Women leaders under the cross and crescent: Muslim and Christian women explore female leadership in their faith traditions

National Catholic Reporter, April 25, 2003 by Heidi Schlumpf

Talk about timing, just hours before the first bombs fell on Baghdad in the Second Gulf War, a group, of Muslim and Christian men and women gathered to imagine how the world-might be different if leadership in churches, mosques and society were more open to women.

Speakers at the two-day conference, "Sisters: Women, Religion and Leadership in Christianity and Islam," at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago focused on the leadership positions in their respective faith traditions that are currently closed to women. They also discussed positive examples of past and current visionary women leaders and the need to create new ways of leading that better reflect women's contributions.

"The solution is not to take traditional roles and substitute the people who have been excluded into them," said Ingrid Mattson, associate professor of Islam at Hartford Seminary and vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, based in Plainfield, Ind.

That misguided thinking is exemplified by the question most frequently asked of Mattson by non-Muslims: Can a woman be an imam? The question itself, she says, is problematic because it assumes clergy are the most important leaders, which is not necessarily true in Islam. ("Imam" literally means "leader" in Arabic and refers to the formal leader of prayer in a mosque.)

"It's a very important position in the United States because in the American context the role of minister is very important," says Mattson. "But anyone can lead prayer, and there are other levels of religious authority."

Mattson instead suggested a functional approach to evaluating whether women have succeeded in exercising authority in the variety of political, scholarly and spiritual leadership roles in Islam, while continuing to recognize the relationship between power, politics and religion.

"We must understand that religious institutions are political institutions with political power," she said, noting that most American mosques are governed by the corporate model of a board of directors. "They write the job descriptions. They determine how space will be used. They make the decisions about money and priorities."

The Quran, in teaching that on the Day of Judgment people will be raised with their leaders, emphasizes the responsibility all people of faith have for their leadership, Mattson said. "We will have to answer for the leaders we have chosen to follow."

Going back to the roots

Although the subordination of women has long been part of both Christian and Muslim history, women from both faiths argued that oppression was not what their founders had in mind. "Natural law and scripture, especially Paul, has been used to support sexism, racism, classism and homophobia," said Georgetown University associate professor Diana Hayes. "However, this was not always so. Jesus called together a community of disciples who were equals."

Hayes, a Catholic womanist theologian, described how various groups, especially African-Americans, have been subjugated in the church. "Europeans and European-Americans have been transformed not into images of God, but into gods themselves," she said. "Women, persons of color and all others outside the norm have been relegated to the roles of passivity, even non-humanity,"

Clearly, she argued, change is needed. "How long can an institution preach one thing but internally go against what it is preaching? It makes no sense to alienate half of a church ... to satisfy a man-made agenda."

Rather than relegate women only to maternal roles, she demanded that the church "bring about a world into which we would want to bring children."

Yet Hayes cautioned against women merely stepping into already corrupted leadership roles, urging them instead to transform the whole idea of leadership. "For reform in the church, we who are women need to speak another language than the masculinized one that exists," she said. "We must look at how exclusive we are being even in our efforts to be inclusive."

Historian Mary Thurkill, assistant professor at Southern Arkansas University, also believes women could bring to the table new, experiential ways of exercising authority. "We have to stop comparing women with men," she said. "We need to pay more attention to shifting paradigms of authority."

To facilitate this shift, she and other scholars have taken up the task of reclaiming and reimagining women in the historical traditions of Islam and Christianity. Thurkill, who is, Protestant, has studied both traditions, specifically looking at images of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad--both of whom have been put on pedestals for their virginal purity

"Most research [about them] has been used to reinforce women's place in the domestic sphere," she said. "But they have also been used as models of holiness, virtue and authority intended not only for women but also for men to imitate as well."

Role models for contemporary Islamic women also can be found among medieval women scholars who studied with and taught men hundreds of years ago. "These women challenge our monolithic and pessimistic view of women," said Asma Afsaruddin, assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame.