This weekend, I attended a regional conference of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) National–a gathering of about a thousand or so young Muslim students from schools around the east coast.
For about three years during my undergrad I was an officer in the MSA. For uninitiated: the MSA is a collegiate socio-political organization for young American Muslims. It’s existed since 1947, which makes it North America’s oldest Muslim organization. The importance of the MSA in the lives of Muslim youth can’t be overstated: in many ways, it is a vehicle–or an experimental flask–for the the future of Islam in America.
When I heard that the MSA would be holding its regional conference close to where I was going to grad school, I decided to show up. It was ironic–I’ve likened being an MSA officer akin to doing military service. You sign up because you want to serve your community. The service itself is often hell-a ton of responsbilities, pressure, and getting shit from all sides. You do your 2-3 years, and even though you’re glad to be a “civilian” again, you don’t regret having been a part of the MSA. And like the military, it keeps pulling you back!
But I digress.
I was attending one of the conference lectures yesterday afternoon. The introduction was given by the current President of MSA National, Asma Mirza. She introduced the rest of the MSA National Board, which included three other sisters and a brother. Much like many females in the audience, I was proud to see a Muslimah up at the podium as our leader.
What I didn’t expect (or maybe I did on some subconscious level)) was that that would be the last time I’d be seeing a woman speaking on stage for the rest of the day. We heard a number of well-known scholars and teachers speak eloquently about the linguistic beauty of the Qur’an and the Black Muslim history in America. All had received some education in the middle east under the tutelage of known Islamic scholars. All were men.
I had a thought. Why?
OK, the obvious answer is that patriarchy exists, and leaders in our still-patriarchial age tend to be men. More interesting to me though is a kind of organizational specificity to the inequality. Like I mentioned earlier, there were plenty of women on the MSA National Board–including the President. But when it came to the segments addressing spirituality and theology, the lack of women was pretty glaring. And this isn’t isolated by any means–I speak from years of being involved in MSA, ISNA and the like. I see the same pattern: there are gains for Muslim women in gaining leadership in Islamic organizations. But very few have gained the credentials of Islamic scholarship to lecture at events, and even so are not in huge demand at events like the MSA’s.
In a larger context: look at the three Abrahamic faiths–How prominent are female preachers, ministers, nuns, ministers, monks and the like? Forget Abrahamic faiths, what about eastern faiths like Buddhism? All are dominated by men. And it makes me wonder, what has happened in the last 2,000 or so years that has made legitimate spirituality, organized religion the province of men?
What is also interesting to me is that it wasn’t always this way. In the Islamic faith, A’isha, perhaps the most well known of all of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s wives, was the most significant preacher of her husband’s message after his death. Muslim women were prominent as teachers in the early days of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam. In Christianity, the orthodox Celtic Church allowed women to lead mass and be priests on equal par with men. So this change is relatively recent.
Maybe this is yet another layer of the patriarchial phenomenon. If we view religion in a political sense, the leaders of a faith are imbued with immense power over those that follow. Organized religion has historically been a unbelivably powerful vehicle for social, political, and economic interests and change. So what what better way to keep marginalize women than to forbid them from holy places and deny them theological scholarship?
Kashmiri Muslim women pray outside the shrine of Sufi Saint Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani
The Spiritual Feminine
Posted in social commentary with tags religion on April 12, 2009 by SultanaThis weekend, I attended a regional conference of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) National–a gathering of about a thousand or so young Muslim students from schools around the east coast.
For about three years during my undergrad I was an officer in the MSA. For uninitiated: the MSA is a collegiate socio-political organization for young American Muslims. It’s existed since 1947, which makes it North America’s oldest Muslim organization. The importance of the MSA in the lives of Muslim youth can’t be overstated: in many ways, it is a vehicle–or an experimental flask–for the the future of Islam in America.
When I heard that the MSA would be holding its regional conference close to where I was going to grad school, I decided to show up. It was ironic–I’ve likened being an MSA officer akin to doing military service. You sign up because you want to serve your community. The service itself is often hell-a ton of responsbilities, pressure, and getting shit from all sides. You do your 2-3 years, and even though you’re glad to be a “civilian” again, you don’t regret having been a part of the MSA. And like the military, it keeps pulling you back!
But I digress.
I was attending one of the conference lectures yesterday afternoon. The introduction was given by the current President of MSA National, Asma Mirza. She introduced the rest of the MSA National Board, which included three other sisters and a brother. Much like many females in the audience, I was proud to see a Muslimah up at the podium as our leader.
What I didn’t expect (or maybe I did on some subconscious level)) was that that would be the last time I’d be seeing a woman speaking on stage for the rest of the day. We heard a number of well-known scholars and teachers speak eloquently about the linguistic beauty of the Qur’an and the Black Muslim history in America. All had received some education in the middle east under the tutelage of known Islamic scholars. All were men.
I had a thought. Why?
OK, the obvious answer is that patriarchy exists, and leaders in our still-patriarchial age tend to be men. More interesting to me though is a kind of organizational specificity to the inequality. Like I mentioned earlier, there were plenty of women on the MSA National Board–including the President. But when it came to the segments addressing spirituality and theology, the lack of women was pretty glaring. And this isn’t isolated by any means–I speak from years of being involved in MSA, ISNA and the like. I see the same pattern: there are gains for Muslim women in gaining leadership in Islamic organizations. But very few have gained the credentials of Islamic scholarship to lecture at events, and even so are not in huge demand at events like the MSA’s.
In a larger context: look at the three Abrahamic faiths–How prominent are female preachers, ministers, nuns, ministers, monks and the like? Forget Abrahamic faiths, what about eastern faiths like Buddhism? All are dominated by men. And it makes me wonder, what has happened in the last 2,000 or so years that has made legitimate spirituality, organized religion the province of men?
What is also interesting to me is that it wasn’t always this way. In the Islamic faith, A’isha, perhaps the most well known of all of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s wives, was the most significant preacher of her husband’s message after his death. Muslim women were prominent as teachers in the early days of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam. In Christianity, the orthodox Celtic Church allowed women to lead mass and be priests on equal par with men. So this change is relatively recent.
Maybe this is yet another layer of the patriarchial phenomenon. If we view religion in a political sense, the leaders of a faith are imbued with immense power over those that follow. Organized religion has historically been a unbelivably powerful vehicle for social, political, and economic interests and change. So what what better way to keep marginalize women than to forbid them from holy places and deny them theological scholarship?
Kashmiri Muslim women pray outside the shrine of Sufi Saint Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani
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