For three months, Asra Nomani has been defying convention at the mosque she attends — by walking through the front door.
Nomani, a journalist who has written for the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, is trying to change a rule that women should enter the Morgantown mosque through a side staircase and pray separately from the men. A growing number of mosques have such rules.
"I can interview the Taliban," said Nomani, 38, "but I can't walk through the front door of my mosque."
Before ever approaching the front door, Nomani asked the mosque's board of trustees for equal access for women. But when she later went to the mosque, the board president stood at the front door and said, "Sister, please, the back entrance," Nomani noted in a discrimination complaint she filed with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
About three months ago, Nomani, her mother and her 12-year-old niece rejected the women's entrance for the front door.
Once inside, the women chose not to pray in a balcony built for women in the rear of the mosque — where the main prayer space cannot be seen. Instead, they began praying under the same vaulted, sunny ceiling as the men — but several feet behind them.
"The men interrupted the start of 'taraweeh' prayer," Nomani recalled in the discrimination complaint. "A man said, `We cannot pray until she leaves.' A group of men told my father to tell me to leave. He said he would not.
"Four men assembled around me and told me to leave. Two men took positions directly behind me and started to pray. One of the men assembled around me asked in an intimidating way whether I wanted to remain with these men behind me. Another man poked his finger at me and spoke to me in a threatening way. I remained."
Nomani and her father, Zafar, a professor emeritus of nutrition at West Virginia University, mosque founder and current board member, recently filed a police complaint saying that one man in the congregation yelled at her, called Zafar Nomani an idiot and waved his arms at them before other members of the congregation restrained him.
"If women are not treated with respect and dignity in our mosques, we have failed," Zafar Nomani said. "I am concerned not only about women but the second generation of immigrant children growing up in America."
Asad Khan, acting president of the mosque's board, said a meeting on the issue will be held soon but declined further comment until after the meeting.
Morgantown's mosque is among a growing number of U.S. mosques that put women behind a partition or in another room to pray. In 1994, 52 percent of mosques had such a practice, but that rose to 66 percent in 2000, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The world's holiest mosque — in Mecca — allows women and men to pray together, said Nomani, who has prayed there. She was born in India and lived in New Jersey before moving to West Virginia.