Shireen Qudosi is a longtime Muslim reformer, writer, and speaker on faith, identity, and belonging whose new book shows she has decided on a very bold reform project indeed: altering Islam into an essentially feminine religion.
The subtitle of Qudosi’s “The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam” contains what appears at first as a contradiction: a dawn of the dark. This is a contradiction in the Hegelian sense, not evidence of an error in logic but of a challenge that has to be transcended to attain a higher level of understanding. Readers will find many of these challenges, such as being invited to “ascend” into “the depths,” as Qudosi brings Islam under the lens of a host of narrative modes of interpretation, from Jungian psychology to magic mushrooms. Yet the basic project is itself a contradiction of this sort: how to find the sacred feminine in Islam, that heroic, epic religion whose most famous advocates have always been males and warriors.
A cynical reading of this project might begin by noticing its similarity to works such as the recent autobiography by Prince Harry, who likewise sought the divine in what reviewer Dominic Green described as “seek[ing] enlightenment like a typical millennial: via drugs and meditation.” Yet there is a history particular to Islam of attempting to reinterpret and engage the faith through the direct personal experience of God. This approach gave rise to Sufi Islam, which in the 12th century remade Islamic thought
