Islam's Female Converts
"In addition, she, not her father or male relatives, as had been the custom, was to receive the dowry from her husband. She became a party to the contract rather than an object for sale," Esposito wrote. "The right to keep and maintain her dowry was a source of self-esteem and wealth in an otherwise male-dominated society. Women's right to own and manage their own property was further enhanced and acknowledged by Quranic verses of inheritance which granted inheritance rights to wives, daughters, sisters and grandmothers of the deceased in a patriarchal society where all rights were traditionally vested solely in male heirs. Similar legal rights would not occur in the West until the 19th century."
Esther Bourne, a 46-year-old accountant in Manhattan, was raised Catholic by her American mother after her British father died when she was 6. Spiritually inclined from a young age, she said she first read the Quran in her mid-20s, because her former husband, a Muslim, owned a copy. "I would go in and out of it," she said.
By her mid-30s, after ending an abusive relationship and enduring the tragic death of a man she loved dearly, Bourne said she began a spiritual quest that included classes on Islam at a mosque on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "When the teachers would explain, my heart just accepted it," she said. "The heart believed it."
In 1992, at the age of 36, Bourne took her shahada, the profession of faith that is the first of the five pillars of Islam. "I don't have panic anymore, and if some misfortune happens, I just accept the decree from Allah," Bourne said.
"You slowly adjust yourself to an Islamic way of life, thinking about God, doing good deeds,” Amatullah said. "Some days I do it better than others."
Amina Mohammed, a 58-year-old dental assistant at the Veterans Administration hospital in St. Albans, has been a Muslim for more than 20 years. She was born Doris Gregory, the daughter of an American Indian mother and a Jamaican father, and was raised as a Lutheran. She said she stopped going to church when she was 16.
Two years later, she began an active spiritual quest by reading about Buddhism, Hinduism and American Indian religions, but, she said, none of them was what she was looking for -- a way to pray to one God in one form. "I was so disappointed," she said. "I knew that there was a correct religion, but I just hadn't found it. But I believed in God -- I was no atheist."
In her mid-30s, after two failed marriages and two daughters -- who are now 27 and 33 -- she said she felt a desperate need for spiritual direction and coincidentally was exposed for the first time to Islam. "This is what I had always felt in my heart," she said.
For about three years she studied the religion; she began to cut down on dating and to cover her head occasionally. Then she went to a mosque in Manhattan and "saw women from different countries and from different races praying together," she said. "I thought this is how it should be on earth."
Amatullah, who lives in St. Albans, has been married and divorced three times since she converted to Islam. Her first husband was from Sudan, the second was from Egypt and the third was Italian-American; all were Muslim. Allah gives both men and women the right to divorce, she said, and she initiated each split.
Although the Quran does not prohibit women from gaining an education or having a career, the converts said, it is a woman's primary responsibility to take care of her children.
"Look at the Western society of today with the breakdown of family, the mother being out of the home and the children being alone," said Bourne, who is single and has a 28-year-old son. "I had problems because I practically had to raise my son alone."
Their faith, the three converts said, has not been shaken by the Sept. 11 attacks, carried out by men who said they were acting as Muslims. The distortion of Islam by extremists and terrorists, the women stressed, should not lead to the condemnation of a great religion.
"To kill innocent lives," Amatullah said, "is anti-Islamic."