by ALEJANDRA MOLINA
Author Tazeen M. Ali said the Women’s Mosque of America ‘has global implications for how we study Islam.’
Tazeen M. Ali was a graduate student in Boston when she first learned about the opening of the Women’s Mosque of America in Los Angeles, believed to be the nation’s first women-only mosque.
Ali recalls the social media debates that ensued around the mosque’s 2015 opening, with people arguing over the Islamic legality of woman-led prayers as well as news coverage about “Muslim women ‘fighting back’ against the patriarchy.”
These media narratives informed Ali’s assumptions that the mosque was a “radical space” made up of younger women who carried traumatic and negative experiences from other Islamic worship centers.
Ali would later learn it was much more than that.
In her recently released book, “The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority & Community in US Islam,” Ali explores how Muslim women without formal Islamic training have been able to cultivate religious authority in the congregation. The Women’s Mosque of America, writes Ali, “demonstrates the dynamism of Islam and the women who interpret it, who approach the Qur’an as a tool to resist social hierarchies, build community, and empower themselves.”
At the space, Ali — an assistant professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis — found a multiracial and multigenerational group of women, some who also occupied active roles in conventional mosques where they prayed and participated in community with men. The women’s mosque, as Ali wrote, hosted monthly jumah for Muslim and non-Muslim women, girls and boys under 12 years of age. While for some, the women’s mosque was the only space they were a part of, Ali learned it also functioned as a “complementary space” for many who belonged to other worship communities.
Ali highlighted how the mosque’s founder, Hasna Maznavi, a comedy writer, explicitly stated that her vision for the Women’s Mosque of America was “rooted in Muslim history” and the Muslim women’s leadership and women-only mosques that have existed for centuries.
Lawyer Sana Muttalib, WMA’s former co-president, credited the Quran for her understanding of Islam as a “gender-egalitarian religious tradition” and her motivation for immersing herself with the women’s mosque, Ali wrote.
Alongside Maznavi and Muttalib, both millennials, were preachers like Gail Kennard, a former journalist in her mid-60s who served as president of the oldest and one of the largest African American architectural firms in LA.
Ali spent a summer in Los Angeles in 2017, making connections with WMA members during Ramadan social events and after jumah while socializing around a halal food truck outside of the mosque. She interviewed more than 20 congregation members at coffee shops and cafes around LA and some at the Islamic Center of Southern California, one of the area’s largest mosques that WMA members also attended.
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