I have 5 observations on Dr. Azam’s essay.

1. Dr. Azam interprets legal traditions in a way that damages the community by impeding its social and spiritual development.

By insisting on defending the dry bones of a sclerotic form of traditionalism against a group of people who simply came together to worship God, Dr. Azam shows how easy it is for a literalistic and legalistic approach to complicate rather than facilitate the spiritual lives of ordinary people. In her world, Muslims who come together to pray under the leadership of a woman require a legal ruling authorizing them to do so. Rather than showing humility towards the divine, and a proper respect for the moral instincts of ordinary Muslims who don't believe that God could possibly harbor petty gender biases, Dr. Azam instead asserts the authority of legal experts, of whom, of course, she is one. It was illegitimate, she instructs us. It's perfectly true that Dr. Azam did not start this -- others seeking to posit legal authority from the same tradition to support the prayer had published their views, and her essay is a critique of those positions -- however it is one thing to deploy arguments in favor of a social action that empowers people to express their faith, and quite another to negate that expression and argue in favor of strict social regulation of religious activity. There is nothing humble about that. It is rather an expression of deep arrogance, a marshaling of elite academic training in an effort to limit other peoples’ choices. This is tradition as obstacle, not tradition as bedrock. This is scholarship as obscurantism, not scholarship as enlightenment.

2. Dr. Azam makes no effort to help define a version of Islam as social text that responds to the need for the community to be equitable.

Dr. Azam’s irresponsible but stultifyingly traditional interpretation of Islam as a social text embraces gender inequality, as she admits when she writes that we should “work on developing a legal interpretive methodology that leads to more equitable rulings, yes.” Her efforts on this score leave something to be desired, as we shall see. Although she rejects the idea of women led prayers, she does not have the courage of her own convictions, that is to say, she points the finger heavenward. She agrees, she writes, with “seeking gender equity,” but “it is the divine will that I believe we are charged with discerning.” If it were only up to her, you see. “Heaven knows I have wished for women to be able to lead salat al-jumu'ah,” she assures us, but “our first priority is to seek the good pleasure of Allah, whose guidance for humanity may not always be scrutable.” For the sake of tradition, and in order to preserve what she claims is a divinely ordained male religious leadership, her own better judgment and indeed the principal of scrutability are tossed aside. It's not about what you and I want, or what makes sense, or what I can defend in any way without reference to the deeply patriarchal and hermeneutically closed circle of the traditions of legal scholarship, it's just the unfathomable will of God, she argues. People have been smothered under this pillow of intellectual and ethical suffocation too long. If women are unfit to lead prayer, Dr. Azam must at least try to explain why, rather than simply regurgitating centuries of patriarchy. Many other religious commentators have been happy to do that, and I think we all know how obnoxious their arguments are. Thankfully, Dr. Azam is not prepared to repeat articulations of male hysteria about women's sexuality, impurity or other claptrap readily available elsewhere. But all she is left with then is "I blame God.”

3. Dr. Azam’s essential argument is, if it hasn't been done in the past, then it shouldn't be done at all, a stance that legitimates past practices because of their chronological primacy and forecloses present correctives.

Slavery, punitive mutilation, capital punishment for apostasy and any number of unacceptable horrors attend the past. There may well be a pure Islam in the realm of the divine, but here on earth in terms of social relations, Islam functions as a social text, that is to say as a semiotic mechanism for regulating the relations between people, in this case in a prayer space. It is perfectly reasonable, indeed essential, to view these social relations as being governed by fundamental principles of human dignity, and indeed practices that were once sanctioned by Islam as a social text, as mentioned above, are no longer practiced in most, or in some cases all, Muslim societies because of an evolving conception of the role and nature of human dignity since medieval mores held sway unchallenged. Arguments can be, and indeed are, routinely made condemning the abolition of these barbarities on the grounds of past practices, but this appeal to chronology does not make them legitimate arguments. Slavery was certainly practiced at the time of the Prophet and far beyond, and is a feature of many of the most holy texts, including the Qur’an. This is not an argument, or even the basis of an argument, for the toleration or reintroduction of slavery, which is repugnant to universal principles of human dignity. Presumably one can look forward to some ghastly and soporific attempts to explain why, though the failure to prohibit slavery in the past was a human error imposed by jurists, the insistence against women led prayers is a correct interpretation of the divine will. One can either brace oneself for a tsunami of fatuous rationalizations, or one can walk away convinced that neither slavery nor the subordination of women are the intention of a benign God but rather are obviously the sins of corrupt men.

4. As a result of these errors, Dr. Azam ends up trapping herself in a web of contradictions, and proposes a series of steps that make no sense whatsoever.

As I understand it, she first of all wants women to be able to write sermons, but not deliver them. Instead, some man calling himself an imam would get up and read the woman's text. This is, quite literally, a farcical idea. Indeed, a great comedy and an enchanting film could be made -- along the lines of the 19th century French classic Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand -- about a moronic imam who can't quite compose or deliver a decent sermon, and the woman who is trying to help him out whispering eloquence from behind some sort of barrier or partition as he stumbles through her elegant arguments and turns of phrase. Her second idea is to have women give "public talks" which would be “between the adhan and the beginning of the khutba,” which would be indistinguishable from sermons except they would be called "public talks" instead. She even goes so far as to suggest that the sermon could in fact be a translation of the "public talk." Her third Eureka is that women should translate the sermon, as long as “the translation is not technically part of the khutba.” (At this point, one is almost relieved that Dr. Azam is not recommending sex change operations to women who wish to become prayer leaders among Muslims). So, to summarize her fatwa: there is no problem with women's ideas being the substance and even the entirety of the sermon, and no problem with women translating the sermon, and no problem with women giving a sermon by another name, but under no circumstances can any actual woman give any actual sermon. In other words, as long as the woman's ideas and her voice are not connected, all will be well. Or, as long as we allow women to give sermons but call them "public talks," all will still be well (presumably because we have thereby fooled the persnickety but credulous Almighty). One can imagine another farcical Azamian scenario in which a woman has written a sermon, which is then read out by a man, and simultaneously translated by the woman who is its original author in the first place, all in order to avoid having her just go ahead and give the sermon. All of these unseemly intellectual contortions, leaps, gyrations and self-inflicted stupidities are the inevitable result of binding spirituality to an unthinking and inflexible legal dogmatism. Taken, as it so often is (especially in Muslim and Jewish traditions), to a logical extreme, this kind of religio-legal literalism ends up enjoining people to do the most ridiculous things and forbidding them from doing what is perfectly natural, and in the long run a society ends up with a government Ministry for the Promotion of the Absurd and the Suppression of the Reasonable.

5. Somewhere deep down inside, Dr. Azam doesn't believe in her own conclusions.

That's obvious from the passages of her text cited above, and many others. It's a pity that her erudition is being placed in the service of trying in vain to defend indefensible relics of the past and not helping to build a better future. She seems determined to join the ranks of those who confuse Islam with fiqh, fiqh with dogma, and dogma with devotion, thereby leaving themselves with little more than a dysfunctional, illogical and completely anachronistic rulebook for daily living. I suppose that by subordinating herself entirely to this stale version of the legal tradition, she will enjoy whatever authority she might acquire as a professor of Islamic law at UT, Austin, and, who knows, perhaps even as the author of sermons to be read by men who probably in most cases would be her intellectual and spiritual inferiors. The irony is, under her rubric, we really wouldn’t need her written sermons in the first place. I mean, if this is what Hina Azam has to offer, we can just go back to Yusuf Qaradawi and dispense with her altogether.

Hussein Ibish is Vice-Chair of the Progressive Muslim Union.

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