JUSTICE
I owe my freedom to the God who made me and who stirred me to claim it against all other beings in God’s universe.
Jermain Wesley Loguen, as quoted in George, “Widening the Circle,” 156
Men kill me
How they think the earth of green and gold and God is all for them
Mohja Kahf, “Men Kill Me,” 61
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Amina Wadud, originally named Mary Teaseley, was born in 1952 into the family of a Methodist minister. A single mother of five children—a fact she insists that all her biographers must include—she is a scholar, educator, and activist, roles that are inseparable from her experiences as an African American and Muslim woman.1 She grew up in Washington, D.C., and converted to Islam in 1972, while pursuing a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. After college, she married, had children, studied and taught in Libya, returned to the United States, divorced, lived on welfare, and worked as a schoolteacher in Philadelphia. Later on, as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, she began her academic engagement with the Qurʾan and traveled to Egypt to learn Arabic. Between 1989 and 1992, she taught at the International Islamic University in Malaysia, where she joined Sisters in Islam, a fledging study circle of Muslim women that would become Malaysia’s leading women’s rights organization. She returned to the United States in 1992 to teach at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she worked until 2008. Since then she held a number of academic positions in the United States and abroad, including in Indonesia.
As a scholar Wadud was widely known among American Muslims in the 1990s and early 2000s for for her interpretations of the Qurʾan, exemplified by her seminal book Qurʾan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, which was originally published in English in Malaysia in 1992, republished in the United States in 1999, and later translated into Arabic, Dutch, Indonesian, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish. As an activist she gained even broader fame—and, to some, notoriety—after leading and preaching at a mixed-gender Friday service in New York City in 2005. That was not her first experience of preaching a Friday sermon: she did this, albeit in a different format, in August 1994 in Cape Town, South Africa. Yet, while her preaching in South Africa remained somewhat less known, the New York incident gained her an unprecedented international fame. All of a sudden, news outlets all over the Muslim world reported on the action of a woman who dared to break the taboo on women leading men in prayer.2 In later recollections Wadud regretted that her preaching had been discussed mostly because of its political symbolism and that few people had paid attention to what she actually preached.3
This chapter looks beyond such somewhat shallow politics and instead explores her exegesis, expressed in her writings and sermons. Wadud’s tafsir, of course, has been deeply political. Throughout her career she has been an academic and an activist, and in both roles she has carried out her struggle for women’s rights in the light of the Qurʾan. Like many academics of her generation, she was inspired by Fazlur Rahman and contributed, perhaps more than others, to the transformation of his “normative” interpretation into a markedly American one. What made it possible was her activism: it was this practical drive that allowed her to propel Rahman’s scholarship beyond the academy. By merging exegesis with activism, she reshaped Rahman’s logic of ethically rereading the Qurʾan into a transformative force in American Muslim life. In this way, without ever mentioning Iqbal, she has also continued the trajectory of the Iqbalian activist spiral.
Wadud was among the first American Muslim intellectuals to articulate the idea of gender equality as inseparable from the Qurʾanic principle of justice. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this notion became part of American Muslim common sense. This highlights the extent to which contextually specific concerns shape local, in this case American Muslim, enunciations of scriptures. For Wadud, such a central issue has been gender justice. Based on her experience, she insisted that it was as a global challenge, which is why in one conversation with me she expressed unease about the American angle of my analysis: I told her that I was examining her work as belonging to an American tradition of Qurʾanic exegesis; she thought that this approach was too limiting. Indeed, she was right, and her impact has been global. Yet, in her writings and speeches, the second word in the phrase “gender justice”—that is, “justice”—was inseparable from a particular network of meanings tied to African American history and her experience as an African American woman. This observation has broader significance: in the United States discourses about women’s rights cannot be divorced from contextually specific conversations about other aspects of justice, including race and politics. This chapter, therefore, foreshadows what is to come in the remainder of this book. In addition, and crucially, its simultaneous focus on one intellectual’s written and oral interpretations serves to highlight some key distinctions between writing and speaking as discrete modes of engagement with the Qurʾan.
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Mohammed Arkoun, a French philosopher, defined the Islamic tradition as a “logosphere,” by which he meant “the linguistic mental space shared by all those who use the same language with which to articulate their thoughts, their representations, their collective memory, and their knowledge according to the fundamental principles and values claimed as a unifying weltanschauung [experience and view of the world].” A logosphere represents human beings who cultivate a “tradition of thought” and whose authority depends on a continuation of established understandings, or what Arkoun called “thinkables.” When contexts change dramatically, however, new realities and therefore new ways of thinking emerge.4 From this perspective, Wadud’s exegesis exemplifies a process through which a new thinkable developed. It speaks to how the notion of gender justice became for many American Muslims an unequivocal element of the Qurʾan’s overall concept of justice. It also demonstrates how that thinkable came about through synthesis of global and local discourses: in this case, an amalgamation of originally South Asian discourses, most centrally by Rahman and Iqbal, and expressions of justice rooted in American history and experience.
In a 2006 interview, Wadud recalled that her lifelong engagement with the Qurʾan began with a deep dilemma, which was grounded in her experience and sense of justice: “When I entered Islam and began to live among Muslims in other countries and participate in events in the United States, the most horrific things were being said and done in regard to women in the name of the religion and I found this to be incongruent with my notion of God. So I purposefully decided that I am going to find out what is the position of women in Islam and if it was in fact what I was seeing—the marginalization, the silence, the abuse—then I just cannot be Muslim because I could not perform my love for God within those restrictions.”5
Qurʾan and Woman was a result of Wadud’s search for gender equality in Islam. In the late 1990s and 2000s, this book became the best-known written American interpretation of the Qurʾan. Wadud wrote it during her sojourn in Malaysia. While based on her Ph.D. dissertation, it was enriched by her experience as an activist. Its goal, she proposed, was to encourage interpretive readings of the Qurʾan by women and from the perspective of women. Her interpretation, she argued, confirmed that the Qurʾan offered women an “undeniable liberation,” at the time of its revelation and in “the modern context.”6
Wadud wrote the book for Muslim audiences around the world, while quite naturally devoting particular attention to her American and Malaysian readers.7 Her attention to the readers’ contexts came across, for example, in her comparison between English, Malay, and Arabic languages, through which she illustrated the impact of Arabic as a “gender-specific language” on the tradition of Qurʾanic exegesis. To highlight the time-and-context-bound nature of language, she further brought up the image the “tropics of Malaysia.” Her point was straightforward: for the scripture’s original audience, its depiction of the paradise as a bountifully irrigated garden appeared strikingly beautiful in part because to them it was exotic; had the Qurʾan been revealed in a different setting, perhaps it would have emphasized heaven’s different qualities.8
While these examples reflected Wadud’s attention to her Malaysian audience, most of her contextually specific references were American and African American. Some of them were explicit. She mentioned, for instance, the U.S. Declaration of Independence to point out that its central phrase “all men are created equal” could be understood differently in various historical contexts: its original wording belonged in the era when patriarchy was an unquestioned reality; over time, however, its meaning expanded to include women as well as men. Through this illustration she stressed that many of the concepts embedded in the Qur’an had be continuously revisited as well.9 Yet, most of her references to her own contexts were less explicit. For example, she continuously returned in her book to the issue of slavery. The fact that she did not connect it directly to her own cultural heritage is understandable: she wrote, after all, for a broad and international audience. But, in light of the weight she gave to the importance of contextually specific experiences, such suggestions were perhaps even more poignant, precisely because they were indirect.
Wadud’s attempt to reach as wide a Muslim audience as possible was also evident in how she chose to present her analysis: throughout the text she refrained from using the term ijtihad. Such avoidance was remarkable since her book was an exercise in rethinking Muslim jurisprudential interpretations of the Qurʾan. In a typical statement, she explained, “The existence of so many exegetical works (tafasir) indicates that, with regard to the Qurʾan, the interpretation process has existed and will probably continue to exist, in a variety of forms. It is essential that the natural adaptive nature of interpretation, from individual to individual and from time and place to time and place, should continue unabated until the end of time—on the one hand, because it is natural, and, on the other hand, because only through continued interpretation can the wisdom of the Qurʾan be effectively implemented. This implementation will be specific to the varying experiences of human civilization.”
In this passage, ijtihad was implicit. Wadud’s stress on “continued interpretation” in light of “specific … experiences” paralleled Rahman’s modernist approach. Yet she phrased it in a way that did not come across as too modernist. She described her work as a mere contribution to the discipline of tafsir, an “intellectual legacy that is more than fourteen centuries old.”10 Her goal was to demonstrate that women had to become integral to this tradition. Therefore, she wrote as an equal contributor to it and was careful not to come across as an outside agitator.
This likely influenced her selection of conversation partners, the Muslim authorities whose works she most often referenced. She explicitly stated that she engaged with the insights of such authors as Qutb and Mawdudi. Her invocation of their names was particularly productive: in the early 1990s, it projected a veneer of tradition, because, at that time, they were often perceived as advocates for a global Muslim revival in the name of the Islamic tradition and not as outright modernists like Rahman. Of course, these two thinkers’ approaches also happened to be methodologically modernist and, therefore, compatible with her analysis, particularly since they both interpreted the Qurʾan thematically. Above all, what the four authors, Mawdudi, Qutb, Rahman, and Wadud, shared was the tendency of interpreting the Qurʾan without paying much attention to the Hadith. Theirs was the method of qurʾan bi-l-qurʾan, or the process of interpreting the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan alone.11
Here Wadud trod an ambiguous line, which indicated her modern grappling with the inherited tradition of exegesis. On the one hand, she interpreted the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan in a way that emulated Rahman’s “double movement.” On the other, she was careful not to push the envelope too far. In the introduction to the book, she explained that she intended for it to serve as a contribution to the study of the Qurʾan specifically, which in time would need to be expanded to include the Hadith as well: “[This book] is about exactly what it says it is about—the Qurʾan, and woman, as a concept. Although part of a larger concern about understanding Islam and women, it has a particular focus within a specific intellectual discipline of Islamic thought. Each specialty must be developed distinctly before they can be combined together to gain a fuller picture. Hence, the special focus on the Qurʾan … is appropriately restricted for optimal efficacy of this consideration.”
To validate her affinity with the Muslim interpretive tradition, she further explained, “I accept the role of the prophet both with regard to revelation, as understood in Islam, and to the development of Islamic law on the basis of his Sunna or normative practices.” But, she added, echoing Rahman, “I place greater significance on the Qurʾan. This is congruent with the orthodox understanding of the inerrancy of Qurʾanic preservation versus historical contradictions within the hadith literature.”12 Through this move, while affirming her allegiance to the broader tradition of exegesis, she also effectively denied one of its key methodological tools: the possibility of the Hadith abrogating the Qurʾan, a widespread practice among classical exegetes that many modern interpreters came to view with suspicion.13 Further reflecting her ambiguous position, which stemmed perhaps from her desire to appeal to those who disagreed with Rahman, she indicated that her interpretative approach followed an “orthodox understanding.” And yet, adding another Rahmanian twist, she paired the suspicion of the historical validity of the hadith literature with the stress on the ethical reading of the Qurʾan: “Furthermore,” she declared, “I would never concede that the equality between women and men demonstrated in the Qurʾan could be removed by the prophet.”14
What Wadud inherited from Rahman was the method of searching for the Qurʾan’s ethical principles. Such principles, in her and Rahman’s view, were eternal. Because the Qurʾan communicated them thematically, however, they were dynamic, not static, and had to be applied differently in various settings. This insight was central to Rahman’s and Wadud’s translations of the Qurʾan from a premodern into a modern text. In Qurʾan and Woman Wadud applied it to her own context and agenda. She interpreted the revelation’s central themes as markers of the ongoing movement toward a more just societal life, which to her was inseparable from progress toward gender equality. Reading the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan, she examined its statements on women in light of its other passages, which, in her view, corresponded with its major themes. Following Rahman, she identified taqwa and social justice as the scripture’s most consequential themes.15 Reaching beyond Rahman, she also insisted on the centrality of the interpreter: she emphasized the importance of who interprets the Qurʾan for Muslims and argued that interpretations of the scripture for women must be carried out by women.
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Wadud presented her exegetical methodology as “hermeneutics of tawhid,” a term that emphasized the central theme of the Qurʾan, the notion of God’s Oneness, as well as the idea of the coherence of the scripture’s overall communication: “the unity of the Qurʾan,” she explained, “permeates all its parts.” This understanding allowed Wadud to sift through the Qurʾanic statements that she perceived as addressing particularities of its original context and interpret them through passages that connoted the scripture’s eternal concepts. Like Rahman, she argued that the Qurʾan had established the principle of an essential equality of all human beings, irrespective of their gender, class, race, or any other qualifier. She based this dictum on the notion of the “equity of [God’s ultimate] recompense,” the Qurʾanic depiction of how God evaluates each human being’s actions. Paraphrasing the Qurʾan and Rahman, she insisted that for God “the only distinction [between each man or woman] is on the basis of [their] taqwa,” or God-consciousness.16
This assertion was Wadud’s interpretation of Qurʾan 40:39–40. Its wording relied on the translation of the Qurʾan by the Indian Muslim scholar Yusuf Ali, which by the early 1990s had become widely popular among English-speaking Muslims around the globe, including in the United States. In Ali’s translation these two verses state, “O my people! This life of the present is nothing but (temporary) convenience: it is the Hereafter that is the Home that will last. He that works evil will not be requited but by the like thereof: and he that works a righteous deed―whether man or woman―and is a Believer―such will enter the Garden (of Bliss): therein will they have abundance without measure.”
To Wadud this passage was crucial because it was inclusive: the Qurʾan clarified here that it addressed men and women equally, and that God evaluated their actions equally as well. She proposed that it also reflected the broader Qurʾanic principle of justice, which overruled the text’s other, male-centered statements. In this regard Wadud generally followed Rahman’s exegesis. Her next point, however, was a step outside of Rahman’s playbook. She observed that the revelation consistently speaks of God as creating everything in pairs, as in Qurʾan 51:49: “And of everything We have created pairs: That ye may receive instruction.” To her, such natural order of creation was yet another Qurʾanic sign of the principle of equality between female and male human beings. Equipped with these two themes—the pairing within the creation and the essential equality of women and men—she moved toward a reinterpretation of two singularly challenging verses, Qurʾan 2:228 and 4:34.
Qurʾan 2:228 is troublesome for many contemporary Muslim readers because it states that “men have a daraja over” women. Ali translated “daraja” somewhat neutrally as “a degree of advantage.” This translation was his interpretation, an exegesis of sorts, which sidestepped what was problematic about this verse: is this “degree” an eternal condition, a marker of some natural hierarchy between genders? Wadud provided an answer, an exegetical counter-reading of Ali’s translation, a rendition of the Qurʾan many of her readers took for granted. She read the Arabic Qurʾan by the Arabic Qurʾan, searching in it for examples where the same or similar terms, such as “faddala,” or “preference,” are used to assign hierarchy. What she found was significant in light of her understanding of the concept of taqwa. She noted that in the Qurʾan “most often daraja is obtained through an unspecified category of doing ‘good’ deeds (20:75, 6:132, 46:19).”17 Such deeds, performed with taqwa by women and men, are equally valuable in the eyes of God. She argued, therefore, that the practice of giving broad significance to Qurʾan 2:228—or even suggesting, however opaquely, that it is somehow neutral—was scripturally and ethically incorrect: it assigned “a degree of advantage” to men as an eternal societal norm. To Wadud this practice contradicted the Qurʾan’s balanced approach to the weighty principles of taqwa and justice. Based on this, she argued that the daraja of men over women is not a universal principle and that alternative interpretations, more sensitive to the Qurʾan’s overall message, were urgently needed in contemporary contexts.
To further destabilize potentially misogynistic readings of the verse, she examined it within its immediate textual setting. She observed that this verse addressed the issue of divorce and the rights of wives and husbands specifically. Following Rahman’s method, she constructed her argument as based on the reading of both the micro- and macro-contexts of the revelation. She highlighted that this verse explicitly used the word maʿruf (“what is known”) to demonstrate that it mandated the conditions of the divorce procedure, and the rights of men and women, within the context of what was known or “conventionally accepted” at the time of Muhammad. The implication, of course, was that once conditions change, so do the “known” norms.18 Therefore, consequent ethical and legal enactments of this Qurʾanic verse, in her view, had to resonate with the notions of rights developed later. This meant that in modern settings the Qurʾan’s “known” norms had to be in sync with modern sensibilities regarding women’s rights.
Wadud carried out a similar analysis of Qurʾan 4:34, which states, in Ali’s translation: “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband’s) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their, beds (and last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance): for Allah is Most High, Great (above you all).”
The words that Ali placed in parentheses were his exegetical additions to the verse. His interpretation corresponded with the predominant Muslim exegetical trend, premodern and modern, which softened the harsh phrasing of this Qurʾanic uttering. In Ali’s rendering the Qurʾan no longer said “adribuhunna,” or “beat them,” but “beat them (lightly).” For Wadud, such tempering of the Qurʾanic language rang hollow, because it attempted to conceal just how dissonant Qurʾan 4:34 was with the revelation’s egalitarian message. This jarring disharmony necessitated deeper reinterpretation, which had to first address the patriarchal sensibilities reflected in the scripture’s overall language.
From the perspective of engaging with the patriarchal language of the sacred text, most problematic for Wadud were two of the verse’s other words: “qawwamuna,” which Ali translated as “protectors and maintainers,” and “faddala,” which he rendered as “has given.” What does it mean for men to be “protectors and maintainers of women”? And what does the Qurʾan imply by “Allah has given” men “more (strength)”? Is this phrasing contextually specific, particular to the societal realities of seventh-century Arabia, or is this an eternal rule? Wadud’s interpretation of Qurʾan 4:34 was based on Rahman’s thematic and ethical reading of the scripture for late-twentieth-century contexts. Such an approach was necessary, she argued, because the thorny issues of patriarchal language “cannot be resolved if we look narrowly” at this verse alone.19 In addition, she relied on the exegesis of the verse carried out by another interpreter, Azizah al-Hibri, who was also influenced by Rahman.20 With Rahman and al-Hibri’s assistance, Wadud performed an ethical abrogation of the verse’s difficult words. But she also added to this interpretive mix her own emphasis on the Qurʾan’s depiction of nature as being created in a deliberately balanced way. By combining ethics with the Qurʾanic idea of balance, she effectively declawed any possible legal applications of Qurʾan 4:34 in contemporary settings: irrespective of what “adribuhunna” might have meant in the minds of the Qurʾan’s first audience, she declared, it could not be applicable across the board—because the Qurʾan speaks here primarily about maintaining a balance between spouses. Therefore, in her view, any consequent interpretations of Qurʾan 4:34 had to be based on the principles of familial ethics and balance. Crucial to her was the fact that the institution of family had evolved throughout history and modern family structures were very different from their premodern varieties. Thus, following al-Hibri, she noted that faddala in Qurʾan 4:34 was conditional on financial and other support a husband provided to his family.
To highlight the importance of varying contexts in determining how this verse should be read by contemporary Muslims, Wadud wondered whether it would be applicable in situations where women served as primary breadwinners for their families? Her question was based on her experience as an African American woman. She observed that contemporary African American women often serve as heads of households, frequently as single mothers. The dichotomy between the context of the Prophet’s society and contemporary African American realities prompted her to formulate a broader answer to Qurʾan 4:34, which she based on her understanding of Qurʾanic ethics. Her solution was to put aside any thought of “beating” and focus instead on the transformation of “marriages of subjugation” into marriages of equal partnership. She argued that thematic analysis of the Qurʾan, which must be faithful to its ethics, made it possible to move beyond its text’s historically determined male-centered formulations. Instead, she called on her readers to trace the “trajectories of social, political, and moral possibilities” present in the Qurʾan, which reflected its deeper ethical lessons.21
Wadud implemented such tracing by performing a sort of naskh, an informal type of abrogation. In her reading the process of abrogation evident in the Qurʾan itself, with some verses correcting others, underscored that it responded to and aimed to transform its immediate context. In new settings, therefore, the Qurʾan had to be read anew, in light of its ethical principles.
Wadud carried out her ethics-based abrogation by examining what she called the “languaging” of the Qurʾanic text. To do so, she returned once again to the example of Qurʾan 40:39–40, which in her understanding reflected the process through which the Qurʾan established gender-inclusive references in spite of the male-centered language—and patriarchal common sense—of the cultural environment in which it had been revealed. The Qurʾan’s own practice of overcoming the limitations of the language of its first audiences was to her an indication of the trajectory of its ethical message of gender equality. It is this message, this progress toward equality, that she insisted must be translated across time and applied in contemporary contexts. Based on this, she appealed to her fellow inhabitants of the modern Muslim logosphere: “If the aim of Islamic society is to fulfill the intentions of the Qurʾan with regard to the rights, responsibilities, potentialities, and capacities of all its earnest members, then those who truly believe in the Qurʾan would eventually wish for the woman the opportunities for growth and productivity which they demand for the man.”22
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Qurʾan and Woman translated the Qurʾan into a modern text by placing it in conversation with contemporary contexts and sensibilities. It was a written translation, a printed book. There is, however, significant distance between books and life. What made Wadud’s exegetical contribution to American Muslim life distinct was its pronounced practicality. As she noted in the introduction to the 1999 American edition of Qurʾan and Woman, she had written it at a time of transition, from being a student to becoming an activist-scholar.23 By moving into the practical struggle for the equality of women, she took her own—and Rahman’s—interpretations out of the enclosure of printed texts. Her activism translated the Qurʾan of gender justice into a living text that would encourage the work of many American Muslims, such as the Syrian American poet Mohja Kahf, whose lines opened this chapter.24
Wadud’s preaching built upon her written exegesis. It was her oral tafsir. Her experience as an African American woman was crucial here as well. She explained this in her 2006 autobiographical text, Inside the Gender Jihad: “I have never been a Muslim except as an African-American…. African-American Islam is unique especially because of the history of African-Americans. I am part of the awesome legacy of the soul and survival of African slaves brutalized by the dehumanization of the institution of slavery in its peculiarly cruel American racist form.”25
Throughout her life, Wadud reflected on the experience of her parents. Her mother, who “was the glue that kept our family together,” inspired her to pay attention to the complexity of gendered power dynamics in families and broader society. Her father, “a devoted man of God,” served for her as an example of a preacher she would one day become. She explained that “the origin of [her] three decades of work on Islam, justice, and gender was the awesome light of belief” that she had inherited from her father, “a man of faith and a Methodist minister who was born and died poor, black, and oppressed in the context of racist America.”26
Wadud’s uncompromising stance in defense of the principle of equality was rooted in her experience and African American history. In Rahman, she found an exegetical methodology. Yet what propelled her scholarship and activism was the legacy of African American scriptural interpretations that spoke in the face of oppression, “I owe my freedom to the God who made me.” It is not surprising then that Wadud’s interpretation of the Qurʾan was constantly mindful of the liberating promise of the human relationship with God. This was the central theme of the sermons she gave in 1994 in Cape Town, South Africa, and in 2005 in New York City.
Wadud’s two best-known sermons took place in different contexts and distinct stages of her life. She delivered her Cape Town address at the Claremont Main Road Mosque, a major center of Muslim antiapartheid organizing in the 1980s and early 1990s. She was invited to speak there by local activists, who saw the struggle for racial equality as inseparable from the overall movement toward a more just society. Because she was a guest, however, she could not structure the event in a way that resonated fully with her vision. The plans to invite her as a preacher for a Friday congregational prayer were met with significant opposition from neighboring Muslim communities and within the Claremont mosque itself. While there were other occasions when women spoke in front of male and female audiences at South African mosques, this was the first time a woman would stand in front of a congregation of men and women and deliver a sermon. Many saw this act as violating the canon of Muslim ritual life. The organizers of the event, therefore, came up with a solution: instead of a formal sermon (khutba), her talk was structured as a pre-khutba. After she spoke, a male speaker gave a very short sermon in Arabic and led the congregation in prayer. In this way her sermon was presented as not violating ritual customs, while still furthering the authority of Muslim women.27
Wadud’s New York City sermon was different. This time, she made sure to serve as the preacher and the official leader of the prayer. Of course, politics were unavoidable in this context as well, except that here the repercussions were quite broad—local, national, and international, Muslim and otherwise. The 2005 sermon was a watershed event in Wadud’s career. In the 1990s her Qurʾan and Woman was the go-to book for a wide circle of American Muslims interested in the issues of gender equality. It was not controversial, or rather, those who saw it as problematic were few and largely not heard. The situation changed dramatically after 2005. With that sermon Wadud made her interpretation of the Qurʾan manifestly practical by stepping fearlessly into the role of an authority who (re)established a legal precedent. After this event she was no longer known primarily as an author of a printed exegesis. Through personal example she urged Muslims to exercise gender equality in all spheres of life, including their ritual life.
This challenge was indeed controversial. During my research for this book, which took place in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was careful to listen to my American Muslim conversation partners’ opinions about Wadud. They were often reticent. Yet, when I asked them what they thought about her work before 2005, I heard overwhelmingly positive opinions. Of course, it took a bit of reminding to prompt them to recollect Wadud’s legacy as a whole, and not as it became overshadowed by their evaluations of her 2005 prayer. Aside from eclipsing memories of the past, controversies bring to the fore the extent to which discussions on some important subjects become impossible to ignore. The turmoil that erupted after Wadud’s prayer highlighted the fact that the issue of female leadership in the American Muslim communities was now, in 2005, at the forefront of local Muslim debates—because of the changing realities on the ground. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was typical to see women serving on the boards of mosques or in other leadership structures of all sorts of American Muslim institutions. Even more widespread was the phenomenon where women constituted the majority of volunteers in various organizations, from neighborhood centers to mega-mosques, and from student groups on campuses to national organizations. As Hadia Mubarak, the president of the Muslim Student Association at Georgetown University in the early 2000s, put it: “Everywhere it is the sisters who are holding up organization—even doing the heavy lifting.”28
In this respect the story of American Muslims mirrored the trends among other American religious groups. For example, Wendy Cadge’s comparative study of recent immigrant and convert Buddhist communities in the United States in the 2000s traced a similar trend: Buddhist women, immigrants, and converts were becoming more involved, in various ways, in their religious organizations. Cadge observed that in both immigrant and convert communities, as “in most religious organizations in the United States, women are involved in [temples and other institutions] in greater numbers than their proportions in the Thai and American populations in the United States would predict.”29
Jewish and Christian communities underwent similar evolutions as well. Wadud’s activism, aimed at full equality of Muslim women in ritual life, paralleled, for instance, the movement toward ordination of women among Protestant Christians and Reform and Conservative Jews.30 Behind this development was a monumental shift in the economic and social distribution of power between men and women, which came along with industrialization, urbanization, mass education, and other factors. After World War I and, even more so, after World War II, women’s roles in American society changed dramatically. By the early twenty-first century, the phenomenon of women serving as primary breadwinners in their families and de-facto heads of households became widespread. Along with all such changes came transformations in the common sense of justice, where gender equality became an immediate and commonly expressed concern. This was true of American Muslims as much as it was for other Americans. An example of this development was the election of Ingrid Mattson as the president of ISNA in 2006, less than a year after Wadud’s New York City prayer—and, it is worth remembering, two years before Hillary Clinton’s first attempt to become the president of the United States.
Of course, many religious women and men do not change their traditions, rituals, customs, and language overnight. Rather, they tend to change the meanings of the words and concepts they inherit while claiming full allegiance to their religious heritage. The titles of “rabbi,” “priest,” or “chaplain,” for example, acquired different meanings once women joined these religious professions. Such transformations also involve people who resist dramatic types of change, such as the ordination of women. A telling illustration of this is the transformation of the institution of “rabbi’s wife” in American Judaism. In the United States, Jewish women and men continuously transformed what this position meant in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. By the 1970s many rabbis’ wives deemphasized or rejected this title. At the same time, many others, particularly in Orthodox Judaism, used it to expand, in practical terms, the sphere and quality of women’s authority and power.31 American Muslim women followed this general trend, including the wide variety of ways in which they reshaped their roles in the community, with some calling for full equality in all aspects of Muslim life but with most choosing different—yet no less consequential—transformative paths.
What is equally important, particularly for the history of American Muslim discourses, is that by the 2000s the realities of increased power of women in Muslim institutional life made it requisite for American Muslim public speakers to reflect this shift in how they spoke, how they addressed their audiences, and how they explained their realities and scriptures. While Wadud’s 2005 prayer was controversial, much of what she said in her sermon was not, because it resonated with broader transformations in American Muslim realities.
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Wadud’s 1994 Cape Town sermon was, in a sense, a crystallization of Qurʾan and Woman. It addressed the ethics of proper Muslim marriage, where both partners must be fully equal to each other. Wadud based this dictum on Qurʾan 30:21, which in that sermon she translated herself: “And among His signs is that He has created from your own selves mates. And He has made between the two of you love and mercy.” The phrase “love and mercy” was her translation of the Qurʾanic word “rahma.” Much as in her written interpretations, in this example of her oral tafsir, she interpreted the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan. She called on her audience to ponder the meaning of the word “rahma,” to recognize that it signified the Qurʾanic ideal of mercy, and to strive to implement it in their family relations: “Rahma is supposed to be one of the characteristics of how we engage in surrender in our marital lives. We should not take the other person for granted. We should always extend loving care and mercy for him or her.”32
On a theological note, Wadud presented the human ethics of mercy as a reflection of God’s work in nature, human and otherwise. She urged her listeners to remember that the Qurʾan refers to God as “al-Rahman, al-Rahim.” Like many other Muslim interpreters and preachers, she connected the word “rahma”—which is related to “rahman” and “rahim”—with “rahm,” which means “womb.”33 This connection between the divine reality of mercy and the human experience of pregnancy contributed to her formulation of the ethical vision of Muslim living. To be Muslim for Wadud was not just to be “surrendered” to God, as the ordinary translation of the Arabic word muslim suggests, but rather to live one’s life as an ongoing process of “engaged surrender”—just as mothers surrender to the awe-inspiring process of creation that unfolds within their bodies. She coined the phrase “engaged surrender” to stress the agency of human beings, women and men, whom God gave the freedom to decide, in every moment of their lives, to either follow the path of God-conscious living or rebel against it. Wadud reminded that the Qurʾan speaks of God as representing the ultimate rahma: “He is Mercy. He is the Ultimate mercy. Both His names of mercy, rahman and rahim, come from the same root word as rahm: the womb. Allah thus engages us continually to understand the nature of our surrender.”34
Reflecting publicly on her own experience of pregnancy and childbirth, Wadud stated that women’s natural surrender in the process of creation of new human life is a sign of God’s mercy. Here, based on her experience, she offered a novel exegesis of Qurʾan 94, which Muslim preachers often quote (like the imam from western New York, whose prayer I mentioned in the introduction). She translated this short sura and then provided her exegetical reflection: “In Surah Inshirah (chapter 94) Allah says: ‘Have we not opened up your heart and lifted/removed from you the burden which weighed so heavily on your back. And raised you high in dignity. And behold with every hardship comes ease. Indeed with every hardship comes ease. Hence, when you are freed from your distress; Remain steadfast and unto your Sustaining Lord turn in love.’ Allah gives us the mother in pregnancy and childbirth as a living picture of this idea of engaged surrender.”35
This verse is ordinarily interpreted as relating to the Prophet. Wadud, however, took the central to the sura theme of God’s mercy and connected it specifically to women’s experience of “engaged surrender,” as they embody it during pregnancy and childbirth. As a female interpreter, she lent this sura a new reading that rendered it viscerally relevant to those who shared her gendered experience. In this instance the Qurʾan, through her translation, spoke directly to women and made their experience a divine sign for all human beings, female and male. This example demonstrates that Wadud’s 1994 sermon offered more than a mere summation of Qurʾan and Woman. That sermon was a lived experience—an experience of engaging and speaking with the Qurʾan, which Wadud shared with her audience. Through words and physical presence, she actualized her scholarly stress on the importance of the agency of women as the Qurʾan’s interpreters. Surely, a male preacher could have said something similar to Wadud’s notion of “engaged surrender,” but he would not be able to infuse it with the same kind of visceral relevancy.
Wadud’s 2005 sermon in New York was in many ways similar to her 1994 Cape Town address. Its general thrust resonated with her previous written and oral exegeses. As in her Cape Town khutba, she reminded her audience about the need to live their lives while cultivating conscious relationships with the divine. Once again, she stressed that when it comes to this relationship, all humans are equal. Yet, throughout the sermon, she spoke in a way that reflected deeper, more developed, and in many respects more daring articulations of her trajectory of ethical activism.
Wadud began her khutba, for example, with a subtle modification of the customary opening supplication Muslim preachers use to initiate their sermons. Ordinarily, a preacher would open his talk by stating that he bears witness that there is no God but one God and that Muhammad is His messenger and Prophet, and by asking God to bless Muhammad and his companions. Wadud, however, added an additional plea: for the blessing of Muhammad’s wives. With this opening note, she immediately reminded her audience that women had been principal agents in Muslim history from the very beginning.
Another significant move in that sermon was Wadud’s explicit enactment of what she had described in Qurʾan and Woman as the Qurʾan’s “languaging,” or its tendency to transform the meanings of words in ways that move human beings to reconsider their ordinary understandings and practices. Once again she centered her khutba on the relationship between God and human beings. As though echoing Iqbal’s dictum, “view the world otherwise, and it will become other,” she spoke of God in terms that contravened the masculine perception of the word “allah”: throughout the sermon, she called God “He,” “She,” and “It.” This was, to her, a new act of “languaging,” which she did not perform in Cape Town. She initiated this process in the opening of the sermon, where she translated the verse that most Muslims know, or at least are supposed to remember, Qurʾan 2:255, which is customarily referred to as The Verse of the Throne: “Allah, there is no god but the God, (and) He/She/It is the Ever Living, the Self-Subsistent Fount of All Being.” Immediately she linked this passage to Qurʾan 33:35, a verse that explicitly names women and men “who surrender” as the people for whom “Allah has prepared … forgiveness and vast reward.” This connection between God, who is beyond the earthly notions of gender, and human beings as equal recipients of the divine grace allowed her to position herself as an authoritative voice in Muslim discourses. “I stand before you,” she testified, “in all my imperfections and weaknesses confessing that I bear sincere love of Allah and love for all of Her ayat/signs.”36
As an equal partner in Muslim engagements with God, she pointed to the Qurʾanic sign, which, she emphasized, indicated the Qurʾanic principle of equality between men and women. She reminded her audience about Qurʾan 4:1, which states that God “has created you from a single nafs [soul/self] and created from it, its mate: and spread the two, countless men and women.” This pedagogic reminder about the essential equality of humans as creatures of God was the basis for her act of serving as a leader of a Muslim congregational prayer. It was also the ground from which she called on her listeners to live as human beings. She reminded them that their high standing in the creation was given to them by God and that no societal constraints could take this status away: “This unity of origin,” she preached, “reflects two important implications, both extensions of the fundamental principle, tawhid: 1) of course Allah is One, Allah is Unique, Allah is united and Allah unifies (all things in creation); 2) no human being is ever the same as Allah, able to know or understand all of Allah’s intention for the creation of humans, or the entire cosmos. Yet all human beings have been granted the potential to experience at-one-ment with Allah for fleeting moments in the creation, and eternally fi-l-akhira (in the Ultimate and Permanent End).”37
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There was more to Wadud’s sermons than controversy. Paying attention to what she actually said highlights the extent to which American—and global—Muslim discourses of the 1990s and 2000s increasingly incorporated in them some sense of gender equality. Of course, what kind of a sense it was at a particular time was different for various groups within diverse Muslim communities. Yet, even the elements of Wadud’s rhetoric that for many were likely quite uncomfortable—such as her gender-inclusive referencing of God—resonated in some crucial ways with the broader dimensions of the Muslim discourses contemporary to her. The way Wadud phrased it was perhaps too challenging for many to hear, because the text of the Qurʾan uses the pronoun “he” when it speaks of God. Still, the tendency to speak differently in light of new realities of gender relations became increasingly widespread in the American Muslim logosphere of her time.
Wadud contributed to the ongoing changes in this logosphere was by introducing ever more daring—yet carefully phrased—articulations of the new thinkables, which had been already present, in various forms, in the experience of many American Muslims. Had her Qurʾan and Women not resonated with broader American Muslim conversations, it would not have been such a widely discussed and overall well-received text. As years went by, she did not merely repeat what she and others had already said but continued to push boundaries toward more ethical—and, in her view, more Qurʾanic—thinkables. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, she kept honing her techniques of “languaging,” which contributed to further developments in American Muslim articulations. Her constant exegetical and practical challenging of the status quo inspired many Muslim activists in the United States and abroad. But what underscores her influence was how much even her detractors came to speak and write in ways that resonated with her phrases and logic. The echoes of her language were particularly pronounced among her American Muslim critics. While many foreign Muslim sources reacted to her 2005 prayer with bafflement and rejection, typical reactions by many American Muslim public figures were more circumspect—in part because they did not want to come across as dismissive of the sensitivities Wadud shared with their own constituents.
A telling example here was an article, “An Examination of the Issue of Female Prayer Leadership,” by Imam Zaid Shakir, an ʿalim (religious scholar, a Muslim equivalent of a Christian cleric or a Jewish rabbi), at Zaytuna Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. I will examine the rhetoric of Shakir’s colleague at Zaytuna, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, later; but for now, it is important to say that in the mid-2000s Zaytuna was the most prolific American Muslim educational organization among a network of groups that presented themselves as “traditional,” which meant a variety of orientations marked by fidelity to the historical legacy of Muslim engagements with sacred texts. Shakir published his article a few days after Wadud’s prayer on the website of another ʿalim, Shaykh Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, who would later join Zaytuna’s faculty as well.
In the 2000s, together with Hamza Yusuf, Shakir was the most recognized ʿalim at Zaytuna, which included among its teachers male and female ʿulama (plural of ʿalim), and male and female students. Given Zaytuna’s emphasis on the authority of the ʿulama, it is not surprising that a central point in Shakir’s response to Wadud’s prayer was a rejection of its Islamic legitimacy. He presented it as an unwarranted innovation in Muslim ritual life. But this was not his whole message. Overall, he agreed that there had been injustices perpetrated by Muslims and that gender inequality was an injustice:
It should be clear that a woman leading a mixed gender, public congregational prayer is not something sanctioned by Islamic law …. Her leading the Friday congregational prayer is even more unfounded…. Saying this, we should not lose sight of the fact that there are many issues in our community involving the neglect, oppression, and in some instances, the degradation of women. Until we address those issues, as a community, in an enlightened manner, we are open to criticism, and will likely encourage various forms of protest…. Perhaps, if the men of our community had more humility, we would behave in ways that do not alienate, frustrate, or outright oppress our women…. When we live for our Lord it becomes easy to live with each other. If in our personal relationships we can come to embody the spirit of mutual love, mercy and affection, encouraged by our Prophet, peace and blessings of God be upon him, we will be able to live together in harmony, and make a beautiful and lasting contribution towards the uplift of men and women alike.38
Muslims and others who are attentive to the dynamics of power in gender relations might be uncomfortable with Shakir’s formulation. They might notice that he presented Wadud’s prayer as a form of “protest” by a woman who was “frustrate[d]” and “alienate[d].” Such phrasing came too close to a sexist stereotype of a difficult and rebellious woman: anyone who drives a car in the United States likely has encountered a bumper-sticker response to this stereotype: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” In addition, Shakir articulated his message in a way that appeared to leave little room for the authority of women. The agency of change, in his phrasing, came across as belonging in the hands of men like Shakir who pronounced what was and was not “sanctioned by Islamic law,” while obscuring his own agency as an interpreter behind his statement’s grammar, its passive voice.
Yet, an overly critical reading of Shakir’s statement would miss what was perhaps most important about it. Yes, he wrote it as a male religious leader. But in this role—as patriarchal as it might appear—he directed his criticism at men, not women. As a male ʿalim, he shamed men to be more humble. In this way he articulated an ongoing transformation of the Muslim male religious authority, which in the new American settings of the time had to be expressed as sensitive to women’s rights. This was particularly pronounced in his use of the word “we,” which signaled that he addressed men and women. He concluded his opinion with a call for “the uplift of men and women alike.” His “alike” here was key: it indicated a degree of sensibility of gender justice, as distinct as it perhaps was from Wadud’s.
This document reflected Shakir’s own process of “languaging.” It represented his endeavor to speak in a way that resonated with his audiences’ sense of fairness. Among his readers and listeners were his female colleagues, students, and administrative staff and volunteers at Zaytuna. But his audiences were also national and international. A popular preacher, he was often featured as a keynote speaker at American Muslim gatherings, and his speeches were popular on the Internet as well. His audiences were made up of constituents who belonged to a wide array of Muslim organizations, where women were prominently represented not just in numbers but in terms of organizational and financial power, as professionals, volunteers, and donors. Such practical power translated into how Muslims, women and men, spoke and how they listened to other speakers. To be heard in this context, Shakir and other Muslim authorities had to communicate in a way that echoed the new American Muslim common sense of justice, which now included a sense of gender justice. Therefore, it is not surprising that his language also included an emphasis on harmony, which was so pronounced in Wadud’s 1994 and 2005 sermons. The “harmony” in Shakir’s statement, however, was likely an indirect echo of Wadud. Because of this, it was even more significant: it echoed Wadud’s language because her articulations shaped the language of her audiences, who, in turn, influenced the speech of wider circles of American Muslims, including those who would eventually speak in opposition to her 2005 prayer.
Another, likely more direct, example of Wadud’s influence in the United States was a document titled “Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers: Working Together to Reclaim Our Heritage,” which shortly after Wadud’s 2005 prayer became adopted by ISNA as a blueprint for more equitable inclusion of women in mosques and other Muslim institutions. It was endorsed and promoted by several other major organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the ICNA, and the Muslim Alliance of North America. This document’s development was spearheaded by Aisha Al-Adawiyya, the founder of Women in Islam, Inc., a New York City–based organization whose mission and work paralleled the Malaysian Sisters in Islam.
In 2005 none of the organizations that endorsed the “Women Friendly Mosques” document supported Wadud’s prayer. In private conversations some of those involved in preparing this document, and others who later supported it, shared with me their disagreement with Wadud’s serving as a leader of a mixed-gender Friday congregational prayer. Many of them agreed in general with Wadud’s exegesis, as she presented it in Qurʾan and Woman. Some recalled that until 2005 they promoted that book and recommended it to Muslim and non-Muslim audiences. But, like Shakir, they thought that Wadud’s precedent of reconfiguring Muslim ritual life was a step too far. Therefore, “Women Friendly Mosques” did not acknowledge in any way the influence of Wadud’s scholarship and activism, which was undoubtedly central in American Muslim discourses since the early 1990s. Moreover, al-Adawiyya and her colleagues had been working on this document long before Wadud’s prayer. For them it was important that the statement would not be perceived as a direct response to the controversy of the female-led prayer. Yet, the timing of this document’s publication, a few months after Wadud’s sermon, indicated that Wadud’s action created a stir that had to be addressed by major American Muslim organizations. Her prayer made gender justice the issue of the day.
Beyond politics, however, more important was the striking similarity between Wadud’s articulations and the language of “Women Friendly Mosques.” Consider, for instance, the following excerpt from the introduction to the document. It echoed Wadud’s Qurʾanic reminders, particularly the notion of human equality before God and, like Wadud’s oral and written exegesis, advanced its argument as based on Qurʾan 30:21:
Muslims are answerable to Allah in every sphere of their life, including their personal and public relations. Human relations and gender relations in Islam are an amanah, a sacred trust that we must guard and make manifest in our interpersonal interactions and institutional arrangements. Islam demands that women and men be spiritual equals. It defines relations between women and men as mutually complementary, and indeed, this mutuality is itself a sign of the Divine (Qurʾan 30:21). Both women and men have been entrusted with the charge of preserving the social order and establishing a just and moral society. Both have been given the guidance to inspire goodness in each other, and thereby, the goodness in all society. The respect, compassion, and mutuality that Allah has placed between women and men must be visible in not only your family life, but also in how Muslims conduct public transactions. Women and men, girls and boys should have equal access to and must feel equally welcome to participate in schools, the masajid (mosques), and other civic and cultural institutions.39
The language of this document speaks to Wadud’s impact on broader American Muslim discourses, particularly her insistence on gender justice as an undeniable and centrally important Muslim principle.
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Wadud’s preaching highlighted the unique power of speech to crystalize, through sound, a multitude of meanings in one single word or phrase. Indeed, Wadud utilized this feature of oral communication in her 2005 sermon, where she kept referring to God as “He,” “She,” and “It.” By doing so, she provided a contemporary exegetical and theological correction to the routine depiction of God as a “He.” In her view this practice, which most people carry out instinctually, preconditioned the Qurʾan’s readers and listeners to think, speak, and act in male-centered ways. Her phrasing was shocking for many of her listeners and, subsequently, readers, who knew that the Qurʾan uses the pronoun “he” when it speaks of God. Yet, this unsettling effect was precisely what Wadud attempted to cultivate. Like the Qurʾan itself, she taught her audiences through reminders. Through this striking articulation, she reminded them about the scriptural principle of the essential human equality before God. The effectiveness of this reminder depended on a deeper, more organic, and engrained notion in the collective memory of Muslims: the idea that God cannot be confined within human descriptions, including gendered ones.
Wadud’s contrapuntal articulation of God was at once Muslim and feminist, or, as she would put it, “pro-feminist.”40 It was also American, because it embodied the legacy of African American struggles for justice. Her notion of God as “He/She/It” was, in a sense, a rendition of the African American Christian slogan “God is Black!,” which had its roots in the rhetoric of Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), a towering intellectual in African American Christian life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Wadud’s father, Turner was a Methodist preacher. His original phrase was “God is a Negro!”41 And it was meant to be shocking. Its power originated in Turner’s art of preaching. In this one phrase he expressed the theologically complex notion of God’s affinity with human beings, in all of their complex situations, and made it viscerally resonant with his listeners and readers. This phrase spoke to the centrality of lived experience in African American theological thought. In the face of the unspeakable horror of slavery and its aftermaths, God for Turner could not be anything but a “Negro”—otherwise, on whose side would God be? Various renditions of Turner’s slogan became central in the discourses of black nationalism and black liberation theology in the twentieth century, including their Muslim iterations.42 Some African American Muslims, like members of the Nation of Islam, developed this expression in somewhat literal fashions. Most others never used this trope explicitly, while still utilizing the cultural logic of liberation embedded in it. Perhaps this is what Wadud meant when several years after her 2005 sermon she explained, “I am my father’s daughter”?43
In the same sermon, Wadud carried out another telling wordplay, which distilled and synthesized meanings and, because of that, crystalized in one moment how the Qurʾan is being constantly translated into an American sacred text—how, through dialogue with its American faithful, it takes on and then transforms their thinkables. This was her spoken rendition of one characteristically Christian word, “atonement.” The fact that she, an American Muslim, used a Christian word is not unusual. Zaid Shakir, for instance, did something similar in his statement when he wrote, “we live for our Lord.” Indeed, “lord” is a direct translation of the Arabic word rabb. But Arabic does not have capital letters, and Shakir’s capitalized “Lord” was an iteration of an American English and Christian expression. What he and Wadud did followed a much wider trend: non-Christian religious people in the United States often take on Christian terminology and make it their own. They do so because some Christian words and concepts are also the terms of the broader culture. The first Buddhist temple in New York City, for example, was established in 1938 and is still, as of 2017, called the New York Buddhist Church. Also, think about all the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Native American chaplains who now work in the American armed forces, hospitals, prisons, and universities. They use the title “chaplain,” which was originally Christian. But, because of who they are, they make it Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Native American.44 Likewise, Wadud’s rendering of the word “atonement” took on a word from American colloquial language, influenced as it was by Christianity, and transformed it into a Qurʾanic and Muslim term: in her voice, it became “at-one-ment.” In this rendition, it all of a sudden came to embody the Muslim notion of tawhid, the Oneness of God, and taqwa, the believers’ potential to attain a degree of affinity with God through their engaged surrender to the divine—if only for one moment.
Most of us, those who did not hear Wadud pronounce this word in her sermon, would be well served to try and say it out loud: “at-one-ment.” Without sound the meaning of this word is flat: it comes across as what a printed dictionary would tell us it is, a Christian word of English origin, which later became Jewish as well. With sound, however, it comes alive and acquires additional meanings, which fluctuate depending on who pronounces it, as well as how and when it is pronounced. Wadud’s “at-one-ment” highlights the poetic quality of her spoken exegesis. Like poetry, preaching exists through vocalization of words. Like poets, preachers synthesize new resonances, sounds and meanings from what has been said before. Without such re-soundings cultural translation of texts is at best incomplete.