(Religion News) Tazeen M. Ali was a graduate student in Boston when she first learned about the opening of the Women’s Mosque of America in Los Angeles, believed to be the nation’s first women-only mosque.
Ali recalls the social media debates that ensued around the mosque’s 2015 opening, with people arguing over the Islamic legality of woman-led prayers as well as news coverage about “Muslim women ‘fighting back’ against the patriarchy.”
These media narratives informed Ali’s assumptions that the mosque was a “radical space” made up of younger women who carried traumatic and negative experiences from other Islamic worship centers.
Ali would later learn it was much more than that.
