On a Wing and a Prayer: Toronto Helps Make Woman-Led Prayer a Reality

By Ahmed Nassef

Read about the April 22 prayer led by Raheel Raza.
Read about the July 1 prayer led by Pamela Taylor.

The March 18th female-led, mixed gender prayer in New York City, sponsored by muslimwakeup.com and the Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour, shook the world.

This small prayer, led by Amina Wadud and attended by just over a hundred American Muslims, was covered by practically every major news media around the world—from TV broadcasters like the BBC and Al Jazeera to top newspapers and magazines published in multitudes of languages. It became a media event par excellence.

The prayer succeeded, beyond anyone’s expectations, in forcing the issue of women’s true spiritual equality to the forefront of Muslim discourse. We suddenly started hearing tired old sheikhs and mullahs, until then comfortable in their unchallenged male religious fiefdoms, talking about the virtues of women’s empowerment, right to education, and social equality (a few even acknowledged the validity of the prayer). From Turkey to Indonesia, the prayer became front-page news and stirred an open debate about women’s roles, prompting many to call for—at minimum—the proliferation of women’s mosques led by female imams. Here in North America, the unthinkable happened; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) suddenly discovered their own commissioned mosque study, a document that is over four years old that they had previously glossed over and misrepresented as a positive reflection of their institutions’ diversity and tolerance. (Apparently, MWU! was the only media that had bothered to read the study and report on the sad reality of the findings.) Now, in an unusual display of self-criticism, these paragons of piety had to issue statements citing that study decrying the “unjust and degrading” treatment of women in mosques and calling for women’s “full participation in the masjid.”

But for many who supported the prayer, this wasn’t just about speaking truth to power and nudging our “leaders” to move a few inches away from the ignorance and duplicity that characterize much of Muslim officialdom. This was a concrete act of Muslim women and men reclaiming our rights as human beings to practice our faith of compassion, love, equality, and mercy. As such, the little prayer that shook the world will truly succeed when similar prayers become just another expression of human love and worship for God, without all the spectacle, without the TV cameras, without the huge controversy.

That is why the prayers that took place in Toronto, one held in a backyard and led by Raheel Raza in April and another in a mosque led by Pamela Taylor this month, were so critical. Although they were both reported on by the Canadian press, the organizers took special care not to turn them into media events. These were Muslims praying to the One Merciful God the best way they knew how, pure and simple.

Hayy ‘ala’s-salah. Hayy ‘ala’l-falah. Hayy ‘ala khayri’l-‘amal.
Come to worship! Come to the real victory! Come to the best of actions!