In San Bernardino, California on Dec. 2, 2015, the parents of a six-month-old girl attacked the Inland Regional Center during a holiday celebration, killing 14 and injuring 22 people.
This baby’s 28-year-old, college-educated father had been born in the United States to Muslim immigrants from Pakistan. Her 29-year-old mother had been born in Pakistan, studied pharmacology in the city of Multan, spent time in Saudi Arabia and met her future husband over the internet.
Five days after what he called their “Islamist terrorist attack,” then presidential candidate Donald J. Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
On Dec. 27, 2017, just six days after his first inauguration, President Trump issued Executive Order 13769 — better known as the “Muslim Travel Ban” or “Muslim Ban” because it mainly restricted entry to the United States for nationals from several countries with predominantly Muslim populations.
This was the environment in which Sabeeha Rehman began her second career; in her retirement, Rehman — a Muslim woman of Pakistani descent — has become a public speaker, book author, op-ed contributor, blogger, podcaster and, more recently, a playwright. At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday at the CWC House, as part of the Chautauqua Women’s Club’s Chautauqua Speaks program, Rehman will give a talk titled “Threading My Prayer Rug.”
The daughter of a Muslim refugee from British India (because of its partition into Pakistan and India in 1947) and a “very regimented” lieutenant-colonel in the Pakistani army (who blew a different tune for each family member in order to get their attention), Rehman hails from Multan, Pakistan.
Although her family moved often because of her father’s career, she said she attended a Catholic school where each day began with The Lord’s Prayer, and she was taught by “very strict nuns.”
At the CWC House, she will focus mainly on her first memoir, Threading My Prayer Rug: One Woman’s Journey from Pakistani Muslim to American Muslim (Arcade, July 2016). Shortlisted for the 2018 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, it has received numerous other honors.
In a nutshell, Rehman will share “stories of her struggles balancing assimilation with preserving heritage and confronting issues of raising her children as Muslims.”
As challenging as they were, those family- and community-oriented struggles helped prepare her to confront even more difficult and widespread societal and political hurdles in the 21st century.
“During the summer of 2016, when Trump was running for office, my husband (Khalid) said, ‘Let’s ask (Chautauqua Institution’s then-Director of Religion) Maureen Rovegno for a week of teaching Islam,’” she said. “I’m too shy and did nothing. He wrote to Maureen, and she said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Plans were soon underway at the Hall of Missions for an “Islam 101” course co-taught by the Rehmans, both of whom had emigrated to the United States from Pakistan and had been drawn to Chautauqua’s grounds in 2012 because of the Department of Religion’s work to broaden interfaith work among the Abrahamic faiths.
“On the first day (of the course) at the Hall of Missions, I go there and see a crowd,” Rehman said. “I was told not to go inside. It was too crowded. Every chair was taken, and because of the fire code, people were being turned away. I said, ‘I have to go in because I’m the speaker.’ ”
Rehman continued, “The next day, people were lining up and scores were turned away. Rather than having them line up for an hour on day three, Maureen gave them numbers, so they didn’t have to wait in the heat.”
At Rovegno’s suggestion, the Rehmans continued teaching Islam 101 during the 2017 season but in a larger venue — Hurlbut Church. Because one of the weekly themes of the religion department’s Interfaith Lecture Series that summer was “A Crisis of Faith?,” they agreed to teach for four weeks.
“Since then we’ve been doing it every year,” Rehman said. “The next year, my husband said, ‘If you want us to come to your communities, we’ll give a talk.’ ”
The response has been heartwarming. “Thanks to the interfaith lecture circuit, we’ve gone to more than 100 cities and given over 280 talks since 2016,” she said.
Even so, for Rehman, interfaith dialogue wasn’t going far enough. It was because of “the fallout” from Trump’s lengthy campaign and his election in November 2016 that she began writing.
Her second book, We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship at a Time (2021), was co-authored by Walter Ruby, an American-born Jew who in 2009, when the two met over the phone, was the Muslim-Jewish Program Director for the New York City-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.
“After Oct. 7 (2023), we started a podcast, ‘We Refuse to Be Enemies,’” Rehman said. “We did 10 episodes last year.”
Her third book, It’s Not What You Think: An American Woman in Saudi Arabia (2022), is a memoir of her experience when she and her husband lived and worked for six years in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s most conservative city.
The Pakistani Bride, a play written by Rehman and read at Chautauqua last July, has been a new adventure in writing. She said she’s developed it into a novella that she intends to publish.
“(Career-wise), being a writer has meant the most to me,” she said. “But my profession brought me to the point I could be confident in writing — strategic planning. (I’ve used) the same skills.”
In Pakistan, high school ends at age 16, so that’s when Rehman entered the College of Home Economics in Lahore, which she said had been started by the Ford Foundation and was affiliated with Oklahoma University. Four years later, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree.
“I trained to be the best homemaker (I could be), and ended up being a hospital administrator in the U.S.,” she said.
In 1971, halfway through her master’s program in English literature, Rehman entered into an arranged marriage with Khalid, who at the time was a medical resident in oncology at Long Island Jewish Hospital at New Hyde Park, New York.
Arranged marriages were “the norm.” Her parents’ marriage, however, wasn’t arranged, which she said was “very unusual.”
After settling in New York, she gave birth to two sons — one of whom would grow up to be a doctor (an orthopedic surgeon) and the other a lawyer (New York City’s Commissioner for the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, and chief administrative law judge).
Rehman said she returned to graduate school in 1980 to earn a Master in Health Services — healthcare administration — at the New School for Social Research in New York.
“Then I was a hospital executive for 25 years,” she said. “I was all over New York and New Jersey at different hospitals. My last was in Saudi Arabia. I was primarily in strategic planning.”
When managed care “became a thing,” Rehman said she became the director of managed care operations, and when compliance became a thing, she became the director of compliance.
In Saudi Arabia, she focused on quality management, strategic planning and operations, including budgeting and planning.
“The main differences between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are that in the U.S. there was a tremendous push on cost containment, whereas in Saudi Arabia you pretty much had a free pass,” Rehman said. “Medicine was less regulated and physicians had complete authority. In the U.S., there’s regulation.”
Rehman continued, “In Saudi Arabia, health is nationalized. You don’t have to deal with pre-authorizations, referrals and billing — none of that nonsense.”
After their grandson was diagnosed with autism, the Rehmans returned to New York, and Rehman started the New York chapter of the National Autism Association because at that time, “parents needed a lot of coaching.”
On Tuesday morning, she will discuss how she went about “shaping (her) identity as a Muslim American from a Pakistani Muslim, … how (she and her husband) were able to create a Muslim community from scratch, … how an American Muslim is different from a Pakistani, … the wisdom of an arranged marriage, … what led (them) to get engaged in interfaith dialogue and how that played out and challenges with post-9/11, the post-first Trump election and the post-second Trump election.”
Afterwards, Rehman hopes her audience will leave realizing that “Muslims are people like us, with the same dreams, aspirations, motivations and worries.”
National origin, skin color, hijabs, beards and ethnicity don’t define them.
“If you’ve seen one Muslim, you’ve seen one Muslim,” Rehman said.
