Female imams a tradition in Chinese mosques

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WUZHONG, China -- At a tiny courtyard mosque tucked down a back alley in China's Muslim heartland, Wang Shouying leads other Muslim women in prayers and chants.

Every day, Ms. Wang dons a green velvet robe and white scarf and preaches to dozens of women at the Little White Mosque in western China's Ningxia region.

She is a keeper of a centuries-old tradition that gives women a leading role in a largely male-dominated faith. She is a female imam or "ahong," pronounced ah-hung, from the Persian word "akhund" for "the learned."

"We need to train and educate our female comrades how to be good Muslims," Ms. Wang said between prayer sessions. "Women ahong are the best qualified to do this because they can relate to the female faithful in ways the male ahongs can't."

Religion was banned during Mao Zedong's radical Cultural Revolution but faith made a comeback in the 1980s, increasing the numbers of Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims and Christians. The communist push for gender equality helped broaden Muslim women's roles.

China's female imams are not the equals of male prayer leaders. They do not lead salat -- the five daily prayers considered among the most important Muslim obligations. Those prayers are instead piped via loudspeakers into the mosques for women from the mosques for men nearby.

Still, the female imams guide others in worship and are the primary spiritual leaders for the women in their communities.

Although it's not unusual in Islam for women to lead other women in prayer, China's female imams are part of a trend of greater leadership roles for Muslim women in many nations, said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Chinese Muslims are carrying on a tradition that fell away in many Muslim societies after national governments centralized religious institutions, making men the leaders, said Ingrid Mattson, an Islamic scholar at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

"This tradition has roots," said Ms. Wang, whose mosque's whitewashed brick outer wall bears the characters "nusi" -- "female mosque" -- in pink. "I don't know what they call us in other places or how it's done elsewhere, but we respect the Koran here."