The story of Rabia al-Basri is one that Muslim kids learn early.
She ran through her hometown of Basra, Iraq, with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When townspeople asked her why, she said she wanted to burn down heaven with the torch and put out hellfire with the water so that people could worship without fear of punishment or desire for reward, for the sake of God alone.
“The story defines this space,” said Mahdia Lynn, who co-founded the mosque in 2016 in the Loop that bears the name of Rabia, and, more importantly, she said, the responsibility that comes with it.
At Masjid al-Rabia, the difference from mainstream mosques is immediately apparent. Every Friday, a handful of men and women pray shoulder to shoulder. The khutbah, or sermon, is a discussion, and congregants participate in a group circle. There is no consistent imam, or leader in prayer; rather, anyone can volunteer to stand in the front to lead. It is one of very few public mosques in the world that allows and encourages women to lead prayer in a mixed-gender prayer space.
“Our approach says that wanting to lead a prayer in that moment, that is what makes a person equipped to lead,” Lynn said.
In mainstream mosques where men lead the prayer, men pray in the front and women pray behind them, or in some cases, behind a barrier. Sometimes, women pray in a separate room with an audiovisual setup.
While women-only mosques have existed for hundreds of years in China, it is only in the past several years that imams and scholars have begun to organize more inclusive mosques in Indonesia, Europe and the United States — all with varying styles and levels of success. In 2015, the first women’s-only mosque in the U.S. opened in Los Angeles, according to news reports.
Though men and women often attend private prayer groups together, it is difficult to find any mosques in the world that publicly advertise having a prayer space with no barriers to gender, like Masjid al-Rabia.
“Most of the places it is happening, people are organizing based on who wants to worship and not because they want to publicize it,” said Amina Wadud, an Islamic scholar who has worked for decades at the intersection of Islamic theology and women-centric movements. “Sometimes you do a thing because you feel the thing is good and you don’t need any attention for it. Sometimes you have to combine that intention with some advertisement because how else do you open people up to the story?”
In Chicago, Lynn said the group is moving to a larger space that, in addition to hosting prayers, will serve as a hub for the social justice work the mosque began several years ago. The most important work the mosque does, Lynn said, is its prison ministry, which has grown to more than 600 participants in the past two years.
“Like Muslims who are queer and trans, (incarcerated people) are our family members who are forgotten. And the fact that they are forgotten is both unacceptable and changeable,” said Lynn, who is transgender. “In the faith tradition, there is a strong idea of freeing prisoners and serving those who are oppressed. You are ultimately helping the oppressor by preventing them from oppressing people.”
‘Embodied ethics’
Lynn’s work is only the latest in a long tradition of global attempts to broaden mainstream prayer norms.
Twenty-five years ago in Cape Town, South Africa, Wadud, who is retired and lives in Indonesia, for the first time led a part of the Friday prayer, which is generally performed by a male leader.
She waited more than 10 years to do anything as public as that again, though she was asked. She said she took time in the interim for “spiritual reflection and intellectual research,” to figure out her own intentions. The next time she led a Friday prayer service, it was in New York in 2005 and it made headlines because of the size of the congregation — more than 100 people participated — and a protest was held outside.
She said it was important to take a public step at that time.
“It was about embodied ethics, where it’s not enough to say, ‘I believe women are equal to men.’ I have to demonstrate it with my body,” Wadud said. “Sometimes you have to do that.”
Imam Ibrahim Khader of the Muslim Community Center organization, which has three locations in the Chicago area, said the separation of men and women in a prayer space is based on hadith, or sayings, of the Prophet Muhammad, one of which states that, in a congregation, the best place for a man during prayer is the front row, and the best place for a woman during prayer is the back row. He also pointed to the requirement of Muslim men to attend Friday prayers, which, according to hadith, does not exist for Muslim women.
“At the end of the day, these are narrations,” Khader said. “We can try and reason with these and understand the context, but we still follow them.”
Scholars, particularly those who say they prioritize inclusion over other ideas, lean on the Quran, which they say has higher authority than either the words or the actions of the Prophet Muhammad, to make their case.
“In Muslim patriarchies, men’s authority is underwritten by specific interpretations of ‘Islam.’ I put ‘Islam’ in quotes because, if we are speaking about the Qur’an, then there is nothing in it — not a single verse — that says women cannot lead a prayer and only men can,” Ithaca College professor Asma Barlas, who studies patriarchal interpretations of the Quran, said in an email. “Nor is there a single statement to the effect that men are morally or religiously or ontologically superior to women. Not one.”
Chicago activist Hind Makki runs a blog called Side Entrance, through which she encourages Muslim women to document women’s prayer spaces in mosques around the world: “the beautiful, the adequate and the pathetic.”
“Certain prayer spaces can be spiritually abusive, and we need to collectively create our own spaces,” Makki said.
As some Muslim communities struggle with inclusion, Makki encourages people to create third spaces, away from mainstream mosques and the secular world, where they can follow their faith without some of the cultural baggage.
“In the here and now, people have shown that they need to create their own spaces that are healthy and welcoming for spiritual sustenance, which you can’t get at mosques where your spirituality is not part of the picture,” she said. “Whether that’s creating a mosque like Masjid al-Rabia, or just gathering in someone’s living room, it’s so important for your spiritual health.”
An interfaith environment
Lynn, 31, who is from southeast Michigan, said she has always had an instinct toward community organizing, and she found Islam in her early 20s, at a time when she was living a very different kind of life than now.
“I was not good at being a human being. I was just not understanding what my place in the world was. Who to be, how to live, what to do,” she said. “Islam gave me an understanding and an order.”
She said the first year of being Muslim was a journey she took alone, but in 2014, she attended an LGBT Muslim retreat in Philadelphia.
“It felt like I was among people who knew the importance of the tradition, what it meant to be a transgender woman practicing Islam, what it means to be someone on the outside looking in,” she said. “That got me back into the community organizing and activism, back to troublemaking.”
This year, Lynn conducted her first nikkah, or wedding ceremony, and the masjid’s (mosque’s) first one — for two queer Muslim men in a prison hundreds of miles away. It was a wedding, she said, that ended up being a stack of papers an inch or two thick mailed to Lynn that contained some of the essentials for an Islamic wedding: written statements from witnesses, an exchange of vows, a mahr statement (a financial agreement in the case of separation). Later, she and others from the mosque threw a party that doubled as a proxy wedding with stand-ins for the grooms.
This week, the masjid, which is run by Lynn, who is a part-time employee, and a few other volunteers, moved into a space at GracePlace in the South Loop, sharing a prayer hall with Christian congregations, and hosted its first Friday prayer. At the final prayer before the move, congregants discussed their new home.
“Are they also progressive?” asked one attendee.
“Yeah, we had to make sure they were OK letting all the gay Muslims in,” said Hannah Fidler, a volunteer program coordinator at the mosque. The group laughed, even though for a community like this, security can be a real concern.
The move to a more public forum is a big change for the community, and Lynn said she hopes it will allow Masjid al-Rabia to become more established in Chicago. The focus for the past couple of years has been mission-based activities, like the prison ministry, a joint Eid and Pride celebration, and Quran study groups, she said. But with a larger space, it’s possible to intentionally grow Friday attendance and make sure it’s accessible to everyone.
Wadud, the Islamic scholar, said this kind of space marks an evolution.
“We are seeing, what does it take to start a movement? What does it take to spread a movement?” she said. “What does it take for it to no longer be a movement because it’s just par for the course?”
