Women promote mosques ‘for all’ in Britain
(The Nation) – “There is nothing in the Koran that says that women and men can’t pray together or that women can’t lead prayers,” said Tauqir, whose long black shirt with long sleeves matches her Dr Martens shoes, while a keffiyeh is arranged around her neck.
In the damp basement room of a Caribbean restaurant in London, Naima leads prayers for an audience of male and female worshippers.
They face Mecca, directed by an arrow scrawled on a blackboard in pink chalk.
But Naima — she did not want to give her full name — had just begun the Al-Fatiha when a young woman got up and hurried out of the room in Camden in the north of the British capital.
As if on cue, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by punk band The Clash was playing in the restaurant.
Leila Bakkioui, 25, clad in a headscarf, admitted she was reeling.
“I went downstairs to pray and a sister led the prayer,” she explained breathlessly to her friend Tana Rasekh, who was waiting for her in the restaurant.
Rasekh said: “When she came out, I thought she had seen a ghost.”
Bakkioui, a young mathematics teacher, had stumbled into a group of Muslims working towards a more “inclusive” Islam, where men and women pray in the same room, with women sometimes leading the prayers.
Tamsila Tauqir helped to launch the Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI) in November last year after she became frustrated by what she saw in mosques in Britain and the wider Muslim world.
