April-May  2005 
Year 11    No.107

Cover Story


A prayer toward equality

BY MONA ELTAHAWY

We are taught that Islam gave women rights more than 1,400 years ago that made them the envy of
women in Europe’s Dark Ages. When European women were mere chattel, Muslim women gained the right to inherit and own property. But now the descendants of those women who envied Muslim women in the seventh century have moved far ahead. Where is that spirit of the early days of Islam?

One of my favourite stories from Islamic history – apocryphal or not – goes like this: Women at the time of the Prophet Muhammad complained that the revelations he had received so far addressed "believing men." What about us, they asked? Soon after, the Prophet began receiving revelations that addressed both "believing men" and "believing women."

If God included us in the narrative, who has kept us out?

Not surprisingly, conservative scholar Yusuf Qaradawi has condemned the mixed-gender prayer on his weekly show on Al Jazeera. But we were not waiting for his blessing or anyone else’s. Many male scholars and clerics have let the Muslim world down. Their apathy and disinclination to speak out – be it against misogyny or against violence in the name of Islam – long ago turned many of us off.

Several Muslim organisations in the United States have either condemned Amina Wadud’s decision to lead the Friday prayer or have remained silent, choosing to stay on the sidelines of an event that embodies the aspirations of Muslim women to be recognised as men’s spiritual equals.

Many of us have moved beyond these scholars, clerics and organisations and are setting our own agenda. The Muslim world is large and diverse. Issues that concern women in Saudi Arabia – where they cannot be admitted to a hospital without a male guardian’s signature – are very different from those in Malaysia, where women recite the Koran on national television.

Here in the United States, where we can debate and argue without fear of losing our lives, there will, God willing, be no violence at today’s prayer. But we have had an exciting few months leading up to it.

Late last year three men and a woman co-founded the Progressive Muslim Union of North America to provide a forum for Muslims who feel alienated by the conservatism of many of the existing organisations. The woman, Sarah Eltantawi, was once the spokeswoman of a mainstream American Muslim organisation but left in frustration at the same silence and ambivalence over women’s issues that we have seen with regard to Amina Wadud’s brave move.

Thousands of us take refuge in the web site MuslimWakeUp.com, edited by Ahmed Nassef, who co-founded it in 2003. The site, which receives three million hits a month, has allowed writers and commentators to argue and take to task the stifling mindset that has held us back for so long.

Amina Wadud’s decision to lead the Jum’ah is the most public example of setting our own agenda. It will be women who will change Islam and bring it into the 21st century, because we have nothing to lose. But many men support us in these efforts, because our fight is their fight.

(Excerpted from an article first published in The Washington Post, March 18, 2005. The writer, a New York-based columnist for the pan-Arab publication Asharq al-Awsat, is a member of the board of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. Her web site is at www.monaeltahawy.com).


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