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Wadud, Amina

Amina Wadud (1952-), a professor of Islamic Studies, African American Muslim activist, feminist, scholar, khatibah (reader/lecturer), imamah (leader), and mother of five children, began her transition to Islam in 1972. For the past three decades, Wadud has led, instructed, and helped form the intellectual backbone of the Muslim feminist movement that works toward greater gender parity in Islam and woman-inclusive readings of the sacred text of Islam, al-Qur'an, and the hadith literature (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad).

Amina Wadud earned a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. After completing her Ph.D., she taught at Qar Younis University in Libya, the International Islamic University in Malaysia, and the Virginia Commonwealth University in the United States. She is currently a visiting professor at the Center for Religious and Cross Cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Feminist Activism by Reinterpreting Islam

An important component of Amina Wadud's activism is the effort to open up spaces for new traditions within the Islamic faith. In one well-known event, Wadud led a mixed congregation of women and men in prayer in March 2005 as a female imamah (largely unprecedented in Islamic history). The event was sensationalized by global media and Muslim conservatives more fixated on the symbolic significance of a Muslim woman leading Muslim men than on the substantive content of khutbah (pre-prayer sermon) delivered or the conditions of historical and intellectual exclusion or marginalization of women in Islamic scholarship, exegetical analysis, devotional life, leadership roles, and public face/voice that motivated reclamation of the prayer space in the first place.

Amina Wadud's formative and original work, Qur'an and Woman: Re-Reading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (1992), advances the radical claim that the oppression of women in Muslim societies is based profoundly upon the exclusion of women's participation in Qur'anic exegesis.

From a pro-faith perspective, Wadud investigates the extent to which the 1,400-year history of Qur'anic interpretation had been influenced by the historical context and individual experiences of the male interpreters, the locale of revelation (e.g., the particularities of a patriarchal Arabia in the seventh century), the limitation of women's role in Islamic history to ahadith transmitters (as sufficient unto itself), and a reliance on literal interpretations of the text. The strategy of Qur'an and Woman is to develop a “symbiotic” relation between revelation and reader, to understand textual context, syntactical structure, and language usage that will allow for a more just social order.

Gender Equality within Islam

Wadud's book Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (2006), builds upon the theory of Qur'an and Woman, numerous articles and lectures, and Wadud's social and political activism to advance a theoretical and practical framework for the achievement of greater gender justice. The text deals explicitly with the ways in which Muslim women have advanced the gender jihad (struggle); for example, through forums, networks, and sisterhoods, and the many limitations they face as they work collectively and individually toward various unified and separate goals.

Some of the innovative theories and concepts advanced and/or developed in Inside the Gender Jihad include (1) a system of Islamic ethics informed by women's experience that places social justice upon the realization of the (a) Tawhidic paradigm (the unity of creation and Creator, the inherent oneness of all), (b) taqwa (moral consciousness), and (c) khalifah (moral agency); (2) the Hajar paradigm (which revisits the oppression of antiquated notions of motherhood); and (3) Khaled Abou El Fadl's notion of the “conscientious pause” with regard to the hudud ordinances of Islamic restrictions and punishments.

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