New York Times
Putting a Different Face on Islam in America 
By NEIL  MacFARQUHAR
Published: September 20, 2006

In a class on Islamic history at the Hartford Seminary some years back, the  
students were discussing a saying ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad that  
translates roughly as, “Whenever God wants the destruction of a people, he makes  a 
woman their leader.”
Ingrid Mattson,  has been elected president of  the Islamic Society of North 
America. 
The professor, Ingrid Mattson,  suggested that the phrase should be analyzed 
in its historical context when  Islamic societies consisted largely of tribal 
raiding parties. A male Saudi  student contended that all such sayings were 
sacred and not to be challenged,  the argument growing so heated that he stormed 
out of the classroom. Professor  Mattson stood her ground, as was her style. 

Now she is challenging convention again. This month, Professor Mattson, a  
43-year-old convert, was elected president of the Islamic Society of North  
America, the largest umbrella organization for Muslim groups in the United  States 
and Canada, making her a prominent voice for a faith ever more under  assault 
by critics who paint it as the main font of terrorism. She is both the  first 
woman and, as a Canadian, the first nonimmigrant to hold the post. 
To  her supporters, Professor Mattson’s selection comes as a significant  
breakthrough, a chance for North American Muslims to show that they are a  
diverse, enlightened community with real roots here — and not alien, sexist  
extremists bent on the destruction of Western civilization. Some naysayers  grumble 
that a woman should not head any Muslim organization because the faith  bars 
women from leading men in congregational prayers, but they are a distinct  
minority.

“The more Americans see Muslims who speak English with a North American  
accent, Muslims who were born and raised here, who understand this culture, the  
more it will cease to be a foreign phenomenon but something local and  
indigenous,” said Mahan Mirza, a Yale doctoral candidate in Islamic studies who  
recalled the classroom scene above from the master’s program at the Hartford  
Seminary in Connecticut. 
At the annual Islamic Society conference in Chicago  where her election was 
officially announced to the thousands of Muslims in  attendance, women rushed 
to have snapshots taken at her side.

“When I see her, I just feel that there is this beam of light on her,” said  
Reem Hassaballa, 30, of Chicago, a teacher and a mother of three. “She is a 
very  good role model. If it can happen in a little convention like this, 
hopefully it  could happen in the whole Muslim world. She could be the start of 
something  bigger.” Ms. Mattson sees both pluses and minuses in the fact that her 
election  is being viewed as a watershed. The Islamic Society of North 
America is a  20,000-member group representing all manner of organizations, from 
student clubs  to professional associations for doctors and lawyers to mosque 
boards to  political activists. Her immediate predecessor was a religious scholar 
who often  wore the flowing white robes and stacked turban of his native 
Sudan.
“Somehow  there is the feeling that someone who is white is safer and less 
scary,”  Professor Mattson said. “But I am who I am. So if there is some social 
capital  that I can use to counteract some of the negative perception and 
open ears to  what we have to say as a community, then that is a benefit.” 

A short, trim woman with a quiet manner that belies her authority, Ms.  
Mattson grew up, by her own description, as a good, middle-class Roman Catholic  
school girl in Kitchener, Canada, a suburban community about 60 miles southwest  
of Toronto. She attended a Catholic girls high school and took piano lessons 
at  the convent, spending hours in church praying or contemplating the art. It 
was a  peaceful asylum removed from the raucous household where she was the 
sixth of  seven children. 
At 16, though, she stopped attending Mass. “I believe I made  a very serious 
attempt to understand my faith,” she said, repeatedly sitting  with her 
religion teacher to ask questions about Catholicism and spirituality.  She found the 
answers wanting, she said, less and less relevant to her teenage  life. 

Ms. Mattson enrolled in the nearby University of Waterloo to study  
philosophy and fine arts, a determined agnostic. In 1986, while studying in  Paris, she 
met her first Muslims, mostly West African students, and was struck  by their 
warmth, dignity and generosity. 
Back home, she started to read more  books about Islam and took classes in 
Arabic, which she now speaks fluently.  When first delving into the Koran, its 
explanations of the presence of the  creator in the natural world struck a 
chord. That echoed her own spiritual  sentiments developed during summers spent at 
the family’s 200-year-old cottage  on an island in a Canadian lake without 
running water or a telephone. 

In 1987, as a college senior, she converted. “This religious community was  
giving me the framework for my spiritual experience, and so I entered into it,” 
 she said in an interview. 
At first she told only her mother, whom Ms.  Mattson describes as a strong, 
flexible, understanding woman. Her father, a  criminal lawyer, had died when 
she was 12 and her mother had worked in a factory  to support the family. 
“My mother was confused at first and did not  understand it,” she said. The 
change was eased somewhat by the fact that her  oldest sister, Peggy Smith, 
had converted to Judaism before her marriage.  
But her brothers and sisters only found out months later, when she wrote  
them a letter from overseas. They were mostly concerned, she said, that she had  
not joined some cult, and vaguely dismayed that her bar-hopping days with them 
 had ended because Islam demands temperance. 
Now, Ms. Mattson and Ms. Smith  share certain common concerns —like keeping 
pork off the table at family  gatherings. 
“Sometimes it’s only the Muslim and the Jew who are eating  Christmas dinner 
with my mother,” Professor Mattson said with a laugh,  explaining that her 
siblings are off with their spouses. Conversation tends to  run around family 
issues rather than comparative religion, she said. 

Ms. Mattson’s first exposure to the larger Muslim world came after she  
graduated from college, when childhood lessons about missionary work inspired  her 
to volunteer to teach Afghan women in a sprawling refugee camp of about  
100,000 people in Peshawar, Pakistan. There, in what might be called the wild  
Muslim east, the group later known as the Taliban barred their women from  
attending her classes. 
“I remember clearly someone pointing a man out to me  and saying ‘That’s the 
brother of the man who killed Anwar Sadat.’ ” she  recalled. “That was 
freaky. I was thinking, what is going on here, and who are  these people?”

But the most important person she met was Amer Aatek, an Egyptian engineer  
working to install a water system in the camp and playing uncle to numerous  
orphans. Not long afterward, they were quietly married in her house in Peshawar. 
 When the destitute refugee women learned that there had been neither 
trousseau  nor a banquet, they gave her a party and presented her with a wedding 
outfit: a  red velveteen top and billowing blue silk pants dotted with 
multicolored  pompoms. It was not exactly her style. She is given to headscarves in dark 
blue  or brown with long matching skirts and long-sleeved jackets. 
In 1989, she  enrolled in the University of Chicago as a Ph.D. student in 
early Islamic  history. Her husband played the main role in raising their 
daughter and son  during much of the 10 years it took to complete her dissertation, 
which was  based on a line from the Koran that translates as, “A believing 
slave is better  than a nonbelieving free man.”

The idea behind the revelation is that the faithful should ignore social  
status. Ms. Mattson said she wanted to know why slavery continued although the  
holy texts discouraged it, ultimately deciding that it was because religious  
scholars ignored political issues. 
“She is one of those people who  constantly strives for social justice,” 
said Wadad Kadi, one of her University  of Chicago professors. “She recognized 
the importance of fundamentally  understanding Islamic law and making it 
relevant to people’s lives.”

In addition to being a professor of Islamic studies at the Hartford  
Seminary, she directs the program that trains Muslim chaplains for hospitals,  
universities or the military. 
Since her time as a student in Chicago,  Professor Mattson has worked with 
the Islamic Society, which was founded in  1963. She had served as vice 
president for the past five years, so her election  was both anticipated and 
unopposed. (Not only is the post unpaid, but she also  is expected to donate 1 percent 
of the salary from her paid job to the  organization.)
American Muslims generally put their numbers around 6 million  but some 
demographers suggest it might be as little as half that.

Ms. Mattson hopes to focus on Muslim women’s rights and on how the current  
negative image of Islam will affect the young generation. She is also concerned 
 that the “terrorist” label is being abused — extended too widely against 
Muslim  groups doing charitable work among the Palestinians and elsewhere. 
Like  other mainstream Muslims, she struggles with how best to convince 
people that  the faith does not condone terrorist violence. She detects what she 
calls  “Muslim fatigue” among North Americans weary both of the extremists who 
use the  religion to justify their attacks and of the moderates who seem 
powerless to  influence them. 
“The sense I have from Americans is that they don’t want to  hear Muslims 
talking about Islam anymore,” she said. “They just want us to do  something to 
stop causing all these problems in their lives.” 
 

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