What’s race got to do with it?
I’m rather puzzled by the reaction to Amina Wadud’s speech in Toronto last month. I’m not surprised, of course, that Muslim WakeUp (or Go To Sleep as our sister Umm Zaid memorably called it) has basically come out in support of Wadud’s outrageous statements. What is really suprising is that a race issue has been made out of it.
Midway through her speech titled “The QurâÂÂan, Women and Interpretive Possibilities,” Wadud waded into the minefield by addressing some difficult passages of the QurâÂÂan. Breaking the ultimate taboo in the Muslim narrative, she stated that despite the fact the QurâÂÂan explicitly asks for cutting off the hands of thieves, she did not agree with the QurâÂÂan. She said she understood that this was a very difficult subject to talk about, but she would be dishonest to herself if she did not express her views.
This understandably caused much anger in the “progressive mosque” in Toronto. She also presented four ways of dealing with “difficult” passages in the Qur’an (surprisingly, or perhaps not, the Sunnah is not mentioned), the fourth being “to say no to the Qur’an” (na’udhu billah). Somehow Prof. Wadud gets the impression that the Qur’an itself gives her the means to do this. I’m sure anyone who reads the Qur’an will agree with me that, in fact, it doesn’t. (Not acting on ayats presenting abrogated rulings is a different matter, but that’s why we follow the scholars, not our desires.)
Someone (whose race wasn’t mentioned) took the mike into his hand and did an imitation of a rapper while attacking Wadud’s speech. Wadud invited him to give his speech while she sat in the crowd, which he did. When someone apologised for the rudeness of some of the audience, “she responded that as a black woman, she knew what it is to have one’s views rejected, she thundered to an applause that started with a few hesitant claps and then rolled across the hall”. The grammatical error is theirs, but this victim mentality is compounded by her reply to an Indian man who said he knew racism. “No you don’t understand. You are not Black; you don’t know what it is to be Black.”
For one thing, you don’t have to be black, or female, to “have one’s views rejected”; you could, for example, be someone of extreme views or someone with nothing constructive to contribute. In my experience, when discussions are held on a free-for-all basis, some people are excluded. The visually-impaired (and, needless to say, the deaf) are more vulnerable to this in today’s society than black people. To say that the Indian man didn’t know racism because he wasn’t black can only come out of a total ignorance of that man’s life. In the UK Indian people have faced quite a bit of racism over the years, and there has been much inter-communal trouble in India, as well as caste conflict. Caste is, in fact, race. The upper castes are mostly the descendents of “Aryan” invaders from the north, and tend to have lighter skin than people of lower castes.
The commentary calls it troubling that Wadud was the only African in the room, in a city whose Muslim population is one-quarter African. But surely that shows how much Amina Wadud means to African Muslims; this event must have been advertised, surely? If the “progressive” movement behind this mosque doesn’t attract Toronto’s African Muslim community, you’ll have to ask them why.
Time after time, irrelevant race issues are brought up in this piece. One Indo-Canadian made this remark:
When a white person converts to Islam, we try to make him the Imam of the mosque. But when a Black woman converts to Islam, we expect her to run the mosque day care for children during Jum’a prayers. Amina should have worn the Hijab; people would have mistaken her for a dark Pakistani.
But the woman’s race isn’t the issue! What matters is that she is a woman, and thus cannot be an imam for men in prayer! If she wants to work for the mosque, whether by making tea or cooking or by running the mosque’s website, fine. And it’s not true that any white convert will get to any position of authority. It’s quite likely that he will face suspicion (for example, have people accuse him of being a spy, which happened to me), and have considerable difficulty finding a wife if he intends to marry a born Muslim. I heard one story of a white convert who went to Dar al-Uloom and became a scholar, and learned Urdu (the language commonly spoken, at least until recently, in British Asian Islamic learning establishments), and ended up being a bus conductor, because he couldn’t get a job as an imam.
It’s undeniable that there are black-white race issues in the Muslim community, but someone who talks nonsense, as Wadud does, should not deflect criticism by bringing race into the matter. The community has been similarly hostile to people like Irshad Manji (of Indian origin) and others who call for radical, and un-Islamic, “reforms of Islam”. On the other hand, the Ummah has a history of black orthodox scholars, who are held in high respect by traditional Arab Muslim scholars (although they may not be well-known, given the geographical barriers between the Arab world and west Africa in particular). It seems that her critics at this particular event didn’t put their views across in the most appropriate way, but it’s become fairly common for people to bring attention to someone’s origins when criticising them. But no-one need think that we will show any more tenderness to someone spouting plainly anti-Islamic ideas in a mosque if they are white than was shown to Wadud in Toronto last month.
