This is a trailer for 'Veiled Voices' - a ninety-minute documentary that explores how women religious leaders in the Muslim world preserve, propagate, and react to traditional religious values in today's modern world. Veiled Voices explores the recent grassroots movement of Muslim women in the Middle East and beyond who act as sheikhas (female religious leaders), and introduces the viewer to a world rarely seen by outsiders, never before documented on film and barely treated in scholarly sources: the world of devout Muslim women leading other women in prayers and lessons. For centuries, men have controlled mosque learning. Whether working within the patriarchal mosque system, or trying to subvert it, sheikhas religiously empower women in highly religious male-dominated societies.

PROJECT FOCUS AND OBJECTIVES:

In Veiled Voices, we examine the movement of women religious leaders from the inside, by entering the mosques and houses where these women teach and live; we enable them to tell their own stories. How these women confront, accept, or deny tradition, and how they justify these choices is a key to comprehending contemporary Islam. We will focus principally on four sheikhas in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Interviews of academic experts here in the U.S. enable us to accurately portray the history and contemporary practice of the phenomenon. By showing how sheikhas work and navigate their roles in the modern world, Veiled Voices will expose and deconstruct the U.S. audience’s stereotypes about Muslim women.

Lebanon:

Ghina Hammoud, a former television personality who founded an Islamic center in downtown Beirut, gathers a diverse group of followers, including both Shiite and Sunni Muslims. She decided to open the al-Ghina Islamic Center five years ago after she divorced her husband and lost custody of her children. She found that her role as a religious leader provided her with the strength she needed to rebuild her life. Hammoud works for social justice and peace by uniting Shiite and Sunni women and by providing disadvantaged women with basic necessities. For instance she makes sure that elderly women are receiving medication that would otherwise be unaffordable. Sheikha Hammoud’s work is critical in light of current socio-political realities in Lebanon. Her organization provides for the daily needs of her followers without an overtly political agenda. At the al-Ghina foundation, Sunnis and Shiites worship together in peace.

Syria:

During December 2006, Bauer and Maher traveled to Damascus to follow Hanan al-Lahham and Huda al-Habash. The two sheikhas teach lessons in mosques in Damascus. Hanan al-Lahham believes and writes that Islam provides for equality for men and women but this has been overshadowed in recent times due to the pervasiveness of cultural patriarchy. Huda al-Habash teaches lessons to women in the al-Zahra mosque in the Mezze neighborhood of Damascus, and believes that through education, her followers will gain the necessary pride and confidence to empower themselves in their work and home environments. Her brother, Mohammed al-Habash (a member of parliament) and her daughter, Enas Kaldi, have been the subject of articles in the New York Times and other American news sources. We interviewed Huda al-Habash, Enas Kaldi, and Muhammad al-Habash to gain inter-generational perspectives on the issue of women’s leadership in the mosque.

Egypt:

Egypt is known for having the highest number of women religious leaders and teachers. In Cairo we followed Da’iya (sheikha) Suad Saleh who teaches at al-Ahzar University and has a weekly television show where both men and women call in to ask her for religious advice. She gives “fatwas” or religious judgements based on Islamic law and is regarded as the most influential female religious leader in Egypt. We also interviewed Sheikh Tantawi, the Grand Imam and Sheikh of al-Ahzar, considered by many the highest religious authority in Sunni Islam who stated that women are welcome on his council and can nominate themselves as Grand Mufti or the highest religious authority in Egypt. Suad Saleh counters this by stating this is a standard statement but that ultimately you have to be voted in by the religious council to become a Mufti and “men vote for men.” We also interview Da’iya Magda Amer who fuses alternative medicine with religious teaching and discusses how you can reach all of your “chakra” points through the preparing for and engaging in prayer.

Academic Grounding:

Throughout the documentary we will include interviews with academic experts from universities here in the United States. We have already interviewed renowned historian Stephen Humphreys, U.C. Santa Barbara, who explains that women have been teaching other women in Damascene mosques since at least the 13th century. Ethnographer Saba Mahmood of Berkeley discusses her groundbreaking research into the women’s piety movement in contemporary Egypt. In a recent interview, Mahmood recounts how a sheikha openly disagreed with her male counterpart, the sheikh of the mosque. She maintained that women have the right to seek religious education despite disapproval from their male husbands and kin. al-though the sheikh disagreed with her, he acknowledged that such doctrinal disagreements are acceptable. The sheikha continues to give mosque lessons. This example demonstrates how women are beginning to assume roles of influence and power within mosques. And, how women are beginning to shift the traditional roles of power within the religious hierarchy. From Mahmood’s interview, we cut to Egypt, where we show the extraordinary popularity of certain sheikhas, who have hundreds of followers and where the women’s preaching movement or da’iyat has grown since the early 90s.