Why Muslims reject Nomani’s campaign
Yesterday a blog which was originally set up to defend Little Green Footballs from one of its critics reproduced an article from Reuters via Yahoo, American Muslim Author Wants to Shake Up Faith. The recent controversies over Nomani’s and Amina Wadud’s antics have gained much column inches, even including an appreciative short piece in the left-leaning British political weekly, the New Statesman. People don’t quite appreciate why the rest of the community don’t share their enthusiasm.
The report notes that Nomani has been “branded a criminal by traditional members of her faith for having a child out of wedlock”. Well, fornication is a sin in Islam, just as it is in every major religion. Islamic law does not apply in West Virginia, but in principle it is a crime. This doesn’t mean that someone who has turned their back on their sin can’t become an upstanding Muslim, but Nomani doesn’t make any secret of the fact that she is a fornicator and that her child is illegitimate. But whether their real concern is her past or her present is, of course, not mentioned. As for the death threats, people often get death threats when doing anything controversial. Linking some threatening phone calls with Osama bin Laden seems a bit melodramatic.
And I don’t see why 9/11 should have given her, or any Muslim, an “internal struggle”, any more than Beslan or any other atrocity. She might look at the history books of Islam at the dreadful things certain groups of Muslims did to their fellow believers in the first few centuries of Islam. This is, and was always, a fringe group, which because of the lack of space for dissent caused by dictatorial, often pro-American, régimes like Mubarak’s and certain families’, has made more recruits than it otherwise would have. In most of the states where parliamentary systems exist, Islamic parties have been prevented from standing or from taking power once elected.
And what is this “Muslim hierarchy” anyway? In most mosques there is no hierarchy, just an imam and the usual administrative committee.
And it’s not as if Nomani & co are the only people who are campaigning for better provision for women in mosques. The reason usually given is that women are supposed to do their regular prayers at home, in as private a location as possible, which is true, but this is sometimes not possible. It’s sometimes the choice between the mosque and the local park, or the corridor at work, in either of which she could be interrupted (or worse), or there could be some reason why her home isn’t a viable place to pray.
And her comments about women being allowed to lead prayer, and the supposed precedents for it, are quite simply all wrong. There are a few reports about women leading men in supererogatory prayers, but these do not include the Friday communal prayer, or any of the five daily prayers. In fact, from the earliest days of Islam, the women who set the example for other Muslim women did not lead men in prayer. And she has Colonel Qaddafi as an enemy – so she must be right, yeah? But Qaddafi is no authority on Islam (some even call him a non-Muslim), but all the real authorities say Nomani is wrong about women leading men in prayer.
And the ironic thing about Nomani’s antics is the repeated comparison with Martin Luther. We need a reformation, a Luther, they say – so Nomani goes and pins her manifesto to the door of the mosque. Martin Luther was a Protestant reformer with a solid Church background; he was a monk (until his split with Rome) and a professor of theology at Wittenberg, the noticeboard for which was that church door. His dispute with the Church was over corrupt practices and theology. He was certainly not a liberal or a feminist who was seeking what amounts to the right to follow one’s whims. And any outsider thinking of cheering on a “Muslim Luther” should look at the bloody history of Lutheran Germany and Sweden.
There are, in fact, efforts to revive classical teaching of Islam and to interest the younger generation of Muslims (women included) in it. And there have been numerous occasions where women have campaigned for access to mosques. This has been a community effort for the benefit of sincere, religious women. Asra Nomani has no background in Islamic learning at all, and is certainly not an exemplary Muslim. If a reformation were needed, she would certainly not be the one to lead it.
