The research for this book was made possible by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation for my project “Contesting the Mosque: Debates over Muslim Women’s Ritual Access” in 2006–2008. I presented my first efforts to make sense of the juristic discussion of women’s mosque access at the conference “Text, Tradition and Reason in Comparative Perspective” at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, October 10–12, 2004. Various parts and versions of chapter 3 were presented at the Islamic Studies Program and Interdisciplinary Seminar for Islamic Studies, University of Michigan, November 10, 2011; at the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies VII Conference, “Islamic Law and the State,” Ankara, Turkey, May 31, 2012; and at the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, Princeton University, February 19, 2013. I thank the organizers of all of these events for the opportunity to present my work and the other participants for their feedback. I owe a debt of gratitude to Kevin Reinhart, Jonathan A. C. Brown, Intisar Rabb, and anonymous Reader Number One from Columbia University Press for their helpful comments on various stages and versions of the manuscript; this is a far better book than it would have been without their help. My particular gratitude goes out to those who read it in its far lengthier and more unruly earlier stages, which were (I hope) significantly tamed with the help of their advice. All remaining errors of fact and interpretation are, of course, purely my own. I also thank Susan Graham, Professor Nadia Lachiri, Dr. Khader Salameh of the al-Aqsa Mosque Library, Robert Dankoff, Justin Stearns, and Guy Burak for identifying sources or helping to make them available to me.
This book was a labor of love, and it depended on both the labor and the love of the members of my family. My mother, Adria Katz, is an unsung genius of editing, and this is not the first of my books to benefit from her keen eye. My father, Stanley Katz, borrowed books for me to consult on lightning visits to Princeton; he is the world’s most overqualified research assistant, and my thanks are inadequate for his help. My husband, Bradley McCormick, cheerfully put up with my precarious piles of books and irrepressible urge to share the wonders of Islamic law and history.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ghaffār al-Mālikī, whose humane faith remains humbling five centuries later. May we all use our learning with his justice and integrity.