JP/J.B. DjwanThe Islamic scholar, author, imam and activist — Dr Amina Wadud — started life as Mary, a Methodist child of the US borderline Southern State of Maryland in 1952.



Descended from Berber, Arab and African slaves who once answered the Islamic call to prayer, generations later Wadud would be born to an open-minded Methodist pastor. She grew up witnessing African Americans sawing off the shackles of racial inequality during an often brutal period of US history.As a 16-year-old, Wadud would have watched in horror the assassination in Memphis of Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Perhaps it was this monumental tragedy in the formative years of an African American, who had tasted too often racism’s bitter fruit that led her in later life to work toward justice and equality with the foundation of that equality, housed in I...