'You go, Muslim girls," I thought, sitting in a Muslim prayer service in New York City last week, the first public observance of the traditional Friday call to prayer that's ever been led by women.
It was also the first religious service I've been to that required my body to be scanned and my bag to be searched. But the level of vitriol directed at this event was so high that extra security was called for. After the original venue backed out due to bomb threats, the service was held in the Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with plenty of police outside.
Inside, sitting shoeless on sprawling blue mats, about 50 Muslim women and about 40 Muslim men listened to Suehyla El-Attar sing the call to prayer, her mezzo soprano echoing through the hall like the sound of a Hebrew cantor. Asra Nomani, a journalist and an activist for Muslim women's rights, issued a call for an "Islamic women's bill of rights," and Amina Wadud, a professor and Islamic scholar, delivered the sermon.
Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, a writer and editor, who led the worshippers in chants from the Quran, Islam's holy book, said she and the other organizers of the service had all received threatening e-mails and phone calls. In one, friends of her parents warned that taking part in the service would "damn my soul to hell."
Around the world Muslim leaders are protesting that the violence that's being carried out in the name of Islam is a perversion of the religion. But they're silent about the fact that Muslim women are catching hell all over. They rationalize treating women like children or property. A New York City TV producer, himself a Muslim, once took issue with my criticism of the requirement that Muslim women shroud themselves from head to toe. I said it was degrading. He said it showed respect for women by insisting on their modesty.
Barring women from entering the front door of mosques, from sitting with men in prayer services, and from occupying the pulpit must be another way of paying respect. Shomial Ahmad, 27, an NYU graduate student, told me that the increasing separation of women in the mosque is the reason she has grown estranged from her religion. At her hometown mosque back in Texas, women have been pushed out of the main prayer hall into an upstairs room, where they now watch the service on television.
On Friday in Manhattan, male and female Muslims sat shoulder to shoulder. Wadud said her belief that Muslim women are not only competent as political and economic leaders, but as religious and spiritual leaders, is a message taken directly from the Quran.
Hey, Muhammad's first wife, Khadijah, was a pretty modern gal for her time. She was literate. She was a businesswoman, who not only took care of her husband's physical and emotional needs, but his financial needs, too. She was also 15 years older than he was, and she proposed to him, instead of the other way around.
Not that Western churches and synagogues don't have a way to go. Catholics bar women from the priesthood, and while women are ordained in some Protestant churches and in all but the most Orthodox Jewish congregations, relatively few serve as pastors in their own right, and they're often relegated to Women's Day observances.
But almost none are as repressed as Muslim women.
Which made last week's service a gutsy thing to do. It put the lie to claims about what Islam really teaches about violence and about the sexes.
Courtesy: www.newsday.com
Email: mccart731@aol.com
Other Recommended Article on Liberation of Women: Women's Liberation Struggle
Posted by proutist-universal on March 22, 2005 8:18 AM
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |