Allison Moore grew up, as she says, in the buckle of the Bible Belt in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sixteen years ago she converted to Islam and has been active ever since in the Tulsa chapter of Interfaith Alliance, a multifaith-based organization that works to protect the boundaries between religion and the government, as well as fight against the threat that religious extremism poses to individual rights. Part of a community of grass-roots activists, she volunteers to speak before the public and to politicians about misconceptions surrounding Islam.

Q. What led you to convert to Islam?

I was raised Episcopalian. When I married a Muslim man from Lebanon, I wanted to covert him to Christianity. I studied the Qu’ran to find its weaknesses and instead found God’s word, and reluctantly I converted. My family was a little shocked. I didn’t convert for my husband but because I truly believed it was God’s message. My life would be a hundred percent easier if I were Christian. Easier with my own family and society at large. I have since divorced and remarried a Catholic, who himself has become Muslim.

Q. Why do you say you “reluctantly” converted?

Growing in your religious faith is a slow process. I took baby steps. When I first converted, I started praying five times a day. In the next year I began to fast. But I faced more challenges with letting go of my culture, part of which included dress. Ten years into it, as I wanted to give myself up more to God, I dressed more conservatively and thought about wearing the headscarf. I struggled to give up vanity. It’s no different than a nun who puts on a habit to think less of herself and her appearance and more about others. About a year ago, I decided to wear it full time.

I have to admit it’s not easy going out in public and have people stare and say, ‘You’re not one of those Muslims, are you? Why do you wear that thing on your head?’ I have to give them something they can relate to. I smile and explain that just as Mary the mother of Jesus wore a scarf as an act of piety, so do we. I have a young daughter who we’ve raised Muslim and she chooses not to wear the headscarf, which is fine.

Q Why do you think the headscarf bothers people?

Christian women worry that veiled Muslim women are oppressed, but it’s non-Muslims employers who won’t hire women if they don a scarf, so they’re the ones discriminating against them. If people see the veil as oppressive, we see it as liberating, because we don’t have to conform to stereotypical standards of beauty. Things such as Saudi women not being allowed to drive are cultural restrictions, not religious.

Q. What other challenges do American Muslims face?

The biggest hurdle I’ve had to jump as an American Muslim is getting out and educating the public about what Islam stands for. Out of some 600,000 people in Tulsa only about 5,000 to 8,000 are Muslim. It’s a vibrant community, but because we’re a minority, we don’t have funding or a vast publicity department. So while many of us are trying to educate the public about our culture and faith, far more powerful forces are ‘educating’ the public against us. So I feel we’re losing the pr battle. Many people have a real misunderstanding of Islam and view Muslims as the current representation of evil in the world. Jihad, for example, which is the struggle of a person trying to be good on a daily basis, the media says means holy war. The media’s focus is on extreme radicals, who represent less than one percent of the people in our faith.

Q. How has this misunderstanding played itself out in Tulsa?

Last year for the centennial of Oklahoma, a local Baptist group bestowed Bibles with the centennial seal as a gift to our state’s elected officials. The Governor’s Ethnic American Advisory Council and the local Muslim community decided to send Qu’rans with the centennial seal, which the Muslim community paid for, selecting an edition that provided explanation of all the verses because they are so often taken out of context. An email went out asking the officials if they wished to receive the gift and several dozen declined. One of them, Republican state representative Rex Duncan, told The Tulsa World he couldn’t support a religion that endorsed the killing of women and children.

Nowhere does the Qu’ran state such a thing. Everyone was concerned about where Duncan was getting his information. We couldn’t let a comment like that go unattested. We held a press conference at the mosque and had a great showing of the Interfaith community. In the end, Duncan still didn’t accept the Qu’ran and a few other state officials followed suit, but we never had a problem with anyone’s refusal, it was the bigoted comments.

Q. Has the situation improved?

Anti-Muslim sentiment has gone up in the last year. For a while the White House stopped constantly pairing the word “terrorist” with “Islamic,” but at the Republican convention, the entire party was at it again. Why not call these people simply “terrorists”? It’s a double standard. After abortion center bombings we never hear the people who planted the bomb referred to as “Christian terrorists.” That’s because people know true Christianity does not sanction such acts. The same is certainly true in Islam.

Q. Have you witnessed or experienced harassment?

I have a lot of friends who have been called terrorists in stores. One friend was chased in her car in the Wal-Mart parking lot by guys screaming at her to go back home. What’s ironic is that she was born here. This is her home. But hate is blind.

Just last month, an organization called the Clarion Fund sent copies of an extremely anti-Muslim film to 28 million homes in presidential election swing states, basically to scare the wits out of people and make them vote Republican. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has asked for an SEC investigation regarding the group’s tax-exempt status and this controversy. CAIR has also reported a significant increase in workplace-related incidents against Muslims. The climate seems so bad at times, that some of my Christian friends have offered to hide me and my family should any large- scale lashing out occur, God forbid.

Q. What gives you hope?

The essence of pure religion is not divisive. Mankind is divisive. Despite everything, the Interfaith community here in Tulsa is strong and vibrant, with Hindus, Buddhist, Jews, Muslims, and Christians and none of them are giving up their individual religious identity but working together as one community. It serves as a model that it can be done.

Visit: www.interfaithalliance.org

Past Close Up Articles
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Rais Bhuiyan, survivor