The Interfaith Feminist Imagination

I’m sitting at the end of my friend’s bed in Sharjah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates (just outside its more famous sister city, Dubai). I’m on my winter break from divinity school and another friend and I have flown here to visit Bushra, one of our best friends from college. We hadn’t seen her since we graduated a year and a half ago, and it’s been truly holy to see her in her element. After all, I got to know Bushra in rural New England, my home turf, so this visit to her context has helped me see her roots. We’ve spent long days drinking chai on the street, trawling the malls and souks of Dubai, and eating homemade Pakistani food.

Reuniting with Bushra also reminds me that before I was ever a Catholic feminist, I was an interfaith feminist. It was Bushra, a Muslim woman, who dragged me to the first meeting of the interfaith club that we helped start in college. I never expected to “get involved with religion” at our secular liberal arts school, but my new friendships helped me understand myself – and my own context – more fully. I began to see how religion leaked into every corner of my life – for good and for ill. Through late-night conversations with my new best friends, religious women from many contexts, I began to more intentionally embrace, reject, and love my own tradition. We talked about internalized misogyny, dating and sexuality, the prayers we loved, the patriarchal bullshit we hated, and the messy, stumbling faith that sustained us. Religious women from across the world have a lot in common.

The other day, I asked Bushra if she had any female Muslim friends who aspired to be religious leaders. Yes, of course!, she said, telling me about her childhood dream to work for faith and justice in Pakistan, her home country. What about people who specifically aspired to be an imam and lead prayers?, I asked. Oh, no, Bushra said. People don’t aspire to things that feel impossible.

Those words stuck in my head. People don’t aspire to things that feel impossible. Some Muslim women do aspire to formal religious leadership, of course, just as some Catholic women aspire to the priesthood, but many don’t because such dreams have no blueprint in their context. This is a problem of imagination. The religious patriarchy has built scaffolding inside our heads. Even the women most equipped to do God’s will in the world struggle to see themselves as capable of doing so. 

How do we address a problem of imagination? How do we dismantle both the internal and external structures that deny women’s sacred gifts? For me, my relationships with women of other faiths have offered one answer. My friends expand my imagination.

From a Lutheran seminarian, I learned about the beauty that can blossom when a woman finds her call affirmed – and witnessed the inequalities latent within progressive denominations. From a Modern Orthodox Jewish friend, I learned about how community can sustain – and stifle. From a Latina convert to Islam, I learned about the joy of discovery and the courage to forge a religious identity that is beautifully consonant with one’s cultural heritage. From a non-denominational Pentecostal friend, I learned about the sweetness of prayer – and the bitterness of rejection. In my friends’ stories of vocation, faith, abuse, and pain, I see God at work. I see the ecosystem of problems and an ecosystem of healing.

By understanding ourselves as a class, a group of people with resonant circumstances, obstacles, and goals, women are better equipped to tackle the religious and cultural infrastructure that holds us in place. We are better able to address the external barriers to ordination and other vocations: my friends and I have backed each other in battles with unjust authorities in our respective traditions, joining forces to present a united interfaith feminist front of sorts. To me, though, the internal reworking of the imagination is just as powerful as the concrete, external results of interfaith feminist organizing. Alongside friends like Bushra, I’ve begun the work of imagining something different, a world in which women can more readily share their love for faith and justice with their communities.

This is no easy, beautiful, “multicultural” or liberal solution: this work hurts. Sometimes we come up against immovable difference. Sometimes our communities or theologies hurt each other. We move within systems of racism and classism, nationalism and colonialism. This work takes love, and love takes atonement. It takes repentance, reparation, and recommitment – a holistic rewiring of the synapses that make it easier for us to hurt than to heal.

Sometimes, though, something moves a little. Sometimes we get a glimpse of a healthier ecosystem, a web of communities that honor the holiness of their women. We imagine something else.