Amina Wadud is Muslim scholar well respected around the world, and has
earned the distinction of being the first woman to lead the mixed
congregation prayers on a Friday in 2003 or 2004. On that day and from
that day forward, the whole Muslim orthodoxy has gone to
work against her. Some of the placards held outside the prayer hall were
disgustingly shameful. Muslims in general value free speech and
subscribe to it but not the conservatives among them. Oddly the
conservatives want to scream, stop and prevent others from free speech,
but themselves? They want to have it all. They almost sound like my
fellow Republicans.The only way to change is to speak up – enough of us
to speak up to make sense to them.
URL – http://nabsites.net/demo/dr-amina-wadud-banned-to-speak-in/
On a Friday in 2003/04, just before the prayers Dr. Wadud, Asra Nomani
and Saleema were on my radio show to talk about what it means to lead the mixed congregational prayers.
I
was fortunate to be a co-speaker with her at DePaul
University in Chicago a couple of years ago and I was also thrilled when
she used some of my symbols from my facebook. I wrote a piece on Sharia
in July 2010, and she wrote an identical piece in November of the same
year – both were novel write ups and followed the same logic to the
point of being duplicate. Sharia was never looked in that fashion before.
Enough
of us have not taken the time to nurture the values of respecting different
opinions… and even expanding on Prophet’s Hadith – combat evil (their
perception) with good.
Muslim men, like all other men seem to deal with women from an
insecurities of losing to her or acknolwedging her knowledge. “what does
she know” or “she is a woman”. It is a fashion among a few prominent
Muslims to criticize women scholarship and discount their knowledge off
the bat. Its the old generation, the new ones in America are growing up
to believe in equality of men and women. However there are some out
there who are trained by their parents to be bigots, again, it is not
only Muslims, you find them among Christians, Hindus, Jews and even
Buddhists and Bahai’s.
The men need to learn to debate her and
not be
afraid to learn and share the knowledge exchange. Even a non-scholar
like Taslima Nasreen, deserves to be engaged in a debate, a fair debate;
instead of physically pushing here out of
the stage. A disgusting act by an elected official in Hyderabad, India.
Muslims shamelessly discount women – what does she know?
We
all have to learn
to grow up. Prophet Muhammad, the mercy to mankind liberated women from
the
ugly clutches of men giving her all the liberties that were God given –
free to
practice her faith even against her husband’s wishes, free to choose her
partner, divorce, own property and business, and she was no more a man’s
property. She is on her own and responsible for her karma on the Day of
Judgment, not her husband. What you see how women are treated has
nothing to do with any religion, it is the men! And we we need to work
on changing by assuring them that by debating with a woman and losing
should be no different than debating with a man.
At
[email protected],
we bring tough issues to the fore, and with hesitation present the orthodox,
liberal and moderate views on a given topic. However it is moderated to keep
off tangent comments, and personal attacks.
The group has 1800 members including 50+ imams, scholar/academics, activist,
extremists (intolerant of others) and ordinary folks.
Its facebook companion www.facebook.com/TexasMuslims
has about 1400 members and about 2000 people who read the site www.WorldMuslimCongress.com every
day.
We also share the information regularly on our mailing list of over
36000 people across the globe – the message of pluralism and pluralism in
Islam.
Mike
Ghouse is a speaker, thinker and a writer on Islam, pluralism,
interfaith and other topics and offers pluralistic solutions on issues
of the day – all about him at www.MikeGhouse.net
Courtesy of Wall Street Journal