See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
“Nur Noori” was born a Muslim but she didn’t want to die as one.
“I felt trapped in the body of a Muslim, I had to renounce Islam,” says the Brooklyn resident who converted to Christianity after marrying an American, a move that divorced her from her family.
Nur’s journey to freedom has spanned continents. She was born in East Africa into a Shiite family that emigrated to Canada in the late 1960s, amid an early wave of immigrant Muslims to the Americas.
At school, she was bullied and subjected to racism. At home, it was the same story. She wasn’t allowed to look her father in the eye. She was forbidden western friends. Her curfew began when school was over. And her mother began arranging a marriage when she reached puberty, considering only light-complexioned bachelors because of a rigorous caste system.
“We shunned whites, but admired fair-skinned Muslims, even if they were deadbeats,” says Nur.
Her teenage years were spent despairing her twin environments and fending off “blank-eyed” suitors.
“I would come home from school and find some stranger and his family waiting to check me out,” she says.
One 40-something came courting for her older sister, but wanted 15-year-old Nur instead.
“My mother didn’t mind, as long as he took one of us off her hands,” she says.
Another aberration, Nur states, were the religious rites that were at odds with her adopted homeland.
“At Shiite wakes, mourners would be knifing themselves until they bled,” she says. “But outside, the whites would be walking around, laughing and joking.”
Nur longed to quit her religion-based culture, but an unmarried Muslim girl leaving her family was the ultimate dishonor. The turning point came when her 16-year-old cousin was married off to a Muslim man from Kenya, on the say-so of a matchmaker.
“My aunt and uncle gave her on a silver platter to total strangers,” says Nur, whose cousin moved to Africa after the wedding to live with her in-laws.
But her letters home soon stopped, prompting worried relatives to show up unannounced on the family’s doorstep in Nairobi.
“They found my cousin starved and beaten,” says Nur.
The marriage, she adds, was annulled, and her cousin — no longer a virgin — had to marry a much older man or be cast out socially.
“She became a prostitute because she had no support system,” says Nur, who was motivated enough to head to the U.S. and start a new life — at great cost.
“I had to give up my family to be true to myself,” she says, shrugging of the Muslim laws that condemn dissenters such as her to death. “I blame the backward Muslim culture for that.”
Next week: The Muslims, Part III — a global future inextricably linked to Islam.
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