By Julia Priest
News-Sentinel staff writer

Shahnah is a resident of two cultures. She occupies parallel worlds.

Each day, like any other young mother, she gets up, prepares breakfast, dresses and feeds her young sons, and prepares them for school. She sends her husband off to his job as a customer services supervisor.

She gets dressed, choosing a lightweight sweater with long sleeves, and jersey calf-length skirt — the autumn days are cooler now. She then heads to her job as a resource specialist with the Galt Joint Union Elementary School District, finishing in time to be home for her boys.

But when she enters her Lodi home each evening, she changes. She dons the traditional garb of her homeland, northwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border. She observes the traditions of her faith, and at home or among family she covers herself in a modest flowing gown.

That day, the family will meet at the home of her grandfather, around 5 p.m. for their first meal of the day. It is Ramadan, and the family will not eat or drink from sunup to sundown.

Shahnah, like hundreds of Muslim women living in Lodi, is struggling with a clash of cultures. The women were brought up in a tradition which tells women from birth that their place is in the home and that modesty is paramount.

They are prohibited from social interaction with men outside their families and even the selection of a life partner is not a matter of their own choosing.<

Yet they live in Lodi, in a larger society where girls and boys clad in shorts and T-shirts play contact sports together at school, where ubiquitous advertising emphasizes sex, and where marriages are sometimes a matter of whim.

In the name of assimilation, they feel compelled to behave in a way that is incompatible with their beliefs, and see their children drifting further away from the core of their cultural identity.

(In researching these issues, a News-Sentinel writer faced challenges in getting close to local Pakistani women. Access was sometimes denied, and always questioned, and in most cases the women themselves did not want to be identified or have their names used. None of the women interviewed for this story consented to have their photographs taken, since publicity of any kind is deemed to be inimical to the rule of modesty.)

Still, some bend the ties of tradition, and go to work and to school so they can learn to function here. Others are not so bold, or are more bound by strict tradition, so they remain isolated.

In a pervasive irony, they remain bound in their homes by the inability to connect with public services and benefits, in a country which celebrates freedom of choice and equal access to social services.

One family, though, invited a writer into their home and shared some of the story of their life as it is today, removed by a culture apart, and by the thousands of miles separating Lodi from Pakistan.

Geographically speaking, the local climate and land are similar, but the society is a world apart.

Shahnah Shah, who lives in Lodi with her husband, Fiaz, and sons Isaac, 5, and Rehan, 3, came from Pakistan as an infant. Her uncle had come first, then her grandparents, and other family members followed. They were poor in Pakistan and opportunities were limited, so her parents brought her here.

When her uncle, Johnny Khan, arrived in 1950, he was one of only a handful of Pakistani men in Lodi. Now there are more than 200 members of her family in the community.

She grew up in the culture of her family, but adapted and assimilated, taking on those features of American culture that allowed her to sustain her family here.

When she attended Lodi High School, she went straight home after school, never to dances or social functions. Swimming was off-limits, as were physical games involving boys.

Later, she drove to classes each day at California State University, Sacramento, grateful for the new car her father had bought her. Her brother was a student also, but his was an older, less reliable used car. Her father had made a choice, she said: A new car would be safer, and less likely to break down, so there would be less chance of her coming in contact with a man outside her family.

In fact, a woman who is touched in an inappropriate way by a man outside her family is considered tainted. In some extreme cases, she would be shunned and outcast, even by her family.

A woman or girl who was a victim of sexual assault, even by an invader in her own home, would be subject to shame, as would her family.

“She would never be married,” Shahnah Shah said.

Physical contact with men other than relatives is strictly forbidden in Islamic culture once a girl reaches the age of puberty. This poses a problem for many young Muslim girls today, as American public schools are co-ed.

Shahnah’s husband, Fiaz, a friendly, welcoming man who works two jobs, came here in 1987, and feels lucky to have attended adult school.

He offered the visitor a plate of Karai-Teka, a skewer of grilled spiced beef cubes with vegetables, explaining that in Muslim culture, it is considered polite to offer food to any guest in the home at any time, and to refuse the food would be a sign of disrespect.

Adults attending school in Pakistan would be scoffed at, Fiaz Shah said.

“If you show a few gray hairs, people will ask, ‘What are you doing in school? Why don’t you take care of your family and pay attention to your prayers?’ ”

While women in Pakistan are encouraged to become educated, Shah said, here their options might be limited by the availability of segregated schools. In Lodi, there are none.

“girls are missing out on education, which they would receive if they were in an Islamic country, because separate educational facilities would be available,” Fiaz Shah said.

As a result, girls may suffer from a lack of education in this country, said Fiaz Shah, who also serves as a bilingual instructor at Lodi Middle School.

The solution is that many girls are withdrawn from public school by about the seventh grade, he said. They are schooled at home, since there are no private Islamic girls schools in Lodi or nearby.

The Lodi Mosque has plans to build a new center on Lower Sacramento Road which will include a school for Islamic education and a separate women’s area for prayer. At this time, there is no place where girls may attend classes segregated from the boys.

There is a large Mosque in Sacramento, which permits worship by women, but since the Lodi Mosque is not large enough to have separate facilities for them, women are not permitted there.

While Shahnah Shah grew up and was educated here, for many Pakistani women who came here as adults, the experience is different.

In deeply traditional Muslim homes, there is an adage: “Women come out of their houses twice in their lives; Once to be married, and once to be buried.”

Mohammed Adil, interim imam of Lodi Mosque, said this extreme view is not held by many in this country. But many of the social constraints of the culture are practiced here.

Women generally don’t leave the house when their husbands aren’t home, Adil said. Shopping, going to the doctor, taking the kids to school would be permitted, necessary activities, but otherwise, the woman should stay in the home and attend to the family and children, he said.

Visiting a friend or going out to see a movie alone would not be acceptable journeys.

“Women only do those things with their husbands,” he said.

The cycle begins and ends with the same issues: Communication and education. Women may be isolated, partly because of language. They could improve their English if they could go to adult school, but they don’t go because it would require them to come into contact with men.

There is a class for English as a second language at Heritage School, but since it is publicly funded, the law prohibits officials from excluding men from the class. Husbands and fathers in traditional homes object if classes are co-ed, and would not allow their women to attend.

Many miss out on basic services, such as health care, transportation and social services because they can’t ask for them in English, or they are prohibited from using them because of the possibility of contact with men.

Dependent on their spouses by tradition and by education, many of these recent transplants to the immodest culture of America are more restricted than in their homeland, Faiz Shah said.

While in Pakistan, a woman would seldom be left alone; here things are different. Families are separated by geography, and grandmothers, aunts and cousins who might be around to help may not be available here.

If there is an emergency, and the husband is not home, a traditional woman could be in trouble, Faiz Shah said.

“They don’t even know how to dial 911,” he said. “They would not know how to talk to the operator if they did.”

Yasmeen, which is not her real name, came to Lodi about 10 years ago, with her husband and three children. Educated in Pakistan, she found work here, and has raised her family in the transitional culture.

Her daughter, Najwa, also a pseudonym, is 18 and looking forward to marriage, which was arranged by her parents well in advance. The selection of a husband is not up to the daughter, Yasmeen said.

In theory, girls are permitted to express a dissenting opinion, and are never forced to accept the parents’ choice, but the selection begins and ends with her parents.

“Most of us have arranged marriages, and they’ve worked out pretty good,” said Nasim Khan, former president of the Lodi Mosque.

Khan cited the high divorce rate in America and low divorce rate among Muslims. Divorce is severely frowned upon and, while it is allowed, it is not commonplace.

Arranged marriages are based on hundreds of years of culture, he said.

“It’s a system that works.”

While marriages are based on criteria apart from romance, love and devotion are valued in the family.

“We fall in love after marriage, so once you fall in love, there’s no turning back,” Nasim Khan said.

Aman Khan, president of the Lodi Mosque, shed some light on the premium set on modesty in the Muslim culture: Women are supposed to wear a hat or scarf whenever leaving the house. Although it is the practice in parts of the Middle East, Pakistani women don’t have to cover their entire face.

Women are to wear very loose-fitting clothing, so loose that their shape cannot be distinguished.

“When you go out in public, you don’t know what men are thinking. Men may be tempted more than women,” he said.

Men are not required to cover themselves like women do because women are trusted to be faithful, Aman Khan said.

Neither men nor women are to gawk at someone of the opposite sex. “It’s OK to look at them once, but not twice,” Aman Khan said.

Samir (not his real name), a 20-year-old San Joaquin Delta College student, was chosen as a prospective groom because of his character and his family’s assets. His parents, in turn agreed to accept Najwa into their family for her good qualities. The two have met and are allowed to see one another in social situations, such as family gatherings, or at school, but they do not date.

“There is no word for dating in our dictionary,” Yasmeen said.

Boys and girls do not have this kind of meeting or interaction before marriage; there is no hand-holding, or time spent alone together.

Before marriage, girls are expected to live at home with their mothers, said Yasmeen, not to have an independent life. It is their responsibility to remain at home, and remain chaste.

Girls may marry as young as 16, but most parents prefer them to be more mature, and they should remain at home until the wedding day.

The wedding of Najwa and Samir will take place some time next year. It will be in the traditional style, but nothing like what it would be in their homeland, where a wedding is a joyful occasion celebrated by all the families involved and shared in by the community.

Yasmeen misses this aspect of her culture more than almost any other, she said.

She expects her daughter to stay in America.

“She will not return to Pakistan,” she said.

For herself, she appreciates the opportunities life here has brought her. “We are able to send money home, to help those who are less fortunate back in our country, and I am grateful for that.”

News-Sentinel staff writer Ross Farrow contributed to this story.

Contents

»Pakistanis leave their native land to find Lodi
»Pakistani men adjust to life in Lodi
»Lodi’s Pakistani women struggle with clash of cultures
»Educator explains background of women’s modesty
»Young Pakistani Americans find themselves caught between cultures
»Pakistani police officers in Lodi bridge cultural gaps
»Lodi Muslim Mosque provides worship place for Pakistanis
»Journey brings loneliness, opportunity