veiled4allah: another new frontier

Via A Dervish's Du'a, an account of a woman officiating at a Muslim marriage:

I knew, from my academic specialization in Islamic marriage law, that there was no legal obstacle to my officiating at the marriage. The role of imam at a wedding is ceremonial rather than sacerdotal; as in Judaism, it is the words of bride and groom (or their representatives) that make the marriage. The presence of an officiant, while recommended and customary, is not religiously necessary for the marriage to be valid. And, as there is no formal ordination of clergy in Sunni Islam, any learned person can deliver the wedding sermon and oversee the vows. In the United States, more often than not, it is the imam of a local mosque who officiates. But many of my male Muslim colleagues are regularly called upon to perform marriages; having a professor rather than a shaykh lead the ceremony would not be unusual. Still, a number of these colleagues have, in addition to academic credentials, some semblance of traditional Islamic learning. Having never had the benefit of such study, I have always been very careful to give analytical, rather than normative, opinions when asked about controversial issues pertaining to women, marriage, and the family. But here I was, being asked to step into the role of imam precisely in order to reshape the paradigm of Islamic religious authority, for this was the bride-to-be's expressed intention in seeking a woman to officiate. Quite honestly, the idea was terrifying. So I agreed to consider it.

I was not alone in considering new things; the summer of 2004 was a crucial moment for shifting religio-cultural norms about gender boundaries and female authority in Muslim communal life in the United States. Hadia Mubarak was elected the first female president of the national Muslim Students' Association, after years in which numerous campus chapters have had female leaders. Sharida Hussein, a Muslim woman and army officer, was seeking appointment as a military chaplain, raising issues of who is qualified to wield religious authority as well as who is authorized to bestow it. Sex-segregation within mosques was being debated everywhere (with the vast majority of critics of the status quo accepting the separation of men and women for prayer, but objecting to the inferiority and inadequacy of the spaces allocated to women). And, only a few days after my phone conversation, a group of Muslim women calling themselves Daughters of Hajar held a woman-led, mixed-gender prayer before joining the communal Friday service at the local mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia.

In each of these instances, something important was being negotiated. How much can or should historical practice shift to reflect contemporary realities? What is essential and what can be modified to suit new sensibilities? And, always, who has the legitimacy to determine the answers to these questions?

As with the question of blood money, it's good to take a look at what is actually a requirement of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and what is traditional or cultural.