Wuzhong, China - A veiled revolution is under way among China’s Muslims who were earlier denied barest of religious freedom during the Cultural Revolution. Muslim women in the country are now part of a change that has set them apart from their counterparts elsewhere on the globe. A handful of female imams (priests), considered unthinkable in Islamic countries, are at the helm of this change.
Wang Shan Zhen, 61, is one of them. She leads the prayers, intoning verses in Arabic with 50 women devotees repeating after her, at a small mosque in north-west China. "It’s very important to have female imams in China. Women devotees don’t understand Arabic and they need someone to help them in offering the prayers properly,"she told TOI at her mosque in Wuzhong in Ningxia province.
The position of imam is hardly held by women in Islamic society anywhere in the world. The rise of female imams in west China is a sign of Islamic resurgence of a different kind, where women are asserting their religious rights in an independent manner, sources in Wuzhong said.
There are about 50 female imams in China, most of whom are in the western provinces of Ningxia, Xianggang, Guizhou, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, where most of the country’s Muslims live.