Sufi Radio Home

As I was preparing to write my bio for this page, the radio station asked if I would agree to be interviewed for the KWMR newsletter. So, here, instead of a regular bio by me, is an article about me by my fellow radio host at KWMR, Ellen Shehadeh (edited slightly by me). This article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 KWMR newsletter.

By Ellen Shehadeh

The last thing you’d imagine when meeting programmer Wendy McLaughlin, a fifth generation Northern Californian, is that you’re in the presence of a devout Muslim. Her long hair is fashionably highlighted, and she carries her statuesque 6 -foot- plus height with the grace and assurance you’d expect from a yoga practitioner and teacher. It’s no wonder she occasionally refers to herself as a “stealth Muslim.”

Wendy has hosted a bi-weekly show, Sufism: The Heart of Islam, on KWMR since September 2005. She interviews Sufis “from all walks of life,” as she says, in order to give her listeners “ a more complete view of Islam than is shown in the conventional media.” Sufism, as she describes it is “the mystical core of Islam”‑‑‑ the essence,” much like Kabbalah is to Judaism.

Wendy became a Muslim five years ago during a difficult period in her life. Quite by chance she saw a flyer for a spiritual workshop about love. It turned out to be a Sufi workshop. There she experienced a “huge relief’ from her pain and a new sense of hope. Soon, her Sufi teachers began to introduce more traditional Muslim teachings and gradually her life started to change. “I began to feel safer in the world on every level, and more connected to myself and other people.”

Wendy was raised as a “garden variety Protestant.” However, following a family tragedy when she was ten, Wendy, along with her mother and sister, became born again Christians. For four years she attended bible study meetings and even spoke in tongues. At twelve she was overcome with religious ecstasy during a religious meeting and fainted away, an experience known as ”being slain in the spirit.”

Even with such powerful experiences, Wendy abandoned religion for the next 25 years. She graduated from the University of California at Davis with a degree in biochemistry, and later got an M.A. in documentary film making at Stanford University. She traveled the world, and was among the first tourists, in 1985, to visit China, just newly opened to outsiders. She has lived in Sweden and Germany and is still able to speak both languages.

As a dedicated Muslim, Wendy experiences Allah as “an incomprehensibly vast force of universal love ‑‑‑ the creative force of the universe,” although she is quick to say that words are inadequate to describe her faith. She refrains from drinking alcohol and eating pork and prays five times a day facing Mecca. Each morning she recites the same passages from the Qur’an in Arabic, another language she is hoping to master. Once a week she attends a gathering called a dhikr, where worshippers chant together.

How does a worldly, highly educated woman like Wendy explain the oppression of many Muslim women? Wendy distinguishes between what is religious and what is cultural and political, and she adds, “I did not become a Muslim to reform Islam.” Wendy says that the headscarf is very misunderstood in the West and that many Muslim women find freedom in a covering that allows them to “stay more inside themselves.” She also says that in some cultures, such as Egypt or Turkey, the headscarf can even be a sign of protest against the government. She makes clear that she has no use for fundamentalism of any stripe and characterizes the Muslim fundamentalists we often read about as “scared and fearful people.”

Her religion is deeply personal and has mostly to do with inner experiences and enlightenment that become evidenced in polite and caring behavior, not in cultural rigor. Yet she still grapples with whether or not to wear a headscarf herself -- recognizing that such attire only incites some people’s worst prejudices. “They would never get to see beyond their ideas about Muslim women to who I really am,” she says. “I feel I am a much better ‘advertisement’ for the beauty of Islam if people find out I am Muslim after they get to know me.”

During a recent trip to Morocco, she experimented with covering her head at all times, but decided, at least for now, to not cover her hair when she is in the States. However, with a nod to traditional Islamic dress, she believes in wearing unrevealing clothing and carrying herself modestly. Future trips for Wendy include travel to Turkey and to Medina in Saudi Arabia to visit the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad. And, just the other night she had a dream that she traveled to Jordan.

As Wendy seeks to find her way as an American Muslim, she is convinced that the interviews she does on KWMR with various shaykhs and other Sufis‑‑‑ and even an occasional rabbi‑‑‑ have helped her navigate this mostly uncharted territory. And with every American Sufi she meets and talks with on the show - writers, teachers, poets, calligraphers, photographers, shaykhs, business people, actors, mothers, fathers, and everything else in between, she sees one more tiny piece of the picture emerge; the picture of what being an American Muslim can look like - combining the best of American culture with the best of Islam – and she thinks that it is a very hopeful picture indeed.