Making space for women In mosques

Seasons 1 & 2: Sacred Steps - The Spiritual Edge

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Aisha al-Adawiya wants men to share space and power

Aisha al-Adawiya

Photo credit: Azad Essa/Middle East Eye

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By Monique Parsons

“You’re going to your spiritual dwelling, and to have to enter the door in combat mode is really traumatic. But...you have to go back. You have to stand in the fire.”

Women don’t always feel welcome in American mosques. They’re sometimes turned away, sent to basements to pray, or discouraged from serving on the boards of directors. Aisha al-Adawiya has devoted her life to changing that. She’s inspired a national campaign — and a fatwa — that’s persuading the men who control mosques to share space and power.

This is the story of how Malcolm X inspired an outspoken Christian girl from Alabama, and how she went on to inspire a fatwa, a religious legal opinion aimed at persuading the men who control America’s mosques to share space and power. AIsha Al-Adawiya says her work is about getting men and women to follow their religion. She urges Muslim women to hold their ground, even when men try to turn them away.

“You’re going to your spiritual dwelling, and to have to enter the door in combat mode is really traumatic. But it’s important to stay there,” she says. “To just walk away and then expect that something is going to change, it’s not going to change. You have to go back. You have to stand in the fire.”

As a young woman in New York City, al-Adawiya heard Malcolm X’s message of Black pride and saw him define justice as spiritual calling. He inspired her to convert to Islam. In 1992, she created Women in Islam, Inc., the first national women’s organization founded by and on behalf of Muslim women. Al-Adawiya, now 77 years old, works at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, and she speaks widely — and bluntly — about the need for women to participate fully in the nation’s 2,700 mosques. She helped drive a national campaign to create “women-friendly mosques,” and she worked behind the scenes to get buy-in from a wide variety of Muslims in North America. The campaign urges mosques to invite women, create space for women in main prayer halls, and recruit them to serve on mosque governing boards.

This is a mosque-by-mosque battle, al-Adawiya says. And while she’s growing weary, generations of her admirers, including educator Hind Makki of Chicago, look to her as a role model and an inspiration. “I think that if she was a man, everyone would know her name,” Makki says.

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Monique Parsons, a religion reporter based in Chicago, is the managing editor of Interfaith America, an online journal that focuses on interfaith engagement and religious pluralism.

The Sacred Steps series is a collaboration between KALW’s The Spiritual Edge and the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Funding comes from the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust.