The lightness resulted from what felt like a screw tightening in my head, as Amina Wadud alternated the pronoun “she” with “he” in the process of invoking the name of the creative force of the universe, or God, or Allah; and like a rusted bicycle whose wheels were newly greased and now sliding gracefully on the pavement, I felt, for the first time, perhaps ever, that I could flow with this arrangement of things. I could open my heart to an understanding of the creative force of the universe that did not fundamentally exclude an essential part of me, my gender. To call God male and to place me in the basement as I listen to exaltations of a masculinized God in a male space is evil, if not shirk. This evil was addressed on March 16, 2005, and I could finally exhale, relieved. A fundamental fallacy had at last been exposed, a wrong righted. There was no question in my mind, at least, that the prayer, for all its complexity, for all the things that could have gone better, for all the shaky circumstances surrounding it, was good. On the side of good. I was even more sure that we never would have gotten official permission for this act, and that we would go to our graves with people telling us that now was not the time, how we first should have said or done this or that. The time had presented itself – the heavens had opened an opportunity to us, and it was up to us to walk toward the light. Words can not describe what it was like to look around me in that lush moment of truth and opportunity and find strong souls of all races, ages and genders beside me. The city smiled on us as we walked through the gates of the Synod house, the sanctuary where we held our prayer.

The days preceding the prayer had been busy, so by the time the morning arrived, I was in work mode, rushing to the church in the morning and getting immediately to work on checking the press passes of the cacophonous stream of journalists flowing in my direction. I ran across the street to grab a much-needed large coffee about a half hour into things, and found young people who had arrived from out of town early drinking tea and eating Hungarian pastries. Everything about the day was warm. The air was crisp but clear, the grounds of the church were welcoming, the neighborhood bustling and lively. A feeling of well-being continuously prevailed over a vague sense of vague danger and risk. I saw many old friends and new ones who felt like old friends. A lovely girl friend of mine who had attended the same mosque as me as a child walked through the gates, now a law-school bound ex-stockbroker on Wall Street. Eyes sparkling, she breathlessly told me that her father had wholeheartedly approved her coming to the prayer. There is something special about support from men, from fathers. I was extremely happy for her, knowing how much that must have lightened her load.

The Synod House had a moistness in the air, and an understated vigor and liveliness to it. Though it was connected to St. John’s the Cathedral, one of the most beautiful religious spaces in Manhattan, the iconography of the Synod House was graciously non-denominational without sacrificing a sense of the divine. As the time for the prayer neared I was in semi-automatic media mode, in which nervous producers followed me around saying things like “but my crew has been here since 9! Can you get those other cameras out of the way?!” Of course, I did find time to mingle among the now crowding space shaking hands and hugging friends, male or female, who had come. An older Pakistani gentleman I had gotten to know while doing activist work in New York and a male Pakistani investment banker were sitting comfortably on the rug, relaxed smiles on their faces. I rushed over to them and kneeled down and shook their hands – I hadn’t seen them in months, and was thrilled that they had found their way here today. It would have been unthinkable in the mosque of my youth to rush over to an older man and enthusiastically shake his hand in the moments before prayer – and wearing a mid-length skirt and no head covering! Unfathomable! The actual exchange, however, was utterly natural – I felt no self-consciousness.

Dr. Wadud, I must admit, helped calm my nerves. I had gone to a lecture she gave the night before at the Auburn Seminary on a “genderless God”, and there I saw the dignity that enshrouded her, lending to me a tremendous amount of strength. Wadud was ready for this challenge. I felt it. She was calm, measured and erudite while lecturing, taking the time to be thorough and treat the matter at hand with seriousness. And when an angry man from the audience began to chide her about the following day’s prayer, interrupting her repeatedly and speaking out of turn, Wadud stared him in the eye and challenged several of his assumptions. She was not going to back down from this or any other challenge – that’s what she was here in New York to do. She seemed spiritually prepared for what lay ahead. I was invigorated and deeply impressed by this energy.

Reaction to the Prayer

I often get shocked by things other people expect, harboring, as I do, a kind of deep optimism that is at times almost embarrassing. This was one of those times. Though I knew the prayer would be contentious, to say the least, I think I was denying to myself how deep, base, unscrupulous and determined the gatekeepers of patriarchy were that we faced. So many true colors were revealed. I was sure, or maybe I was hoping, that leaders would put the obvious good this would do for the Muslim community before their own egos or cowardice, or prejudice. I was disappointed.

I don’t mean to lump all the opposition to this prayer into one category, called “wrong”, though I have trouble not finding patriarchal assumptions in almost all the arguments against the prayer I have heard. There are several ways to understand the oppositions to this prayer, and I am focusing here only on one strain of opposition. Some dismiss PMU's emphasis on women's led prayer as a misplacement of priorities, a focus on a relatively unimportant issue when the other horrors inflicted upon women are taken into account. Yet Nasr Wassel, the former mufti of Egypt, nicely reminds us in the quote I opened this piece with of the direct relationship between shunning women from spiritual leadership and shunning them from political leadership. There is no doubt, therefore, that some of those who opposed the prayer most strenuously are really engaged in a raw struggle over power and authority. This struggle is no different, in that sense, from struggles over racial and economic justice. One shaikh, mufti, and ‘religious authority’ after another, both here and in the Muslim world, took to the airwaves, the mosque pulpit and the Internet to denounce this prayer in the strongest possible terms. Shaikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the mufti of the state of Qatar and frequent commentator on Al-Jazerra, called the prayer “fitna” (responsible for chaos), as did Shaikh Muhammed Tantawi, the Shaikh of Al-Azhar, the most revered school of Sunni Islamic learning, located in Cairo, Egypt. In an embarrassing testimony to the intellectual poverty of some of our religious leaders, both men’s arguments against female-led prayer were premised on what can only be called, and not without regret, the “butt argument”. If men were to pray behind women, the theory goes, their irrepressible and animal-like instincts will take over, and they will spend the entire prayer with eyes locked on the heavily-garbed behind of the woman before them. Given that women are routinely forced to pray behind men when they are not relegated to some dungeon, one would think it would have occurred to the shioukh to ask whether a woman is similarly susceptible to the magnetism of the male behind. Answer: women do not have a sexuality, so the question has not occurred to us. Women’s sexuality has been limited to that of potential distraction to the mosque’s first priority, the men. Conveniently, moreover, if women were to assert the mysterious presence of an independent sexuality, this would only confirm that her sexuality should be strictly regulated by covering her up and placing her in a basement, balcony or some other nether-space, lest she use it to attract men and nullify their wudu.

Let’s return to the so-called “fitna” the shioukh claim this prayer caused. To watch one frothy-mouthed shaikh and commentator after another thunder against this prayer, one would have had to conclude that long-elusive “unity” in the Muslim ummah had finally arrived. If there was one thing Qaradawi, Tantawi, the Wahabbis, the Shia, and even Libya’s drag-wearing Qaddafi could agree on, it was that female-led prayer was bidah, a frightful innovation that had to be stopped by any means necessary. The character assassination and menacing threats against Dr. Wadud dutifully commenced, as did the conspiracy theories that the organizers of the prayer were paid by the U.S. government, a charge that I must now clearly and unambiguously deny. All this righteousness may have been worth the slightest little something, but for the scandalous fact that these same gate-keepers of morality didn’t make a peep when fourteen young Saudi girls were burned to death in their school rather than be allowed to leave without their headscarves and save their lives. There was no fatwa, no unanimity among the scholars, no official outcry, no sense of a threat to the Muslim ummah, no fitna and no bidah.

This is the scandal and the secret that the prayer exposed. It is necessary to keep pressing forward until it is no longer possible for Muslims to wax philosophical about how unfit women are to lead, how in need of protection they are, while turning their heads as women are neglected, abused in myriad different ways, and even allowed to die because of their failure to meet male-set standards of “decency”. What is indecent is this naked oppression and power struggle in the name of “modesty”, “propriety” and “tradition”. Our struggle is simple yet has profound implications: we ask only that the most fit to lead among the Muslims lead us into truth, peace and beauty, whether that person is a woman or a man.