First Fruit of the Prayer

By Name Withheld

I am going to pray again. I am returning to salat after years away. I am returning because of the woman-led jum’ah that took place today. Something in me that had been knotted in pain has begun to ease.

When I was a child, prayer anchored my days. When a relative who didn’t pray took care of me for an afternoon, as the hours passed I felt disoriented, until I realized we had missed salat, which in my family meant everyone gathering, wet from wudu, for jamaat. Non-Muslim friends sometimes asked ‘Can I watch?’ and were welcome, sitting on the couch swinging their legs while we made our mysterious, marvelous movements.

When I was a teen, prayer was mine. It fit me, like a soft hijab. It grounded me wherever I was in the world. Lost on the big campus, I knew at least one corner was mine: where I laid my forehead in sujood.

Fajr, duhr, asr, mughreb, isha, gave shape to my time. Some days dhuha and witr. In Ramadan, add taraweeh, along with an ihya, staying up all night in prayer, in the last ten days, often with other women. Tahajjud was my goal, too, and once or twice a year, I managed it. Sunna prayers were my friends. Once as a kid I even tried to pray the superogatory prayer after asr, and the grown-ups nudged each other and said, ‘Hey—somebody tell her, there’s no sunnah after asr!’

I loved the recital of Qur’an; it made my heart leap. After I learned tajwid, which requires regular practice, like the violin, I became a Qur’an gourmet, taking sweet pleasure in beautiful technique and knowledgeable recital.

Form is important in salat as in everything. How many times did a grown-up gently pull my right hand and lay it on top of my left hand when I was a girl unschooled in the correct postures that give outline to every form, just as the pen outlines an upright aleph or a curled mim. Rise fully after ruku. Observe symmetry in the time you give each posture, as the Prophet did. How people form their feet in juloos says a lot about them—do they choose the rigorous one-flexed-ankle, one-turned-ankle position or, something from the range of easier, more leaning, postures? Which dua do you say between the first and second sajda? My grandmother says ‘rabi ighfir li wa irhamni,’ while my friend says another, for this is a point in salat form where multiple answers are right. And in the many details, even with accurate form observed, each salat takes the shape of the individual praying, a signature style; each prayer looks like a different work of art. A proper prayer is a work of beauty, how it all comes together, body and spirit one, no separation, the movements smooth, the transitions fluid. Its fruits are abundant. Serenity and sakeena descend. Angels pray beside you.

I learned prayer form and Quran from women. My mother is a lifelong leader of women’s Quran tafsir groups. I have prayed behind her countless days of my life. My grandmother before her likewise. I took tajwid with a woman scholar. I have prayed behind women imams all my life. I have prayed behind illustrious pious Muslim women of our age. Women who have worn down their hearts to a polish with dhikr, who own a treasure of duas.

In mixed-gender gatherings, however, none of the women’s piety, proficient recital, good form, or seasoned knowledge of every nook and cranny of prayer, matters. All women are ruled out before any of that is even considered—ruled out by gender alone. A man who doesn’t even observe proper form, his back sloppily sloped in ruku, is the default and permanent choice of imam over his wife whose prayer form is exquisite. A man whose poor qira’a makes me wince automatically assumes the mantle of imam should prayer time come upon him in a group of women, no matter how graced with skill and knowledge they are. My gangly brother at fourteen, who did not have enough sense to let his body come to full tranquility in each posture at that impatient age, took precedence as imam over my grandmother with her learning and piety, according to the traditions and customs of Islam and the widespread belief of most Muslims, because he was past puberty and so, biologically, was an adult male—meeting the first requirement, which she did not meet.

What does this say to us? What it said to me was soul-crushing. Soul-crushing were the answers I got from the Muslims I knew, men and women. Laughter and mocking were common responses whenever I raised the question, ‘Why? Why not women imams?’

I came to a point where I could not go on observing a salat whose proper form, I was repeatedly and authoritatively told, forbade female leadership. It was a lie, then, the whole bill of goods about the proper form for salat in jamaat, how important Quranic learning and recital technique is, how important religious knowledge is in the imam, how all God looks at is our taqwa, not our sex.

The first lesson we are taught as Muslims, after tawhid and stemming from tawhid, is the spiritual equality of all human beings under God. ‘The most honorable of you is the most pious.’ All that matters in prayer is your tuqa. Not your skin color, not your nation or tribe. Only your inner equilibrium, your relationship with God, pure and ungendered. Not really, if a woman can never be imam with men present, no matter how learned she is. What a ‘bait and switch’ trick, making you believe the stuff about spiritual equality and then springing this on you in the fine print.

Can you see how humiliating this is? How it feels like rejection from God? How undermining to the very core of faith?

It’s not about the egoism of wanting to lead. Why is ego never raised when we talk about men being imams? Being an imam puts awe and panic into most people. It did in me when I led women at our ihyas and gatherings. It is a profound responsibility. You are their vanguard, their shepherd through what might be the most important few minutes of their day. Who wants that for glory?

But it is about the thought that you are not believed worthy. To even hope to rise to that challenge once in your lifetime, even in old age. Ever. Because of your gender, something you cannot control. You are ‘less than.’ This is a source of pain and bewildered hurt.

I don’t care how conservative you are, how much you say you’ve never wanted to be imam: Every girl has been to that place. That place of bewildered pain at the misgiving that you might be rated less worthy by God. If you think you haven’t been there, you just don’t remember. You were so young when it had to be buried alive, the question. We spend the rest of our lives constructing explanations so that we don’t have to go there again.

None of the men in my life, or the women, for that matter, had a compassionate response. None of the Muslims in my mosque-oriented, deeply religious life, understood why it mattered. Not the conservatives, not the liberals, whose indifference and inaction hurt more.

‘Even if your research is right, which we doubt because you are no scholar and we have it on authority of scholars, but even if it turns out that women imams over mixed congregations really is allowed in Islam and it’s only been disallowed out of custom,” the people in my life derided, ‘you’ll never get any other Muslims to do it. You can’t go against the universal consensus of Muslims. No mosque will allow it, no community condone it, no group will ever permit such a prayer. So what is the point of believing in it?”

The lack of succour from the men in my life on this issue cut deep. I am related to a veritable army of good men. If just one man, even if he could not see a way clear to allowing women imams, could have said, ‘I acknowledge your pain. I see why it matters. I get it,’ God, what a difference that would have made.

Somehow I get why women give up on or never take up this issue, and I find women’s conservatism on it more understandable. A conservative or traditional woman, like the many I love dearly, has more to lose by challenging the system than by finding a nice respectable place within the honored, if hierarchical, space it does give her. Something about this has to come from men.

I sought a champion among Muslim men in vain. Praying behind them started to feel like humiliation. I would stand and sorrow, instead of pray. That is how I knew that I would not, could not, ever again pray behind these men, then, who filled my life but did not validate it.

I know I was wrong to seek an answer from men, or from women. I knew I needed to teach myself to rely on God alone for guidance. But I did not have the inner resources to pearl-dive solo for the signs of God, nor did I find a teacher, and I faltered among companions here and there, seeking ones who would help toward yaqin.

Rather than get pulled down completely into the dank abyss where I had some moments, I turned from exterior prayer to interior prayer, took form inward. God did not ever leave me, nor did I leave God. Al-Rahman is always present; I am full of amazement and shukr, and my gratitude spills over. But inward form is easy to be distracted from, to lose the thread of—for me, anyway. I need and crave outward form, a tangible vessel for my prayer that strikes a resonant chord in my heart.

I feel like today God answered my need. Has given me men who stand up for me now the way my brothers never have. And women who are the sisters of my soul more than the women who would always disappear when I’d turn for their support in the struggle to manifest the spiritual equality promised by God.

I miss salat. I have missed it for years. I say this, and then have to take a few minutes from writing to sob like my heart is breaking–Okay, I’m back, several wet tissues and a big red nose blow later. I want to unroll my prayer rug again. My body misses the movements. My forehead misses the caress of the ground.

I began with ghusl this morning. Washed away the hardness I let cover the old wound. Dug out my big soft prayer scarf deep in the back of the linen closet. A few minutes before the salat was due to begin on the East Coast, I made wudu. I spread my prayer rug again. My knees have forgotten, in the intervening years, some of the suppleness that constant juloos gave them, and they hurt. But not as much as my heart used to, before the woman-led prayer held by my Muslim heroes, and the angels who prayed beside them today.