As Ms. Wadud likes to point out, her life did not begin with the March prayer. Born Mary Teasley, she grew up in Washington, D.C., one of eight children. Her father was a Methodist minister; everyone called him "The Rev." The family didn't have much money. When she was in middle school, a counselor noticed that, while her grades were mediocre, her standardized test scores were excellent. The counselor arranged for her to attend a better public school in Massachusetts, where she excelled academically and was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, becoming the first person in her family to attend college.
She converted to Islam as an undergraduate in the early 1970s. For Ms. Wadud, who is African-American, it was the emphasis on justice that she says first attracted her to the faith. She chose the name Amina after the mother of Muhammad and the last name Wadud, which means "loving."
Not long after her conversion, Ms. Wadud wrote her first paper on women and Islam, in which she concluded that "everything was hunky-dory," she recalls. She would later revise that assessment. By the time she entered graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor she had become deeply distressed at how the Muslim tradition often depicted women as inferior to men. She remembers, for example, hearing Muslims argue that women in Islam should not be allowed to drive. "Is that right?" she asked herself.
Categories : 
5:33 AM
Moderate Islamist here
0 comments:
Post a Comment