12 images Created 5 May 2017
CHINA'S FEMALE IMAMS
At a tiny courtyard mosque tucked down a back alley in China's Muslim heartland, Wang Shouying leads other Muslim women in prayers and chants.
Every day, Wang dons a green velvet robe and white scarf and preaches to dozens of women at the Little White Mosque in western China's Ningxia region.
Wang is a keeper of a centuries-old tradition that gives women a leading role in a largely male-dominated faith. She is a female imam or ahong, pronounced ah-hung, from the Persian word akhund for "the learned."
"We need to train and educate our female comrades how to be good Muslims," Wang said between prayer sessions. "Women ahong are the best qualified to do this because they can relate to the female faithful in ways the male ahongs can’t."
China's women imams are not the equals of male prayer leaders. They do not lead salat — the five daily prayers considered among the most important Muslim obligations. Those prayers are instead piped via loudspeakers into the female mosques from the male ones nearby.
Still, the female imams guide others in worship and are the primary spiritual leaders for the women in their communities.
Although it's not unusual in Islam for women to lead other women in prayer, China's female imams are part of a trend of greater leadership roles for Muslim women in many nations, said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Chinese Muslims are carrying on a tradition that fell away in many Muslim societies after national governments centralized religious institutions, making men the leaders, said Ingrid Mattson, an Islamic scholar at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
Women's equal status in work and religion is evident across Ningxia, which was settled by Muslim traders from the Middle East a millennium ago. The communist push for gender equality helped broaden Muslim women's roles.
Women here work beside men in government offices, banks, shops and schools. Religious schools for girls are common. Often women maintain separate mosques, virtually identical to those led by men.
"The Chinese Communist Party liberated us from the kitchen, and it gave us the same duties and obligations as men," said Wu Yulian, a 45-year-old Muslim mother of two and head of a kindergarten. "I believe that men and women are equal by nature and that the practice of restricting women in some parts of the Middle East, like not allowing them outside, not allowing them to drive or be seen by men is really unfair and excessive," she said.
Down a dusty track on the outskirts of Wuzhong, 30 girls study at the Muslim Village Girl's School for Arabic Studies — a private boarding school set up by a local businessman. But drawing closer to worldwide Islam may come at a price in Ningxia, where a new generation of women may start to question whether their tradition of female imams is truly Islamic. TEXT by Alexa Olesen
Every day, Wang dons a green velvet robe and white scarf and preaches to dozens of women at the Little White Mosque in western China's Ningxia region.
Wang is a keeper of a centuries-old tradition that gives women a leading role in a largely male-dominated faith. She is a female imam or ahong, pronounced ah-hung, from the Persian word akhund for "the learned."
"We need to train and educate our female comrades how to be good Muslims," Wang said between prayer sessions. "Women ahong are the best qualified to do this because they can relate to the female faithful in ways the male ahongs can’t."
China's women imams are not the equals of male prayer leaders. They do not lead salat — the five daily prayers considered among the most important Muslim obligations. Those prayers are instead piped via loudspeakers into the female mosques from the male ones nearby.
Still, the female imams guide others in worship and are the primary spiritual leaders for the women in their communities.
Although it's not unusual in Islam for women to lead other women in prayer, China's female imams are part of a trend of greater leadership roles for Muslim women in many nations, said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Chinese Muslims are carrying on a tradition that fell away in many Muslim societies after national governments centralized religious institutions, making men the leaders, said Ingrid Mattson, an Islamic scholar at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
Women's equal status in work and religion is evident across Ningxia, which was settled by Muslim traders from the Middle East a millennium ago. The communist push for gender equality helped broaden Muslim women's roles.
Women here work beside men in government offices, banks, shops and schools. Religious schools for girls are common. Often women maintain separate mosques, virtually identical to those led by men.
"The Chinese Communist Party liberated us from the kitchen, and it gave us the same duties and obligations as men," said Wu Yulian, a 45-year-old Muslim mother of two and head of a kindergarten. "I believe that men and women are equal by nature and that the practice of restricting women in some parts of the Middle East, like not allowing them outside, not allowing them to drive or be seen by men is really unfair and excessive," she said.
Down a dusty track on the outskirts of Wuzhong, 30 girls study at the Muslim Village Girl's School for Arabic Studies — a private boarding school set up by a local businessman. But drawing closer to worldwide Islam may come at a price in Ningxia, where a new generation of women may start to question whether their tradition of female imams is truly Islamic. TEXT by Alexa Olesen
