Centering Rahma in Contemporary Islam— The “Divine Feminine” between Decoloniality and Tradition.

In her recently published khutbah “An-Nur”, the Senegalese Shaykha Oumou Malik Gueye proposes that God’s essence is rahma, or mercy, a word that derives from the Arabic root rahim, the womb. “Divine Mercy as the basis of all being is (…) reflected in the depths of woman as the receiver of Mercy, carrier of Mercy, [and] giver of Mercy” (The Women's Khutbah Book, 2022). The connection Oumou Malik Gueye draws between rahim, rahma, and al-Rahmān invites us to ponder: What is the relationship between a conceptual awareness of “mercy,” the female womb, and women’s prominence as religious leaders? In this talk, I trace this connection in contemporary theological discourse and ask how and when it is leveraged to support new modes of Muslim religious authority and praxis. More broadly, I argue that the feminist move towards the tradition can be defined as a Muslim engagement with the global feminism debate, allowing practioners to fight both Islamophobia and Muslim patriarchal practices.

While a feminist reading of the past is “invaluable to those living religious communities that want to create new, bountiful, future visions for their own humanity within their [evolving] traditions,” it also raises, as Sa’diyya Shaikh reminds us, the “methodological specter of anachronism” (2012). And yet, it is this journey “to the past” that has allowed for the establishment of women-only, women-led, and queer-inclusive mosques; It is in here that notions of religious authority are expanded and women along with gender nonconforming individuals may “lead prayer and perform the khutbah.” amina wadud describes her first journey to the minbar, when, in 1994, she delivered the Friday khutbah to a mixed-gender congregation in Cape Town. She describes this moment as “the foremother to a new spiritual awakening beyond Muslim patriarchal hegemony. It was an affirmation of the Divine Feminine” (2022). While wadud’s khutbah inspired a global movement for women to take the center stage in mosques, her success rest on the example of courageous and rebellious foremothers such as Sakhina bint Hussain ibn `Ali who, Mernissi argues, never pledged ta`a, or obedience, to her five or six husbands (1991).

In Sura Maryam we read that God, the Giver of Mercy, sent “Our” Spirit to Mary, to give her a pure son, as “a sign for humanity and a Mercy from Us (19:21).” Barbara Stowasser explains, Qur’anic exegesis differentiates between “Our [God’s] Spirit” sent to Mary in the form of a perfect man and Mary's conception of Jesus after God’s Spirit was breathed into her. “While the former has been “personalized” by way of identification with [the Archangel] Gabriel, the latter is understood as the life substance with which God (directly) awakened Adam to life from clay, just as it (directly) awakened Jesus to life in Mary’s womb” (1994). While the Qur’an tells us that Gabriel appeared to Mary in the form of a handsome young man, God’s Spirit, is non-gendered. God, too, tran-scends gender. Mary’s womb, in this framing, is not just a passive “receptacle,” a “field,” that awaits to be watered. Awakened by a non-gendered God, the womb, on one side, and the black clay, on the other, birth bodies with souls.

In contemporary feminist discourse, the womb is often a place—imagined, intellectual, physical, spiritual—that connects humans, and in particular women, with the Divine. Riffat Hassan highlights that, according to the Qur’an, women and men are created in egalitarian terms, from a single, undifferentiated, soul. She argues that, if the first woman was neither created from Adam or for Adam, God created her as a self-conscious being, a presumption that has serious implications for her right to actualize her full human potential. Hassan concludes, in addition to being equal to men, women have “special sexual/biological functions such as carrying, delivering, suckling, and rearing, offspring” (1996). Similarly, Sa’diyya Shaikh, describes pregnancy and childbirth as “sites of intimate relationship to the divine One.” Shaikh also highlights Ibn `Arabī’s equation of God’s essence with the “ultimate feminine source” from which the first human being became manifest (2012). 

But, if the feminine, as Ibn `Arabi asserts, “permeates all things ontologically” do women occupy, in a reversed reading of Q 2:228, a “degree above” men? While Ibn `Arabi “foregrounds women and their particular ontological status”, others have argued for an integration of female and male gender complementarity (Shaikh 2012). Pakistani scholar Ghazala Anwar also connects the attribute al-Rahmān with the womb and a mother’s love and defines “gender rahma” as the gender-just balance of compassion that holds the masculine and the feminine in fluid relation within all of creation. “Reference to all human individuals, regardless of their place on the gender spectrum, as both nafs and insan, articulates a contoured, ever unfolding gender fluidity (…) which negates all oppressive hierarchies" (2022). Reflecting this notion of gender complementarity, in their memoir, Hijab Butch Blues (2023), Lamya H writes, “In the beginning, God created a person, a Black person, lovingly proportioned and shaped. God named this person Adam, and the God breathed into Adam a soul. Made from this soul her mate. From her, from Adam, this first soul, her mate.”

In contemporary Muslim theology, women’s growing prominence as religious leaders is related to an increased conceptual awareness around Mercy and the womb. Calling God "the womb of creative compassion" not only allows feminists to center equity and fairness in their exegetical practices. It awakens practitioners, Sa’diyya Shaikh and Fatima Seedat explain, to “humanity’s unitary origin,” which denies the “Satanic logic" of "domination among human beings and in our relation to the earth" (2022). Similarly, Oumou Malik Gueye leverages the exegetical tradition to argue that “male and female are in synergy for the necessary cosmic unity at the level of creation.” In line with Ibn `Arabi’s suggestion that women and men are equal in terms of humanity and spiritual potential, she reclaims “a holistic concept of humanity and gender in Islam,” which allows her to propose, “a gender-free unity of being.”