THE LADY IMAM

The story of a woman who saw Islam in a new light.

wadud was not always a Muslim. Born Mary Teasley, she grew up in Maryland in a house that her father, a Methodist minister, built himself. When Mary was in fifth grade, the bank repossessed the land, leaving her family unhoused. That same day, Mary’s mother—whom wadud later believed had undiagnosed bipolar disorder—left the family to live with friends in Washington, D.C., not far from where Mary and her siblings ended up after a period of housing insecurity. As Power (If the Oceans Were Ink, 2015) relates in her appreciative biography, Mary fell in love with the Carnegie Library, where she began her journey as a precocious autodidact who left home to study at a prestigious public school in suburban Boston and the University of Pennsylvania. At UPenn, she changed her name after converting to Islam. Through two marriages and the births of her five children, wadud earned a Ph.D. in Islamic studies and began traveling the world, preaching her intersectional feminist interpretation of the Quran, most notably delivering a historical sermon in South Africa that centered the female body and experience in an unprecedented way. Throughout her adult life, wadud would has continued to center Black, female, and queer experiences, changing the face of Islam. This enthusiastically voiced biography of her impact on Islam is both pertinent and revelatory, elevating the journey of an intersectional feminist whose work is little known in the Western world. Although the prose can at times be wordy, this is overall a quick and rewarding read about a movement that continues to this day.

A fascinating analysis of a Black Muslim woman’s revolutionary impact on Islam.