How do you picture God?

In my mind, you know, who's like an older Arab gentleman with like a strong jaw and like a beard.

Aisha Chaudhary is a gender and Islamic studies professor at the University of British Columbia.

And for the longest time, this is how she pictured Allah as a man.

In Islam, Allah is neither male nor female. God is beyond gender.

I mean, if we're every time we speak about God, we're misgendering God, then why not she?

So Chaudhary started using different pronouns whenever she talked about Allah, including with students.

I do remember like a particular class where, you know, I just refer to God as she, and I just remember

this male student. He had a physical reaction to me doing that. And I was a little bit like

surprised by that, but I was also curious about that. I sort of realized, oh, this is this moment

of discomfort is like a learning moment for all of us. Like it's a learning moment for this person,

you know, I always always say that to my students, like when you have a reaction, an emotional

reaction, a physical reaction to something you're learning, it's important to pay attention to

that and go deeper into that. Using feminine pronouns for God has given Chaudhary a different perspective.

Using these different genders for God, I think helps me personally come up against the limitations

of my imagination of God. And it helps maintain the mystery around God and help me understand

that I can't encompass all of God. And that actually God is always beyond me.

It struck me as blasphemous. It struck me as outrageous. It struck me as disrespectful and uncomfortable.

That's Sophia Rahman. She's also a gender and Islamic studies scholar. When she first heard

someone refer to Allah as she, Rahman was taken aback. So she sat with her discomfort for a bit,

tracing where it could be coming from. I will first reaction to things, whatever they may be,

whether we're talking about the pronouns with which we refer to Allah or anything else really.

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