. Whether we are listening to an independent journalist speaking of her experiences working in Cairo and Saudi Arabia and refusing to live by the “rules,” or to am educator and mother who has found the Prophet’s hadiths as one of the best parenting books she has read, or to an African American woman who connected to her Muslim heritage in South Africa, we are hearing the experiences of Muslim women living Islam here in the United States as Islam is defined by them.

I would love to see the day when the subject of the head covering does not need to come up in a discussion about women in Islam or Islam in general. Still, I understand the reality in which we live where external symbols of choice dominate discussion and, more often than not, misunderstanding. The choice to cover or not cover and the insidious portrayal of the subject by the western and some non-western media make the hijab (the headcovering) and the niqab (the full-body regalia) integral to any discussion on Muslim women in the west or otherwise. The women in this video give us some of the most insightful, personal, political and entertaining reflections on the hijab or the scarf, as many in the video call it, that I have ever seen on film. Whether the women in this video believe the decision to cover or not cover one’s hair is a matter of politics, faith, or fashion, there seems to be consensus on the bottom line: it’s about choice. A Muslim woman who chooses, like myself, to not cover her hair will feel both supported in her decision as well as challenged.

The women in this film don’t stop challenging. They talk about issues that speak to me not only as a Muslim woman in the west, but as a woman, a Muslim, a feminist and an activist living in the west. The discussions around gender, sex, and sexual orientation are direct and honest. We hear from a woman who shares the struggle she had because she thought she couldn’t be a true Muslim and a lesbian until she met a woman who was also a lesbian and one of the most devoted Muslims she had ever known. We hear from a woman who dares to reason that since today genetic testing can determine the father of a child, then women should also be able to have multiple spouses.

And like with any rich and satisfying coffeehouse discussion, we are left with a question that gets us and keeps us thinking: What is our responsibility as Muslim women living in the west where, at least for today, there exists more religious freedom than in predominantly Muslim countries?

Some of the answers the women in this video give us are that we need to speak for Muslim women and Muslims who cannot speak for themselves, and that we need to speak out against the Wahhabi brand of Islam--a brand of Islam where women are entrusted to raise children but not to drive cars, where schoolgirls burn in fires because of an indoctrination that says a man cannot look at a woman who is not his wife or sister. Great answers, but it’s clear that whether this video is asking us as Muslim women in the west to examine our relationships with our bodies, our minds, or our spirits, the point is that it’s asking and not telling. Muslim women come in all shapes and sizes, and we don’t stand alone. Or in my case I don’t run alone.

One final note: The only thing that I do fault Nousheen for is the way she ends her film. Here she gives away the Muslim woman’s best-kept secret. We see individual shots of each of the women she interviewed smiling. And though you would never know it from western or eastern television and film broadcasts, Muslim women do laugh.

Read the MWU! interview with Farah Nousheen.

Nazrah has won the Film Award by the National Association of Muslim Women, which will show clips of the film in their upcoming national conference in Richmond, Virginia on August 16. Nazrah has also been submitted to the film festival at the annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention on September 1. As of this writing, ISNA had not confirmed approval of the film for screening. For more information on screenings and how to obtain a copy, consult the Nazrah website.