The Bagel Jihad and other Worries
Being Sheryl Siddiqui
By Barry Friedman
(Earlier abridged version first appeared in The Tulsa Voice)
Sheryl Siddiqui, spokesperson for the Islamic Council of Oklahoma, wants only black tea.
“One of my big jihads is training myself to only eat when I'm hungry.”
We’re at Old School Bagel Cafe.
“Are you sure?” I ask, offering to split my salt bagel.
“I’m fine.”
“Jihad?”
“Struggle.”
“So where do we begin?”
“This is just me, Sheryl, okay? I’m only speaking for myself—not in any official capacity.”
“In this environment, in Oklahoma, though, is that possible? Can you ever just be Sheryl?”
She smiles.
“I am one of the daughters of the American Revolution,” says this Muslim woman in a hijab (headscarf) from across the booth.
Come again.
“Back in the battle of Lexington,” says the former Sheryl Harrington, “there were two Jonathan Harringtons, and my family was related to one of them, as such we have direct bloodlines to the American Revolution.”
“That’s astonishing, considering you’re the go-to Muslim every time someone in the media needs one. They call you. What’s that like?”
“Wicked. Just wicked. God forbid, somebody see me when I’m doing something else.”
“Something else?”
“Yes, like being human. I’m so imperfect.”
Siddiqui is on the board of The Oklahoma Center for Community & Justice (OCCJ), of the Oklahoma Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR-OK). She was a chairperson of Tulsa Partners Inc’s Language & Culture Bank, worked on First Amendment issues, and has volunteered her time to combat domestic violence response. She also advocates for mental health and wants to spend more time pursuing her passion: disaster mitigation. She is married to neonatologist Dr. Ali Siddiqui, has three married sons and five grandchildren.
“I’m not a perfect parent. My husband and I look at each other and say, ‘Thank God, HE was in the equation, because we didn’t know what we were doing.”
She is a Muslim by choice.
“We are often seen, you and I, Jews and Muslims, as guests in this community.”
“Yeah, but you’re on the team,” she says, laughing.
“Right we have the hyphen … Judeo—Christian. You’re still waiting for yours.”
“My family came here in 1640, so we were here before there was a United States of America, so I feel ownership. You can’t make me a minority,” she says, still laughing. “You can’t marginalize me.”
“Tulsa has a diverse Muslim population: from more than 40 countries, three Native American Tribes, well over half are American born, one third are African American. How can anyone think that we are monolithic in our thinking, politics or practice?”
And, yet, that’s exactly what people think and why it’s her phone that rings when a Moore woman’s throat is slashed by a man yelling in Arabic. The FBI, local police called it workplace violence (1)—not terrorism—but it doesn’t matter.
He (2) said the “silent majority” of Muslims who have not commented on the beheading in Moore, as well as the terrorist acts of the Islamic State group, or ISIL, are “just like Germans” who joined the Nazis when the Nazis came into power.
That’s State Senator John Bennett (R-Sallisaw) being a clodpate.
“He has legitimacy because he’s an elected official,” she says, “even though he’s an elected official yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre.”
But she has to be careful about pushing back, even against the crazies, even, as it turns out, against a just now re-elected governor who didn’t criticize Bennett for those comments. Siddiqui is a daughter of the American Revolution, sure, but she is also wearing a hijab.
“If I am critical, I’m not patriotic.”
She’ll say it anyway.
“This is a white Christian businessman's state. Not for women, not for kids. And the hate mongers are so well-funded.”
Siddiqui has no—she repeats this often—no problem with the local media in Tulsa.
“In my experience, Tulsa media sees our diversity, our projects with OCCJ. We’re a part of their lives. Further, the leadership over the years in town—police chiefs, mayors, superintendents—we’ve had no trouble whatsoever.”
Maybe a little.
The first, of course, is with FOX News.
“NOT local,” she insists, making the distinction with FOX 23, “not local—national. And they have an agenda.”
Then there’s the matter of Bill Sherman, Tulsa World Religion Writer.
“They both use a similar tactic,” she says, “when addressing any issue that in any way relates to Islam: they find someone they know, whose credentials are not respected by mainstream Muslims, and then play their distorted perspectives against a respected Muslim scholar or leader as if the two are equals. And when stories are covered by these reporters, the hater always gets the last word.”
Sherman, obviously, sees it another way. By email he told me, “In the case of Rep. John Bennett, I think Oklahoma needs to know what he is really saying and what his opponents (CAIR, etc.) are saying, without my opinion about it. I leave that to the editorial writers. I'm sure that Sheryl Siddiqui, whom I consider a friend, would rather I blast the Bennetts of the world, or not give them a voice. But when I'm quoting her, I'm sure she wants me to be accurate and fair.”
Not to speak for Siddiqui, but methinks it’s not the accuracy of your reporting she’s objecting to, as much as it is the gentility with which you cover these nutjobs.
I looked at about a dozen of Sherman’s reports and his blog—called, wait for it, The God Blog (and am I the only one bothered by that?)—and Siddiqui has a point. While there was nothing anti-Islamic in any of his writings, not even close, the moral equivalency and dismissiveness—at one point in a blog entitled News out of Africa a PR nightmare for Muslims, he reassures us that Adam Soltani, executive director of the Oklahoma Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic is a “thoroughly American guy”(3)--was disturbing.
What exactly does that mean--thoroughly American? Is that a look? Does Barack Obama have it? Bobby Jindal?
Two other examples:
In Some readers unhappy with report on Muslim holiday (4) Sherman writes that he reports “without compromising my own faith” and “If I only covered people I agreed with, I’d have very little to write about.”
For the love of Allah, you make that statement in a column about Muslims? We’re to assume, then, that these are the people with which you don’t agree, but will still deign to write about? (What a prince!) Which brings up another point: Since when is someone’s personal faith a standard for religious, or any other kind of, reporting? To put it another way: who cares if reporting on other’s religious practices or beliefs compromises Sherman’s faith?
In Moore beheading has Muslim community reeling (5) Sherman, in fact, maddeningly gives both moderate Muslims and Bennett equal time, first describing Muslims as “defensive” about the attack and then characterizing Bennett as someone who is “warning Oklahomans about the dangers of what he sees as a growing Islamic influence in the state.”
“Warning”? Please. This is putrid, incendiary hatred and should be called out and pelted with sanctimony and rotten fruit (if you’ve got)—especially in a blog.
We continue.
Rabbi Sherman (no relation), formerly of Temple Israel, who has known and worked with Siddiqui for more than two decades, sees a parallel between Judaism and Islam and understands the frustration.
“It is a terrible bind,” he says, “and we have to be on their side. We know what it’s like to be a minority. We are children and grandchildren of those Jews who suffered with the same problems of assimilation that Muslims are going through now. We’ve had a one- or two- generation head start. I think, similarly, there may need to be a reformed Muslim movement, just as there was a reformed Jewish movement. And that can only happen in America.”
“Do I foresee Oklahoma Muslims splitting into congregations defined by level of observance?” asks Siddiqui, referring to the Reformed, Conservative, and Orthodox movements in Judaism.
“God knows. I hope not.”
“I think that there's goodness and spiritual health by having the whole bell-curve represented in each mosque. We know who the worker-bees are, we know who knows more Quran than we do, who drinks or gambles, who really loves kids, who is looking for a spouse, who loves our community so much that they'll walk out of a meeting and slam the door because the rest of us just don't get it. That … I can live with.”
And she must live with the Bennetts, too.
“I denounce those acts of terrorism because I’m Islamic. Here’s the chapter, here’s the verse in the Quran. Here’s Muhammad’s teachings on it, but it doesn’t fit the narrative of Muslims as killers, murderers.”
It’s a dynamic unique to Muslims in America.
Nobody ever asked the Reverend Mouzon Biggs to distance mainstream Christianity, generally, and Boston Avenue United Methodist Church, specifically, from the Nazis or the KKK, both of whom thought themselves Christian. It was absurd, insulting to think there was a connection. Mouzon Biggs never appeared in an article where a Grand Wizard of the KKK got the last word.
The work, Siddiqui says, is getting harder.
“Emotional, heavy work, personally injurious, because I feel inadequate in such a way that I will never get through to someone with a closed mind. That’s the part that hurts.”
“My family wants me to get out of here as fast I can get out, because there’s never a week they call me, there isn’t some hateful thing going on. I used to have normal weeks. There are no normal weeks anymore.”
Yet, she talks of meeting and working with Tulsans who are the cream of society, the people who care, the visionaries and the “joy” it gives her. She wants me to know about Allison Moore, Director of the Surayya Anne Foundation, a women's shelter run by Muslim women serving women of all backgrounds, and Zaheer Arastu, Principal of Peace Academy here in Tulsa, running around the gym with kids.
“Okies might find that we're not teaching the next generation of Muslims what Bennett thinks we are.”
There’s the hope.
Here’s the despair.
“But how do you prepare kids to be successful in a state where they are enemy number one?”
(1) http://www.tulsaworld.com/... Oklahoma lawmaker John Bennett doubles down on anti-Muslim vitriol at tea party event
(2) http://kfor.com/... FBI: Oklahoma beheading not linked to terrorism
(3) http://www.tulsaworld.com/... News out of Africa a PR nightmare for Muslims
(4) http://www.tulsaworld.com/... Some readers unhappy with report on Muslim holiday
(5) http://www.tulsaworld.com/... Moore beheading has Muslim community reeling