Women in mosques: fixating on the number of female imams overlooks the progress that has been made

Debate continues in the wake of a high-profile Radio 4 Woman’s Hour interview with Zara Mohammed, the first woman general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. Mohammed was pressured live on air to answer a question about how many female imams there are in Britain. Following accusations of hostile questioning from host Emma Barnett, the discussion pivoted to a widely misunderstood issue in Britain and beyond: the role of Muslim women in religious spaces.

To dispel some of those misconceptions, it’s important to understand the varied experiences of Muslim women in a number of religious roles and communities around the world. There are complicated reasons for the lack of women in leadership roles but that is not to say that no progress has been made on updating gender disparities in Islamic religious life.