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The protesters said that leading prayers has nothing to do with gender equality. (BBC photo) |
LONDON — British Muslim women took to the streets in the south-east city of Oxford on Friday, October 17, to protest the first-ever women-led Friday prayer in Britain.
"What she is doing is against Islam," angry Maryanne Ramzy told the BBC News Online, referring to American professor Amina Wadud, who led the Friday weekly prayer at the Oxford Muslim Educational Center.
"I disagree with it."
Wadud, an associate professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led about a dozen of male and female worshipers at the Friday prayer at the MEC conference hall.
Before the prayer, Wadud, who has led a similar prayer three years ago in New York, delivered a brief sermon to the mixed congregation.
The mixed prayers, organized by the MEC, marked the start of a conference on Islam and feminism at Wolfson College in Oxford.
Many Muslim women gathered in front of the conference hall to protest Wadud's prayers, despite calls from Muslim leaders not to protest to avoid giving it more publicity.
"We're here to uphold the traditions and the values of Islam and uphold the ways of the prophet - peace be upon him," said protestor Aishah Samah.
Britain is home to nearly 2 million Muslims.
Divine Order
British Muslims said that the issue of leading the prayers has nothing to do with gender equality.
"It has nothing to do with position of women in society," Mokhtar Badri, vice-president of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), told the BBC.
"It is not to degrade them or because we don't think they are up to it."
Samah, the protestors, echoes a similar view.
"We have no objections to women being heads of state, or organization leaders," she said.
"Women are highly respected in Islam but in Islamic law, women cannot lead prayer."
According to a statement issued by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America after Wadud's first precedent women-led prayer in New York, there is unanimous consensus for the entire Ummah that women cannot lead the Friday Prayer nor can they deliver the sermon.
Whoever takes part in such a Prayer, then his Prayer is nullified.
The AMJA said that it is never found in any jurisprudential text that a woman can lead the Friday Prayer or deliver the sermon.
The opinion [that a woman can lead the Friday Prayer] is an innovation and a heresy on any account, nullified by all scholars.
"This is something divine not human," said Badri, the MAB vice-president.
"We have to do it in the way it has been ordained by God to do it."
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