c. 2004 Religion News Service

TORONTO _ The handful of girls and women arriving for Friday prayers at the Islamic center make small talk before removing their coats and shoes, tying their head scarves and quietly filing into the prayer room _ just as their Muslim sisters do the world over this day.

After the adhan, the call to prayer, they listen intently to the English sermon, then perform the qiyam, the standing posture. Like the men,they raise their hands to their ears and then fold them, right over left, over their hearts. Like the men, they prostrate and touch their foreheads to the ground, returning to the standing position.

The only conspicuous difference is that at the Noor Cultural Centre, females do not use a separate entrance, do not sit in a balcony or behind a partition, or languish at the back of the room.

The small, glassed-in prayer space in the center’s basement is believed to be the first place in Canada where Muslim men and women pray side by side _ or at least, lined up with each other.

It’s not completely egalitarian _ a three-foot aisle separates the men’s and women’s sections _ but it’s being hailed as a major first step in the expression of a more flexible form of Islam in the West.

Is it Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare? The start of a renegade movement? Neither, says the center’s CEO, Roshan Jamal, who, as far as she knows, is the only woman to head an Islamic organization in Canada.

“It’s not breakaway. It’s not reform,” says Jamal, a 59-year-old accountant who favors business suits and doesn’t cover her hair in public. “It’s mainstream. It’s how Islam was meant to be practiced.

“We are simply returning to our roots.”

Thirty years ago, when Jamal came to Canada from Mozambique, “there were few mosques and women were not very comfortable. I found every space restrictive. I didn’t feel I belonged. There were a lot of women like me.”

Muslim women “ended up going nowhere. They would go [to the mosque] for Eid (festival days) or for Friday prayers, or just to someone’s basement.”

The Islamic facility, housed in the former Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, opened a year ago and offers its mostly Sunni members lectures and language programs. The prayer room opened on the first day of Ramadan, in October.

“This is the kind of thing I always dreamed of,” says Jamal, with a smile, “a place where broad-minded people can go to learn and worship.”

Toronto seems to be at the cutting edge of this kind of openness. Last month, a 20-year-old Muslim woman became the first female to deliver a sermon in a Canadian mosque. It raised some eyebrows, but also earned kudos from Muslims, including many men.

And a University of Toronto graduate student analyzing the Hadiths _ the sayings and practices of the prophet Mohammad _ has concluded that most Islamic trends oppose the segregation of men and women. Her research was published recently in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. Though there are no formal ties between the two, Jamal acknowledges that the Islamic facility she runs and the New York-based Progressive Muslim Union of North America, which emerged last month, mark a new trend toward liberalism and tolerance driven mainly by younger Muslims.

The Noor center “is an effort to show there’s another side to Islam … that God is not punishing but loving,” says Jamal’s husband, Husein, a 69-year-old physician who often leads the prayer service (there’s no full-time spiritual leader or imam). “If you want to reach people, there’s no point in being confrontational. This is a gentle, no-fault approach.”

The prayer space wasn’t created willy-nilly. Center officials say they consulted no less an authority than the Ayatollah Sistani, one of only five living grand ayatollahs and the most senior Shiite cleric in Iraq.

“He said it was completely permissible for men and women to pray together,” says Husein Jamal, “but there had to be three feet between them.”

Practices vary, but in most mosques, women use a separate door or worship in a mezzanine or behind a screen or partition. One trend puts women at the back of the hall.

A male worshipper at the Noor center, who refused to give his name, says that while he has no problem worshipping alongside women, there’s nothing wrong with segregating them.

“It’s quite respectful,” he says. “It says to women, `you are distracting men.”’

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If men are distracted, it is they who should be segregated, responds Husein Jamal, and not just in the mosque, “but on busses and office buildings.”

Men and women prayed together until 675, when the third Shiite imam, Husayn, ruled they should be separated in the main mosque in Jerusalem “because it was a strange, new place and he didn’t want any trouble,” explains Husein Jamal. “It stuck.”

There’s been little public negative reaction to the prayer room, apart from one nasty anonymous posting on a local Islamic website. “We approached them to say `if you have something to say, please say it to us.’

“You can say we are a product of the reaction to the hard line.”

Both Jamals say there is nothing in the Qur’an or Hadiths that enforces the segregation of women and men at prayer.

“The Prophet asked women to lead prayers,” notes Roshan Jamal. “In Mecca, men and women pray not only together, but intermingled.”

In Toronto, and probably many other places, that’s a long way off, says Alia Hogben, president of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women.

It is the nature of Muslim prayer to stand shoulder to shoulder to form a solid bond. “Many men would find that awkward,” Hogben says.

As for developments at the Noor center, “it’s about time.”

MO/DH END RNS