Her Turn to Pray

By Jeff Chu, Nadia Mustafa

The worshippers face Mecca. "Allahu akbar." Hands lift heavenward. "God is great." They bow as a voice leads them through the litany. "Alhamdulillah." From the familiar words to the leader's call and the 100-strong congregation's murmured response, the prayers sound much as they always do. "Praise be to God." Except that the voice leading them is a woman's.

The prayer leader is Amina Wadud, an Islamic scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the organizers who invited her claim that she is the first woman to have presided over a mixed-gender prayer service in public since Islam's earliest days. The event was held in a cavernous hall on the grounds of New York City's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine because no major mosque would play host to it. "There are still men who believe women are not allowed to be leaders. They're bullies," says organizer Asra Nomani, author of the new book Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. "It's time that women take their rightful place alongside men."

While worldwide many Muslim women embrace the strict gender divisions in traditional Islam, in the U.S. a movement is afoot to meld the Western view of gender equality with Muslim teachings. "The newer generation wants to emerge with its own American Muslim identity," says Daisy Khan, director of the American Sufi Muslim Association. Scholars can cite no clear Koranic ban on female leaders, and Wadud thinks women's inequality is not a tenet of the faith but a mark of misguided tradition. "That's where most of the rules came along to say women cannot do things," she says.

In fact, Muslim women have long had important leadership roles. Aisha, a wife of Muhammad's, led an army and taught both women and men. Today's reformers are taking smaller but still symbolic actions. Last fall, at Chicago's Muslim Community Center, a 6-ft. partition that had long divided the genders during prayer was lowered 3 ft. after several women protested. That enabled the women to see the imam in front, and center president Mohammed Kaiseruddin says the change has helped women "feel like part of the congregation."

Nomani's fight began on her return to Morgantown, W.Va., from a pilgrimage to Mecca. "I experienced full and unfettered access to the holy mosque in Mecca," she says. Back in Morgantown, she decided to defy a ban that forbade women to use the front entrance and pray in the main hall with the men. Mosque leaders are considering banishing her for such disruptive behavior, but she feels she's making progress. She prays in the main hall now and says, "They just pretend I'm not there."

Complaints about barriers, literal and figurative, deluged Shahina Siddiqui, president of the nonprofit Islamic Social Services Association, as she surveyed women at mosques across the U.S. She is producing a booklet advising imams to "make mosques more sister-friendly" by, among other things, giving women a larger role in policymaking. "There are women who are more conservative, and they should be accommodated," says Siddiqui. But, she adds, "that should not be a barrier to those who want to participate in a more open space."

Until Wadud stood up last Friday, that space did not include the pulpit. Experts say women have led only other women in prayer--and many Muslims are against change. Opponents flooded Wadud and the organizers with angry calls and e-mail. Outside the cathedral, a dozen protesters held signs that said, MIXED-GENDER PRAYER TODAY, HELLFIRE TOMORROW. One veiled woman voiced an argument common among conservative Muslims everywhere: Restrictions on women are for their protection--and are "signs of respect." Inside the hall, police ejected a man after he burst in, shouting "God save your souls!" The organizers "should be stoned," he said later.

Despite such attacks, Nomani plans more services, including one this week near Boston, as part of her Muslim Women's Freedom Tour, which some critics dismiss as a book junket in religious disguise. But her confrontational approach, not the substance of her arguments, is the problem for some would-be supporters. Such prayer services seem "less about worship and getting closer to God than about making a political statement," says moderate imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, author of What's Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West.

One of the difficulties of effecting change in Islam is that no clerical hierarchy exists; there is only an assortment of jurists whose authority comes from the willingness of the faithful to accept their decrees. One of the most influential elders in the U.S., Khaled Abou El Fadl, a sheik and a professor of Islamic law at UCLA, told TIME that he sees no reason to keep women from leading. In his view, meritocracy ruled in Muhammad's time, and it should today. "The person who is most knowledgeable should be the one to lead prayer," he says. "Gender is irrelevant." Such words are an answer to the prayers of women like Wadud and Nomani--and a sign that the debate has only just begun. o