Islamic Feminists Storm Some Barricades

[roxiejules]

via Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704682604575369472168848914.html

Muslim feminists call it the "penalty box." It's the area of a mosque where women, segregated from the men, pray. In Islam, prayer is required five times a day and Muslims often pray in congregation at mosques. During these prayers, women usually are partitioned off in a separate room or behind a curtain, "like naughty children," one Muslim woman tells me, while men pray in a grand main hall.

One Muslim, Fatima Thompson, describes the penalty box at her mosque in Maryland as an overheated, dark back room. Another Muslim woman, Asra Nomani, tells me that at a major Washington D.C. mosque, the female section was in a trailer, where the voice of the imam (the prayer leader) came from a crackling speaker. "It was so humiliating I never went back," says Ms. Nomani, a former reporter for the Journal.

Now these Muslim feminists have had enough. Hoping to reform Islam by making it more women-friendly, Ms. Thompson—an American convert to Islam—has organized several "pray-ins" at mosques in the D.C. area. These include the Islamic Center of Washington and the Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., a mosque attended by several of the 9/11 hijackers and the Fort Hood mass killer Maj. Nidal Hasan. Ms. Thompson's next pray-in target is a mosque in Washington.

Like the civil rights activists of the 1960s, whose "sit-ins" were part of a movement that ended racial segregation, Ms. Thompson hopes her peaceful pray-ins will help initiate a movement that ends overt sexism in Islam, despite the conventional wisdom that regards Islam and feminism as anathema. Her efforts come at a time when, as of a 2001 study, 66% of American mosques segregate men from women during prayer, an increase of 14% from 1994.

Though neither Ms. Thompson nor Ms. Nomani has been arrested, say, for trespassing, Ms. Nomani—who has been fighting sexism at her mosque in West Virginia for seven years—says she has received several death threats. Such violence-oriented intolerance, which in the West has become the public image of Islam, seems irreconcilably at odds with the moderate feminism of the pray-in group.

While people like Ms. Nomani work for reform, other women question whether it is possible. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali author of "Infidel" and a former-Muslim-turned-atheist, agrees with the Islamic feminists that a mosque is "an island of gender apartheid." To her, however, such practices represent Islam's essential sexism. Being a Muslim and a feminist, she told me, are inherently contradictory.

[CJvR]

1. Strange.

If she didn't want to be treated like a dog why did she convert to that religion?

It is hardly as if Islam's opinion on women is a well kept secret.

[provis99]

2. there's a mosque in a place called Falls "Church"?

irony is an interesting thing.

[roxiejules]

3. indeed