Female imams a tradition in Chinese mosques

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.”

Women’s equal status in work and religion is evident across Ningxia, a West Virginia-sized swath of desert traversed by the Yellow River that was settled by Muslim traders from the Middle East a millennium ago.

Women here work beside men in government offices, banks, shops and schools. Religious schools for girls are common. Often women maintain separate mosques, virtually identical to those led by men.

“The Chinese Communist Party liberated us from the kitchen and it gave us the same duties and obligations as men,” said Wu Yulian, a 45-year-old Muslim mother of two and principal at the Yisha Hui People’s Kindergarten in Wuzhong. “I believe that men and women are equal by nature and that the practice of restricting women in some parts of the Middle East, like not allowing them outside, not allowing them to drive or be seen by men is really unfair and excessive.”

Closer ties to the rest of the Muslim world are behind the growing interest in Islamic and Arabic studies.

China’s trade with the Arab world grew tenfold over the past decade, reaching $51.3 billion last year. And relaxed passport controls have made it easier for China’s estimated 20 million Muslims to make the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, with nearly 10,000 expected to go this year, compared with just seven Chinese pilgrims in 1978.

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