Islam and Reform: The Woman Imam

In less than a year, the Islamic world faced the eruption of two major incidents in the West pertaining to women's status in Islam. The first incident was banning the veil in French public schools and other public agencies. The second incident was the daring step taken by Dr. Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, who became the first woman to lead a Muslim congregation including both men and women in prayers. The event has triggered a heated-debate among Islamic scholars and intellectuals.

In response to the incident both Sheik Yossef Al Qaradawy and Ali Jumma (the Egyptian Mufti) maintained that there is a consensus among religious scholars regarding the impermissibility for women to lead men in prayers. However, a few scholars, such as Al Tabary and Ibn Araby, maintained that this was permissible though they differed whether the woman Imam is to stand along with men in the raw, or in front of them. The argument against women leading the prayer at the head of the congregation is that Muslim prayers require kneeling and prostration which may be cause to attracting attention to a woman's body, thereby, distracting men. Although there is nothing in either the Qur'an, or the Sunna, that denies a woman the right to lead collective prayers , there is no historic precedent for such a public act. The consensus so far has been that women may lead the members of their own family on the condition that they are well-versed in the Qur'an .

Islam treats men and women on equal foot, Wadud argues in her well-known book " The Qur'an and Women", and hence concludes that the discrimination practiced against women contradicts the teachings of Islam.

Wadud's action will most probably be condemned by most people in the Muslim world, specifically since it comes at a time when many Muslims suspect that the West would like to impose its own brand of Islam; not to mention the furor that may result from the fact that the prayer in question was held in a Church (the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan) - since no mosque accepted to host this prayer session. In fact, this action may have negative consequences on the women's cause in the Muslim world, since its conservative opponents manipulate the incident to claim that women deviate from core Islamic teachings and societal values if granted full equality. Finally, given that Islamic scholars reached no consensus on the issue of women Imamat, all stakeholders must actively promote and participate in Islamic reformation which would lead to the resolution of such new controversies through Ijtihad.