A few years back I met a British-born female convert to Islam who reckoned there was no real reason why women couldn't lead mixed-sex Jummah prayers but I've found it hard to find anything about this since, so univocally androcentric have the sources been. So it's interesting to find this. The real thing is going to be how things play out from here. This really is a challenge to the tacit and sometimes not so tacit consensus in the Islamic world but based on the frequently-made Muslim claim that men and women are equal. Perhaps this is the way for women to bein to challenge the other inequalities that face them in Islam: their testimony being worth half a man's, for example, or divorce rights.
What will be interesting is the effect that such things will have on the structures of Islamic thought and the hermeneutical and interpretive methodologies employed in Islamic scholarship. These are 'places' that Chirstian theology has been long familiar with through it's part-creation of and participation in Enlightment culture. Islam has still to deal with the matter arising but cannot really avoid having to do so if it is to retain credibility for increasing numbers of increasingly well-educated and non-deferential western-situated Muslims.
Muslim WakeUp! Blog The Female-Led Prayer in the Arabic Press
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