Source: www.chinafile.com
http://video.chinafile.com/players/s8YTlES9-ylyuUi5i.html

China’s Hui Muslims are unique in many respects. The country’s second-largest ethnic minority share linguistic and cultural ties with the majority in China that have allowed them to practice their religion with less interference and fewer restrictions than others, like Uighur Muslims and Tibetans. Outside of China, the Hui practice of installing women as the head of female-only mosques has been viewed with criticism and admiration. In this video, we look inside the lives of Hui women and what the practice, and the religion, means to them.

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A Mosque of Their Own
Women have led Muslim congregations in China for generations, but their tradition’s success may be its own undoing

Chinese Female Imams

The women of Sangpo know well they are the guardians of a 300-year-old custom that sets them apart in Islam and they are increasingly mindful that economic development could be that tradition’s undoing.

Sangpo, a dusty hamlet about two hours from the capital of China’s landlocked Henan province, is home to about 5,000 people, some 95 percent of whom are Hui Muslims. The Hui, China’s third-largest ethnic minority, number nearly 10 million followers of Islam in China. Many are direct descendants of Arab traders on the Silk Road who married local Chinese women, but the Hui today are mainly identified through their religion rather than by ethnic characteristics.

Packed into this town are six mosques run by women, whose congregants are all female, and only five headed by men—an imbalance the women point out with pride, and a rarity among Muslim communities in China, let alone the rest of the world.

This is the heart of a Hui Islamic practice that has been studied, derided, picked apart, and admired by scholars of Islam and of China. There are a few female imams elsewhere in the world, including in Spain, Turkey, and the United States, but for the Hui of Henan, the practice is not an oddity. Rather, it is a widely accepted part of religious life among women that is tolerated by men.

Guo Dongping, a female imam in Sangpo, describes her role as a combination of community organizer and language and religion instructor. In addition to leading prayers and teaching Arabic, Guo often serves as a counselor to the women in her flock.

“If someone is unhappy with her situation at home, especially when there are problems between a woman and her mother-in-law, she will come to the imam, who will console her,” she says. “Imams often deal with…………..

While their precise numbers are unknown, China has dozens of female imams—more than anywhere else in the world, according to leading scholars. Most are in Henan province. They first appeared in the 17th century, in a doctrinal adaptation likely born of necessity. According to Shui Jingjun of the Henan Academy of Social Sciences, this owes to the land-locked province’s geography and history. “In the past, Muslims living in the central plains lived in scattered settlements, and therefore felt more sense of crisis because they were prone to outside influences,” Shui explains. “They had difficulty passing down their religion, so they thought men and women should work together.”

Maria Jaschok, director of the International Gender Studies Center at Oxford University, who has studied the female imams of China since the mid-1990s and who co-authored a book on the subject with Shui, says the lack of reliable statistics on the imams’ numbers owes to the fluid conditions under which they operate.

“They’re not registered separately, some are not registered at all and……………..

In Henan, along with a few Hui Muslim enclaves in northwestern China, women-run mosques are counterparts to the houses of worship for men; female mosques serve as community centers for women. Within them, female imams do nearly everything their male equivalents do, apart from officiating over weddings and funerals. Technically, they’re not allowed to stand at the front of the mosque to lead prayers, a symbolic gesture. Instead, the women lead prayers facing in the same direction as their flock, rather than facing out toward them as would the leader of a mosque for men.

The women have far more modest mosques, less funding, and smaller spaces, but their communities are strong and often at the core of familiar relationships.

Scholars say this unique approach to women in Islam has helped…………. read the rest @ http://www.chinafile.com/mosque-their-own