Across Generations

THE MAKING OF THE “LADY IMAM”

An Interview with amina wadud

Kecia Ali

amina wadud Kecia Ali

Keywords: activism, exegesis, Islam, Qur’an

amina wadud is professor emeritus of Islamic studies and a visiting scholar

at the Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, California. Because of her
embodied ethics, she is best known internationally as the “Lady Imam.” Her
intellectual work focuses on critical reading of Islamic classical sources and the
sacred text from a gender-inclusive perspective. Her first book, Qur’an and
Woman: Rereading the Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1992), transformed the

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1 (2019), 67–79

Copyright © 2019 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc. • doi: 10.2979/jfemistudreli.35.1.06

-67-

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68 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1

way people talk about women in Muslim scripture. Her second book, Inside the
Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006), integrated the personal politics
of Muslim women’s movements with both spiritual and philosophical discourses
regarding Muslim women, agency, and authority in Islamic thought and prac-
tice. wadud is a founding member (with Zainah Anwar, Askiah Adam, Norani
Othman, Rashidah Abdullah, Rose Ismail, and Sharifah Zuriah Aljeffri) of Sisters
in Islam, a civil society organization committed to promoting the rights of women
within the frameworks of Islam and universal human rights. Sisters of Islam first
assembled in 1987 within the Association of the Women Lawyers when several
women lawyers and their academic, activist, and journalist friends came together
under the association’s sharia subcommittee to study problems associated with the
implementation of new Islamic Family Laws that had been legislated in Malaysia
in 1984. She is also a member of the Musawah network (directed by Sisters in
Islam coordinator Zainah Anwar). Musawah, which means “equality” in Arabic,
is a global movement for equality and justice in Muslim families. It was launched
in February 2009 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at a meeting attended by over 250
women and men from around fifty different countries. Musawah is pluralistic and
inclusive, bringing together nongovernmental organizations, activists, scholars,
legal practitioners, policy makers, and grassroots women and men from around
the world.
Currently, wadud is doing research (funded by the Arcus Foundation) on
sexual diversity, human dignity, and Islamic classical sources to further her meth-
odological work as it intersects with the lived realities of Muslims and their allies
on issues of social justice and Islamic theology. She is the architect of what she
refers to as the tawhidic paradigm, a humanist Islamic rubric for universal human
rights. She is mother of five and Nana to six.
This interview took place at the “Contemporary Women in Islam: Politics and
Identity” conference hosted by the Lewis Global Studies Center at Smith College
in February 2018 while wadud was serving as Smith Global Scholar in Residence.
The transcript that appears here has been substantially condensed, lightly reor-
ganized, and edited for clarity by Kecia Ali. The entire interview, which contains
significant additional material on spirituality, ritual practice, race, and racism, can
be viewed along with other videos from the conference on YouTube.1
Kecia: We met more than twenty years ago when I was a doctoral candidate
at Duke. I didn’t realize then that it would be the start of an engagement that has
continued in print, in person, by phone, and over email for more than two decades.

1
“Public Interview with Amina Wadud and Kecia Ali, 2 8 18,” March 9, 2018, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=lGWfJ-4Gzes; and “Women in Islam Conference Recordings,” last updated
March 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL48PX0Y_7A-3FL3_pMJSjX8VTWwcq
VK6w. See also “The Noble Struggle of amina wadud,” December 23, 2015, https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=ElBH0nCQFrc.

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 Ali: The Making of the “Lady Imam” 69

So first of all, thank you; it’s been a real enrichment of my life and scholarship to
have you be part of it. Let me start by asking about Qur’an and Woman because
it’s been more than twenty-five years since the initial Malaysian publication of
the book, which grew out of your work with Sisters in Islam. It was republished
by Oxford University Press in 1999. Can you say something about what brought
you to the book in the first place, and where the book has brought you over these
decades?
amina: Thank you very much. Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim. I always begin
in the name of Allah whose grace I seek in this and all other matters. This year
I celebrate being sixty-five, so I do look back on life and friendships and have a
different kind of appreciation for the longevity of some of those relationships.
Certainly, Qur’an and Woman has had totally unexpected longevity. There’s just
no way that I could have predicted it, because I had zero political intent. I was
just a seeker whose love affair with the Qur’an caused me to immerse myself in
a historical, intellectual trajectory around that book. And at the same time, it still
left me asking: What does it mean to be a woman as part of the textual communi-
ties? I just kept finding that things were missing, and I really wanted to be able to
highlight that in my study.
As a graduate student trying to complete the PhD, it turned out that some-
how, I had captured something that has outlived even my own expectations. (I
now advise students to do the exact opposite of what I did: do not attempt to write
your magnum opus; it’s just a long research paper.) But the question was really
very innocent. Becoming a Muslim by choice when I was twenty, I never felt for a
minute that I should be somehow second in my relationship with my Creator. Yet
I had already traveled enough and experienced living outside of the United States
and in Muslim communities in the United States to be aware that some of what
happened in those communities did not reflect the ideals that I felt were neces-
sary in order for me to sustain an intimate relationship with my Creator. And I felt
that the best way for me to figure out what Allah intends for the role of women
was to take it straight from the sacred text.
I wasn’t the first person, obviously, who had related to the text in terms of
its intent and purpose. But when you look back and find that they are literally
all men until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, you think to yourself, well,
maybe something’s missing in this story. So, I did my dissertation with that in
mind. I was actually discouraged by my advisers, who wanted me to go the nor-
mal route for the dissertation: pick a topic, read everybody who’s written on that
topic, expose what you have learned from them, develop a critique if you have
one, justify that critique, and then write a conclusion. And I just thought, the
more of these guys I read, the more invisible I become. I cannot use them as a
reference point. It just doesn’t work for what it is I’m experiencing with this text.
So, the entire process was totally antithetical to what I’d recommend anybody
ever go through.

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70 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1

Well, I got the PhD. Then everybody tells you to turn your dissertation into
a book (and I did eventually). But I went for my first job, which coincidentally
happened to be on the other side of the planet, in Malaysia. It opened me up to
something that has had even greater longevity for me—a set of relationships with
regard to Muslim women’s activism.
The currency of the book sometimes still surprises me because I actually
don’t talk about methodology in it at all. I do, however, try to apply the method of
reading for gender. It’s like a hundred and four pages; it’s such a small book. It has
been translated a dozen times into different languages. I think maybe the inno-
cence of the project comes through, and simultaneously, the profundity of what
it demonstrates about the necessity of rethinking any discourse about humans
that has been shaped solely by the reality of men’s experiences. In the context of
having a sacred text that’s intellectually, spiritually, and politically pivotal in the
community, to have somebody demonstrate the ways in which women’s experi-
ences aren’t being included and to give examples of the ways in which it could
happen, allowed me to be at the right place and the right time to do it—the rest is
twenty-five years’ worth of history.
Kecia: I want to come back to women’s collectives and activism, but it’s a dif-
ferent time now. I teach Qur’an and Woman regularly in my classes. A couple of
years ago, for the first time, one of my students said, “It’s wonderful that there’s all
this talk about women, but what about the very strong binary that’s running through
this text?” Today, when many people think about gender they’re thinking about it
beyond a dichotomy of male and female. When I told her you were working on
issues of gender diversity, she said, “Great. How do I get that book?” I know the
book isn’t ready, but can you say something about how you move from Qur’an
and Woman to thinking about human personhood and human servanthood to the
Creator outside this binary that most of us were working with twenty-five years ago?
amina: My definition of Islam now includes locating what I call the hege-
monic binary patriarchal neoconservative version of it. That’s the one that we all
knew; that was the one that I was writing within. Existing in the context of the
binary allowed me to do certain things with regard to equality and reciprocity.
Now, when I’m trying to reconfigure and look at gender-nonconforming realities,
it’s really a challenge. It’s a lovely challenge, because the reality is it’s very easy to
get to a certain point in your work and then all you do is just repeat that work in
various guises.
I’m visualizing a number of ways to move outside the binary, and that includes
interrogating the maintenance of that paradigm in so much Islamic work in eth-
ics and spirituality and then problematizing it. What I want to do is continually
rescript the notion of a fixed point and instead try to describe a radiating reality
in which there are interactions between certain locations—for lack of a better
word, let’s just say the positive and negative or the one and the zero that they use
in digital language. There is a location but the problem with that location is first,

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 Ali: The Making of the “Lady Imam” 71

that it gets fixed solid in one place, and second, that it becomes invoked in certain
power dynamics.
It’s my current research, not yet formulated, and I don’t want to commit
myself and as a consequence lose out on where I could go with it. But it has been
a challenge that I have embraced for the possibility of returning to that notion of
what it means to be human. The inspiration for the work I’m doing now is a kind
of universal understanding and acceptance that human beings were created with
karama, which is dignity. My plan is to go at all the places where it’s problematic
and allow those places to speak, to articulate their own presence and reality. I want
a way to open up the categories.
I’m still working on it, but I definitely feel that the binary was both necessary
and beneficial to me at the time to examine the power relations in any setting
where there is an interaction. Now I realize that by using the binary I’m inadver-
tently participating in creating a stagnation where real life actually has a great deal
more beauty in its complexity.
Kecia: It’s been striking to me in conversations I’ve had with you over the
decades how you’re both absolutely committed to discerning and articulating
the highest ideals and most transcendent possibilities and also really attentive
to practical lived realities, the way things are for Muslims, especially women or
gender-nonconforming Muslims. Can you speak a little bit about your work with
Sisters in Islam, Musawah, and other organizations that are committed to making
practical change on the ground? Can you also say something about how it is to
work on those real-life considerations without losing sight of the ideals, and also
how you hold on to those ideals when also trying to do practical things?
amina: One of the events in my life, the blessings, was that I came out of
graduate school hijabi (veiled). There was general skepticism that a black woman
in the veil could represent ideas about Islam in the context of a secular university,
so I didn’t get hired. My first job turned out to be in Malaysia. Coincidentally, I
had been interviewed by a journalist who had visited my graduate university and
did a three-part series on Muslims in the United States. She was my sole contact
person in Malaysia other than the university officials, who were all men. I con-
tacted her to say, “I’m coming to Malaysia.” They were already meeting, a group
of mostly professional women who were absolutely clear that they had no problem
with their identity as Muslims, so it wasn’t like we needed to get rid of Islam—that
wasn’t even on the table—but they were observing such a disparity between lived
realities and their ideas of what they thought represented justice and equality. So,
they didn’t know quite what to do but had tried a couple approaches, mostly legal,
before I got there.
When I got there, I started meeting with them. I was hooked in to this theo-
logical abstraction of perfection and utopia and they were dealing with all the
stuff that has to do with law and policy and culture. And the clash between us, it
just opened both me and them up to other possibilities. In the end, by the time

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72 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1

Sisters in Islam was organized, eight of us women had been meeting for a couple
years. We began an articulation—that actually turned out to be unique and now
again is being replicated—which is the necessity of grappling with the trajectory
of Islamic discourses critically with regard to gender in order to challenge how
they get manifested in real lives either by culture or by policy.
This realization took me out of the ivy tower of abstraction and down into
reality. I sometimes had to pull them to think about the theology, which they
resisted, and they sometimes had to pull me to think about the lived realities on
the ground, which I too resisted. In the end, these friendships have continued for
three decades.
Now, theological concepts like those of the Mu’tazilites and the Asharite are
part of a dynamic relationship in the work that both Sisters in Islam and Musawah
do, which is actually a radical theological engagement similar to liberation theol-
ogy. The context of people’s lives takes precedence over text. We develop what’s
called an exegesis of praxis, which draws on the work of South African scholar
Sa’diyya Shaikh. The bottom line is: Can there be justice if Muslim women don’t
experience justice? Their experiences have come to the fore. What this did for
me is to bring my abstract metaphysical ideas into a reality where I realized that
an idea is only as good as your capacity to be able to put it into implementation,
whereas before I was happy just to float around in the ideas.
I now understand that there are three prongs to my life, though very rarely
can I get all three of them to be on par: my own spirituality and interest in sym-
bolism, liturgy, and worship; my intellectual, critical thinking component; and my
activism. The reality is that when I have to choose among them, I can’t make my
brain not be included, that always has to be there. But I would prefer the activism
even over the spirituality. I see way too many quietists among the new Sufi com-
munities. I just don’t understand ethically how you can arrive at a state of enlight-
enment that is just you singularly floating above the mountain. I just can’t see it
if it’s not embedded in social justice. For me the task of being human on planet
Earth takes priority over even some of our highest ideals in articulating what
might be our own intimate relationship with the divine. I do have to do trade-offs,
and I’m aware now what trade-offs I prefer, but it’s still kind of a tender spot.
Kecia: I want to come back later to ritual and spirituality, but let’s go back to
the job market for a minute. You didn’t get a job in the United States, and you went
to Malaysia, but you eventually came back and taught at Virginia Commonwealth
University. You had a long career there. You were tenured and promoted, and you
published more. In Inside the Gender Jihad from 2006, you talked a lot about a
field that you called Muslim women’s studies. You talked about how in the acad-
emy, that’s a very fraught idea, within institutions and in professional organiza-
tions and in public spaces attempting to operate in a subfield of Muslim women’s
studies, especially as a Muslim woman scholar, especially as a black woman in
a predominantly white institution, and in predominantly white professional

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 Ali: The Making of the “Lady Imam” 73

organizations. Can you say something about your return to the United States and
your academic career while at VCU?
amina: The reality is I took early retirement because I arrived at a place
where it was clear to me—and it has been confirmed in over ten years that I’ve
been retired—that the U.S. academy would not be the home for the production
of new knowledge in Islam. The field is predominantly interested in geopolitics
and history with a smattering of Sufism, mostly from the historical perspective,
not investigated as an ethical system.
Islamic feminism is one of the newest disciplines on the block. At that time
when I was talking about Muslim women’s studies, I highlighted it in that way;
now it has manifested more coherently in some institutions. Momentum had
already been building, and yet to build it meant that you had to contend with not
just the fragmentation of the disciplines but also the incapacity of the existing
disciplines to understand the necessities for certain other dimensions to be given
equal space. Now, women’s studies programs will also be interested in someone
who has a focus on Islam and Muslims. Islamic studies has moved the slowest but
Islamic studies has also now understood that it needs to engage with gender. But
this awareness didn’t exist enough at the time when I arrived at one of those mile
markers in life. I literally submitted my documentation for consideration of pro-
motion to full professor, and when I got it, I tendered my resignation.
I think the academy was a good home for me because I do like intellectual
abstractions and the whole idea of the exchange of learning and inquiry and crit-
ical thinking, but it did not nurture me to exist in the ways I wanted to. Once I
made the decision, I left and was jobless. I didn’t know what would happen. But
now, when I look back on those ten years, I can see that I have actually had the
opportunity not only to do so much of what I love but also to have an impact in
these things happening around the globe.
I am happy to see that there are certain efforts to bring certain things together
now that didn’t exist at the time when I left the academy, but it is still unfortu-
nately completely uneven. At the time that I, for example, went up for tenure,
there were actually no other hijabi Muslim women who were tenured, and none
of them in my field. If there was a hijabi, she was in the medical school not the
humanities or social sciences. It’s not even that long ago, and the idea that you
could actually engage in critical thinking and wear hijab was categorically denied
in many of the settings that I would go into. Now, not only are we there, but
there is a cadre of academics with both spirituality and political awareness coming
through the academy and moving into all kinds of spaces. I’m looking forward in
fact to seeing how some of my younger colleagues have progressed in their work
over the years. It is becoming more palpable, but we are still far behind.
There are places where it is happening individually for some academics, but
it’s still not enough. The number of women, for example, who are in endowed
chairs in the area of Islamic studies? It’s one. It used to be there were none. In

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74 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1

fact, they were all held by white males, and then they started having brown males.
When you have grotesque manifestations like all white male endowed chairs in
Islamic studies, it just means that really the entire rubric of learning in the context
of US academia is a perpetuation of certain colonialist privileges that actually limit
the capacity of the universities to fulfill their higher mission. It was enough for
me to understand that if I wanted the freedom to be able to continue to develop
what I thought was my mandate in being human that I couldn’t do it in academia.
There’s not been very much to entice me to think otherwise in the ten years since
I retired. Besides, occasionally I can go and hang out at Smith for a week and
pretend I’m an academic for a little while.
Kecia: I want to first emphasize what you pointed out about the way that
positions in the academy are still unequally distributed and note that one of the
motivations for me and Laury Silvers and Juliane Hammer putting together the
open-access volume A Jihad for Justice was precisely that you retired as a full
professor from a university, and where was the festschrift?2 Usually, students and
former PhD advisees, and sometimes colleagues of an eminent figure who retires
write contributions influenced by his or her—and it’s usually his—contributions to
the field, and then an obscure academic press publishes it as a $350 hardback that
only two hundred libraries buy, and that’s it. The contributors get a copy and you
have to beg a PDF from someone if you ever want to read it or cite it. We didn’t
want that to happen with this book. Some of the contributions are academic essays
and some are essays with a little bit of a twist, but there are also letters, poetry,
and other genres, other ways of responding because your work has impacted peo-
ple in so many areas—activists and scholars, folks who are both, and community
members who may not identify as either. So, what we wanted to do was something
that wouldn’t fit within those constraints and would be available in the same ways
that you’ve really sought to make your ideas accessible outside the academy by
writing for broad audiences, doing public speaking, and now using social media to
present your ideas. . . .
Kecia: Now, let’s talk about place, because you’ve talked about being in
Malaysia and you’ve talked about not being in for the long haul in the academy.
You’re peripatetic. Every time I get a note from you, you’re someplace else:
Southeast Asia, South Africa, maybe South America. I never really know; it might
be Europe. I’m wondering if you can say something about what it’s been like
for you as a Muslim to be a citizen of the world, to study at Al-Azhar, to pray in
mosques in London, and also at the same time to be an African American woman
in all of those spaces, both the belonging and the not-belonging and what that’s
meant to you.

2
A PDF version of Kecia Ali, Juliane Hammer, and Laury Silvers, eds., A Jihad for Justice:
Honoring the Life and Work of Amina Wadud (2006) can be downloaded at http://www.keciaali
.com/a-jihad-for-justice.

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 Ali: The Making of the “Lady Imam” 75

amina: I like the belonging and not-belonging part of it. I have had to make
my peace with not having the feeling of a fixed and stationary community, but I do
have a kind of restlessness, so I don’t think I would have stayed anyway.
I was in South Africa last month. I’ll be there again next month. Next year
is twenty-five years since I first got an invitation to give the Friday sermon in the
collective prayer that happens in the mosque. In that period of time, I have made
lifelong friends, really good friends that you laugh with—and at the same time
you challenge each other. The same thing with Malaysia, because I came in 1989,
which will mean that next year, it’s thirty years.
I’ve made peace with my restless nature. Again, I wouldn’t recommend it. It
just has to be something that works for you.
I feel like the globalization of communication is in my corner; we now live in a
space where it is possible to keep [up] communication, including with my children
and now grandchildren, and I don’t feel so estranged. But it was hard at certain
times because my identity as African American aligns itself with the history and
experiences of people in a very particular place, and I am very rarely accompanied
by another African American in the places that I go internationally.
I think in becoming a Muslim I intuitively knew, as did Africans who were
brought here and enslaved who had Islamic backgrounds, that you are connected
to the entire planet. You are not separated from Divine truth just because you’re
separated from your origins. The reality of the sacred is manifest everywhere, in
every religion, and even in nonreligions. I see that manifestation, so I’m no longer
so estranged by the mandate to define a territory as exclusively mine, as a Muslim,
as a woman, as an African American. That gives me a great deal more freedom
but also challenges me whenever the ground becomes a little bit too stabilized.
Don’t forget, I live in California—we have earthquakes, so you have to plant your
feet somewhere in order to get certain things done. I have the privilege of being
able to operate on the grounds of certain motivations, to go out and experiment
with those motivations in a number of different settings, and to let those settings
challenge me for the ways in which I have thought about or acted upon limits.
It keeps the process very much alive for me. I now encode that into conver-
sations about Islam. I say, “I don’t believe in a dead God; I believe in Al-Hayy, the
Living God, and I don’t practice a dead religion.” For any place where the only
marker that you have is somewhere over there or somewhere back then, you need
to get with the program because we’re moving toward the future every second.
So, the destabilized setting of my life and my life’s work has in fact influenced my
perspective.
I’m not retired. I like to tell people I’m retired, because then you can always
say, “No, oh, I can’t do that, I’m retired.” But my heart and mind are still kept
alive, sparked, and interested in the things that I’m interested in and by the fact
that they are not fixed in one location with one people, at one time, or even in one
language. It’s a nice kind of a springboard for longevity, for creativity.

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76 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1

Kecia: It’s so interesting that you use the word destabilizing, because I think of
you as someone who is really grounded and rooted not so much in a particular
physical location but both in a text, in the Quran, and also in your experience of
God, the Creator, and your practice. However, there have been some moments
when others have experienced you as profoundly destabilizing, profoundly chal-
lenging. Your Friday sermon at the Clermont Road Mosque in Cape Town was
one of them twenty-five years ago and then there was jummah (Friday prayer) in
New York in 2005, where you led a mixed-gender prayer. You just spoke a little bit
about your own motivations. I think the way people reacted to those events and
the consequences, conversations, and controversies that have flowed from them
say a lot more about other things that are happening in the world than they do
about you and your intentions and your practice. I’m wondering if you could just
speak to that a little bit.
amina: Well, it’s hard to speak to others’ reactions because it requires me to
understand and affirm a perspective that I totally do not share. Yet, I would say,
in a Muslim confessional context in the United States, the majority are predomi-
nantly conservative. People are still grappling with whether or not there is a fixed,
set answer to every question, even the ones they haven’t thought to ask. I don’t
believe that, and I don’t find myself dependent upon that.
I think if you peel back enough layers you will find that there are some things
that I hold onto, that I cherish, because I did not come to Islam to begin my path
of believing in God; I came into Islam already believing in God and having had an
affirmed relationship. My father was my favorite parent. He was a very loving and
consistent, hands-on, [a] very poor black man with a spiritual vision in accordance
to his own calling that he received at fifteen, walking in the fields of Georgia. He
lived that trajectory all his short life. He died in his forties. I admired his ethical
location and dedication. He was always consistent, and he introduced me to the
God of love, so I took the name wadud (“loving”) because I had been inspired by
that before I became Muslim.
Then I became Buddhist. Buddhism is a nontheist tradition, and the value
of that for me is the practice of meditation, which I still maintain. Buddhism also
helped me understand that the bearded white man in the clouds on the throne
was one conception of God but not necessarily the sum total. When you come to
the place where you outgrow your own childish attachments to the ultimate real-
ity, it is so much easier for you then to engage in theology, that is the conversations
about the meaning of the divine. I still love that stuff. I took a job in religious stud-
ies so I could talk about God all the time and nobody would ask, “What’s wrong
with this woman?”
I think there are some things that are fundamental and that are stable for me,
but I shy away from them for fear that an attachment to that thing will disallow me
the vision of the reality. So, as soon as I find myself fixed into something, I think to
myself, “Uh-oh, what’s gonna happen?” Then I say to myself, “Just trust in Allah.”

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 Ali: The Making of the “Lady Imam” 77

I do believe there is such a strong and palpable presence of that reality, that for
whatever ways in which my own feeble mind and being cannot embrace it, all that
means is that I’ve become fixed on some other idols, some other symbol of it, and
that the symbol needs to go. I just sort of buckle down and prepare myself for it.
That’s been the course of my life. It does not mean that I would not covet
a relationship with the predominantly conservative confessional community of
Muslims here in the United States, but I have also decided that the capacity for
me to contribute as one human being in one body on this planet has been blessed
by a plethora of opportunities that did not allow me such comfort. So, I can rec-
ognize that being part of an established congregation would be a comfort, I could
even covet it to a certain extent, but I don’t depend on it anymore. As a conse-
quence, it allows me to remember to see the beauty where the beauty manifests
and to open up to the challenges as not in and of themselves insurmountable but
as instruments for change and growth and the broadening of perspectives and the
increased light.
So, everywhere I get pushed up against the wall, I’m looking for the magic
button in the wall that will cause the panels to slide open and allow me to enter
the next room. It’s not as if I don’t sometimes feel backed up against the wall; I
just try not to succumb to it, except to recognize my discomfort and acknowledge
that the only way I would be discomforted is through not accepting a reality. I
want to know what that reality is, and I want to be able to open to it and as soon as
I require of myself what I learned from my father, being honest and transparent
with myself, it frees me then from attachment to any one particular thing.
The lack of a fixed location has allowed me to entertain, intellectually and
academically and politically in terms of my activism, how to move the parameters
that people are trying to establish in such a way as to limit the possibilities for
other human beings to likewise experience that kind of life. I hope that answers
your question because it’s a complicated story.
Kecia: One of the things I wanted to ask you about in terms of community
has to do with the increase in a number of places worldwide—in Denmark, in sev-
eral places in the United States and Canada, and elsewhere—of woman-centered,
nontraditional mosque communities, some of which are queer inclusive; some
of which make a special effort to be trans friendly; some of which are very con-
cerned also about accessibility, physical and otherwise, to the mosque space; and
many of which center around women’s ritual leadership, either of other women
or in gender-mixed groups. Clearly, by leading a mixed-gender jummah prayer
you demarcated a kind of outer boundary for some people, you bore the brunt,
unfairly I think, for it. For many in the community, though, it meant that lots of
others could do things that previously would have been perceived as really, really
radical before you opened up space for them. It made things like leading men
privately, leading male family members, or leading men outside jummah seem
less radical. A range of other things has happened, but I’m particularly interested

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78 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35.1

in the communities. You spoke about there being mainstream conservative com-
munities that some of us participate in and some of us feel estranged from . . . but
the fact is there are these other communities growing, and I wonder if you could
speak to that, including maybe in Berkeley, California, where you’re currently
based.
amina: Last week, they actually had a woman in Kerala in southern India
lead a group and it was advertised quite widely. I thought that was quite interest-
ing because there are still mosques in Kerala that women can’t enter at all. I have
to be honest about my location in a Western, secular religious-freedom democ-
racy/imperialist location.
My father considered his greatest moral imperative in the context of his own
poverty as a black man in America, with eight children, as being able to maintain
through tenacity the freedom of religion that is supposedly offered here. That
meant that I understood something about the civic component of religion in a
dynamic that was very different from my experiences living and working abroad.
This is that, particularly in the black community, when people migrated after slav-
ery to the North and established what we used to call storefront churches, this is
religion being made by the people, as the people live it now. For me, that’s actually
the only religion that’s got authority. In the context of Islam today what that would
mean is that people would take agency to break out of the mold of a repetition of
certain forms of religious authority and institutions that did not nurture the lived
realities of the diversity of people that existed.
So, we take agency to make our own mosques and to have people under-
stand it’s just like any other sort of nongovernmental organization. You’ve got
to have a couple people, and you’ve got to have a space. You keep working to
increase the number of people or the space or whatever and to infuse this idea
of a community-based construction with the historical recognition that that’s
what has happened everywhere Islam has spread. Someone in the community
gathered funds to create a musalla (prayer space) or a mosque or jami’ah (large
mosque for congregational Friday prayers). That was always what was happen-
ing. When you look back and this mosque has been here for two hundred years
or three hundred years or eight hundred years, you pretend that it is an eternal
fixture. But instead, what you find is that there was a momentum to bring this
into being, and now it’s become a part of precedent. So, we can keep doing it
today.
One of the things I do when I go places is to actually encourage people: if you
build it they will come. As a consequence, more people are taking agency to do it.
They’re defying the necessity of either a state-run or religious-ministry-run estab-
lishment of the sacred order. The sacred order can be established by the people;
in fact, that’s been the overwhelming history of the growth of Islam. So, to reclaim
that now—I confess I was inspired by living in the liberal, secular society, and the
idea of congregation and the power of the congregation to shape the church or

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 Ali: The Making of the “Lady Imam” 79

the mosque or the temple. Just like Sisters in Islam, there were only eight of us.
It starts off small, and then it increases by the community mandate. The mandate
within the community, we’ve already seen it’s very strong.
So, the more opportunities people have availed themselves of in order to be
able to make these things possible, the more the possibility becomes less and less
far-fetched. Then you look back ten years, twenty years, a hundred years, and it’s
going to be taken for granted that that’s what’s supposed to happen anyway right?
So, be the change you want to see in the world—I hate to quote Gandhi whose
name is currently under siege but . . .
To make change happen requires only the dedication to do whatever it is you
want to do, with others who are willing to work with you. I mean, I advise people
about how to do it. If you can get just three people—I don’t recommend two, but
literally three people—and you keep working at it, and you grow, and one per-
son drops off, but by that time, two other people have come. You need to have a
core—a kind of community, a kind of network—and then you just keep going at
it. Every obstacle that comes, you face that particular obstacle: we need funds, we
need to have our own dedicated space, we need to build a space. You grapple with
those things as they come about rather than assuming that you have to walk in,
build a new building, have all the stuff established. Just start small, and let it grow.
I think what is happening in terms of the inclusive mosque initiatives world-
wide is that people are willing to stand apart from the majority. They’re willing
to forgo the authority that is ascribed to the majority, even when the majority is
not serving the needs of the whole. They can accept being a numerical minority
because serving that minority of people, that collective or congregation, matters.
So, I’m really happy to see the ways in which people are grappling with differ-
ent constraints to move forward. The inclusive mosque initiative in the United
Kingdom, for example, is explicitly disability friendly. They make sure they always
have places that are accessible, that they have British Sign Language interpreters.
When you start thinking about inclusiveness, don’t just think about gender, don’t
just think about sexuality, also think about class, also think about ableism. The
more all these features come together, the more we begin to understand realisti-
cally how Islam belongs to us. It belongs to all of us, and we make it as we live it.
Kecia: I think we should end there because I cannot think of a more power-
ful summing up of all of the things that you’ve been talking about. Thank you so
much.

Kecia Ali is professor of religion at Boston University. Her books include Sexual
Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence
(expanded second edition, 2016) and The Lives of Muhammad (2014). She’s
currently writing a book about the gender politics of academic Islamic
studies. ka@bu.edu

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