Women are the Future of Islam by Sherin Khankan

Author:Sherin Khankan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER SEVEN

For my sisters

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

On a weekly basis I, along with other personnel from Mariam Mosque, hold open consultation hours at the mosque offering Islamic spiritual care. In our office connected to the prayer hall, where I typically meet couples for preliminary interviews for marriage preparation, women and men come to me with questions about their married life, death, conversion, grief, their family and the myriad of life’s difficulties. The room is spacious and furnished with a big white couch, a sizeable table, two chairs and a large antique handwoven carpet, with a revolutionary message covering most of the wall. These female visitors are looking for insights and advice, asking me to listen and, opening up to me like others might do with a pastor.

This is how, one day, a woman in her forties with North African roots comes to me. In her brown eyes, I can read infinite sorrow and loneliness. Suspecting the extent of her unhappiness, I invite her to sit down on the couch while I make her a cup of tea. I have the woman’s permission to share her story here. She tells me that she lost a child, her daughter, who was ten years old. The woman’s husband exposed her to emotional abuse, and regularly humiliated and hit her from the start of their marriage. And she felt terribly guilty. The reason? Her daughter, despite being gravely ill and very weak, tried several times to protect her from her husband’s abuse. The sickly girl would put herself in her father’s way when he became violent, but he would shout and push her away. But the child would return to the fray, hanging on to her father and trying in vain to hold him back. ‘These images haunt me often,’ the woman concludes. ‘My daughter was defending me and I was incapable of protecting her.…’ Over the course of the conversation, my visitor confesses to me that she feels responsible for her daughter’s death. When she was pregnant, her husband punched her in the stomach, and she is convinced that the child’s fragile physical state, then her death, were provoked by these violent episodes. ‘I should’ve left, not put up with it, I was a coward …’

As I’m addressing a believer, I apply the technique of ‘Islamic spiritual care’, one of the hallmarks of Mariam Mosque. This form of conversation is a mix of cognitive behavioural therapy and religious teaching based on the Quran and other Islamic texts.

I comfort the woman by telling her, for example, that in Islam, death is established by fate and is an inescapable fact. Such words might seem simplistic, yet they have the power to comfort those who are grieving. I talk about the Prophet Muhammad – blessed may he be – and his way of envisaging death and the beyond. However, even though faith is always of great assistance, explaining to someone in deep distress that ‘things are written in advance’ doesn’t suffice.

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