It’s not just lunch for these strong Muslim women
Their laughter reverberated over the clatter of cups and silverware, drifting past the lunch-hour cacophony of La Madeleine.
The women were gathered round a rustic wooden table, nursing oversized blue cups of cappuccino and tall glasses of iced tea. They greeted each other all at once, words colliding and clashing, like schoolgirls at a cafeteria table.
It had been a few weeks since their last get-together, and there was much territory to cover.
As always, their con- versation would dart like quicksilver from one topic to another. Career women and community activists, outspoken and irreverent, rooted to Houston and proud of their roots, they refute stereotypes simply by being themselves.
Lately, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, Calif., and election-year rhetoric vilifying Muslims, their talk has turned time and again to those stereotypes, to frustration with media tropes of oppressed women veiled from head to toe in black, to the pain caused
by the hostile stares of strangers, to the sorrow of seeing their children made to feel unwelcome in their own country. But first things first. Someone threw out a question inspired by Saira Jilani’s latest Netflix obsession: Who are you on “Friends”?
“A little of all of them,” said Bibi Khan, who wore a peach hijab and ready smile.
“I ask my kids: ‘Who am I?’ and they say, without hesitation, Monica,” confided Jilani. “I look at her and go: That is so me, so OCD about everything.”
“Let’s talk about who Lily is,” Khan proposed with a mischievous gleam.
They considered Lily Nasar, whose blond hair is pulled back into a bun. “Rachel?” suggested Jilani. “Phoebe?” countered Khan’s daughter, Safra.
“She’s a cross between Rachel and Phoebe,” decreed Khan, as they all broke into laughter and leaped to the next subject.
Don’t get the wrong idea. They are not just ladies who lunch. This is a group to be reckoned with.
Jilani, on sabbatical after 20 years in the corporate world, serves as program director for Speak Up, a group that raises awareness of social issues affecting Muslims. Bibi Khan, a former credit analyst and social services chair for the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, is planning a citywide unity rally, one of the 19 projects-and-counting on her plate. Her daughter, a University of Houston business major, is helping set up a mental health center, where Fatima Sultan, a licensed therapist, will provide counseling. Along with Nasar and Afshan Jilani, Saira’s mother, they all recently staged an interfaith meet-and-greet between Muslims and Christians.
Like many Houstonians, their journey to this city began in other places. Saira Jilani, who was born in London and moved around the world for her engineer father’s work, came to Houston as a high school sophomore. Khan, the daughter of Guyanese immi- grants of Indian descent, grew up in Queens, N.Y., and moved to Houston in 1996, looking for a family-friendly city for her children. Sultan was 6 months old when her Pakistani parents left Chicago and settled in Kingwood.
Bibi Khan and her daughter choose to wear head scarves; the others do not. Nasar, married to a Pakistani man, is a convert; the rest were born into Muslim families.
About two years ago, they were brought together through community service with the AnAnisa Hope Center, a domestic violence prevention agency founded by Bibi Khan and named after the fourth chapter of the Quran, an Arabic word that — fittingly — means “The Women.”
As An-Nisa gradually expanded to include mental health services, ESL classes and a food pantry, the relationships deepened, and the women began taking on leadership roles in the community. Among their recent projects: an all-day conference exploring issues of identity among American Muslims, a cultural sensitivity workshop for Houston Police Department cadets, and a “human library” event where nonMuslims could learn more about Islam.
The friends now spend “a lot of time together,” joked Nasar. “A. Lot. Of. Time.”
Their lunches, usually on Fridays before or after services at the mosque, are a time to debrief, decompress and digress. At this recent gathering, they were still buzzing from the success of the interfaith event at Cypress Creek Christian Church and Community Center.
“Everyone across the board has the same issues. Everyone goes through difficult times,” Khan said, recalling a conversation with a Christian woman who had dealt with problems with her children.
“As humans, we are all the same,” said Afshan Jilani. “We are one.”
That, her daughter said, was the point of a recent workshop in Kingwood, called “A Day in the Life of a Muslim.”
There, she talked about her husband’s contributions to housework.
“He makes me breakfast in the morning. He makes the bed, and he does laundry,” Saira Jilani recounted. “I’m saying this and two ladies in the audience. Their faces …”
“Their jaws dropped,” finished Khan.
“They were like … What?” Jilani continued. “A Muslim man? APakistani man? Does this for you? Sultan jumped in. “If people knew how many Muslim men are so scared of their wives …,” she paused, her words interrupted by peals of laughter. “They would be like, what’s going on here? They have no idea.”
“Just think of our friends,” mused Khan. “Women are more aggressive than their husbands. Let’s be real.”
“Maybe it’s us,” Sultan teased. “Have you thought about that?”
Another round of raucous laughter.
“Want to hear something funny?” asked Khan, now on a roll. “So, one day I decided I was going to vacuum.”
“One day! After 20 years!” her daughter chided with affection. “I was shocked.”
Khan tossed her a side-eye glance.
“Let me go back to my vacuum story,” she said, undeterred by the teasing. “I decided one day, because my husband usually vacuums and all that, today I’m going to do it.” Sultan could not resist. “Do you know how to turn it on is the question?”
Khan did not miss a beat. “That was the problem.”
“I knew it!” Sultan cheered, as the table dissolved into chuckles. “I knew it!”
About 45 minutes in, after the talk swerved from housework and husbands to the appeal of the HPD cadets and men in uniforms, the tone got political. And personal.
The day before, news broke that the militant Islamic group known as ISIS had called for the assassination of Clear Lake leader Waleed Basyouni. It was a reminder of the threat posed by extremists — and the shadow cast on all Muslims.
“These people who are in ISIS hate those of us who are American Muslims, who are good Muslims,” noted Afshan Jilani.
“Not just American, everyone,” said Sultan. “It’s horrible.”
“They are not Muslim,” added Khan. “The moment they have an intention of doing something like this, we don’t consider them Muslim anymore.”
“I feel like terror has no name, no face, no nothing,” agreed Jilani. “They are doing it for their own agenda, a political agenda, and they make everyone else with that religion look bad.”
“No one on this planet hates this group more than our people,” Sultan said, emotion spilling from her voice.
As the threat from ISIS and radical terrorists has grown, so has the hostility toward Muslims in this country. A hostility, the women lamented, felt most acutely by their children.
Sultan described her 12-yearold daughter cringing at news reports of violent incidents, praying “Please don’t let it be a Muslim.”
Jilani described her 8-year-old son coming to her after a speech by Donald Trump and asking, “Do we have to pack up?
“You were born here,” she told him. “You are so American to the core. We have a picture of you in a cowboy hat.”
“The kids get the rough part of this. They are the ones out there,” Sultan sighed. “They’re in school. They have to hear names. They have to hear teachers say crazy things that are not close to the truth.”
She glanced around the table, at the women nodding, at the friends who in a few moments would encircle a fruit tart decorated with three candles and sing her “Happy Birthday.”
“This is my circle. No one is going to say anything like that to me.”