Interviews - PLAYS, FILMS & PLAYS

This Friday 6th March, just ahead of International Women’s Day, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI), a UK-based group who convene inclusive spaces for worship and community work, have invited Dr. Amina Wadud to lead their mixed-gender Friday prayer (Jummah).

It’s been 10 years since Dr. Wadud made headlines when she did the same thing in New York in 2005 and became the first woman to lead both men and women in prayer in the global North. Now IMI are continuing the process she started and potentially turning it up a notch. With their ardent approach to ensuring their events are accessible to disabled people and their eagerness to provide spaces where Muslims of all sects, all genders and all sexualities can meet as equals, their work raises questions about what a truly pluralistic Islam looks like today.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Wadud, author of Qur’an and Woman and Inside the Gender Jihad over Skype. She chats causally about her travels to the global south where she feels “indebted to women and oppressed people who take me to task for attempting to perfect an interpretation that might be irrelevant to people’s lives.” She laments the energy she spends in the US “eking out the space between the sort of apologetic neo-liberal articulation of Islam and the conservative projection of Islam. Neither one of which,” she tells me, “is going to push us forward the way we need to go.” I ask her about the liberation theology she’s been working on and what she calls “radical pluralism.” She explains: “the future of Islam means we need to be taking some spiritual-radical, liberal-radical turns at this time in history.”

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On 6^th March, the IMI are going to be opening up the congregational prayer space to everyone including people who have, perhaps, proactively avoided those spaces of ritual worship because historically, those spaces have excluded them for myriad reasons. Do you have any advice for them on reclaiming that space?

Yes. I like the way that you’ve formulated this question because you are expressing it from what I would describe as the base level upwards and I’ve been looking at it as far as reformist theory. One cannot wait to have ownership of Islam granted, one has to actually feel confident of the necessity for asserting that ownership especially when it is being neglected or deprived. So, the power lies at that basic level as well as at the top. There is a need to arrive at the confidence to be able accept that despite differences of opinion, despite outright obstacles and objections, one has to go forward with a sense of ownership. I think it’s a process of self-affirmation and transformation.

You know, when more ordinary Muslims arrive at that place, then the achievement of democratisation of authority will be met. I continue to work on what I call radical pluralism and that means that there is and has always been, a diversity of Islams in accordance to the people who live it. It means that every person who confesses to be Muslim has the right to say what the public understanding of Islam is and if there are different public understandings of Islam, great, ‘cause the more the merrier.

It’s likely that there will be an outer circle of attendees at the inclusive prayer. They’re going to be the Muslim allies of the people who are praying. Although those allies might not be taking those steps towards ownership themselves, they are going to be there. What message would you want to put across to those people who may not feel it’s okay to join in, but they’re still showing their support?

Alright. To them my message would be: get off the fence. I don’t feel that they’re helpful to themselves or to anyone by presuming that when such a thing as inclusive prayer gets the approval of whatever parties they are waiting to have approve it, only then can they openly participate. That is simply a form of hypocrisy and cowardice and it doesn’t do anyone any good to have them sit on the periphery, which they do on the basis of taking some efforts to preserve their I’m-still-a-good-Muslim-ness, according to other people’s expectations of what is a good Muslim.

I think a little more concern needs to be put on the honesty and integrity of their own hearts. If their heart is in support, then their body needs to be following suit.

In the fight for gender equality and inclusivity in religion, you’ll have come across people who feel that the reality of those who say they are excluded or marginalised is perhaps exaggerated or distracting from more so-called important issues. How do you bring people into awareness about anything that they believe is not their reality?

This really is more of a pedagogical issue. This is about the ways that we imagine knowledge can be explained. What does it take to build empathy in people so that they will respect that there are differences even in the perceptions of the same experience and that each of those different perceptions are equally important? I have seen a few mechanisms that work. I’m especially thinking about Toni Morrison’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature because one of the means is through storytelling. We need to cultivate the capacity to listen, to learn, to witness other stories as equally significant because they are, in fact, significant aspects of the total conversation of Islam in our day.

I think we need to multiply the number of stories that are told about Muslim realities and right now, we are on a repeat cycle for certain formulas and these formulas have outlived their utility. We have played out certain stories to such an extent that the people who are experiencing stories outside of those overplayed ones, do not realise how valuable their contributions are. We have not moved to a global awareness about Muslim diversity so our notion of, for example the hero, is still where it was many years ago. We still love the trope of the Muslim woman that needs to be saved by something. The something could be education, fashion etc. We love that story, we love that victim being made hero trope. We can move beyond that.

Which has been more difficult, getting men to see women differently or encouraging women to see themselves differently?

I have to say, personally, I put little attention into how men see women. They’re not my audience, they’re not who I aim at when I make certain statements because the historical record indicates that men have had undue privilege. So I think in a way, that they’re doing okay. I guess you could say that I’m working on women changing their minds about themselves. However, I find that articulation a little problematic because it seems to start from a place of disapproval. I’m not stressing so much that women change as much, as I’m stressing that women become greater in self-acceptance.

The language of change presumes that they have something wrong that needs to be corrected and I am trying to work philosophically on the grounds of: you’re okay just as you are. When I talk about change, I use that word in terms of transformation and I usually articulate it this way: the universe is always in motion and God himself is alive so if we are not continually moving then the universe will move on without us, so not paying attention to that transformation is not stagnation, it is in fact, regression. Because in order to keep up with the universe, we have to keep moving. But I don’t give a direction to that movement and I don’t give an evaluation to what I think would constitute a “proper” or “good” location within it. I just think we have to keep up with the universe.

Originally published on Media Diversified

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If I were handing out awards for theatre, last year’s best performances would have gone to Michaela Coel and Toby Wharton. Coincidentally, they’d both have won for best writing too. Toby’s co-written og and Michaela’s Chewing Gum Dreams were undoubtedly two of the best shows on the London fringe scene last year and with both of these performers cast in Nadia Fall’s verbatim play Home, it topped my list of things to see. But I didn’t like the title for this National Theatre Shed production. Home seemed so generic, so familiar, so simple. Titles for plays, I think, should always be intriguing. On first hearing it, Home just wasn’t. Now that I’ve seen the show however, I’ve done an about-turn. It’s an entirely encapsulating title, clever and pretty perfect for this stellar production.

Michaela Coel confirms this within a few minutes of our conversation. Currently in Channel 4’s Top Boy as Kayla, Michaela, who plays two characters living at Target East hostel, a temporary housing solution for people who find themselves with nowhere to go. Michaela tells me about the hours spent talking to an environmental psychologist in preparation for her roles, “about what it is to be homeless and about what homelessness is really about.”

Having bound across the foyer with a huge grin and limitless energy, she sits straight up and talks thoughtfully about the emotional state that emerges from an understanding of where one comes from and where once can safely go. “There’s a difference between just having a home and knowing that this here is my parent’s land. Knowing that they own it and when they die, I’m going to own it and no matter what happens in the world, I have this that I stand on, that I own. And when you don’t have that, your mentality changes because there’s no sense of surety, your standing on something that can be ripped from your feet at any moment.”

That relationship to our environment is made crystal clear in Home, it becomes something that extends beyond the people who live at Target East and into the audience. That feeling of living somewhere temporary, somewhere you might not be able to afford soon or somewhere you don’t feel you belong is what brings us close to the range of characters in this play. Michaela talks about a similar feeling when she tells me about her own childhood: “My dad came here as an illegal immigrant and he was caught and sent back to Ghana. Me and my mum, we don’t own no home, we’ve been moving from flat to flat since I was born and it makes me feel very invested in this play. When we’ve gone into the real hostel to do drama workshops with the people who live there, I look at them and I think, there is no difference between me and you. I know the same people as some of them, you know, mates from my secondary school. That’s why I have to make sure I honour these stories.”

And while Home might be a picture of people in dire straights, it’s not remotely preachy or guilt-inducing. “What this play doesn’t do is make people feel bad,” says Michaela, “it’s not saying shame on you and it’s not saying lucky you, it’s just saying this is what it’s like for these people. There’s just something quite unifying in the play, this sense of struggle.”

To Nadia’s credit, she’s found some great ways of creating a sense of unity and at the same time honouring the stories she tells. There is for example, Grace Savage, a beatboxer who doesn’t say a word but instead becomes the voice of the silent. “When you see Grace” says Michaela, “you’ll understand why no one else in the world should even try beatboxing because, she’s just the best. But even some of her beatboxing is harrowing and you kind of think how can something like beatboxing have that much of an effect? She sort of represents the people who refused to talk to Nadia, the people who didn’t want to share their stories, her character is those people who are so frustrated that they can’t speak or they don’t want to relive what happened to them or they’ve gone through such an experience that they only have a few words and can’t go any further than that.”

Grace also provides a lot of the lightness in the play, the humour and the comic relief that comes with an environment like that of Target East, where there are little babies, middle-aged security guards, wise case workers, stubbornly positive managers and persistent drug dealers. One of Michaela’s characters has a uniquely hopeful take on life and it can land her in some disastrous situations. “None of these people are stupid, that’s clear. But we all come with our own prejudices and Nadia’s been a great help in showing us that we’re here just to tell these stories. One of my characters for example, she’s caught Chlamydia four times, twice from her current boyfriend and you want to go: What the hell is wrong with you? But you hear her backs story and it makes it easier to step back and see why she might make the decisions that she does.”

The other character Michaela plays is Young Mum who has one scene that makes me laugh out loud just thinking about it. “She’s so happy. She considers herself a chairman of the hostel. She’ll give you a tour, she’ll show you the garden and say ‘yeah it smells of wee sometimes but today it’s nice’. She’s still together with the father of her child, he’s at uni and she’s climbing. A lot of these people are climbing, they’re just starting from a much lower place.”

Written for Spoonfed
Originally published on Spoonfed

Radical Pluralism: An interview with Dr. Amina Wadud

Homebody: An interview with Michaela Coel