Julia Suryakusuma*
*) The writer is the author of Julia’s Jihad.

LAST week I attended a talk entitled “Jamal, the Feminine Beauty of the Divine: Gender, Art and Sufism” at the Salihara Art Center. The topic was interesting enough, given that Islam is often portrayed as exclusively masculine and patriarchal, and has a reputation for being unfeminine and unfriendly to women. But I was even more interested in the speaker, Amina Wadud, who in