THE INTERVIEW | amina wadud “I do not make a feminist interpretation of the Koran, but rather an inclusive reading of it” (ISLAM)
This year the scholar, PhD and Imam amina wadud, a leading world figure in Islamic feminism, took part in the second “Fe(r) i dones” congress, with the main conference “We all walk this path together: Islam, gender, sexuality and justice”. She is the author of various books and the co-founder of the pro-feminist and pro-faith organisation “Sisters in Islam” (SIS). She has also worked as an international consultant on Islam, justice and human dignity and she was a researcher into sexual diversity and human dignity in the primary sources of Islam.
You can find the conference by Dr. amina wadud “We all walk this path together: Islam, gender, sexuality and justice” HERE.
(DIALOGAL) the Dialogal magazine. Spirit, culture and commitment on the occasion of her visit to Barcelona, for the second #FeRiDones conference, organised by the Office for Religious Affairs, in collaboration with the Reial Monestir de Santa Maria de Pedralbes, I had this conversation with her (section of the Dialogal magazine: “Clau de volta” or Keystone).
In 2005, Professor amina wadud (USA, 1952) was headline-news around the world after she led the salat (the Islamic Friday prayers) in front of a mixed congregation in New York, breaking with the tradition that only male imams could lead prayers in which both men and women participate. That same year, she came to Barcelona to take part in the first Islamic Feminism Congress, organised by the Catalan Islamic Committee, where she also led the prayers in front of a congregation of men and women who prayed together, without any separation by gender. The significance of this act, which we might describe as revolutionary and which created a lot of controversy within the Muslim world, takes us to Professor wadud’s fifty-year career studying the Koranic texts, researching and doing academic and community work.
What has the life of amina wadud been like?
My ancestors were taken from Africa and turned into slaves. My ethnic baggage is 65% African and 35% European, especially Irish, but the legacy of slavery in the USA has had an impact not only on our ethnicity, but also on the comprehension of our dignity.
My father was a Methodist preacher and I grew up in a religious environment, but I was very curious about other religions and for a time, I practised Buddhism. By the time I came to Islam, at university, I had eliminated the patriarchal God from my consciousness, and I dedicated the next fifteen years to studying the Koran, in order to make an inclusive interpretation. It is very clear that when men interpret the sacred text, they sometimes take women into account, but usually they forget about them. And the text doesn’t do that. My first book, Qur’an and Woman* (1992), has been translated into a dozen languages and it is still being read today.
On finishing my studies, my first job was in Malaysia, because I was not allowed to work in any American university wearing the hijab. There, together with other women, we founded Sisters in Islam, an organisation that works towards political reform and to make a transversal interpretation of Islam that takes the issue of gender into consideration. That organisation also led to the creation of Musawah, an international movement that works towards the reform of Islamic family law. This activism and collective work with other women to make specific changes based on an inclusive theology are a fundamental part of my career. Above all, my theology is centred on the intimate relationship between the creator and creation, especially human beings, and it is from the vindication of this intimacy between each person and God that I tackle and question any interpretation of Islam that is exclusionary, in any sense.
I have been a Muslim for fifty years and I have never had one day of holiday; this job is an open-ended process. Promoting the ideas for the reform of Islam is a need, but it is also a benefit. and the strong point of this reformation process is, precisely, Islamic feminism. All in all, it is not only the patriarchal interpretations of Islam that we need to confront, but also the secular and anti-religious interpretations of feminism. And this is how the hybrid “Islamic feminism” has developed, questioning the exclusionary definitions of these two concepts.
What does reading the Koran from a gender perspective involve? And how do you include exegesis and theological reflection into your daily practice, in the personal and community senses?
To start with, I want to point out that I do not make a feminist interpretation of the Koran, but rather an inclusive interpretation, which started with the inclusion of gender and that I now continue to work on, so that it is also inclusive in terms of the diversity of gender identities. It is important to understand that, for me, feminism is the result of a process, not an initial motivation. It is through the redefinition of both Islam and feminism that I have been able to bring the two things together.
Most of my work is centred on the interpretation of the sacred text, using classic interpretation tools. My contribution to movements such as Sisters in Islam and Musawah is, above all, an interpretation of gender and a critical analysis methodology that is accessible for everyone, but at the same time, precise and rigorous, and therefore, difficult to refute.
Although, for me, the exercise of interpretation itself has been very liberating; it has not always resulted in specific actions. When we started to work with Sisters in Islam, we organised training to offer tools for critical interpretation, and it was the training participants who started to establish how to translate theology into specific actions that tackled the problems of their context. For example, the application of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) is usually very patriarchal, but through this critical, inclusive interpretation, we realise that is the result of the privilege that men have when interpreting and putting fiqh into practice.
Working with women’s organisations is essential, because it helps us to build knowledge and understand that Islam is a dynamic religion, which is always subject to interpretation. For this reason, it is important to be able to disconnect the interpretation from the fact that the text you are interpreting is sacred or divine. The law is always human and it is the result of how we interpret what we believe to be divine will. As a theologian, I work on abstract notions of the divine and on how the divine word becomes part of the community. The community’s interpretation and discourse about the divine word is only human discourse, and I am part of that discourse.
How can we transform individual or collective feminine leadership, community life and the way we live Islam?
For many communities of Abrahamic traditions, it seems that there is a single idea of authority, understood as someone who has power “over”. This paradigm is very patriarchal and, moreover, it is not eternal and has nothing to do with God, but with the privilege of people of masculine gender and with people who benefit from masculine power. For me, there is another idea under the word leadership: serving the community. This is the type of leadership that women have exercised, often without being aware of it, and not because they had power “over”, but rather because they have promoted power “with”.
When the ideas of leadership, according to which only certain people can do certain things, are deconstructed, when the idea of authority is democratised, it will be possible to build a community of service for the transformation of all relationships. Everyone has a relationship with the sacred and we all have the potential for transforming this relationship into acts. No-one can take this communion with God away from us, and no-one can give it to us either.
For me, community life is full of ideas about the sacred, but we have to take care with these ideas about the sacred in our practice, not only in our rituals, but also in the way we sustain life: how we care for the environment or what the relationships we establish with each other are like.
How has Islamic feminism evolved over the years?
When I started out, I always said that I wouldn’t live to see the change I was working towards, but that change is already visible now. Firstly, there has been a generational change. Young Muslim women, in the context of both the majority and the diaspora, see the need to create a synthesis of the various factors that make up their identity very clearly, and they are finding ways of reconciling things that they had always been told were contradictory. There is also the collaboration among people who have experienced oppression for various reasons, in order to work together to combat those oppressions. The academic world has also done a lot of work, with the aim of facing the gender issue in a critical way, from all the disciplines of Islamic thought. The work of organisations like Musawah has made it possible to see specific changes in relation to laws concerning the family, for example. This is not a majority position, of course, but I have seen enough changes to be optimistic.
*Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Fajar Bakti Sdn Bhd. 1992)
Interview granted by the Dialogal magazine
