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'As You Are, You Will be LeAd’
By Sarah Eltantawi and
Zuriani Zonneveld
Khaled Abou El Fadl Leads a Town Hall Meeting on Woman-Led Prayer in Los
Angeles
Since the March 18th prayer led by Amina
Wadud in New York and co-sponsored by muslimwakeup.com and the Muslim
Women’s Freedom Tour, the Muslim community’s excitement, confusion, and
even outrage led the
Progressive Muslim Union of North America (PMU), which endorsed the
prayer, to take two concrete actions in an attempt to alleviate our
community's confusion. First, we started a
Prayer Initiative which houses information about female-led prayer,
including arguments for and against it and first hand accounts of the
New York prayer. Secondly, we committed ourselves to organizing as many
town hall meetings around the country as we could on the subject of
female led prayer. PMU put on its first such town hall meeting in Los
Angeles on June 5, and invited UCLA Law Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl to
give the keynote speech.
Our goal was to act as a conduit of
information to the Muslim community in order to encourage Muslims to
make informed decisions about this issue. The goal of the New York City
woman-led mixed gender prayer was not to impose this particular style of
prayer on others, but to be part of a challenge of the current status
quo, which attempts to dictate one style of prayer on everyone, namely
where men lead, and women stay behind. Our point in endorsing woman-led
prayer and launching the Prayer Initiative is not so much to dictate how
people should pray, but rather to insist that a wide spectrum of
interpretations be respected and discussed.
El Fadl spent the first 45 minutes or so of
his two-hour presentation making precisely this point. Calling Muslims a
“lost” people due to the depth of alienation from our rich intellectual
traditions, and decrying the lack of quality and high standards in our
religious leaders’ reasoning and intellectual integrity; it was as if El
Fadl felt he needed to engage in a collective deprogramming of the 70+
in attendance before he could start to lay down his research on
female-led prayer. Why?
We believe part of El Fadl’s point was that
the swift denunciation of female-led prayer by most of our religious
leaders was quite likely more a product of knee-jerk polemics and an
expression of deeply-held patriarchy than the product of intelligible
legal reasoning.
At one point in his introduction, El Fadl
reminded the audience that “Shariah is supposed to be a fountain of
God’s wisdom from which we can all draw from.” The image of Shariah as a
fountain was one that we had some difficulty with, as we are more used
to Shariah being represented as a quasi-mysterious, unyielding code of
conduct usually regarding the most obscure, mundane, and deeply personal
of issues. Moreover, this mysterious code is usually dictated to us by
self-appointed religious gurus who somehow possess one of few keys
available to its decoding, and whose decisions tend to reflect their
interests as men and authority figures. Yet the statement set a tone. El
Fadl took us through this kaleidoscope by focusing on the one issue of
female-led prayer and led the audience into different schools of
thought, including extinct ones, different debates that took place
within those schools, different geographical locations, different
centuries, and finally highlighted the influence of politics on these
debates.
In his survey of the history of discussion of
the issue of female led prayer in Islam, El Fadl divided the arguments
against female led prayer into two categories: ones that questioned
women’s intellectual capacity to lead prayer, and others that argued
that women led prayer would create fitna due to the potential to
sexually excite men.
Intellectual Capacity of Women
Um Salama, a woman of the Prophet’s time,
enjoyed a very high degree of religious authority, as did A'isha, the
Prophet's wife. In fact, according to El Fadl, “About 30% (if not more)
of Islamic jurisprudence was created by these two women.” When jurists
later wrote about these two women, many “exceptionalized” them in order
to get around the potential legal implications of the fact that these
two women were certainly of the highest intellectual capacity at the
time of the Prophet. Jurists later argued that the status of A’isha and
Um Salama could not be instructive for laws regarding women, since these
women were close to the Prophet, and it is therefore impossible to find
any women of comparable intellectual ability in any other period.
Sexuality
The other major reason jurists gave for a
prohibition on woman-led prayer is the potential for fitna caused by
sexual distraction. El Fadl emphasized that on this point, what is
needed is an understanding of the sexual anthropology of Muslims during
that period, and a recognition that sexual mores – including what is
considered sexually enticing – changes over time. It may well have been
that in certain Islamic societies in certain geographical locations at
certain times to bend over would be too close to a sexual act; and it
may well be that such prostrating does not produce the same effect or
have the same symbolic place in our culture today. Ironically, El Fadl
told us that A’isha, the Prophet’s wife, at one time slept next to the
Prophet as he led prayers.
Not all jurists, by any stretch, argued
absolutely against female-led prayer, and some believed female-led
prayer was permissible at all times, including the five daily prescribed
prayers and for “extra” prayers, such as Taraweeh prayers during
Ramadan. Al Tabari for example, is one such scholar who believed
woman-led prayer to be acceptable at all times. He and other jurists
created schools of thought that were powerful in the 10th, 11th and 12th
centuries – at one time their power surpassed that of the Hanbali school
– but that later became extinct.
Politics
One of the oft-repeated refrains supporters
of woman-led prayer hear is that the Muslim community in general, and
Muslim women in particular, are facing “more important issues,” and that
woman-led prayer is, at best, cosmetic. What it takes to disprove this
assertion is to demonstrate that not only is female spiritual leadership
is in itself important, but that female spiritual leadership has
implications beyond the realm of the spiritual. Is it possible that
women are being kept from positions of spiritual authority in order to
limit their power in other arenas?
El Fadl argued that from early on in Islamic
history, leadership of prayer was recognized as a form of social and
political leadership. This view is consistent with a particularly
revealing quote from Nasr Fareed Wassel, the former mufti of Egypt, who
told Egypt Today in their January, 2005 issue, "In order to lead Muslims
in their worldly affairs, the ruler must be eligible to lead them in
their prayers, and since by consensus of the Muslim community women
never lead men in prayers, they cannot rule them.” El Fadl also observed
that women rights issues tend to surface in contexts of political
oppression.
We believe it would have been hard to walk out of that lecture without a
renewed appreciation of the kaleidoscope of conversations, debates and
legal rulings, all influenced by political and social factors, that make
up the corpus of Islamic intellectual history. Islamic intellectual
histories, like all historical narratives, are first and foremost human
products, in this case the product of the sum total of Muslim attempts
to uncover the essence of the divine. Indeed, there is not one system of
human endeavor that has not grown, evolved or been shaped by the
challenges of their day, be it other religious laws such as Jewish law
or Canon law, or the legal history of the United States with its
constitutional amendments, countless rulings and laws, trends and
lasting social movements. To deny this history in Islam and instead
advocate for some kind of ahistorical, salafi approach to texts as
literal guidebooks or cookbooks for Muslims (a pinch of this good deed
here, ½ a cup of prayer there will lead to heaven…) is to ignore basic
truths about how social norms and truths are shaped in human history.
Why can we Muslims no longer afford this
salafi approach? Because external problems we are facing starkly remind
us that we must become more politically and intellectually
sophisticated, and we must do it fast. Interestingly, when we asked El
Fadl his advice about what contemporary Muslims can concretely do with
the picture he painted for us that day, El Fadl replied that we
absolutely had to demand the highest possible quality from our political
and spiritual leaders.
Educating ourselves about our own tradition
is an important first step in the imperative to transform our community
into a more internally tolerant and just one. We believe that only when
we make these strides internally will we be able to more strongly
advocate for justice from external forces, forces that exert too much
influence over our lives, livelihoods and even our intellects.
As human beings, it is easier to just
continue with the Islam we think we know. Learning and debating is often
too much work and too much effort. Some people are too afraid to take
the time to learn because then they as Muslims are required to speak up
for what is right – not necessarily what they are familiar with. By
launching the Prayer Initiative and organizing these town hall meetings
on the issue, PMU hopes to become a reliable and constant source of
information and knowledge. What individual Muslims choose to do with
that knowledge is up to them.
Sarah Eltantawi is the communications
director, and Zuriani Zonneveld a board member, of the
Progressive Muslim Union of North America.
This item is located at:
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2005/06/as_you_are_you.php
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