Realities of a Muslim Convert

By Alaina Love McConnell

Photo by Crystal Costello

Intended Publication: The Chicago Tribune

Laura Bowers has completed three of her five years of a Bachelors and Masters program at Loyola University where she is majoring in Social Work.  At 18, Laura joined the Islamic community and now self-identifies as Muslim-American.  She openly embraces many facets of her new religion including its moral code, its dietary practices, and its prayer rituals, though she admits to sometimes having trouble praying before dawn on account of sleeping in.  During her free time, Laura enjoys going out to eat with friends and reading about Islam.  After graduation, she hopes to earn a Doctorate in Islamic Studies and ultimately pursue a joint career in social work and Islamic studies.

LAURA BOWERS IS sitting cross-legged on her bed.  A long, black abaya dress is hiked up around her hips, revealing a pair of faded GAP blue jeans.  Her laptop rests comfortably on her knees.  She is logged in to Facebook.

“There is an 8:40 and 9:20 showing of The Hunger Games,” she says flipping through her iPhone.  “Which one do you wanna go to?”  “8:40,” I reply, flopping down on the bed perpendicular to hers.

We are on the twenty-first floor of a Chicago high-rise apartment complex.  The one-bedroom unit Laura shares with three other young women is modestly decorated and messy with undergrad intellect.  Old notebooks and “A” papers scatter the room in frenzied disarray, while a roommate’s aversion to a chemistry class is scrawled sloppily across a whiteboard; “Orgo sucks!”  A book titled “In the Footsteps of the Prophet” by Tariq Ramadan lies lazily on the bedroom floor.

Half an hour before, Laura met me in the apartment lobby, her face flushed with excitement from having just returned from a meeting with Ta’leef, a nationally renowned organization geared toward connecting with and practicing Islam.  Momentarily, I was shocked at how visibly different my friend looked.  In the two and a half years since her conversion, this was the first time I was seeing her covered.  The girl I had met nearly four years ago during a 2008-2009 gap-year in Spain, who donned white Diesel high-tops and silk-screened Vespa jackets when we hit the Barcelona bars, could not have looked more different, more confident standing in front of me now.  She was glowing.   

Loyola’s Muslim Awareness Week of 2010 was coming to a close when Laura, then a freshman, testified her devotion to Allah.  “I was so scared,” Laura admitted.  “I kept thinking, ‘Can I even do this?  I’m white?’”

Initially, Laura said, she did not tell anyone about the conversion except her mom and a close Muslim friend, Salwa Shameem, whom she met in high school.  Although Laura grew up in an open-minded, non-practicing Christian household— her family commercially celebrated Christian holidays but not much else—she was unsure if people in her home and college communities would be accepting. “I didn’t even tell you, Fein,” she said one evening over Skype, addressing me by the nickname she coined for me in Spain.

It was true.  We were sophomores—she at Loyola and I at Kalamazoo College—by the time she nonchalantly inserted her conversion into a phone conversation. “Oh really? Cool,” I probably said, my memory flashing to moments in Spain when she struck up conversations with the Moroccan subway pick-pocketers and when she took an eleven-year-old Muslim boy who attended our school under her wing.  Her interest in Islam had been noticeable even then.  But had I ever thought she would convert?  Not really.     

   

“I was so worried for her,” Salwa said, thinking back to when Laura first expressed interest in converting.  “I told her, ‘Laura, you don’t need to rush this.’”  But Salwa remembered that Laura was adamant, which could suggest that her mind was already made up long before voicing her thoughts aloud.

Laura’s mom, Jennifer Bowers Iwanski, and step-dad, Ron Iwanski supported their daughter’s decision.  When Laura asked her mom for her blessing before the conversion Jenn recalled, “I didn’t even think twice… I just said,  ‘Okay, well of course you have it,’” she said. 

Jenn’s daughter has big brown eyes that crinkle at the corners when she laughs.  Her wit comes naturally and she, like her mom, can easily command the attention of a room.  Laura’s five-foot, nine-inch frame supports her healthy appetite—she loves her mom’s chicken potpie— but good genes and a speedy metabolism allow her to remain slim despite her opposition to working out.  Laura’s friends and family describe her as bright and inquisitive, two characteristics that have undoubtedly fueled her journey of conversion.

Salwa recalled that in high school, Laura always asked questions about her spirituality.  “She would ask, ‘Why do Muslim women cover?’ or ‘What do you think happens when you die?’” Salwa said.  “She wasn’t so much affected by what we [Muslims] did, but why.”

The information Laura obtained from Salwa and her other Muslim friends, such as covering is about preserving modesty and not about oppression or that Earth is a temporary abode on the way to an eternal paradise, only ignited her interest in the religion.  She soon turned to the Qur’an, which Muslims believe is the literal word of God, and other religious texts to further her Islamic education.  “The more I learned, the more I realized this is how I feel in my heart,” she said.  “Consciously, there was no intention to find my faith.  It just kind of happened.”

Of all the moral codes Laura now adheres to, gossiping and backbiting were two of the habits particularly tough for her to kick.  The seventeen-year-old Laura that I remember from Spain was reining Gossip Queen of Ausiàs March High School, her Queendom challenged only occasionally by me.  Now, Laura said, if she falls back into old tendencies she must confront the subject to ask for forgiveness.  “And that’s really hard to do,” she said.  Rather, she prefers to eliminate these toxic tendencies altogether.

Laura described her reasons for converting in relatively simplistic terms.  “I just wanted a religion where the Prophets, God’s message, the Book, and Science had no contradiction among each other,” she said.

 

As a child, Laura observed religion as means to exclude or condemn people who were different.  If she tried to apply her grandfather’s practicing-Christian framework to a Jewish friend of her dad’s, for example, she became scared and hurt.  “I couldn't understand why he had to go to Hell,” she said.  The hypocrisy of “Jesus’ love” did not escape her and as she grew, her angst was replaced by skepticism.  She became wary of an obtuse God who ostracized non-believers.        

When she began hanging out with Muslim kids at school, her entire outlook on religion changed.  Her friends taught her how in Islam, God judges a person based on one’s actions, character, and heart.  “Having friends of all faiths and of all backgrounds, [that’s] really important,” she said. 

Since her conversion in 2010, Laura has grappled with her perceived and projected identities, trying to find a balance that gratifies both internal and external acceptance.  The dissonance between these identities, particularly in a Western, image-based society, is powerful and unaccommodating.   “There is no cultural context for a person like me,” she said.

By no means is this disharmony solely perceived by Laura.  When she and I went to dinner and to see The Hunger Games, for example, the response the pair of us received from fellow subway riders, waiters, and ticket collectors was startling.  Everywhere we went we perplexed people.  What are these two doing together? I imagined people whispering.  Who is the mysterious covered woman and who is the blonde in skinny-jeans?  We were observed and then probably dismissed, unable to be placed within accepted social frameworks.  

Laura once described to Salwa her reality as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between personal extremes, working to find a comfortable, middle ground.  On one extreme, she is the fresh-faced convert who tried to simultaneously embrace physical and spiritual transformation when she had still not completely come to terms with either. 

“One day, I just went down to the cafeteria wearing a hijab,” Laura said.  She recalled that the friends she was supposed to meet that evening for dinner decided to sit elsewhere once they saw what she was wearing.  “A girl yelled at me that wearing a hijab was oppressive.  [Another friend] told me that he didn’t want to sit with covered Muslims.  I had just converted,” Laura said.  “I wasn’t ready for all that.  I wasn’t ready to debate.”

On the other side of the pendulum, she struggled with the skepticism and confusion of others, even by those closest to her.  A heated discussion with her mom about the hijab, for example, compelled Laura to stop covering for an entire summer.  “In my mind, I thought she was so feminist and so strong of a woman that she would never want to wear the headscarf,” Jenn said.  “I didn’t understand what the headscarf was all about.” 

As Laura contemplated the conundrums of the female, American-Muslim convert and tried to find spaces of inclusivity, other demons jumped out from Chicago’s dusty closets.    

 “I think people perceive her as Middle Eastern,” Salwa said.  “People naturally associate wearing hijabs with being an Arab-Muslim.”  Laura’s dark hair and light complexion compel people to make all sorts of assumptions about her; from thinking she’s a fair-skinned Jordanian to concluding that English cannot possibly be her native language. 

While at times appearing to be non-white can be stressful, even alienating, the hijab grants Laura access into some of the most intimate circles of minority communities.  When attending Muslim events or hanging out with students of color she said, “I get to hear stories now that they would have never shared with me had they not assumed that I was a part of their group…It gives people a level of comfort to know that I am being labeled the same as they are.” 

This acceptance into minority communities can be described as a type of “reverse otherization” one in which she, the white girl, finally “gets it.”  “Probably one of the most transformative experiences [of my conversion] is that all of a sudden I am treated like a woman of color,” she said. 

As someone perceived as both white and non-white, Laura has taken on the role of stereotype breaker.  For example, she works to promote the differences between religion and culture. Just as other religious communities span multiple geographic regions, have ties to various cultures and practices, and have no one, concrete system of values, Muslims also cannot be defined to only one sphere of existence or way of living.  This distinction can be useful when considering the role and treatment of Muslim women.

 

“I think everybody has this idea that Muslim women are oppressed and that they are not allowed to have personalities and opinions and passions.”  That’s not what the religion is about, she said.  Study of the Qur’an reveals that Islam promotes gender equality, from its creation tales of Adam and Eve, to advocating for equal education, work, and money, to giving Allah both male and female characteristics.  

    

The cultures that do tolerate oppression are “enforcing practices that do not exist in Islam and are antithetical to Islam,” Laura said.  “And that makes me furious and also really sad because the community is only breathing with one lung when its women are oppressed.”

What is more, Laura explained, covering does not reflect male control or voiceless women.  Wearing a hijab is a choice made by a practicing Muslim woman and centered on preserving the modesty and the integrity of the female body.  In many regards, covering is an assertion of power by women to reclaim their bodies and reject notions of sexual objectification.  It encourages men—who also observe modesty requirements— and women to focus on one’s actions, character, and intelligence, rather than one’s outward appearance. Laura, like other hijabis find covering to be liberating. 

Since 2001, Islamic conversion rates in the United States have skyrocketed, with three in four converts being women.   “After 9/11 Islam has been on center stage and everybody wants to know what is Islam?  Who are these terrorists?  Who are Muslims?” Laura said.  “So people look into it expecting to find these horrible terrorists and they come out finding themselves.  I think 9/11 has only increased the opportunity for learning and dialogue," she said. 

While Life as a female Muslim-American in a post 9/11 world is complex at best, Laura has never regretted her decision to convert.  In recent months, the swing of the pendulum has slowed to an occasional twitch, goaded more by cultural discrepancies than inner unrest.  At twenty-one, she understands her purpose in life as learning about God by compassionately serving His creation.   “Islam, for me feels like I have discovered the truth,” she said.