A female imam is a woman who leads others in prayer. Her question is akin to asking how many women drink coffee. Her arrogant ignorance on the nature of prayer leadership--it is both practical and institutional--is sadly typical. A thread.
Practically, when a woman leads anyone in prayer, she is an imam. Women lead their children, they lead family members and friends (including men), they lead other women in and outside the home. Far less often, women lead in institutional contexts (women-only or mixed-gender).
Institutionally, it is now widely deemed legal for those communities who want a female imam in their mosque. There's been a lot of legal analysis around this (some of which I took part in with @egypsci). I was an institutional imam for years. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
But there have always been familial and institutional female imams, such as companions of the Prophet and in Chinese women's mosques.
The number of women's mosques is growing as are the number of gender-equal mosques. Small, but growing. @WomensMosque of America and Canada. @masjidalrabia and @JumaCircle (which I co-founded). Europe has a growing number. Please put other locations in the comments.
The movement toward institutional acceptance of women imams had it's most dramatic push with Amina Wadud's @TheLadyImam historic 2005 prayer that was the impetus for so many to start organizing (including @renaissanceeast and I who organized two Eid prayers in which she led).
Finally, while this thread was meant to outline the basics for those who sincerely want to know, what we do and when we do it is no one's business but ours. You are welcome to learn with us, but not to judge us. This is a great insider analysis:
P.S. I'm not going to engage comments that are combative or demanding from any quarter.
A few of us were talking about how we were taught that a woman's silence is her piety. Yeah, no. Here is one traceable account of how this notion came to be a thing and examples of how these and other damaging positions are portrayed in my Sufi Mysteries Quartet. An 8 Part 🧵
The second in a thread of how the notion that women's silence is her piety and other damaging positions came to be a thing with and how the social realities arising from them are portrayed in my Sufi Mysteries Quartet.
The third (typo below) in a thread of how the notion that women's silence is her piety and other damaging positions came to be a thing with and how the social realities arising from them are portrayed in my Sufi Mysteries Quartet.
Seventh in my series on Hafsa bint Sirin. I pause in my story of Hafsa's life to consider classical storytelling about her life and its intents, specifically motherhood, before the final thread next week where I share what I think her social life was really like.
Earlier threads detailed how the sources tend to paint pious women as recluses. The message over time is that good women restrict their social lives, especially their public social lives, even if that means restricting spiritual or scholarly engagement.
Sixth in my series on Hafsa bint Sirin. I continue the story of Hafsa’s life, here we touch on her elite status, her students, her hadith transmissions, and her personal losses (with a touch of plague).
When we last left Hafsa, she earning her mother’s ire for taking her father’s side in his multiple marriages, especially the niece of Anas ibn Malik. The match raised him, and his children, to family of one of the Prophet’s companions.
Sirin’s efforts to raise his and his family’s social status ensured his spiritually and intellectually precocious children, had every opportunity for success. It is, in part, on him that she was a guest of the Governor of Basra and took part in an elite legal debate while there.
The fifth Hafsa bint Sirin thread. Despite taking part in legal debates as a social and intellectual elite and a well-known Qur’an reciter in her day, she comes to be known in later sources for being a pious recluse. Grrr. So how and why? Artist Habiba El-Sayed, "Shared Pain."
As I mentioned in the last thread, the idealization of women’s pious withdrawal in the world extends to secluding women from public exposure in the texts themselves, which is exactly why they are at the centre of my novels, The Sufi Mystery Quartet.
Sufi and pious women were mentioned in very early sources, then dropped almost in their entirety, reappearing in the 5th century in only in two biographical sources in significant numbers: Sulami’s Early Sufi Women (Dhikr) and Ibn al-Jawzi’s Characteristics of the Pure (Sifat).
Second in my series about Hafsa bint Sirin (d. 719), Muslim women’s religious life and the history that informs the world of my novels The Sufi Mysteries. Today we look at Hafsa bint Sirin’s role in securing women the right to attend the Eid prayer in Basra.
I know this seems odd to some, that it was ever thought impermissible, as Eid prayer is typically attended by the whole family. Alas, it was once. And it may be Hafsa who helped make today’s openness to all a thing.
Before the Hafsa threads, I looked at women’s stubborn piety in the face of some men’s eagerness to push them to the sidelines of religious authority and public religious practice.