This is a classic case of what happens when an American woman marries a foreign Muslim man and converts to Islam (hat-tip: A_Plague_on_Both Houses). I’m afraid I have no sympathy at all for this woman. To me she is a traitor to her culture first, a traitor to her country second, and a traitor to her children third. To not see something like this coming is just to be ignorant of the religion she adopted as her own, and yet from her pain I can now at least alert would-be converts who might seek the same path — to think twice.
This story also hits close to home because I have at least one woman in my high school graduating class that went on to make the same choices. Hopefully she hasn’t lost her own children yet, but if she ever did I wouldn’t be any more surprised or compassionate.
You see, this is a complex issue. Am I to want this convert to Islam to bring Muslims back to the United States, even her own children? Stay in Oman. Deal with the religion you have made your own and do not seek help from Americans. Your right to seek such aid died the day you converted to Islam.
A woman who grew up in Hazelwood says she faces deportation from Oman without her three children because of conflicts with her Omani-born ex-husband.
Khadijah Heather Jones said in a telephone interview this week that a divorce from her husband has led to an order forcing her to leave the country by June 1.
Jones converted to Islam in college. She has lived in the Middle Eastern country since 1993, shortly before she married Jamal Mohammed Al Balushi, a former student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The couple have three children, ages 5 to 12, who were born in Oman. Jones said she is being forced to the leave the country without them.
Jones’ St. Louis-area family has asked U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to plead her case to the government of Oman.
“I need somebody to be a hero for my kids,” Jones said. “I just have faith that the American government can do more than give me a list of lawyers’ names.”
Jones said she received such a list from the American Embassy in Muscat, Oman’s capital, as well as a promise to speak on her behalf to the Omani government.
Oman, an oil kingdom ruled by a sultan, is on the eastern point of the Arabian peninsula. Jones and the children live in Muscat, on the coast. She said she has custody of the children now, but the court set a rehearing on her husband’s petition to obtain custody on June 6 — after she would have been flown out of the country.
“I’m worried I’ll never see my kids again,” she said. “There’s a rule in Oman that, if you supposedly abandoned the children, you can never claim them again. If I am deported, I couldn’t get back here.”
Maria Speiser, a spokeswoman for McCaskill, said the senator sent a letter last week to the American Embassy in Muscat “asking for close consideration of this case.”
Jones’ parents, Greg and Cyndi Jones of Hazelwood, also have contacted the State Department, other elected officials, the White House and the Omani Embassy in Washington.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” Cyndi Jones said.
A spokesman at the Omani Embassy could not be reached. A spokesman for the State Department said Thursday that the American government “is limited in the assistance it can provide” in cases such as Jones’.
“American citizens residing overseas are subject to the laws of the country in which they are in residence,” said Edgar Vasquez, a department spokesman in Washington. “Embassy officials can provide general information pertaining to a country’s legal system and provide a list of foreign attorneys.
“But beyond that –, ” Vasquez said, not completing his sentence.
Heather Jones graduated from Hazelwood West High School in 1988 and graduated from Southwest Missouri State University, now Missouri State, with degrees in criminal justice and psychology. She said she converted from Catholicism to Islam and took the first name Khadijah when she was 18.
She said she met her future husband in early 1993 while she was teaching in Oman, saw him again in Little Rock later that year and returned to Oman to marry him in December 1993. She said she has lived there since and, until May 13, worked with him at a telecommunications company.
Their children are sons Zakaria, 12, and Yusef, 5, and daughter Amani, 9. Jones said she brought them to St. Louis for an extended visit in 2005, and that the troubles began when she returned with them to Oman that summer. She said her husband met her with a suit for divorce.
She said she has been forced to resign from work. Her expected deportation date is June 1 because that is when her employment, and thus her work visa, formally ends.
She said she and the children are living with friends.
“We are in a desperate situation,” Jones said.
You were in a “desperate situation” the day you converted to Islam, Ms. Jones.
Podcasts Archive
