I just finished reading “Inside the Gender Jihad” by Amina Wadud. The book spans her life as a Muslim, a scholar of Islam, and an activist working towards gender inclusiveness in the Muslim world. This is a woman who brought a seismic shift in how I read the Quran. Before I read her “Quran and Woman”, I used to hear an alien, dictatorial and manly voice when I opened the Quran, that spoke mostly to men, that seemed to give them many favors, and that urged women to obey and always be under the jurisdiction of men, either a father or a husband. I read it based on my experiences as a muslim girl who experienced more restrictions on her life than her male peers. The book opened my eyes to the ethics of equality and justice in the Quran, the prominent place that women hold in the Quranic worldview, and the patriarchal conditions that it sought to change with its strategy of progressive changes to the human psyche and social life. Men are being called upon to recognize their privilege in the society and become agents for justice. (Quranic interpretive science generally looks into Quranic verses as existing in a context, except when it comes to women. Then oddly, interpretation becomes literal, and static, trying to keep it “more of the same”!)
I remember a heated discussion I had with my family members, about 15 years back, where I spoke in support of Amina Wadud’s prayer leadership in 2005. I think it was around the same time that “Quran and Woman” was published as a translation in Malayalam. I had very little knowledge about the Islamic framework that legitimized her action, but the manner in which her action was decried just irritated me. People who protested it saw it as a heresy. I did not see it that way. The reaction itself seemed very patriarchal. A very scholarly and slightly patronizing relative who tried to convince me about the wrongness of Amina Wadud’s views also confessed that he had not read her book entirely, even though he owned a copy. I think it was around that time that I made a conscious decision to start reading. I have not stopped from that time and have dwelled into many modern scholarly works on Islam in English. “Quran and Woman” itself was not an easy read, as the author herself warns in the preface. But I persisted with the book, read and reread it, and made sense of it eventually, until it completely transformed my approach to the Quran. I saw that I had developed a perspective of my own. There was in the Quran for guidance for me, in my femaleness, looking at the challenges my life brought me.
My reading and the opinions they brought forth rocked the boat a bit at a women’s Quran group led by a peer at the mosque (by no definitions was the lady a scholar). My opinions were coming from half-baked knowledge, but I thought it was important to voice my concerns with what was being taught. I spent a couple of years away from the mosque after some very unpleasant turn of events that led to the ousting of a family for belonging to a different sect. Then when I went back to the mosque, it was to leave again following the ouster of a very esteemed African-American sheikh who challenged some of the cultural norms, encouraged an appreciation of the diversity within muslim tradition, and who encouraged thinking and questioning. (When I look back to those events, I see the work of “muslim Karens” – an epithet that I came across recently! The authority they were ringing up to keep people in check were transnational- sitting at transnational Islamic councils).
But in all my reading, I have never come across an Islamic scholar who speaks so explicitly and precisely about the affliction that cripples the mosques, flaws that I have personally experienced, that I find disappointing and alienating, the way Amina Wadud does here:
“If the mosque organizations are focused on preserving the boundaries of Islam to such a level as to give more attention to constructing and preserving those boundaries, then where will Muslims, whose lives are not so narrowly defined, go to further their knowledge of Islam and to affirm their identity as Muslims? Furthermore, how will their identity as Muslims in America be integrated with their lives in close interaction with non-Muslims in America? Only protecting narrow boundaries is a deterrent to such agendas. “
She calls the extra-mosque enclaves, that grew in the aftermath of 9/11, that work outside the mosque congregational context to address Islam and Muslims “one of the best things in North America that have resulted from 9/11”. Muslim Space is certainly one of them, and I am grateful for the sense of belonging that I find there, however small the community is.
I did meet Amina Wadud on one of her visits to Austin a few years back. I remember her telling me that she sees her role as one of exposing the cracks, the fractures in Islamic thought, that needs to be fixed to uphold the the Tawhidic paradigm – where all our ideas, and systems serve the one, indivisible, uniform, transcendent, yet immanent Allah, unifying all of us in a web of interdependent and mutually benefiting relationships; where Allah is the third one in any relationship, bringing balance and harmony.
“Inside the Gender Jihad” is a deeply invigorating book, in spite of some parts that I struggled to comprehend, and understand, especially in Chapter 2, a section that relates to her life in the academic sphere as a professor of Islamic studies, and all the hurdles that she experienced as she fought to include gender as a category of thought within Islamic studies. If I remember right, this is a book that Amina Wadud considers a work of greater scope than “Quran and Woman”; it is also the book that is more personal to her, weaving her own experiences into the content of each chapter, as she puts across her intellectual arguments for new ways on thinking about gender, and gender related issues in the Muslim world.
Coming back to myself, as I spend hours reading, I realize that what unmosqued me was not that I read books, but that I read the wrong kind of books!
timeless pursuits 