Posts Tagged women in the mosque
Eid al-Adha aftermath: maybe there’s hope
Posted by xcwn in Adventures in recovery, LGBTQ issues on November 26, 2012
For a number of reason, many of which I outlined in my last post, Eid al-Adha was far from being my favorite holiday back when I was a conservative Muslim. In the insular, very conservative community that I belonged for a number of years, Eid was really a celebration of patriarchal power and privilege.

This year, I learned that Eid al-Adha doesn’t have to be a celebration of patriarchal power and privilege. It can become a way for justice-seeking individuals to begin to recognize their own complicities within structures of power, and to resist these.
This photo is of the Eid prayer space of El-Tawhid Juma Circle in Toronto, Canada: <http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mmw/2012/10/mmw-eid-roundtable-part-2/#more-12005>
While I and my convert friends did our best not to acknowledge this, and tried so hard to get into the spirit of things, to find some spiritual nourishment in the whole thing—or failing this, to at least make it memorable and fun for our kids, it was practically impossible for us not to notice that its overwhelmingly patriarchal focus left barely any room for us or our children. It was a celebration of a particular type of hyper-masculinity that all but erases every way of being that doesn’t fit into that mold, and damns to hellfire all those of us who can’t help but protest the injustice of being negated and shoved to the margins.
But as this year’s Eid al-Adha approached, I began to hear things that made me wonder if perhaps I hadn’t written off this holiday too quickly. One mosque had invited a woman to give the sermon at the Eid prayers. And another was having a woman lead the Eid prayer. History was being made, apparently—and on this day of all days, when the story told in innumerable sermons around the globe studiedly ignores female subjectivities, and real live women are most typically relegated to the kitchen. I could hardly believe it.
But I was skeptical. The holiday is what it is, I thought. How could a few women giving sermons or leading prayers make any difference? Wouldn’t it be the ritual equivalent of… I don’t know, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?
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