The hope of resurrecting the past has not stopped women from acting in the present. A new breed of Islamist women is emerging across Europe, as exemplified by the hijab-wearing Hanife Karakus of Limoges, the first woman to lead one of France’s twenty-five regional Islamic councils. Mosque-going women in North America, angry at being assigned the worst spaces for praying and for being relegated to kitchen duties, have made their views known. A poll by the Islamic Society of North America, the umbrella group of many mosques, found gender equity at the top of the respondents’ concerns. “People felt that women weren’t well treated and were excluded from decision-making,” said Ingrid Mattson, the first woman president of the society.35 The complaint is not confined to women. Khaled El Fadl says there is little or nothing in Islamic jurisprudence decreeing that women must pray in a separate room. After all, at the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, women pray in the same area as men, perform all the same rites as men, shoulder to shoulder with men. In the early period of Islam, women joined men at the mosque not only to pray but to debate the issues of the day.

There have also been complaints about the religious and cultural conservatism of the imams and the leaders of many mosques and Muslim organizations in Canada and the United States. Much of this, however, is largely an immigrant phenomenon not confined to Muslims. North America, with its rich history of immigration, has seen over the past 200 years that the first generation of immigrants, regardless of their origins, tended to turn to religion to keep their identity. They became more religious than they were “back home,” and those most active in the churches tended to be more conservative. Immigrants often had no choice but to import priests from the “old country” — priests who generally did not speak English well, could not offer appropriate religious guidance to suit the changing social and cultural milieu, and who ended up alienating the younger parishioners. It took the next generation to produce local priests and a new leadership to reshape the church and its institutions to their more liberal and ecumenical liking. This has been the experience of virtually every immigrant community — the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Italians and others. It is an evolutionary process.

Islamic feminism is clearly “a global phenomenon,” says Margot Badran of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. “It is not the product of the East or the West. It transcends both. Who’s afraid of Islamic feminism? Quite a few people. They include non-Muslims who fear Islam, and Muslims who fear feminism. They make strange bedfellows.”36