When people think of amina wadud, they often think of the woman who led a mixed congregation of Muslims in prayer in New York in 2005 .
While some Muslims found it inspiring, others were so incensed that they sent the African American Islamic scholar death threats .
But there is so much more to amina wadud — who intentionally prefers her name to be rendered in all lowercase letters to honour the Arabic alphabet — her life, her legacy and her body of work than that one fateful Friday prayer in Manhattan that took place over two decades ago.
Whether you are intimately familiar with wadud's work, including her books Qur'an and Woman, Inside the Gender Jihad and Once in a Lifetime , or you have heard of the Muslim theologian and wondered what she is all about, award-winning journalist Carla Power's new biography, The Lady Imam: How Amina Wadud's Life and Faith Changed the World (One World), has all the answers.
When speaking to Muslims around the world about the impact wadud has had on them in the book, Carla receives the same answer every time: that wadud saved their faith.
As someone who has read wadud's books, I came away from reading this biography impressed at just how accurately Carla has grasped wadud's work, such as her tawhidic paradigm, and the depths to which she has researched her life, having interviewed everyone from Wadud's ex-husbands to former classmates and even the daughter of a couple who took care of amina when she was a child.
"It has been fun finding people all over the world who've been influenced by her," Carla tells The New Arab . "The other great thing was talking to her kids and to the people who raised her when she was young."
Like much of the rest of the world, Carla first came across wadud in 2005 when she hit headlines for leading Friday prayer in a church in Manhattan.
She met wadud in 2009 and the more she learned about the feminist Islamic scholar, the more Power realised that not enough people know about wadud's vast contribution not only to Islamic theology, but to feminism, race relations, and queer theory.
In The Lady Imam, Power often draws parallels between Malcom X and wadud: she posits that Malcom X dismantled racial hierarchies in Islam and wadud continued that work by going one step further: dismantling gender hierarchies in Islam.
"As an American, it really irked me that wadud wasn't better known as a great American public intellectual," says Carla.
“Over and over again, there were erasure processes that meant that she wasn't known outside her academic sphere or progressive circles. Meeting her, I saw how people reacted to her and how charismatic she was. I had wanted to write her biography right after meeting her."
To write the biography, Carla met and spoke with wadud over the course of five years, initially over video call when COVID-19 was at its height and she was confined to the four walls of her home in Britain, while wadud was thousands of miles away in Indonesia.
Once pandemic travel restrictions were lifted, the two eventually reunited in Indonesia.
"Every week on Friday at four o'clock in the afternoon her time and ten o'clock in the morning my time we would talk," she recalls.
"Her life takes place in so many different places, so during COVID-19, it was a form of respite. One week we would be talking about her time in Egypt and the next we would be talking about a Sufi compound in Virginia."
Rather than your standard chapters, Carla has split wadud's biography into sixteen sections she calls hijrahs, mirroring the spiritual and physical nomadic nature of wadud’s entire life.
She has a wandering lifestyle, spending decades searching for her tribe of like-minded Muslims, encountering Salafism and Sufism along the way, eventually finding her home in Sisters in Islam in Malaysia, as well as a group of intellectual, creative, activist, feminist and queer Muslims.
"The first time we met, amina said, 'I make my way from the outside,'" says Carla.
"I very much had this sense that her life was a series of journeys and perpetual movements, both spiritual and literal, towards an ever-closer union with the Divine. So 'hijrah' seemed like a good structuring metaphor to think about these leaps that she was taking, whether it was moving from Salafism to more progressive interpretations of Islam, or moving from America to the Middle East to Southeast Asia."
During her childhood, wadud unintentionally ended up in a Martin Luther King march where she first encountered the intersection of religion with activism.
Later on, this experience contributes towards a realisation of her life's mission, that "the faithful can harness Divine wisdom to struggle for justice on earth."
Carla says while writing the chapters on wadud’s childhood, she was reminded of Toni Morrison's novels, and indeed there is an uncanny overlap between Morrison’s work and that of Wadud.
In The Lady Imam wadud tells her that she found Morrison's work 'transformative' bringing her to the realisation that in American literature Morrison looked for Black experiences while in the Quran wadud sought women's experiences, leading to her most famous book Qur'an and Woman .
One misconception many people hold about wadud is that she is not a classically-trained Islamic scholar; the opposite is true, and wadud uses those same classical tools in Qur'an and Woman, which could be why traditionalists find her work so unnerving.
While hijrah is one theme in The Lady Imam, I would argue that so is the concept of jihad: wadud has overcome multiple adversities, beginning as a young girl when the family house is repossessed, and her mother runs away, rendering wadud and her siblings motherless and homeless, to her two marriages in which she picks up the responsibility of both child-rearing and breadwinner.
Then, she is sidelined by American academia and by traditionalist Muslim circles. In her later years, wadud resigns from academia just as she is about to make tenure and semi-retires to a village in Indonesia, where she has been fully embraced by the locals.
However, this does not read as wadud being ousted to the fringes by American academia and traditionalist Muslim circles, but rather as her ultimately choosing her peace.
"It's bittersweet because on the one hand, it is telling that she is in a tiny village in Java rather than chair of a Harvard department, which I think if she had been better received and understood, she would have been. Her contribution to 20th and 21st-century Islamic thought is undeniable, whatever you think of her stances," says Carla.
"The fact that she married scholarship with activism in a very visceral way, putting her body on the line, makes her a figure. I think she should be on postage stamps!" Carla adds. "She is now living in her seventies as she has had to her whole life, which is making her own way where there is none, to paraphrase that great old African-American saying," she adds.
"One of my main things in writing The Lady Imam was just hoping to bring her to a broader audience, and that people who aren't Muslim but who have an interest in pioneers, thinkers and activists would take an interest in her too." Yousra Samir Imran is a British Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press. Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA