BEIJING — Could an old religious tradition from China help solve one of the world’s most pressing problems — violence committed in the name of Islam?
The irony of an officially atheist country possibly offering a way out of an international religious problem is intense. Yet that is what some Islamic scholars in China and elsewhere hope may happen as they point to a quietly liberal tradition among China’s 10 million Hui Muslims, where female imams and mosques for women are flourishing in a globally unique phenomenon.
Female imams and women’s mosques are important because their endurance in China offers a vision of an older form of Islam that has inclusiveness and tolerance, not marginalization and extremism, at its core, the scholars say.
Exact numbers are not available, but Shui Jingjun, a leading scholar of women in Hui Islam (the Hui are scattered across China and are distinct from the Uighur Muslims of the far western region of Xinjiang) estimates there are hundreds of female imams leading mosques around the country, educating boys and girls, and organizing social services in their communities.
Female imams and women’s mosques are not “a new thing here. It’s just a cultural tradition that was never interfered with,” Ms. Shui, an author and researcher at the Henan Academy of Social Sciences in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, said in an interview.
Interesting article seems the Chinese Hui Muslims have liberated knowledge for both genders and not just for one!
Re: Find Knowledge even if you have to go to China!
"Find knowledge even if you have to go to China" means that we should try to advance ourselves as individuals and societies by learning about science and technology. That we should be at the forefront of research.
Re: Find Knowledge even if you have to go to China!
That's all good ... But there has been no explanation given how we are going to go from point A to point B ....
Merely talking about about point B is not going to be enough.
Exactly Brother psyah, you start in the cradle by educating Mothers who will raise children that appreciate knowledge and strive for equity and justice for all!
Why is it that Pakistans neighbors to the west will do every possible atrocicity to tell the whole world that Islam does not allow knowledge to be imparted to little girls?
because these young men's Mothers never recieved any knowledge to be worth any thing.
and yet in Pakistan there are Lady Doctors and school Teachers and professors all Muslims too.
Like they say, intelligence comes from ones Mother.