The most revelatory thing about Ingrid Mattson, President of the Islamic Society for North America (ISNA) and Muslim prayer leader at the ecumenical National Prayer Service at Obama’s inauguration, is that she studied Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Ingrid Mattson grew up as a Catholic. By all accounts, she was a spiritually precocious child. She talks about feeling God’s transcendence in the quiet buildings of the Catholic Church as a young girl, and about her “simple, naïve piety.” Then, in adolescence, she lost that faith and stopped going to church despite her brother telling her to stick it out – one hour a week at mass is not a high price to pay for eternity. His advice was far from flippant. It was more about not disrupting her family and community, and that she could still return to her faith and even secure paradise. She ignored this advice, but did find that transcendence somewhere else not too much later, leaving her family and her Catholic faith for good.
While in university, she immersed herself in her art studies; in the darkened classrooms with giant slide projections of Western art, in her department’s archives cataloging those same slides, and in the thick library art books she assiduously studied. But, these images didn’t touch her as she wished they would. She had expected them to take her to the same place she had found so easily in her childhood, to the realm of God. “ What was I seeking in such an intense engagement with visual art?” she asks. “Perhaps some of the transcendence I felt as a child in the cool darkness of the Catholic Church I loved.”
It is a mystery that despite the gentle Madonnas, the heartbreaking Pietàs, the dignified saints, and the joyous infant Jesuses, none of these works touched her into returning to her original faith. They fell short, or more precisely, she did. She was unable to receive God in her non-believing heart, which had ended up at a dead end, following the “barren outcome” of her philosophy course in Existentialism.
Her journey towards Islam started when she went to Paris for a summer during her junior year at university, a time which she calls “the summer I met Muslims.” She was charmed by these West African Muslims, whom she met at an anti-racist concert, and who, according to her, lived in Paris with grace and generosity despite suffering a “very overt prejudice and racism.” She lived with them in their student quarters for several weeks observing their behavior and their religion.
She started to study the Koran upon her return to Canada, and converted to Islam in her senior year at university. The God that would never appear to her during her hours of isolated contemplation, when she looked at image after image trying to find His spirit, finally announced himself to her as Allah “The Hidden, veiled in glorious light from the eyes of any living person.” He has accepted her in his transcendent invisibility, and he has relieved her from the burden of her endless quest to find him in images. Her newfound Islamic tradition also miraculously prohibits visual representations, which absolves her further from such futile search . She realizes “[her] mistake of thinking that seeing means knowing”, and that one knows about Allah without “construct[ing] statues or sensual paintings.” S he can now begin the task of simply worshiping her one true Allah.
What is it that impressed Mattson that she felt such admiration for those influential African Muslims she met in Paris, calling them “remarkable human beings…[who] had a dignity and a generosity of spirit”? And what makes her talk about Muslims she meets later in her life as the most generous people she has ever met? Of course, in making these superlative statements about Muslims, she has to be comparing them to something. That surely is her own community back in Ontario, whose faith she had abandoned a few years earlier. And those racist Parisians and their mistreatment of the black Muslim students, who, it never occurs to her, were accepted into the great learning institutions of France by these same prejudiced French.
There is a strange family history that might explain some of her behavior. Her much older sister married a Jewish man and converted to Judaism with minimal protest from her Catholic parents. Would this sisterly (and parental) betrayal affect her so much during her deeply pious Catholic childhood that she, in adulthood, would turn away from her family and religion to adopt something that would not remind her of this pain?
In a poem she wrote against waterboarding, she talks of a brother Joey, who had drowned.
I used to love swimming underwater
Until Joey drowned
Dear sweet brother
Pulled down by the Kicking Horse River
Another family death, her father’s when she was only twelve, had left her and her siblings with a mother working in a factory to support them. Is this part of her family saga of disappointments and betrayals, where those closest to her have abandoned and hurt her to such an extent that their sins can never be expiated, or at least she can never forgive them? Better to find another set of people, another religion, another God, and she will make sure they will never wound her in this way. Better to find the truly pious.
At the end of her undergraduate studies, Mattson makes another trip, this time a cross-country bus ride to British Columbia, for a summer job planting trees. By chance, she finds Fazlur Rahman’s book Islam a few days before she leaves. By the end of her trip “ as I traveled across the Canadian prairies”, she says, she makes a life-long pledge to Islam . She then spends a year working in Afghan refugee camps where she meets and marries an Egyptian Muslim, and bears two children. She goes on to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies, and eventually rises to prominence, dedicating her career to Muslim causes by running various academic and political Islamic institutions. The apex of her profession so far is her post as President of ISNA, which she achieved in 2006, having been Vice President since 2001.
Mattson’s many activities at ISNA focus on Muslims’ perceived discrimination against them by white Christian America. She doesn’t consider 9/11 Islam’s problem, for example, complaining that it has caused Muslims to spend too much time trying to build positive images to the external world, rather than concentrate on improving themselves. She compares “Death to America” slogans, shouted in unison by thousands of Muslims, to the few Christian preachers who – Nazi-like, according to her – speak out about the dangers of Islam. These preachers, notably, never wish death on any Muslim. She’s one of the many “moderate” Muslims who felt that the Pope’s apology for quoting a medieval text that described Islam as “evil and inhuman”, words that were not the Pope’s, was not enough. Behind her quiet demeanor, there is an unflinchingly dogmatic person at work. Whites and Christians are to blame for everything, and Muslims can do no wrong.
And Muslims never disappoint her personally. “Look to his people, and you will find the Prophet” she writes, and she does indeed find them and her prophet in a double dose of good fortune. Having left her own people and their God, this is surely a gift from her new deity commending her judgment. She finds examples of the Prophet in the Afghani refugees who sewed her a wedding dress using their meager possessions, in her young son’s Koran teacher, and in those distant African Muslims in Paris who shared their food and religion with her. Her journey is over, it seems, and she has found her true home.
But her strange, quiet, droning voice suggests otherwise. She sounds like she’s on anti-depressants or sedatives. And she makes little grammatical mistakes as she speaks, hinting at a lack of focus (or truthfulness?) that at times prevents her from completing her thoughts to the ends of her sentences. Her expression is often detached and impassive, with the occasional smile, and a pucker ever so slightly when mentioning those atrocities aimed at her beloved Muslims.
During a television interview with Patty Satalia’s Penn State’s Common Ground Lobby Talk on December 2006, Satalia quotes a line from the Koran, “Whenever God wants the destruction of a people, he makes a woman a leader”, and asks how she relates to that, especially given her recent appointment as President of ISNA. Mattson gets defensive saying that some of Mohammed’s messages were invented by opportunists and politicians. She adds that one has to look at the totality of Mohammed’s sayings to get a better idea of “gender equality” in Islam (which exists, in her view). She also becomes evasive and says that is for the hadith scholars to decipher these discrepancies.
When asked by Krista Tippett in the public radio program Speaking of Faith during a March 2008 interview (in the unedited version of the interview, cut from the final version), on her exultant response after her first reading of the Koran and what she did about all the “upsetting, bewildering and foreign” parts, Mattson becomes evasive once again. She offers no explanation for the many violent and destructive passages in the Koran except to say that she was “reading the Koran for myself”, which might translate to her extracting what she wanted from it, and leaving the unpleasant parts alone. This seems to be her modus operandi to this day.
Tippett asks astutely, “Many people had become aware of Islam for the first time through that act of very dramatic violence [of 9/11]... Where [could] non-Muslims look to find [benevolent] images as vivid as those images of towers crashing to the ground?” Mattson does give a vivid and sensitive tableau of “the beautiful, beautiful image of 3,000 Muslims in absolute peace and harmony making the pilgrimage together to Mecca every year.” But then her distrust of images comes to the fore when she goes on to say, “Could that image [of the 3,000 Muslim pilgrims] really outweigh this daily bombardment of bombardments we get on TV? We just have to get away from that.”
Images of violent Muslims are deceitful, is her message. And since these images are so overwhelming, they will render even the most beautiful ones ineffective. It is better, as her hadiths have said all along, to reject them all. Her pious and good Muslims, reflections of Mohammed himself, cannot do any harm.
Know us by our actions, has become her mantra. “ There are millions and millions of Muslims engaged in good works”, she explains, and that is where we will find the true Islam, not in the horrific images that television, magazines, films and photographs continually portray. Yet, it is actions that those shocking images depict. And it was those actions by Muslims, who led 3,000 innocent, beautiful, Americans to their deaths, that were caught on camera, images of actions that will haunt us for an eternity. What can she say about that? “We just have to get away from that”, will be her dispassionate and dogmatic response. What a far cry from the fine arts student who imbibed images from her Western tradition throughout her university days. But relinquishing that tradition has not brought her any closer to the truth, which must have been what she was searching for all these years.
One has to wonder how she reconciles this schizophrenic mind to achieve her eerie calm, which is nothing like the genuine calm so easily discernible on the face of a pious nun, but which on hers looks like a blanket stifling something deep and dangerous. If this is the end of her journey and what she calls home, then it must be full of torment.