BIRMINGHAM – Shaykh Fadel Soliman is an international speaker, filmmaker and presenter of Islam. The Bridges Foundation of which he is Director has distributed over 300,000 free DVDs of its films to non-Muslims with the aim of sharing good information about Islam with different communities.

Shaykh Fadel has a Master’s degree in Shariah. He spoke to AboutIslam.net regarding the recent furor surrounding an imam, his wife and the all-too-familiar experience of women being kept from entering many mosques in the UK.

Q And A with AboutIslam UK Correspondent, Lauren Booth

AI: Thank you for taking time to speak to AboutIslam Shaykh. What are you focused on at this time?

FS: I have been working on a translation of the Quran for two years. This will be a completely different translation to others because all translators concentrate on what Allah Ta’ala meant to say. We are focusing on how Allah Subhan’wa’tala spoke. Because we believe it is the right of Muslims from non Arab speaking backgrounds to know how their Lord spoke. For example, God Subhan’wa’tala spoke over 500 times about the Hereafter in the past tense. Of course this sounds strange for the listener. This is just one of the things that we are translating, the grammatical shifts and the real tenses of the verbs.

 

AI: Imam Ajmal Masroor made a Facebook post after his wife and daughter were banned from entering a central London mosque to pray Asr. It has re opened a controversy painful for Muslimah’s. 

FS: Ajmal has thrown a stone in still water and that was good by him. I wholeheartedly support him. (In some mosques) they (women’s prayer spaces) are neglected. They are not cleaned like the men’s spaces. In some there is heating only in the men’s section! If you don’t have enough money then you should heat the women’s section first. I wonder what kind of men are these? Respect the women, respect your religion.

 

AI: Women report the painful experience of being turned away from a third of mosques in UK and European cities. The reason given is often given as a lack of separate bathroom and wudhu facilities.

FS: I wonder what were the facilities in Prophet Muhammad’s mosque they didn’t even have carpets! All you need is to allow people to enter and pray, that’s it! If they (women) don’t have an extra door they have to enter from the same door. Forbidding anyone is not an alternative.

 

AI: Let’s get to the heart of the issue. Is it legal in Islamic jurisprudence to ban women from any mosque on gender related grounds?

FS: It is (made) haraam by the Quran to tell someone not to enter a mosque and pray. Men-only mosques are a bidah as they violate a clear instruction by the Prophet SAWS ‘Dont you ever prevent the female servants of Allah from attending mosques’. He forbade us from making a single gender mosque.

 

AI: Yet 28 per cent of UK mosques have prayer space for men-only. In some areas women are aggressively turned away from worshipping inside. How do Muslimah’s prove their right  in relation to entering any mosque?

FS: I contacted a great scholar, Shaykh Muhammad al-Hassan Walid al-Dido al-Shanqītī the founder of the center of establishing scholars in Mauritania. I asked him if mosques which do not allow women or men are ‘bidah mosques.’ He said ‘no’. He said they are not mosques at all. The condition for any place to be considered a mosque is that no one can be disallowed to enter and prayer freely. So, if people set out to make a mosque for one type of people only say, for doctors, or rich people, or white, or black, it is not a mosque. Call it whatever you want; it’s not a mosque.

 

AI; Is there any historical precedent  showing how such a mosque would have been seen by Companions of the Prophet SAWS?

FS: Abdullah ibn Masud was worried and angry when he saw people taking their shoes off outside the mosques. He was afraid it would become ‘bidah’ something as subtle as that! I didn’t want to say Companions of the Prophet would burn such mosques which the Prophet SAWS told them to do with Masjid Ad-Dirar, a mosque made to disunite Muslims….

 

AI: What is the implication of this ruling against single sex mosques?

FS: The jummah is invalid.

 

AI: Is that a possibility?

FS: Yes! And by the way, any people who rent a place and only allow a certain class or age of people to attend their jummah is invalid.

 

AI; What about the men who don’t know or haven’t considered the inclusion of women at their mosque. Those not involved in decision making?

FS: Allah is so generous and loving those who did not know their prayers are accepted inshAllah.

 

AI; What must happen now as a result of this new ruling?

FS: The shaykh spoke very clearly and strongly. This is a matter which should be ended as quickly as possible. We must speak to the brothers running these mosques so they change immediately, starting at the next prayer.

 

AI: What should our sisters do with this new information re asserting the ruling on the basis of Quran and Sunnah allowing them access to any mosque in the UK and worldwide?

FS: The women should march.

 

AI; March where?

FS: March towards mosques and say: ’This (praying inside) is our right. This is the house of Allah.’