The soul-stirring intersectional biography of the most famous Islamic woman scholar working today, from the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist author of If the Oceans Were Ink and Home, Land, Security.
A fierce feminist, single mother of five, queer rights activist, and a respected scholar, amina wadud has led a revolt against Islam’s patriarchal establishment that’s been felt keenly all over the world for decades. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X before her, wadud has mobilized faith’s potential as an engine of equality. And yet her story has never been told in book form—until now.
Born Mary Teasley, the daughter of a Methodist preacher, wadud grew up in Maryland with a rare vantage on socioeconomic divides, living through poverty and her sister’s tragic death from an illegal abortion. A gifted student, teenage wadud was sent to live with affluent white families in Weston, Massachusetts. After cross-country hitchhiking, a stint in a Buddhist ashram, and other 1970s countercultural pursuits, she converted to Islam as a twenty-year-old Ivy League student.
wadud devoted her life to studying the Quran and challenged its most fundamentalist teachings with her own equalist readings. In Manhattan in 2005, she became the world’s most famous—and infamous—Islamic scholar when she broke with tradition, becoming the first woman in 1400 years to lead men and women together in public Friday prayers.
The Lady Imam chronicles the life of a singular figure not only in Islam, but also in feminism, Black history, and gender studies. With unprecedented access through years of interviews and archival research, Carla Power has written the definitive account of wadud’s extraordinary life while shedding light on our deepest questions about faith, family, and social justice.
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