(Book cover: @tazeenmali/Twitter)
The Women’s Mosque of America – Authority and Community in US Islam by Tazeen M Ali, Pages 238. HB, New York University Press, 2022, $42
It is said that sometimes a lifetime can be captured in a single moment and sometimes communal weaknesses are captured in the microcosm of an institution. This book, by Tazeen Ali, is about a small mosque that seeks to challenge the status quo among its own based on gender, race, and qualifications that give us religious authority.
The Women’s Mosque of America, based in Los Angeles, facilitates Jumuah prayers once a month, giving women the pulpit and authority as khateebas [sermon speaker] to address issues that specifically impact them. “If one of the goals of the congregational prayer is to bring about social cohesion…then the present order of the mosque works against an important purpose of the congregational prayer.”
In proposing an alternative order that excludes men and takes a male-led ritual such as the Jumuah prayers, the WMA has ruffled a lot of feathers. But “congregants are not returning to the WMA every month out of a desire to continually assert women’s ritual authority; they return for the sense of spiritual community that many of them have not experienced elsewhere.” (p 65)
The structure of the sermon and the women that give it, who are not elevated from the congregation but are a part of it, allow for a sense of community to tackle difficult subjects such as race, miscarriages, and divorces, which are subjects that are painful but very rarely navigated in communal religious spaces.
When talking about sexual violence, there is “an added pressure on Muslim women to stay silent about their experiences of sexual violence because of the shame that people in their communities would inflict on them on the one hand and the broader Islamophobia that their narrative would fuel on the other.” (p 135)
Places like the WMA not only allow for the subject to be raised within a khutbah [sermon], but also allows the congregation to share their experiences in the discussion circles that happen afterwards, which is an incredible source of healing.
The nature of the Jumuah and discussions that follow allow for difficult discussions such as the legitimacy that is derived from race and disqualifying the lived experiences of the marginalised communities within ours. “… The WMA members I interviewed reject an authenticity gap between the ‘Islamic East and Muslims in the US’.
This creates space to consider US Black forms of Islam as authentic and African American and other Muslims who do not appeal to Arabic expertise and Arab cultural norms, as legitimate figures of religious authority.” (p 77)
Quite often, we have a bias towards what we view as ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ forms of faith, which disenfranchises pockets of our communities that do not identify with that race, but more importantly, it blocks out an important narrative of an oppressed people among our own from our day-to-day practices of faith. We unwittingly take on the role of colonial overlords in perpetuating the same racial injustices under the guise of faith. It’s like a colonial hangover that we haven’t shaken off.
A perplexing occurrence in the book is Amina Wadud’s name, which always begins in lowercase throughout the book.
Ali’s views seem to be in tune with Wadud’s, so I could not understand this mistake that I initially thought was an editing error but appears to be a conscious (but unexplained) feature of the book.
In our quest for prescriptive answers to life’s greatest injustices, we seek to outsource solutions to people in power, not realising the potency of our lived experiences.
Spaces like the WMA, which is a microcosm of our society, give a glimpse of potential alternative ways of doing things that are more just and more in tune with the egalitarian nature of our faith.
Aasiya I Versi
