I’m going to Malaysia to attend the launch of a movement for gender equality in Muslim families. Several prominent Muslim women scholars are behind the movement and it’s a huge honour for me to be there. I will write about it once it’s been officially launched but in the meanwhile I’m reposting an oped I published in the International Herald Tribune in 2005 about one of those Muslim women scholars – Dr. Amina Wadud.

Making History at Friday Prayer

By Mona Eltahawy

March 29, 2005

NEW YORK: On March 18, I put on my smartest clothes and my favorite jewelry, hailed a cab and tried my best not to cry as I rode to the Juma’h prayer that marks the highlight of the Muslim week. We are taught to look our best for the weekly prayer, and this was no ordinary Juma’h. It was the first time on record that a woman was to lead a mixed-gender Friday prayer.

It was reassuring to see police officers standing guard outside Synod House, next to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. The original venue for the prayer backed out after it received threats. But no security check could dampen our emotions.

For some of the 100 men and women sitting together on the floor of the prayer hall, the tears flowed early. I could hear the two women next to me quietly sob as they listened to a woman issue the call to prayer. For one of them, a Somali, they were tears of return – in her country, women were not allowed into the local mosque.

When Amina Wadud, an Islamic studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, stepped up to the microphone I let out a long sigh – of relief, of acceptance and, finally, of peace. For years I had been engaged in a seemingly endless bout over women’s rights with a male-dominated Islam, neither one of us able to deal that knockout blow.

Amina Wadud dealt it for me. The struggle would continue, but seeing Wadud give her sermon, I could see the light at the end of the 1,400-year-long tunnel. Hearing her recite verses that addressed men and women as equals and listening as she pointed to the exclusion of women by male jurists from the codification of Islamic law – several decades after the death of the prophet Muhammad – it was clear she was serving notice that female scholars of Islam were done with being on the sidelines. The spiritual equality at the heart of Islam meant nothing less than equality in religious leadership, Wadud was saying. Our presence there at Synod House was our collective Amen to that.

And then she led us in prayer.

We later heard of protesters outside, but they were a handful and were to be expected. What I had not expected was to look up at Wadud and feel that it was normal to see a woman in her position. Who knew that making history could be so normal? And make history we did. Suddenly, scholars and clerics who have ignored countless atrocities in the name of Islam over the past few years awoke to denounce Wadud and those of us who prayed behind her. Predictably, some saw a Zionist-American plot to use women’s issues to destabilize the Muslim world. Others irresponsibly accused Wadud of heresy, a word that some consider a death sentence.

A jihadist Web site urged Osama bin Laden to issue a fatwa calling for our deaths, while the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi complained at an Arab League summit meeting that our prayer would create a million bin Ladens.

There are rays of hope. Egypt’s grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, said a woman could lead a mixed-gender prayer as long as the congregation approved (but then the religious institution he heads issued an online fatwa condemning our prayer, no doubt in a bid to distance itself from his words).

More support came from the Islamic Commission of Spain, which earlier this month issued an unprecedented fatwa against bin Laden and his followers that coincided with the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings.

But our impact on ordinary Muslims counts the most.

“At least now I know that my children (if I ever have any) will see a religion with more equality,” a Saudi man wrote to me. Amen.