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It was back in college when I first heard someone refer to God (god) by the feminine third-person singular pronoun. I was in the psychology club and we had alumni visiting us, I don’t remember her name nor much else she said but I vaguely recall her leaning forward in a bit of glee when she said those words, that word. What did she mean? What did she mean by using ‘she’ to refer to god? I didn’t contemplate it much at that moment, it was fleeting, and no context was given, I moved on with my day. A few years ago, the New York Times published an article about Rashida Talib in which she is said to have stated, “My Allah is a she.”
What ties these two incidents together is that both women (one in my first-hand experience, the other according to a third-party source) called ‘god’ she and gave no further context nor explanation as to why they were doing so or what was meant to be conveyed by doing so. I’ve been putting god in lowercase italics thus far to make it clear that the one true God is not female in any way and to specifically address the fact that the god of Christianity, whether referred to as ‘she’ or ‘he’ is a false god. Before addressing the pronoun issue within Islam it’s important to address Christianity in general and separate ourselves from them.
The Christian god is a false god, in the Quran, God says, “…Warn those who say, Allah has taken a son. They have no knowledge of it, nor had their fathers. Grave is the word that comes out of their mouths; they speak not except a lie” (18, 4-5). A god that has a son is not at all God. Through our creed we also know that God is unlike his creation, thus a god who is also man is not God at all. Nevertheless, this is also what makes the usage of she in Christianity, or rather, by a Christian woman, even more baffling. Christians believe in the trinity; the father, the son, and the holy ghost. “The son,” Jesus Christ, is a literal man, there is no room to possibly call him ‘she,’ even by our modern liberal standards where people get to be called whatever pronoun they prefer, I doubt we’ll find evidence of Jesus Christ making such a request. By the same token, god is referred to as “the Father” in Christian texts, again, even by liberal standards there’d be no grounds for calling a god who is metaphorically referred to as ‘father,’ she. I know nothing about the “holy ghost” so I won’t touch that third of the trinity. The point is, there is no room whatsoever, to call god ‘she’ in Christianity, Christians can call god ‘she,’ but they cannot claim it makes sense.
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Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
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