The Muslim world should embrace homosexual and female imams
In the wake of the Orlando shooting, it is important that gay rights be accepted and gays seen as individuals with rights
June 14, 2016, 3:07 pm
SHARE :
Arshia Malik
BBC News Service in its February 2016 article documented the tradition.
As to how the tradition of women's mosques started, we have to go back to the founding of the Ming Dynasty in the late 1300s, when the Muslim community - previously favoured guests - suddenly became an anxious and oppressed minority. Responding to the shock of the alien Mongol occupation, the early Ming rulers waged a chauvinistic war against non-Han peoples. Minorities now aroused hostility and suspicion and were subject to a brutal policy of assimilation - the Muslims were told they must marry Han people and not among themselves.
So the 15th Century was almost catastrophic for Chinese Islam. But in the late 16th Century things improved and among the Muslims a new cultural movement began, a revival of Islamic culture and education. A century later Chinese Muslim philosophers were able to write erudite books showing how you could be a loyal Muslim and also loyal to the Chinese state. And at this point, at the grassroots, men realised how important women could be in preserving and transmitting the faith. So women's mosques grew out of a double movement in the Chinese Muslim world – the need to preserve the community and the desire for women's education.
Guo Jingfang and her friends in Kaifeng think that the schools came first, and then became full mosques in the 18th Century. Education still has a big role today, from basic teaching to copying texts.
‘When our mothers were girls it was the only place where poor Muslim women could receive an education: the women did it together, women supporting women, said one of the women chatting in the mosque's courtyard. "In some places in the Muslim world it is not allowed, but here we think it a good thing. Women have had a better status here since 1949 and this is part of it.’
One of the women mentioned the progressive ideas of the Islamic Association of Kaifeng, which gets men and women to work together on new education projects. "China is changing and these are good things for the future," she said. Later, in the main women's mosque, everyone joined in the prayers, and the men in our crew were invited too, visitors from afar.
So coming back to the acceptance of homosexual and female imams. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, it is important that gay rights be accepted and gays seen as individuals with rights. Like Faisal Saed Al Mutar, activist and founder of Global Secular Humanist Movement says, "If religions don't modernize to accept LGBT & women's rights, then religions need to die, not people.
It is time for religion to modernize. As Irshad Manji, author, speaker, founder of Moral Courage TV on YouTube and practitioner of ijtihad, in her 2011 book
Allah, Liberty and Love: T
he Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom, says: “Some things are more important than fear!”
http://nation.com.pk/blogs/14-Jun-2016/the-muslim-world-should-embrace-homosexual-and-female-imams
