WHERE ELSE WOULD THE REFORMATION OCCUR?:

Let These Women Pray!: In an uprising reminiscent of the lunch-counter protests of the 1960s, women at one of Washington D.C.'s most popular mosques are copying the tactics of the civil-rights movement, and refusing to follow rules that ban them from praying with the men. Asra Q. Nomani on the arrest threats and outrage that followed. (Asra Q. Nomani, February 27, 2010, Daily Beast)

The women’s prayer was a “Stand In,” a civil-rights protest against gender segregation in mosques, inspired by Black History Month. The 21st-century suffragettes are part of an emerging movement that challenges traditional interpretations of Islam—and questions the disturbing fact that women’s rights take a back seat to civil rights in America when freedom of religion is invoked. So, today, a mosque can’t tell a woman of color she has to sit separately because of her race, but it can banish her to a corner, as most do, because of her gender. Some even ban women altogether.

Police officer Barry Goodwin soon arrived and awkwardly walked over to the line of women—in his socks, because he couldn’t enter the mosque in shoes—to search for the organizers. It wasn’t long before it dawned on the visiting women that trouble was brewing.

Goodwin eventually found Thompson and her small troop of protesters. “I’m not a Muslim. I’m just here to do my job” he said politely. “Ladies, this is how it works. You have to obey the rules of the church here… I’m sorry. The church or temple. However you want to call it. You have to obey the rules.” He continued: “If they ask you to leave. You have to leave.” Failure to leave, he pointed out, would be grounds for arrest for unlawful entry. He said: “I don’t want to do that.”

Three mosque officials hovered over the women. What irked them, they later said, was that late-arriving men had to pray behind women. Their position was that the women could stay if they prayed behind the partition. “If you want to come here to pray,” one administrator, a woman, told the group, “you can pray. But you cannot come here and disrespect the mosque.”

What unfolded that day inside the mosque underscores a growing agitation inside the American-Muslim community by women frustrated by separate-and-unequal status. A survey by the Council on American Islamic Relations showed that two of three mosques in 2000 required women to pray in a separate area, up from one of two in 1994. In 2003, I challenged rules at my mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, that women enter through a back door and pray in a secluded balcony. I argued that, in the 7th century, the prophet Muhammad didn’t put women behind partitions, and the barriers were just emblematic of sexist man-made rules. The men at my mosque put me on trial to be banished.

To me, the women’s space in a mosque is an indicator of whether the interpretation of Islam being practiced is puritanical and dogmatic, or open and inclusive. This one choice is a harbinger for other controversial interpretations of Islam, including domestic violence, honor killings, suicide bombings, violence and interfaith relations. Just this week, a hard-line Saudi cleric issued a fatwa on his Arabic-language Web site calling for the killing of Muslims who don’t enforce strict gender segregation.