Now:
Nsenga Knight is making history.
The 26-year-old Brooklyn filmmaker chose to mount a stunning show, "As the Veil Turns: Female Pioneers of the American Muslim Community."
The show is stunning in its simplicity and depth; it includes only nine 30-inch-by-20-inch black-and-white photographs of African-American women of various ages, all of whom have been observant Sunni Muslims since 1975.
But thanks to the wonders of modern technology, each picture comes with headphones and a small MP3 player attached. Hold the play button down for five seconds and the pictures come to life - the women tell their stories of faith and family, of lives in and out of a religious context.
"I wanted it to be an oral history, so the stories are told like they wanted them told," said Knight, 26, who has been a practicing Sunni Muslim her entire life. "With these tapes, people can go back and say this is what the person said because they heard them say it."
Most people won't have 22 hours to spare - yes, a collective two hours short of a day's worth of oral history hangs on the gallery walls. The women of the exhibit range in age from 44 to 79 years old, and tell tales both comic and tragic, all providing insight into a way of life foreign to those outside the faith.
Knight came up with the idea in the spring of 2006, after the death of Sister Aliyah, a woman in her mid-60s whom Knight had seen in the Brooklyn Muslim community for years.
"She was such a dynamic woman," Knight said. "She helped set the styles of clothes we wear by what she wore. Even though men and women learn in separate classes, she would sometimes teach the men."
These people were jewels of history and wisdom in the community, and it was all being lost," she said.
Knight was born in East Flatbush and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She attended PS 235, Meyer Levine Middle School and Brooklyn Technical High School (Class of 1999) before majoring in film at Howard University (Class of 2003)
The death of Sister Aliyah gave the project urgency, Knight said. She did two things - visit the Seniors and Pioneers club meeting of the Abdul Muhsi Khalifah Mosque in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and started seeking funding.
Neither was a hard sell. At the club, "People started telling me stories as soon as I told them what I wanted to do," she said.
Knight chose women because their stories were seldom told, and because "who these women are have a very direct effect on who I am. Because of who they were, I am able to be who I am.
reprint NYTimes, Article, 2007 by Clem Richardson
was informed that his sister, Fatimah and her husband (raa) were Muslims. Furious he went to his sister's home and heard the recitation of the Holy Quran. He was anxious to know what the Quran really said. He asked his sister:"whose voice was it?" Out of fear she concealed the pages of the Quran and denied having anything worth reading. At her denial his anger at their abandonment of their tribal religion erupted. He beat them both mercilessly. Fatima (raa) cried out courageously; "Umar! You do whatever you like. Islam cannot get out of our hearts." His heart was moved and he asked his sister to read out to him what they were reading. Umar (raa) read the verses and was captivated by the dignity, grandeur and wisdom of the Quran and after a while he loudly said: "I bear witness that there is no god except Allah and that Muhammad (saws) is His messenger.
