Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice

Because the evidence of women’s actual presence and activities in mosques (or of their absence or preference for other religious venues) is sparse and uneven, this chapter is necessarily shaped by the existence of useful sources. The nature and focus of the data thus vary from case to case, based on the genre and emphases of the available material. The differential focus of the sources is presumably not completely arbitrary, however, but may to some extent reflect substantive differences in regional practices and assumptions. Rather than offering a comprehensive chronological survey of each geographical area studied, each section will focus on the specific period or periods for which the available sources are particularly rich and on the specific issues most salient in those sources. The sections are organized roughly according to their primary chronological cencentration. The first, on Iraq, focuses on the first two centuries after the Muslim conquest and examines the emergence of resistance to women’s presence in mosques in relation to contemporary practice. The second section, which focuses on the building and renovation of several of the great mosques of Muslim Spain and North Africa in the eighth to fourteenth centuries CE, examines the construction of architecturally distinct women’s prayer spaces and the legal questions it raised. The third section, which centers on Cairo in the fourteenth century CE, examines the range of religious and profane activities women pursued in mosques and compares the appeal of mosques with that of graveyards. The fourth section, on Syria, focuses primarily on mosque-based ḥadīth transmission and preaching in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries CE. The last section, which takes up the issue of outsider reports of women’s mosque access, centers on women’s presence in mosques in Ottoman Istanbul in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries CE.

As we have seen in the section on Ḥanafī doctrine in chapter 1, some early Iraqi (and particularly Kufan) authorities manifested a hostility toward women’s public worship that contrasted with the attitudes of their Ḥijāzī colleagues, as well as with the apparent presence of women in the mosque in the lifetime of the Prophet. A number of different reports suggest that the prominent Companion of the Prophet Ibn Masʿūd (d. 32 AH/652–53 CE), a figure who personified the religious heritage of Kufa, vigorously combated women’s attendance at Friday prayers; according to some versions, he even pelted them with stones to encourage them to go home.¹ Ibn Masʿūd is similarly reported to have declared that “it is better for a woman to pray in her home than in any other place,” with the exception of an old woman who shuffles in her boots or who “is beyond hope of marriage.” He is also said to have stated that “when a woman goes out, Satan gazes down upon her,” even if she proposes to go out for a pious purpose such as attending a funeral or praying in a mosque.² These well-known narratives support the widespread assumption (expressed by some classical Islamic scholars, as well as in modern works) that in the context of the Muslim communities that grew outside of the Arabian Peninsula as a result of the conquests, women’s mosque attendance was suppressed relatively soon after the Prophet’s passing.

If opposition to women’s mosque attendance originated primarily in the conquered territories, it seems to have been especially characteristic of Iraq—and particularly of the garrison city of Kufa. Christopher Melchert argues that “the cluster of hadith allowing women to go to the mosque originated in opposition to a Kufan custom of forbidding women to attend most prayers in the mosque.”³ Examining evidence about early Islamic funerary practices, Leor Halevi concludes that “Muslim pietists from eighth-century Kūfa displayed a novel and unprecedented concern with the segregation of the sexes,” including a negative attitude toward women’s participation in public worship.⁴

However, despite ideological opposition to women’s attendance at public worship, the evidence does not suggest that Iraqi women ceased to frequent mosques during the lifetime of the Prophet’s Companions. Indeed, in other reports Ibn Masʿūd himself seeks to regulate women’s prayer in mosques rather than prohibiting it. In one, he counsels, “If you [feminine plural] pray in your homes [on Friday], pray four [cycles], and if you pray in the mosque, pray two.”5 He is also said to have placed elderly women in the first rows of women and young women all the way in the back.⁶ Regardless of the historicity of any given report about Ibn Mas’ūd, early Iraqi sources did not find it plausible to represent him as finding (or even as leaving) the mosques empty of women.

One gets the impression from other reports as well that religious opposition to women’s mosque attendance in Iraqi cities in this period was expressed in the face of women’s actual presence in mosques. The prominent Kufan legal authority Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī (d. 96/914) is said to have forbidden his three wives to attend Friday and congregational prayers⁷—apparently a stricture unusual enough to arouse comment—but he is also said to have led congregational prayers under the governorship of the tyrannical al-Ḥajjāj (when fear apparently thinned the ranks of the worshippers) with only a woman behind him.⁸ The historian al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) recounts that during the uprising of al-Mukhtār in Kufa in 66/685, when men were taken captive and imprisoned in the palace, a woman “would go out as if she was heading to the Great Mosque to pray, or as if she was going to her family or visiting a relative of hers” when she was actually going to the palace to smuggle in food.⁹ Here the mosque appears to be an ordinary destination assumed to arouse as little suspicion as a woman’s visit to her kin.

Although the data are sparse, the situation would seem to have been little different in Basra; evidence suggests both the presence of women in mosques and the existence of sentiment against it. An anecdote about the Companion of the Prophet Abū Barza, who settled in Basra and died in the sixties of the first century AH, recounts that one day he returned home to find that his concubine (umm walad) was not there. Told that she was at the mosque, he greeted her on her return by yelling, “God has forbidden women to go out, and commanded them to remain in their homes, and not to follow a funeral procession, or go to a mosque, or attend Friday prayers!”¹⁰

The turbulent events of the mid-first century AH also involved dramatic appearances in mosques by women of a group that was not religiously typical, but that was nevertheless deeply rooted in the Iraqi milieu, the Khārijites. In 40 AH, the assassination of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib is said to have been instigated and orchestrated by a beautiful (and thus likely young) Khārijite woman, Qaṭām ibnat al-Shijna, who was at the time performing a religious retreat (muʿtakifa) in the Great Mosque of Kufa.11 A generation later, during the governorship of al-Ḥajjāj, the Khārijite rebel Shabīb ibn Yazīd entered Kufa with his wife Ghazāla. According to Khalīfa ibn Khayyāṭ (d. 240/854), the latter “entered the mosque of Kufa and recited her litany (wird) in the mosque, and ascended the pulpit; she had vowed to do that.”¹² According to a report transmitted by al-Ṭabarī, she “had made a vow to pray two prostration cycles (rakʿatayn) in the mosque of Kufa in which she would recite [the unusually lengthy Qur’anic chapters of] al-Baqara and Āl ʿImrān—and she did so.”¹³ The implication of this anecdote seems to be that Ghazāla had vowed to perform these acts in the mosque as a form of thanksgiving, presumably if the rebels managed to enter Kufa. Shabīb is also supposed to have left Ghazāla as his successor after his defeat, in which context she is stated by a much later source to have ascended the pulpit and given the Friday sermon.¹⁴

Ghazāla’s actual delivery of a sermon would have represented the revolutionary egalitarianism of the Khārijite insurgents more than the everyday religious mores of contemporary Iraq. However, Qaṭām’s religious retreat and Ghazāla’s vow to pray in the mosque apparently fell within the mainstream of women’s behavior. A very early source recounts an incident that occurred in Basra. The judge Shurayḥ (who served as judge there during the governorship of Ziyād ibn Abīhi, between 45 and 53 AH) was presented with an issue relating to women’s mosque retreats. A woman had vowed to spend the month of Rajab in iʿtikāf at the mosque; however, Ziyād had recently heard bad rumors and forbidden the women to spend Rajab in the mosque that year. Shurayḥ reportedly exercised his legal insight by suggesting that the woman could expiate her vow by fasting the whole month and feeding poor people every night when she broke her fast.15 The fact that Ziyād is said to have forbidden “the women” to spend the month in religious retreat in the mosque on a specific occasion as a result of rumors (presumably of bad behavior) suggests that it was otherwise customary practice. About a half a century later, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728) is said to have been asked about a woman who vowed to pray two rakʿas in every congregational mosque in Basra if her husband was released from prison. Al-Ḥasan is supposed to have replied, “She should pray in the mosque of her clan (masjid qawmihā); she isn’t capable of that! If ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb were around to see her, he would beat her over the head (la-awjaʿa raʾsahā).”¹⁶ Here al-Ḥasan’s skepticism seems to be directed at the ambition and scope of the woman’s vow rather than at the fact of her committing to pray in a mosque; to pray in her neighborhood mosque was both more feasible and perhaps (based on the reference to the redoubtable ʿUmar) also more modest.

Scruples about women’s mosque attendance, and sporadic efforts at control by both scholarly and political authorities, appear to have coexisted with the apparent reality of women’s presence in the mosques of Basra and Kufa at least for the duration of the first century AH. In terms of reconstructing women’s mosque-related behavior and objectives, it is interesting to note the importance of vows and retreats, which seem to be mentioned more often than ordinary Friday or congregational prayers and which may reflect the distinctive patterns of early Iraqi Muslim women’s mosque-based religiosity. It may be that the episodic nature of vows and retreats—and their adaptability to hopes and needs such as the release of a husband from prison—made them particularly attractive to women. (Of course, it is also possible that the routine nature of congregational prayer offered less occasion for conflict or comment.) Given the state of the sources, the historicity of any individual report is difficult to determine. What is more assured is the set of assumptions and patterns underlying the individual anecdotes. Even more significant than the literal veracity of an incident recounted from the first century AH may be the fact that it was plausible to an Iraqi author of the third or fourth century such as Ibn Abī Shayba (d. 235/849) or al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923).

Reports about the second century AH similarly reflect the ongoing assumption of Iraqi women’s presence in mosques. Some deal with historical figures whose actions may very well be accurately reported; even those that are purely literary or outright jokes, however, reflect the cultural worlds of their authors. The historian Ibn Saʿd (d. 230/845) recounts that the Kufan ḥadīth transmitter Misʿar ibn Kidām (d. ca. 152–55/769–72) had a mother of pietist leanings (umm ʿābida); Misʿar, who taught only in the congregational mosque, used to walk with her to the mosque, carrying her felt prayer mat. When they entered, he would spread the mat for her; she would stand and pray (apparently in the rear), while he went to the front of the mosque to teach his disciples.17 The Kitāb al-Aghānī of Abū’l-Faraj al-Isfāhānī (d. 356/967) recounts a humorous anecdote in which a woman approaches the Basran poet al-Farazdaq (d. ca. 110–12/728–30) in the mosque to ask him a question.¹⁸ Another story recounts that Abū Ḥanīfa’s own mother avidly followed the preaching of a storyteller (qāṣṣ) in the mosque, to the point that she preferred the latter’s legal opinion to that of her distinguished son.¹⁹ A much later Iraqi source includes a humorous anecdote in which the Kufan traditionist al-Aʿmash (d. 148/765) is accosted on his way to the mosque with his wife.²⁰ In a discussion of Basran women devotees, Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) cites Abū Khalda (d. 152/769) as reporting that he had never witnessed any man or woman with greater stamina for standing in prayer than Umm Ḥayyān al-Salmīya; “she would stand [in prayer] in the neighborhood mosque (masjid al-ḥayy) as if she were a palm tree blown to left and right by the wind.”²¹ Although these later sources do not necessarily accurately record the events of the second century, they may be rooted in earlier sources and certainly reflect an image of women’s presence in mosques that persisted among later Iraqi authors.

In the third century AH, the Basran littérateur al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) recounts a comic tale, set in his hometown, in which a dog strays into an empty house during Ramadan.22 The house is empty because the men are off tending their plantations and the women are off praying in the mosque (presumably the tarāwīḥ prayers, which take place at night during that month). Interestingly, although in one place the text states that the women are praying “in their [masculine plural] mosque,” in another it states that they are “in their [feminine plural] mosque”—offering a tantalizing suggestion of a separate women’s place of prayer. In any case, al-Jāḥiẓ’s antic tale suggests that prayer in the mosque was a plausible narrative pretext for women’s absence from home. In another source of the third century AH, Ibn Ḥanbal’s son ʿAbd Allāh transmits a story in which the first-century female mystic Maʿādha al-ʿAdawīya is confronted in her tribal mosque in Basra (masjid Banī ʿAdī) by a man who complains, “One of you women comes to the mosque, puts down her head and lifts up her rear end!” She retorts, “Why do you look, then? Put dust in your eyes and don’t look!” He protests, “I can’t help but look!” Upon this, she explains, “When I am at home the children distract me, and when I am in the mosque it makes me more energetic [for prayer].”²³

It also appears that early Iraqi judges held court in mosques, where women appeared as litigants and witnesses (although a recent study concludes that, particularly from the third AH/ninth century CE on, elite women were kept away by status-related ideals of seclusion).²⁴ One of the factors that recommended the main mosque as the site of judicial practice was its accessibility to the general public, including women. An anecdote attributed to Hilāl ibn al-ʿAlāʾ al-Raqqī (d. 280/894) recounts that the early-second-century Basran judge Iyās ibn Muʿāwiya was sitting in the mosque and saw three women entering. He cleverly inferred that one of them was bereaved of a child, the second was pregnant, and the third was menstruating (the last based on her turning away from the door in respect). Even though the anecdote itself may be apocryphal (and exists in several different versions, not all of them explicitly placed in the mosque), it reflects the assumption that women frequented the mosque long before the ripe old age envisioned by many Iraqi legal scholars; at least two of the women envisioned in this vignette are still in their childbearing years.²⁵

Although sparse and anecdotal, the evidence clearly suggests that the opposition attributed to authoritative figures such as Ibn Masʿūd did not actually result in the discontinuation of Iraqi women’s mosque attendance after the generation of the Prophet’s Companions. It seems quite clear that at least some Iraqi women frequented mosques for various purposes, including regular prayers, pious retreats, and Ramadan devotions, well after the first generation of Muslims had died out and new cohorts of native-born Iraqi Muslims had arisen to take their place.

It has been argued that the limitations on women’s mobility, visibility, and public participation that emerged in the first three centuries of the Muslim era reflected the new community’s assimilation to the patriarchal mores of the new locales and established religious traditions amidst which early Muslims elaborated their faith after the conquests. In one very influential formulation, whereas the early Muslim women of Arabia “mingled freely with men” during the Prophet’s lifetime, “Arab mores … changed as the Arabs adopted the ways of the conquered peoples.”26 Conversely, some authors have seen later restrictions on the public mobility and participation of Middle Eastern Jewish women (for instance) as resulting from Islamic influence.²⁷ Because of the paucity of relevant evidence, both arguments appear largely to reflect the preconceptions of the scholars involved.

With respect to the specific issue of women’s attendance at public worship, there seems to be little evidence to suggest that disapproving attitudes among early Iraqi Muslim scholars were conditioned by the mores of the subject peoples. Legal debates in both the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmud appear implicitly to assume the presence of women at synagogue worship.²⁸ The individual opinions on these issues are attributed to much earlier rabbinic authorities, but they were canonized in the two centuries preceding the rise of Islam and may reflect ongoing assumptions about ritual practice. An Iraqi Christian source of the Islamic period refers to women’s customary presence on the western side of church naves.²⁹ Much like their opposition to women’s participation in funerals, early Kufan Muslim authorities’ objections to women’s public worship seem most likely to have arisen from their own evolving internal religious, social, and political concerns.³⁰ They appear to have reflected neither the preexisting customs of local populations nor the ongoing de facto practice of Muslim women. Nor did they reflect a monolithic “Islamic” ethic, but rather competed with other pious values, including women’s desire to partake of the auspicious and holy aura of the mosque.

Unlike in most other areas of the Arabo-Islamic world, accounts of the construction and renovation of major early mosques in North Africa and Andalusia (areas historically dominated from an early period by the Mālikī madhhab31) often mention spaces explicitly designated for women’s prayer. The construction of physically distinct women’s prayer space is not a practice with obvious precedents in the sunna. Ḥadīth reports do not describe any architecturally distinct prayer space for women in the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, but imply that women simply prayed in rows behind the men.³² However, a report transmitted from the early Medinian historian Ibn Zabāla (a student of Mālik ibn Anas) describing the expansion of the mosque ordered by the caliph al-Mahdī in 161/777–78, refers to “the women’s arcades” (saqāʾif al-nisāʾ), which appear to have been at the back of the enclosed courtyard of the mosque.³³

Not much later, the same arrangement seems to have been reproduced in al-Andalus. The Spanish Umayyad caliph Hishām I (reigned 172–80/788–96) is reported to have built roofed arcades at the back of the Great Mosque of Cordoba specifically as a space for women’s prayer (banā bi-ākhar al-masjid saqāʾif li-ṣalāt al-nisāʾ).³⁴ The mosque was further enlarged by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Ḥakam (reigned 206–38/822–52), who broadened the mosque by adding two additional bays (bahw) on each side. Each of these two additional bays opened into a gallery (saqīfa), supported by nineteen columns, with doors opening onto the already existing women’s galleries at the back of the old mosque.³⁵ (These statements have been taken by some modern scholars as a reference to raised balconies; it is possible that the columns supported the floors of the galleries rather than their roofs, although this is not the most obvious meaning of the word saqāʾif, which simply designates an area that is roofed over.³⁶) In addition to the two side galleries, one was constructed at the back of the courtyard. Thus, galleries for women (whether elevated or at ground level) surrounded the mosque’s courtyard on three sides.³⁷ The construction of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s galleries is supposed to have “added thirty prayer spaces for women when they attended the congregational mosque (istawsaʿa bihinna thalāthīna makān muṣallā li’l-nisāʾ idhā ḥaḍarna al-masjid al-jāmiʿ)”³⁸—which sounds extraordinarily conservative even if the galleries were quite narrow, if each “space” accommodated a single woman.

In later sources, the women’s sections are described as “enclosures (maqāṣīr, sing. maqṣūra),” which suggests that they involved physical and visual barriers rather than simply being demarcated by the pillars of the arcade.39 The maqṣūra in general was understood as an innovation of the early Islamic period, introduced by Ummayad rulers to protect themselves from hostile subjects.⁴⁰ It is not clear from the references to the women’s maqāṣīr in Cordoba whether they were identical with the galleries, enclosed only part of the galleries, or opened out from them. The mosque also had doors specially designated for women, although fewer than were allocated to men. Describing the mosque as enlarged during the reign of Hishām ibn al-Ḥakam (reigned 366–99/976–1009), Ibn Bashukwāl states that on its west side there were nine doors, including a large one reserved for women and leading into their enclosures (maqāṣīr); there was a similar arrangement on the east side, and on the north side there were two large doors for men and one for women leading into the maqāṣīr.⁴¹ Al-Ḥakam al-Mustanṣir (reigned 350–66/961–76) is said to have demolished the old ablutions fountain that was in the courtyard of the mosque and replaced it with four fountains, on each side a large one for men and a small one for women.⁴²

All of this information, fragmentary as it is, suggests that accommodations for women in the Great Mosque of Cordoba were a significant and ongoing concern in successive renovations of the mosque, although the numbers of women were expected to be significantly smaller than those of men, and that efforts to separate male and female worshippers may have increased over time. Despite the measures to demarcate separate space for women, however, the sexes do not seem to have been strictly divided on occasions such as Friday prayers. Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Qurṭubī (d. 424/1032–33), who was in charge of the maẓālim courts in Cordoba and wrote a manual for the morals inspector (muḥtasib), writes in his advice for keeping order in the mosque on Friday that the muḥtasib ought to prevent male beggars from walking between the rows of women in the congregational mosque or its courtyards unless the specific beggar in question is too elderly and enfeebled to feel or excite sexual desire; similarly, he should prevent a young female beggar (shābba) from passing between the rows of men in the mosque or its courtyards, but could permit a female beggar who is elderly (mutajālla) and enfeebled. He should also prevent men and women from mixing at times of congregational prayer or on festivals.⁴³

Women’s attendance at Friday congregational prayers in Andalusian cities such as Cordoba was a phenomenon that clearly persisted in later centuries, and despite normative emphasis on the perils presented by younger women, it apparently was not limited to women of advanced age. The judge Ibn al-Munāṣif (d. 620/1223), who served in several Andalusian cities and settled in Cordoba,44 complains bitterly of the presence of young and nubile women in the Friday mosques. As one of the “objectionable practices that are customary in places of prayer,” he mentions “the attendance of some women who are cause for concern such as young and full-figured women (al-shābbāt al-mumtaliʾāt laḥman), from whom temptation (fitna) can be expected, at the Friday mosques; there is much harm in that.”⁴⁵ Ibn al-Munāṣif himself advocates that women (whether merely young and buxom ones or all women he does not clarify) should be denied access to the mosque if their presence causes harm, and argues that ʿĀʾisha herself had banned them in a time much less corrupt and fraught with innovations than his own. As in so many other cases, his argument that women should be barred from the mosque stands in stark contrast with his depiction of the actual state of affairs.

Despite efforts at separating men and women, mosques such as the Great Mosque of Cordoba were probably among the few public places where a high-status young woman might tarry and encounter the opposite sex, a fact that seems to have freighted interactions there with some peril of damage to a woman’s reputation. Outside of times of communal prayer such as Friday noon, the mosque was the site of teaching and socialization that were not always of a purely religious character. In one anecdote, the littérateur Abū ʿĀmir Ibn Shuhayd (d. 426/1035) is sitting in the Great Mosque of Cordoba with a group of his companions on the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan (Laylat al-Qadr). However, Abū ʿĀmir and his friends are engaged not in pious exercises, but in lighthearted banter when a young woman from a prominent Cordoban family comes by accompanied by slave women, “looking for a spot to engage in intimate colloquy with her Lord and seeking a place to ask forgiveness for her sins.” She is described as “veiled, fearful and watchful of those who observed her”; with her is a young son described as being “like a myrtle bough, or a gazelle.” When she catches sight of Abū ʿĀmir, she quickly turns around and withdraws in alarm, for fear that he will flirt with her or shame her by revealing her name; indeed, when he sees her, he immediately does so.46 This anecdote, whether or not it records an actual incident, reflects the issues of social propriety and reputation that were involved when young and high-status women ventured into public space to pray.

Evidence from Mālikī North Africa as well suggests that as of the fifth/eleventh century, the use of maqṣūras to separate women from men in congregational prayer was still neither uniform nor completely uncontroversial. In an exchange preserved in the collections of al-Burzulī (d. 841/1438) and al-Wansharīsī (d. 914/1508), the Qayrawānī jurists al-Lakhmī (d. 478/1085) and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (d. 486/1093) are asked about several problems that had emerged in the congregational mosque (al-jāmiʿ).⁴⁷ Presumably the mosque in question is the Great Mosque of Qayrawān, particularly because the first question in the series has to do with the cistern located in the courtyard; Qayrawān was known for its dependence on rainwater gathered in cisterns, and the ancient cistern in the courtyard of the Great Mosque (to which others were later added) was also well known.⁴⁸

The women have a custom (li’l-nisāʾ ʿāda) of praying in the mosque and in its arcades. On Friday there are many people, and sometimes the rows of men are continuous with the rows of women, and sometimes some of the women mix with the men. The judge and some of the shuyūkh were agreed in the opinion that an enclosure (maqṣūra) should be erected in one of the [mosque’s] arcades (fī baʿḍ al-saqāʾif minhu) for the women, and in order to provide a screen it should be secured with bricks,⁴⁹ and the women would pray in it at prayer times. A muḥtasib⁵⁰ from among the students arose and said, “Nothing should be innovated in the mosque that did not exist in the early days until the scholars are consulted.”⁵¹

It is notable that, according to the wording of the inquiry, women would have been restricted to the maqṣūra only at prayer times. It would appear that the divider was actually constructed, as the contemporary Abū ʿUbayd al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094) states that “the mosque has ten doors and a maqṣūra for women … between which and the mosque there is another wall that is perforated (mukharram) and skillfully fashioned (muḥkam al-ʿamal).”⁵⁴

Other North African mosques offered women’s space that appears to have been architecturally more separate from the main prayer space. Women were allocated separate space in the two main mosques of Fez, the Qarawīyīn and al-Andalus mosques. At least as of the eighth/fourteenth century, the Qarawīyīn had a women’s prayer room (bayt al-nisāʾ) at the back of the courtyard (bi-muʾakhkhar al-ṣaḥn) with its own exterior door; the mosque had two small doors reserved exclusively for the use of women, as compared to fifteen larger ones for men.⁵⁵ A modern source claims that the judge al-Maghīlī, who oversaw the renovations made on the mosque in the reign of the amīr Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (reigned 685–706/1286–1307), created an upper-story colonnade (riwāq) for women above the mosque depository (mustawdaʿ), a space from which women could follow the teaching sessions going on below.⁵⁶ This would be consistent with modern data about the layout of the mosque. A plan of the mosque from the 1920s shows a “women’s mosque,” apparently elevated and accessed by a stairway, at the northwest corner of the mosque (and thus at one of the back corners of the courtyard);⁵⁷ a Western traveler’s account from 1918 refers to “the mestonda, or raised hall above the court, where women come to pray”⁵⁸—perhaps a misheard reference to the mustawdaʿ, or depository. Lucien Golvin remarks of this space that its small size implies that at the time women were no longer attending congregational prayers in large numbers.⁵⁹ However, pending further evidence it is difficult to determine precisely when, or for what purposes, women might have been limited to this space.

The other great congregational mosque of Fez, al-Andalus, also had dedicated space for women; al-Jaznāʾī refers to the construction, at the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century, of a separate door to the “women’s prayer room” (bayt ṣalāt al-nisāʾ). This space appears to have been on the ground level, as a chamber for the imams of the mosque was constructed above it.60 The use of the expression “room (bayt)” suggests some degree of enclosure. Again, however, there is no way of knowing whether women were limited to the spaces explicitly reserved for them or what activities they may or may not have been able to pursue in the main body of the mosque.

Women’s attendance at Moroccan mosques in the late medieval period was apparently not limited to urban contexts or to the great metropolitan mosques. The Maghribī jurist Abū’l-Qāsim ibn Khajjū (d. 811/1408),⁶¹ in a query probably relating to the hinterland of Fez,

was asked about a village (qarya) in which the Friday congregational prayers were held; the women wanted to perform the Friday prayers, but the mosque could not accommodate them because of the large number of people. Are they permitted to pray in the residential area [of the village] (al-muʿammara), or are they permitted to pray only behind the men? And may they pray behind the mosque, near to it, or one or two body-lengths away from it?

He replied: I do not consider it permissible to perform the Friday prayers in the residential area; it is performed only in the mosque and in the plaza around it (riḥābihi) and the paths adjacent to it, and it is not permitted to perform it in a privately owned place, even for the owner. [The women] may pray in any of the mosque’s paths that are adjacent to it and in the plaza surrounding it (fī riḥābihi), even if there is a barrier [ḥāʾil, presumably between them and the next row of worshipers or between them and the imam]; indeed, that is preferable.⁶²

It is not clear from this fatwa whether the women are already participating in the Friday congregational prayers or whether they simply desire to do so. In any case, they are clearly taking active steps to secure their right to attend. There appears to be no dedicated space for women in the mosque, and the questioner apparently hopes that they can validly follow the prayers from their adjacent homes.63 Ibn Khajjū replies essentially by applying the general rules for the validity of Friday prayer, which must be performed within the mosque or in continuous rows spreading outside of it—although he would prefer that there be some kind of barrier concealing the women, even if only as a happy side effect of the lack of space within the walls of the mosque. It is significant that Ibn Khajjū does not in any way suggest that the women in question ought to be discouraged from coming, despite the difficulty of accommodating them within the mosque.

The existence of dedicated women’s space in major North African and Andalusian mosques, and the terms in which it is discussed in surviving sources, suggests women’s participation in congregational prayer. The sources also afford occasional glimpses of a far wider set of activities that women pursued in the mosques of this region. It is clear that to some extent women visited mosques to seek out the expertise of religious authorities. The distinguished scholar Ibn al-Fakhkhār al-Judhāmī (d. 723/1323) is said to have spent his afternoons in the mosque in Málaga, leaning against an arch and teaching; women would approach from behind to ask him for fatwas (presumably to avoid visual contact with an unrelated male).⁶⁴ In some cases, women could reside in religious retreat in a mosque; the ascetic ʿĀʾisha bint ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿĀṣim, who lived in the seventh to eighth century AH, apparently resided in a chamber atop the mosque in Algeciras.⁶⁵ For some women, access to the great mosques seems to have opened the doors to substantial religious learning and social prestige. The mother of Shaykh Aḥmad Zarrūq, who was born in 846/1442, “used to attend the study sessions of one of Fes’s pre-eminent jurists, ʿAbdallah al-ʿAbdūsī, along with her sister and another scholarly woman, with little Ahmad at their side.” It is quite likely that al-ʿAbdūsī, a preacher at al-Qarawīyīn, held his sessions at the mosque.⁶⁶ Mosques were also the site of more informal and even more heterodox activities. Abū’l-Qāsim Ibn Khajjū, the same jurist who directed the village women to pray in the plaza and paths adjacent to the mosque, received a query about a faqīh who remained constantly in the mosque (mulāzim li’l-masjid); women would come to him “with their adornments exposed (bādiyāt al-zīna),” and “he would sit with them and perform divination for them (yukahhinu lahunna).”⁶⁷ In the seventh/thirteenth century, Rāshid al-Walīdī alludes to women gathering along with men to perform ṣūfī dhikr, apparently on Thursday evenings.⁶⁸

Overall, there does seem to be significant correspondence between the content of Mālikī legal texts and the evidence for women’s presence in mosques in this sampling of locations historically dominated by Mālikīs. The provision of dedicated prayer space for women implies the recognition (and acceptance) of the fact that women may participate in public prayer in mosques; the comparatively small size of women’s accommodations (including prayer space, doors, and ablutions fountains) compared to men’s suggests the expectation that they will do so in relatively limited numbers. This is exactly what Mālikī doctrine, which endorses women’s mosque attendance, but advocates that it be infrequent for all but elderly women, would lead us to expect. However, the foundational Mālikī legal texts would not have led us to anticipate the early and growing emphasis on spatial and visual separation of women’s prayer space.

One can catch a fleeting glimpse of more popular attitudes toward women’s presence in mosques in this region from a source of another genre, that of adab (belles lettres). The story in question, which deals with an elderly habituée of the Great Mosque of Qayrawān, is recorded in a text of the sixteenth century CE (which in turn credits it to a so far unidentifiable earlier source). The story is set in the Aghlabid period (in the third/ninth century), although its provenance is presumably well later, and it is intended to illustrate the devious wiles of old women (al-ʿajāʾiz). It begins when a man falls in love with a young girl (ṣabīya) who is married to a merchant and lives close to the Friday mosque. He enlists the help of one of the old ladies who regularly frequent the mosque (min muwāẓibāt al-jāmiʿ), who promises to get the better of the damsel’s virtue. One day the old lady knocks at the young woman’s door. She says that she has come early to the mosque for Friday prayers and has canceled her wuḍūʾ, and she asks for water to renew her ablutions. Making the same request each week, she gradually wins the young woman’s confidence. She then borrows the young wife’s jewels on false pretenses and demands that she meet her outside of the home to get them back. The young woman virtuously insists that her husband has taken an oath of threefold divorce if she leaves the house. She informs her husband, who comforts her and sets out to seek redress from the ruler, Ibrāhīm ibn Aḥmad (ruled 261–89/875–902). The ruler directs his mother to invite “the old women of the mosque” (ʿajāʾiz al-jāmiʿ) to a banquet. There he begins to winnow and select the suspects, choosing first forty, then ten, and then finally narrowing the field to the one culprit, from whom he succeeds in recovering the jewels. The story ends with the ruler sternly admonishing his mother to have nothing more to do with the old ladies of the mosque.69

Although certainly fictional, this entertaining story illustrates certain assumptions about women’s mosque attendance and about the relevance of life cycle, social status, and religious prestige. The old lady’s habit of regular Friday mosque attendance is represented as unremarkable, and the story assumes that the “old ladies of the mosque” number at least in the scores. The women’s mosque attendance is clearly related to their advanced stage of life. Conversely, the young merchant woman’s confinement to the home seems to be associated with her tender age and high status and (as represented by this particular story) yields her a much higher degree of perceived virtue than the public religiosity of the old ladies in the mosque. As suggested by the remarks of Ibn al-Munāṣif, women who attended congregational prayers were not always elderly. Nevertheless, it would seem that both Mālikī legal distinctions among women of different age cohorts and the relative Mālikī tolerance for women’s attendance at Friday and congregational prayers had some correspondence with ground-level values and practices.

Scattered references suggest the presence of women in Egyptian mosques from the earliest centuries, particularly in the context of study and preaching. At the turn of the third/ninth century, the sister of the prominent scholar al-Muzanī is said to have attended the study circle of al-Shāfiʿī, which was held in the main mosque of Fusṭāt.⁷⁰ Two centuries later, the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī missionaries in the service of the Fāṭimid state held instructional sessions for women in the Azhar mosque.⁷¹ Women’s presence in mosques in this period was not limited to the Shīʿī context; the prominent preacher Umm al-Khayr al-Ḥijāzīya, for instance, appears to have been active in the Friday mosque.⁷² However, only in the Mamlūk period is there sufficient evidence to reconstruct the range and nature of women’s activities in Egyptian mosques.

The work of Ibn al-Ḥājj (d. 737/1336), which represents the richest source of information about religious practice in Mamlūk Cairo, suggests a vibrant and multifarious female presence in mosques. Because Ibn al-Ḥājj seeks to denounce practices he considers religiously deviant, rather than to give a balanced account of contemporary lifeways, he emphasizes women’s more vivid or objectionable activities over their more sober and routine participation in religious life. Ibn al-Ḥājj’s own austere piety did not represent the mainstream of contemporary Egyptian religiosity, and many of the practices he denounces were stoutly defended—or simply taken for granted—by other prominent members of the religious establishment. His scandalized rejection of a given practice need not suggest that it was regarded as deviant or unorthodox by most contemporary Egyptians, and in many cases the women who engaged in them would not only have assumed their legitimacy but also would have been supported in this view by male relatives and religious professionals.

Ibn al-Ḥājj most strongly emphasizes women’s mass attendance at mosques on the occasion of major religious festivals, both canonical and noncanonical. All of the Sunnī schools except the Shāfiʿīs preferred (on the basis of ḥadīth) that the prayers for the two canonical festivals, ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā and ʿĪd al-Fiṭr, be performed on outdoor prayer grounds on the outskirts of the city. However, Ibn al-Ḥājj’s discussion indicates that this was not (or at least not always) the current practice in Cairo, a fact that may be related to practical considerations or to the predominance of the Shāfiʿī school. He writes about the festival prayers, “Women ought to be far removed from the men, unlike what they do today, because they usually mix with the men; one usually finds the mosque on the day of the festival filled with women.” He complains that men and women mix within the mosque and while entering and exiting through its doors.73 He goes on to observe that the women go out to the festival prayers “in the way that is known, and has been discussed more than once” in his work—that is, ostentatiously dressed, perfumed, and adorned (even more than was customary on other occasions).

Ibn al-Ḥājj concludes,

Here, as in several other places in his work, Ibn al-Ḥājj’s assertion that contemporary Muslim women should be excluded from mosques altogether (the sentiment to which his comments are sometimes reduced⁷⁵) is clearly a polemical response to a very different reality. Although his wording is somewhat vague, it is quite possible that he is referring to women who engage in public preaching in the mosque on the occasion of the festivals rather than women who simply listen to preachers. If so, it would seem that their public role on such days was very prominent indeed.

Even more vivid was women’s presence at mosques for religious observances not explicitly mandated by the sharīʿa. Even though many of these occasions have been treated in the secondary literature as examples of “popular Islam” and Ibn al-Ḥājj himself denounces them as innovations (bidaʿ), it is important to remember that little evidence suggests either that they were limited to the unlettered masses or that the religious establishment regarded them as illegitimate. Indeed, in most cases they took place in major mosques where they could not have occurred without the knowledge and cooperation of male religious authorities. One of the holidays whose observance distressed Ibn al-Ḥājj was the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ, a day of mourning for Shīʿīs that in this period was widely observed with festivity and merriment by Sunnīs.⁷⁶ Ibn al-Ḥājj describes how on this day the Mosque of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ⁷⁷ in Cairo is reserved exclusively for women. He complains that they take the opportunity to adorn themselves with finery and revealing clothing—a practice that he associates with the vain display of their charms to men (al-tabarruj li’l-rijāl), rather unconvincingly given the sex-segregated setting (unless the unseemly display took place on the way to the mosque rather than within it). “They remain in [the mosque] from the beginning of the day until sunset, to the exclusion of men (lā yushārikuhunna fīhi al-rijāl); they rub themselves against the volumes of the Qur’an,⁷⁸ the pulpit, and the walls and under the Green Tablet.”⁷⁹

Women’s exclusive access to one of the most important mosques of Cairo on one of the most holy days of the religious calendar must have been condoned and facilitated by the religious authorities. It is notable that their behavior on this occasion, at least as described by Ibn al-Ḥājj (whose polemical motives are frankly displayed), savors more of shrine visitation than of conventional mosque-based worship. There is no suggestion that congregational prayer featured in their gathering. Instead, the women’s aspirations seem to have centered on the reaping of baraka, the blessings to be garnered from physical contact with sacred places and objects on a particularly auspicious day in the religious year. However, it is significant that the sanctity of the place arises not from the tomb of a holy figure, but from its very status as a mosque; devotion is centered on the architectural feature that most centrally qualifies it as a Friday mosque (the pulpit), on the walls of the edifice itself, and on the volumes of the Qur’an that represent the most vital and orthodox functions of a mosque, the recitation of the Qur’an and the dissemination of its teachings.80 In this context, the widespread distinction between mosque and shrine proves to be of little utility.

Other noncanonical festivals, according to Ibn al-Ḥājj, involved large-scale and indiscriminate mingling of men and women in mosques. On the first Thursday night81 of the month of Rajab, people gathered in mosques large and small to perform the Raghāʾib (Wishes) prayer amidst festive illuminations. In addition to the prayer’s problematic status as an innovation (it was not performed by the Prophet and indeed was known to be of relatively recent vintage), it was widely criticized for the mixing of men and women that took place on the occasion.⁸² Not only did women go out, according to Ibn al-Ḥājj’s familiar plaint, with festive clothing and adornment, but the crowds that gathered in the Friday mosque (al-jāmiʿ al-aʿẓam) were so dense that people urinated in the back of the mosque rather than making their way outside. Women in particular, he claims, were embarrassed to go out to relieve themselves and paid a fee to use a vessel that was carried around the mosque.⁸³ Ibn al-Ḥājj makes a similar complaint about the night of Niṣf Shaʿbān,⁸⁴ when crowds of men, women, and small children gathered in the mosque; the presence of small children led to the soiling of the mosque and to even greater hubbub and frivolity (al-laghaṭ wa’l-lahw) than on the twenty-seventh of Rajab (celebrated as the anniversary of the Miʿrāj).⁸⁵

Indeed, the nocturnal gatherings that took place on the great annual religious festivals were not new in Ibn al-Ḥājj’s time; for at least two centuries, they been notorious for the mixing of men and women in the major mosques of a number of areas in the Islamic world. The Baghdādī Ḥanbalī Ibn ʿAqīl (d. 513/1119) wrote with horror about the “masses of men and women” who gathered at mosques and cemeteries on the nights of the great festivals, which were marred (in his eyes) by the wasteful and ostentatious illumination of the mosques and by the frivolity and liveliness of the gathering.⁸⁶ (Ibn Mufliḥ, who cited his comments three centuries later, noted that “in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and other Muslim countries,” things had only gotten worse.⁸⁷) Abū Bakr al-Ṭurṭūshī (d. 520/1126–27), an Andalusian scholar who studied in several areas of the Islamic East (but whose polemic in this area is devoted largely to Qayrawān), writes with horror of the misbehavior that allegedly occurred in the dense crowds on the night when the recitation of the Qur’an was completed during Ramadan. Not only did men and women press against each other willy-nilly in the disorder, but “a woman came to us to complain, saying, ‘I went to hear the preacher in the Friday mosque, and a man embraced me from behind and took his pleasure with me (iltadhdha bī) in the crowd, with nothing to prevent him [from actual intercourse] but [our] clothes; so I vowed never to go again.’”⁸⁸ Al-Ṭurṭūshī responds to these phenomena with a barrage of reports advocating the exclusion of women from mosques.⁸⁹ Reproducing this passage from al-Ṭurṭūshī a century and a half later, the Syrian Shāfiʿī Abū Shāma (d. 665/1267) remarks that anyone who has attended the festivities for Niṣf Shaʿbān in Damascus and its vicinity knows that the sinful uproar there is even worse than described by al-Ṭurṭūshī;⁹⁰ he similarly musters textual evidence in favor of excluding women from mosques.⁹¹ As is so often the case, this seems to have been a form of scholarly protest against a practice that nevertheless persisted; Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī (d. 790/1388) also complains of the gathering together of men and women as one of the offenses committed on the night of Laylat al-Qadr.⁹²

In Cairo as well, women clearly continued to attend mosques in droves at particularly holy times of the year, despite occasional efforts at interdiction. Zayn al-Dīn Ibn Shāhīn writes of Ramadan of the year 893/1488 that “in it a proclamation was made that women should not go out to the Mosque of ʿAmr because of the corruption that they were causing during the month of Ramadan … ; nevertheless, they were not deterred, and on some of the Fridays of this month in the mosque there was an indescribable uproar and selling of toys and other things.”93

In Cairo in the time of Ibn al-Ḥājj, women’s presence in mosques was by no means limited to such carnivalistic festivals; however, his references to more ordinary cases are more casual and less extensive. For instance, he argues that small children should not be brought to the mosque by men because they might cry when people are praying and distract the worshipers. It is all right for them to attend with their mothers, however, because “it is ordinarily the case that the women’s space (mawḍiʿ al-nisāʾ) is far enough away [from the lines of male worshipers] that [the babies’ crying] will not disturb the men” (and also, he argues, because babies cry less when they are with their mothers than when they are with their fathers). Ibn al-Ḥājj immediately qualifies this observation with the remark that “this is if necessity demanded that the woman pray in congregation in the mosque; it is better for her to pray at home,” and he briefly reiterates his legal arguments against women’s mosque attendance.⁹⁴ However, the incidental quality of his reference in itself suggests the quotidian and familiar nature of women’s presence in mosques. It also implies that there was space customarily allocated to women in a mosque and that its location was sufficiently well known that he could unproblematically refer to where it was “ordinarily” found.

Ibn al-Ḥājj also refers, disapprovingly but without hysteria, to women’s attendance at Friday prayers. Again, his normative argument that women should not attend mosques stands in clear contrast to his observation that they (at least sometimes) do. He states,

Ibn al-Ḥājj’s remarks suggest that enough women attended Friday prayers that they had been assigned space in the “addition” (ziyāda), a liminal space attached to the mosque, but outside of its original walls, that existed in more than one major mosque in Cairo.⁹⁸ They also suggest that at least some women eschewed this space and ventured to enter the mosque proper, placing themselves in the back of the congregation—sometimes behind a physical barrier (maqṣūra) and sometimes not.⁹⁹ Ibn al-Ḥājj’s comment that the barrier in any case does not conceal the women suggests that, when it existed, such an enclosure was less than a solid wall; it may have been an openwork screen. Despite the apparent provision of dedicated women’s prayer space, the authorities are implied not to have advocated women’s attendance, but to have failed to address it; attendance at Friday prayers is represented as occurring on the women’s own initiative. It is unclear whether this reflects the actual dynamics of women’s presence at congregational prayer or Ibn al-Ḥājj’s determination to accuse the women of religious innovation and deemphasize the legitimation of their presence by the authorities. It is also unclear whether the modest scope of Ibn al-Ḥājj’s references to women’s participation in regular congregational prayer reflects the relatively small number of women involved or simply the fact that, as a canonical and decorous ritual, ordinary mosque prayer failed to elicit the detailed and vivid polemics through which Ibn al-Ḥājj revealed so much about the more controversial festivals.

Ibn al-Ḥājj also notes (and objects to) women’s attendance at study sessions in the mosques. He observes that it is the practice among some people in his time to gather in the mosque to hear books read aloud; the men and women sit in separate groups facing one another—and apparently without a barrier to conceal them from each other’s view. What is worse, female listeners may sometimes be overcome by ecstatic states in which they stand up, scream, and expose parts of their bodies—something that would be impermissible within their own homes, but that is far worse in a mosque in the presence of men.100 The precise nature of the sessions Ibn al-Ḥājj has in mind remains unclear; the intense emotional reaction that he describes suggest mystical reading-matter or at least impassioned preaching, but again he is presumably emphasizing the most lurid possible scenario.

Women’s presence at sessions of preaching and teaching is also mentioned in other sources. In the thirteenth century CE, the satirical work of al-Jawbarī describes a corrupt preacher performing for a large and gullible audience of men and women in an Egyptian mosque in 623 AH.¹⁰¹ Although the specific story may not be factually based, the assumption that a throng of mixed sexes could gather to hear preaching in a mosque probably was. In a manual for officials charged with keeping the public order (muḥtasibs), Ibn al-Ḥājj’s Egyptian contemporary Ibn al-Ukhuwwa (d. 729/1329) laments that in his day “people do not assemble about [the preacher] to hear admonition or for edification, but it has become a kind of amusement or sport or social gathering; and in the assembly there takes place that which is improper, men gathering together with women so that they see each other, and there are other things also not proper to be mentioned.” He reiterates the admonition of al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) that men and women should be separated by a screen during preaching sessions and that women should be discouraged from going to mosques at all, yet clearly these rules do not reflect current realities.¹⁰²

Less frequently mentioned is preaching specifically addressed to women and their religious needs. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī states that the ṣūfī and jurist Aḥmad [ibn Muḥammad] ibn Sulaymān al-Zāhid (d. 819/1415) “used to preach to women in the mosques, devoting himself to them to the exclusion of men, and teach them the rules of their religion and the marital and neighborly duties that were incumbent upon them.”103 However, an earlier report by al-Sakhāwī states that al-Zāhid was in the habit of seeking out abandoned mosques, sometimes using the ruins of one to rebuild another; finally, he founded his own mosque in al-Maqs,¹⁰⁴ where he preached especially to women.¹⁰⁵ This account suggests that perhaps al-Zāhid pursued his woman-centered activities largely in mosques that were under his personal control and/or otherwise unused, although this may well relate to the distinctiveness of al-Zāhid’s religious style rather than to any difficulty in gathering women in better-established mosques. That his focus on women was somewhat unusual is suggested by the remark attributed to him that “these women do not attend the lessons of the religious scholars, and none of their husbands instructs them!”¹⁰⁶ It is notable that al-Zāhid’s homilies, as represented by al-Shaʿrānī (who claims to have the written texts in his possession), focused on inculcating knowledge of women’s obligations toward God, their husbands, and their neighbors.

Women of Mamlūk Cairo also sometimes appeared in mosques in their capacity as religious authorities. As has been noted by Jonathan Berkey, “Zaynab, the daughter of Dāwūd Abū ‘l-Jawad (d. 1459), apparently succeeded her father as shaykh of the Sufis at the mosque of ʿAlam Dār near the Bāb al-Barqiyya in Cairo.”¹⁰⁷ A number of women preachers are known to have flourished in Cairo in the Mamlūk period; although the biographical literature is often vague about the venues of their activities, it seems likely that women sometimes appeared in mosques as religious instructors as well as in the audiences for their sermons.¹⁰⁸ Muhammad Akram Nadwi notes that Ibn al-Ḥājj’s contemporary Sitt al-Wuzarāʾ bint ʿUmar ibn al-Munajjā (d. 716/1316) “was popular in Damascus for teaching al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ, then invited to Cairo where she taught in the great mosque and other venues, her lessons being attended by notable men of the city, including its scholars.”¹⁰⁹

Women were also present in mosques for more profane activities. Some would bring the thread they had spun to the mosque and sit awaiting offers, which led to negotiations and sales (as well as to the soiling of the mosque by the small children that accompanied some of them). Their presence, according to Ibn al-Ḥājj, attracted unsavory characters. Women also came in pursuit of court cases, waiting within the mosque as the judge presided outside (perhaps in the ziyāda). The frequentation of the mosque by female litigants, their legal representatives (al-wukalāʾ), and their husbands sometimes led to loud disputes.¹¹⁰

Other references also support Ibn al-Ḥājj’s description of the major Cairo mosques as lively public spaces frequented by both sexes for purposes both sacred and profane. A thirteenth-century Maghribī traveler expressed his dismay at the scene in in the mosque of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, which men and women passed through casually to shorten their way from place to place and in which they ate cakes and nuts sold by itinerant vendors.111 In 844/1440–41, efforts to renovate and reform the Mosque of al-Ḥākim included directives to the doorkeepers to prevent women and children from entering, sitting in, or passing through the mosque. People of any sex or age were discouraged from passing through the mosque’s courtyard in their sandals.¹¹² Such efforts of reform, however, were usually of short duration.

No other source provides a concentration of synchronic data about Egyptian women’s religious practices comparable to the work of Ibn al-Ḥājj; however, scattered references suggest that these practices were sustained in subsequent centuries. In a passing comment that is the more convincing for its casual and offhand nature, the Egyptian scholar Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) refers to “the continuous practice based on the permissibility of women’s going out to mosques, markets and journeys when they are veiled so that men cannot see them (istimrār al-ʿamal ʿalā jawāz khurūj al-nisāʾ ilā al-masājid wa’l-aswāq wa’l-asfār mutanaqqibāt li-allā yarāhunna al-rijāl).”¹¹³ The Egyptian Shāfiʿī scholar ʿImād al-Dīn al-Aqfahsī (d. 808/1405) writes in his manual on rules relating to mosques that “it is desirable for the prayer leader and the superintendent (nāẓir) of the mosque to designate a door of the mosque for the women so that no man enters or exits with them”—a comment that betrays his assumption that women will be present in most mosques.¹¹⁴

In this period, the narratives of European travelers begin to offer another source—fragmentary and biased, but sometimes revealing—for the activities of Egyptian women. The Dominican friar Félix Fabri produced a detailed narrative of his sojourn in Cairo in the course of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1483. He reports that the women of the “Saracens” pray in separate sections in their “churches” (in context, clearly mosques) and must do so unadorned. For these “pagans” it is both deplorable and ridiculous for men and women to attend a house of worship together in their worldly finery—an opinion with which Fabri appears heartily to agree.115 It would seem, based on this passage, that the impression transmitted to a non-Muslim visitor to Egypt in the late fifteenth century was that women could attend mosques, albeit in modest clothing and in a place apart from the men.

In contrast to this evidence from the Mamlūk period, European visitors to Egypt in the Ottoman period often stated summarily that women did not go to mosques. It is unclear whether this reflects an overall change in Egyptian women’s habits, the distinctive practices of the women of the predominantly Ḥanafī Ottoman elite (a sector of the population that loomed large in the eyes of European visitors), or simply the misconceptions of ill-informed outsiders. Jean Palerne, who visited Cairo in 1581, reports that women “do not go to the mosques at all.”¹¹⁶ He states that a woman simply cannot enter a mosque unless she is the wife of a pasha or other dignitary who is privileged to visit by virtue of her status; in this case, however, she goes “out of curiosity” and presumably not to pray.¹¹⁷ It is difficult to determine the source of Palerne’s information, which is associated with some degree of fanciful misinformation.¹¹⁸ Johann Wild, who lived in Egypt as a slave between 1606 and 1610, similarly reports that “women do not go to church [sic] … , but are supposed to perform their ablutions, pray and perform their religious duties at home in their houses.”¹¹⁹ Wild, too, refers to “Turkish” women, although it is difficult to know how specifically he intends this term.

Antonius Gonzales, a Franciscan who served as chaplain to the French consul in Cairo in 1665–66, provides a more detailed (and perhaps more convincing) account of Egyptian women’s mosque-going habits. He states that the women of Cairo venture out into the streets only rarely, to go to the public bath or to “church” (here, like other travelers, he appears to use the word as a blanket term for places of worship).120 Respectable women and girls never frequent places where men gather, and on the street one never sees a man address women or girls; what is more, “they perform their devotions after the men depart, or in places separate from them.”¹²¹ In another passage he states, “In the mosques, the women have special, separate spaces where they cannot be seen by men. When they enter and exit they are covered up so well that no one can recognize them. It is rarely allowed that the two sexes gather at the same time in a church [i.e., mosque]; rather, [the women] usually come when the men are not present. They are also not obliged to go to church every Friday, as the men are obliged to do.”¹²²

These passages of Gonzales’s account are free of polemic and even somewhat complimentary (he describes the public deportment of Cairene women as “very quiet and modest”¹²³). Although it is difficult to determine how much access or exposure to mosques Gonzales may have had, the length of his stay in Egypt and the sensitivity of his attitude may well have allowed him some degree of insight into Cairene life. His reference to women praying in the mosque after the men had left, or using it at alternative times, suggests that women’s mosque usage followed independent patterns that were perhaps not dominated by participation in male-led congregational prayer—although separate space was designated for this purpose.

The predominance of the evidence thus suggests that in the Mamlūk period, women could be found in Cairene mosques in many different capacities. Because no other currently available source appears to supply a description of women’s presence and activities in mosques comparable to that of Ibn al-Ḥājj, it is difficult to judge whether the magnitude and scope of women’s use of mosques declined significantly thereafter or simply becomes harder to document. Even with respect to the Mamlūk period, however, the fact that women played a role in the life of mosques does not tell us what role mosques played in the lives of women. It is impossible to determine the numbers in which women attended Friday prayers, slipped into the mosque to worship individually, or sat in its shade to sell their wares. Women’s mosque visitation on major religious festivals seems to have been a mass phenomenon, although it occurred only intermittently in the yearly calendar. The strong possibility remains that, even though women had a significant presence in mosques, most women’s religious life may not have been primarily mosque-centered.

Indeed, both the voluminous testimony of Ibn al-Ḥājj and the remarks of Western travelers suggest that women’s visitation of graves and shrines was a larger-scale and more pervasive phenomenon (although both “graves” and “shrines” might in some cases also be mosques). Ibn al-Ḥājj complains that women have “innovated for themselves” a rotation assigning specific days to individual holy sites. According to his (possibly hyperbolic) account, Mondays were assigned to the Mosque of al-Ḥusayn in Cairo, Saturdays to al-Sayyida Nafīsa,124 and Thursdays and Fridays to the great Qarāfa cemeteries on the outskirts of the city.¹²⁵ Both al-Ḥusayn and al-Sayyida Nafīsa were mosques in the full sense of the word, but were also notable for the remains of important early members of the Prophet’s family. The phenomenon of women’s grave visitation, particularly in the Qarāfa on Fridays, appears to have been sufficiently large and problematic to inspire repeated (and clearly vain) efforts to suppress it. In Ibn al-Ḥājj’s own era, “Emir ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ṭaybars, the Castellan (wālī bāb al-qalʿa), barred women from outings to the Qarāfa on special days (mawsim).” This was only one of the repeated (and apparently ineffective) bans on women’s visitation of the cemeteries in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries CE.¹²⁶ Although considerations of religious orthodoxy may have played some role in these efforts at suppression, the authorities were more likely motivated by concerns for public order inspired by the apparently vast scale of women’s grave visitation practices. Rare efforts were made to suppress grave visitation in the Qarāfa altogether,¹²⁷ and men were clearly also enthusiastic participants, but the central role of women is clear both from descriptions of visitation practices and from efforts at their regulation.

The scale and visibility of women’s grave visitation practices are confirmed by the accounts of Western travelers, who rarely fail to remark upon it. Jean Thenaud, who visited Cairo in the early sixteenth century, writes of the Qarāfa that “every Friday, the women go to visit the graves of their dead, upon which they cast large quantities of [sweet-smelling plants and] perfumes, such as jasmine, basil, roses, and scented oils and waters. They say that on that day, the souls of the departed indulge in scents.”¹²⁸ Palerne writes—with an eyewitness vividness notably absent from his remarks on women’s mosque attendance—that

In 1599, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī, an internal traveler within the Ottoman Empire, described how “every Friday, starting at the time of the morning prayer a countless multitude of people, walking or riding, appearing in the direction of the cemeteries, take the road toward Karafa.” The crowds visit first the tombs of al-Shāfiʿī and Abū’l-Layth and then that of Sayyida Nafīsa. “When the women go to the graves of their relatives they always take some green plants and flowers along with them, they visit the tombs of the dead with fragrant herbs.”¹³⁰ This account emphasizes that large numbers of people of both sexes made the weekly pilgrimage to the cemeteries, including Ṣūfī shaykhs who played a leadership role. In the early eighteenth century, Benoît de Maillet writes that women go to visit their dead at the Qarāfa at least twice a week, weeping and casting rayḥān (basil) onto the graves.¹³¹ In the early nineteenth century, Richard Pococke notes that “the time when the women go out is mostly on Fridays, to the burial places, to adorn with flowers and boughs the sepulchres of their relations, to hang a lamp over them, and pour water on their graves, and they place water in vases near.”¹³²

There is no doubt that women’s grave visitation was a practice of enormous popularity and great durability, even in the face of persistent efforts at eradication. It is true that several factors may have contributed to its overrepresentation in our sources, as compared with less flamboyant practices such as women’s participation in congregational prayer. For Ibn al-Ḥājj, women’s grave visitation was worthy of sustained polemic (and thus of detailed description) both because he considered it religiously illegitimate in itself and because the length of the journey and the lax behavior of the crowds led to a distressing degree of contact and mixing between the sexes.133 For Western travelers, activities in the cemeteries were presumably far more visible and accessible than those in mosques (from which they were, in most cases, barred until the nineteenth century). Even Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī seems to have found the goings-on in the Qarāfa rather exotic and picturesque. However, even accounting for a certain degree of reporting bias, it seems likely that far more women made frequent Friday visits to the cemeteries than participated in Friday prayers. (It should be noted that the weekly participation of throngs of women in grave visitation at the Qarāfa does not necessarily mean that ziyāra was a regular weekly practice for most individual women; as usual, the lack of firsthand testimony by female participants leaves us with an outsider view of undifferentiated female masses.)

The fact that so many women were able to make excursions to the Qarāfa, and particularly on Friday,¹³⁴ suggests that the normative legal account of the constraints on women’s mosque visitation corresponds poorly to the actual dynamics of women’s ritual activities. According to the fiqh texts, the primary limiting factor on women’s participation in congregational prayer is the strong presumption against their leaving the home in general and their appearing in mixed settings in particular. Visiting the Qarāfa, however, inevitably involved a longer absence from the home and a higher degree of public visibility than the comparatively brief journey to a mosque located within the woman’s urban quarter, where she could expect to pray in a location sheltered from the male gaze. Women absenting themselves from public congregational prayer, only to spend their Fridays flamboyantly lamenting in the Qarāfa, were clearly not responding to the ideal of public invisibility promoted by many religious scholars. Although legal authorities generally considered it religiously undesirable for women to attend public congregational prayers (at least if they were young), in most cases they considered it reprehensible for women of any age to engage in grave visitation. Only the Mālikīs argued that grave visitation might be meritorious for sexually unattractive old women, as it was for men;¹³⁵ however, the Mālikī Ibn al-Ḥājj gave short shrift to this opinion.

One explanation for women’s deviation from the prescriptions of the religious scholars in these cases would be that their exclusion from or marginalization in mosques drove them to the less orthodox consolations of the graveyard and the shrine. One problem with this argument is that, as we have seen, women were not categorically barred from mosques; some women could and did attend congregational prayers, although it is unclear how many of them chose to do so (or what other barriers, familial or reputational, may have discouraged them from trying). Of course, it remains true that scholarly opinion largely discouraged women’s mosque attendance, which may have deterred many women. This explanation, however, raises the question of why women were willing to defy scholarly opinion with respect to grave visitation if they submitted to it with respect to mosque attendance.

Women’s apparent preference for graveyards could be explained by the assumption that, whereas male authorities exercised effective authority in the context of the mosque, the liminal space of the graveyards evaded effective regulation. The argument that the mixing of the sexes in the Qarāfa was a result of a relative vacuum of normative control has been made in detail by Christopher Taylor in his fascinating study of Egyptian grave visitation.136 However, Taylor’s study and others also demonstrate that the Qarāfa was full of mosques and khānaqās, often staffed with full complements of religious personnel;¹³⁷ given this fact, it is unclear why it should have eluded official or scholarly regulation. By this period, the Qarāfa was not an unsettled wasteland, but a teeming urban area.¹³⁸

Furthermore, if women’s mass public activities were a sign of lack of normative control, Ibn al-Ḥājj’s complaints suggest that normative control was also often lacking within the city proper, even at religiously important sites such as major mosques. The Mosque of al-Ḥusayn, arguably the most important religious site within the heart of Cairo, was an important focus of women’s weekly visitation; yet al-Ḥusayn could scarcely be characterized as spatially or organizationally outside the purview of normative religious control. As already noted, women’s annual takeover of the important Mosque of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ either was facilitated by the religious establishment or defied its regulatory authority. Even in more routine contexts, the use of mosques by unruly female litigants and haggling female vendors suggests that far from representing opposite poles in the spectrum of socioreligious regulation, the great mosques and the great cemeteries to a certain extent shared the quality of vibrant public spaces where social intercourse (like religious performance) followed its own dynamics.

Rather than understanding women’s grave visitation as a solution to which they resorted as a result either of physical exclusion from mosques or of normative discouragement from mosque-based worship, it is more plausible to regard women’s overwhelming presence in the cemeteries—and their clear, but apparently more modest presence at congregational prayers in the mosques—as an expression of the women’s own religious priorities. This interpretation is strongly suggested by the testimony of Ibn al-Ḥājj, who disparages the capitulation of ostensibly pious men to their wives’ peremptory demands to go to the Qarāfa. He claims that women threaten their husbands with sexual strike or divorce if forbidden to visit the graveyards.139 His account is clearly intended to motivate his male audience to intervene in their wives’ religious activities by representing their acquiescence as a form of henpecked capitulation. Nevertheless, it is significant that Ibn al-Ḥājj represents both mosque attendance and grave visitation as expressions of women’s own initiative—albeit two forms that apparently attracted unequal numbers of women. His emphasis on the marital negotiation confirms one aspect of the normative legal model, which is that the most effective locus of control on women’s public religious activities would have been at the door of the marital residence. The evidence suggests that once outside of the home, a woman would not have been turned away from either the mosque or the graveyard; however, it was primarily at the graveyard that mass female participation attracted the wonder of travelers and the frustrated attention of the religious and political authorities. On those occasions when comparably vast numbers of women demanded access to urban mosques—for instance, on the nights of the popular festivals and on the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ—the authorities seem to have been just as impotent (or as unwilling) to interdict their activities there as they were in the Qarāfa.

Women’s apparent preference for public religious activity in graveyards was not unique to Egypt. In later times, travelers to North Africa also commented on local women’s propensity to frequent cemeteries rather than mosques on the day of congregational prayer. Pidou de Saint-Olon, who served as ambassador to Morocco in 1693, writes that “their Women do not enter into the Mosques … yet they say their Prayers at home; and, on Fridays, resort to the Burying-places, to pray and weep over the Graves of their dead Relations.”140 In an independent and somewhat earlier seventeenth-century account, Lancelot Addison (who worked as a chaplain for seven years in Tangier) states that on Friday men don their best garments to go to the Great Mosque; “the women likewise on this day visit the Sepulchres and strew the graves of their deceased Friends with green Boughs and Herbs.”¹⁴¹ Although de Saint-Olon may or may not have been correct in his belief that women simply could not attend the mosque, women’s grave visitation is likely to have been openly visible.

Why might some medieval Cairene women—and some women in other times and places—have preferred the graveyard over the mosque? Because their views on this subject have not been directly preserved for us, we can only speculate. In addition to being the occasion for a refreshing outing, grave visitation potentially enabled the cultivation of family networks through the shared care of the dead. In this way, it may have addressed the personal needs of women more directly than congregational prayer in the mosque. Bereavement must have been a pervasive experience for women as well as men, and the maintenance of kinship ties—not only with the deceased but also with the other relatives who cared for the same graves—must have been central to women’s emotional and social welfare. When the sultan banned women from the streets of Cairo in 841/1437 (as a gesture of piety intended to end an attack of plague), a woman whose son had died in the plague reacted to her inability to follow the funeral procession to the grave by jumping to her death from the roof of her house.¹⁴² The reaping of baraka through the visitation of the graves of the pious and the distribution of food to the poor may have addressed both women’s hopes for this-worldly welfare, which could be enhanced by the blessings of auspicious places and activities, and their hopes for otherworldly salvation. Overall, there seems to be little obvious correlation between the distribution of women’s public religious activities and the normative doctrines of contemporary fiqh; it is more likely to be primarily a reflection of the women’s own needs and agendas.

One of the early figures most vividly associated with Syrian mosques is Umm al-Dardāʾ the Younger (al-Ṣughrā).143 She is supposed to have been raised in the household of the Companion of the Prophet Abū al-Dardāʾ, who settled in Damascus after the conquest and remained there for the rest of his life. One report recounts that, as an orphan in his care, she “used to go with Abū al-Dardāʾ dressed in a hooded cloak (burnus)¹⁴⁴ to pray in the rows of men and sit in the study circles of the reciters to learn¹⁴⁵ the Qur’an, until [one day] Abū al-Dardāʾ said to her, ‘Go to join the rows of women!’”¹⁴⁶ This report suggests that her activities in the mosque were in part a violation (or bending) of gender segregation that was enabled by her young age. Abū al-Dardāʾ finally brings an end to her circumvention of the gender rules by directing her to join the other women.¹⁴⁷ Although Umm al-Dardā’s activities may have been anomalous in some ways, there are assumed to be regular “women’s rows” within the mosque.

In her later life, Umm al-Dardāʾ is associated with both Damascus and Jerusalem; according to one report, she was in the habit of spending six months of the year in each place.148 Ibn Kathīr states that “the men used to recite and study law under her direction at the northern wall in the Friday mosque of Damascus; ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān used to sit in her circle with the students of law and study under her direction when he was caliph, may God be pleased with her!”¹⁴⁹ This statement represents Umm al-Dardāʾ in the later stages of her life; ʿAbd al-Malik ruled from 65 to 86 AH, and her last known act was to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in 81 AH.¹⁵⁰ Other anecdotes linking her with ʿAbd al-Malik are set in Jerusalem. One recounts that ʿAbd al-Malik and Umm al-Dardāʾ were sitting together in the Dome of the Rock; when the call to the maghrib prayer sounded, they arose, and Umm al-Dardāʾ leaned on him until they entered the mosque (i.e., presumably al-Aqṣā). She sat down with the women, and ʿAbd al-Malik went to the front to lead the people in prayer.¹⁵¹ As suggested by her physically leaning on the caliph’s arm, at the end of her life she may well have been enjoying the privileges of seniority, just as she had enjoyed the privileges of youth in her days as an orphan. Nevertheless, the anecdote also casually assumes the general presence of women in the mosque, just as Ibn Kathīr’s scenario suggests that a woman—at least an aged one—could publicly teach (although apparently to an audience of men) in the most important mosque in Damascus.

Women’s presence in Syrian mosques in the early period is not presented as being limited to the sacred precincts of Jerusalem or to the metropolis of Damascus. An anecdote in Ibn al-Jawzī’s Ṣifat al-ṣafwa tells of the female client (mawlāt) of Abū Umāma (presumably Abū Umāma al-Bāhilī, a Companion of the Prophet who settled in Ḥimṣ and died in the eighties of the first Islamic century¹⁵²). The narrator of the story, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Yazīd ibn Jābir, states that he saw her in the mosque of Ḥimṣ teaching the women the Qur’an, the normative practices of the Prophet (al-sunan), and their religious duties (al-farāʾiḍ).¹⁵³ As ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Yazīd ibn Jābir is supposed to have died in 153–54 AH,¹⁵⁴ this story is probably set in the first half of the second century.

In addition to teaching, some early Syrian Muslim women were associated with an extreme and ascetic devotion to worship. These women existed in other areas of the early Islamic world as well; as Umaima Abou-Bakr has noted, their activities were often—although not exclusively—pursued in mosques.¹⁵⁵ Ibn ʿAsākir recounts a report that Umm al-Dardāʾ¹⁵⁶ had a following of women who stood in prayer all night until their feet swelled.¹⁵⁷ This may well have taken place in her home, but other women pursued such activities in the mosque. A Companion of the Prophet, Kathīr ibn Murra, who settled in Ḥimṣ, recounted that “I dreamt that I entered [the branches of] a lofty tree in heaven, and I began to wander in it and marvel at it. In one part I suddenly beheld some of the women of the mosque (nisāʾ min nisāʾ al-masjid), and I went and greeted them. Then I asked, ‘How did you achieve [this degree of reward]?’ They said, ‘By [performing] prostrations [in prayer] and [eating] little morsels [of bread] (bi-sajadāt wa-kusayrāt).’”¹⁵⁸ This report suggests not only the existence of women engaged in pious exercises (and perhaps in religious retreat, iʿtikāf) in the mosque but also the esteem in which they were held.

The assumption that even small-town mosques were accessible to Syrian women persisted in later centuries, as far as the fragmentary evidence allows one to conclude. The poet Abū’l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1058), a lifelong resident of the northern Syrian town of Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, refers to women’s frequentation of mosques in one of his poems:

Although al-Maʿarrī clearly disapproves of women’s being given the freedom to visit the mosque, it is presented as a real, if lamentable, phenomenon, similar to the undoubtedly genuine practice of women’s visiting the public baths. The implied scenario seems to be a spontaneous individual visit to the mosque, including prayer behind an imam (either a professional religious functionary or simply a male fellow-worshiper) if one is available. It may be that a woman’s appearance at Friday prayers was a less routine occurrence. Al-Maʿarrī describes a dramatic incident in 417/1026–27, when a pregnant woman entered the main mosque of Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān during the Friday prayers to appeal to the community against a tavern keeper who had molested her.¹⁶⁰ It is unclear whether her very presence (in addition to the sensational nature of her public complaint) is anomalous or not.

There is evidence that, at a somewhat later date, women routinely attended Friday prayers in at least some of the towns and villages of Palestine. Significantly, these seem to have been locales where Ḥanbalism was predominant. In a famous passage of his Aḥkām al-qurʾān, the Andalusian jurist Abū Bakr ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148) admiringly describes the behavior of the women of Nablus, whom he observed during a stay of several months in the town. “I never saw a woman on a street during the day except on Friday, when they went out into [the streets] until the mosque was full of them; when the prayer was finished, they returned to their homes, and my eye did not fall on one of them until the next Friday.” Ibn al-ʿArabī clearly does not regard the retiring behavior of the women of Nablus as typical; whether the women of other localities attend Friday prayers he does not state.161 In a unique text studied by Daniella Talmon-Heller, the Syrian scholar Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Maqdisī (d. 643/1245) presents an anecdote in which a man goes to attend Friday prayers in the village mosque of Salamīya (near Nablus) with his mother. In the story, the wonder-working local shaykh multiplies a small amount of food to feed everyone present; “then the food was taken up to the women (rufiʿa ilā al-nisāʾ).”¹⁶² It is unclear how localized or unusual the practice of women’s attendance at Friday prayers in the Nablus area may have been. It may have reflected the distinctive religious culture of the Ḥanbalī community, which predominated in this area. Again, it suggests that women’s mosque attendance in Greater Syria was not limited to the great mosques of the metropolis of Damascus or the pilgrimage center of Jerusalem, but extended to at least some village mosques.

More salient than references to women’s attendance at Friday prayer, however, are allusions to their presence in mosques at sessions of teaching and preaching. This was clearly not a phenomenon limited to Syria; indeed, the presence of women (and the resulting issue of visually or physically separating the sexes) is a recurrent theme in discussions of preaching. As we have seen, the issue of mixed gatherings of men and women listening to preachers is addressed by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) in his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, a work composed at the end of his life when he lived in Damascus and in Ṭūs (and thus may reflect, at least in part, his experiences in Syria).¹⁶³ There al-Ghazālī complains that young and attractively dressed preachers behave seductively in sessions attended by women. Significantly, he notes that the ill effects of women and men sitting within view of each other are attested by customary experience.¹⁶⁴

The wide occurrence and long persistence of the habits denounced by al-Ghazālī are suggested by the fact that his remarks are reproduced by later authors of manuals of ḥisba, treatises providing guidelines for authorities entrusted with the preservation of public order, as well as in polemics against religious innovations. Portions of al-Ghazālī’s comments are reproduced in one of the most famous preaching manuals of the medieval period, the Kitāb al-Quṣṣāṣ wa’l-mudhakkirīn of the Baghdādī Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201),165 who observes that “these assemblies are never lacking in attractive women.”¹⁶⁶ The relevant passage from al-Ghazālī is reproduced verbatim in the early fourteenth century CE by the Egyptian Ibn al-Ukhuwwa and in the seventeenth century by Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Dajjānī.¹⁶⁷ Thus, the spatial and visual separation of men and women at preaching sessions continued to be treated as a relevant concern in texts that claimed to address pragmatic current issues.

A literary anecdote of the thirteenth century, although certainly fictional in its details, similarly assumes the presence of women as well as men at mosque preaching sessions. The Masnavī of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273) was composed in Konya in central Anatolia. It is there that Rūmī spent most of his life and where his sense of social practice must have been formed, although he also visited the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo.¹⁶⁸ In one of the many apparently profane tales that the spiritual master puts to unexpected mystical use, the legendary trickster Jūḥī (Juḥā) disguises himself as a woman for a mixed preaching session:

Although this cheerfully bawdy incident surely never took place, the anecdote reflects a milieu in which men and women attended preaching sessions together, although apparently seated in separate groups and with the women thoroughly veiled. The preacher is ready to address the listeners’ most mundane practical questions about ritual practice. Eloquent preaching was valued and apparently sometimes elicited cries of ecstasy from women as well as men (although in this case spiritual transport is clearly not involved).

The fact that mosque preaching sessions were particularly potent attractions for female audiences in various parts of the Islamic world is suggested by a striking account by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who traveled through Iran around 726/1326. He states that the people of Shiraz are characterized by virtue, religiosity, and chastity—“particularly its women; they wear boots (khifāf) and go out enveloped [in cloaks] and wearing face veils (multaḥifāt mutabarqiʿāt) so that no part of them is visible.” He praises the women’s charitable activities and observes in wonder that “an astonishing circumstance about them (min gharīb ḥālihinna) is that they gather to hear the preacher (al-wāʿiẓ) every Monday, Thursday and Friday in the Great Mosque; sometimes one or two thousand of them gather, holding fans that they use to fan themselves because of the intense heat.” Ibn Baṭṭūṭa concludes by remarking that he has never seen women gather in such numbers in any other town.170 It is noteworthy that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa is astonished by the magnitude (and perhaps the regularity) of the Shirazi women’s gatherings, but apparently not by their presence in the mosque. It is also significant that, like the women of Nablus in the description of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the women of Shiraz here seem to combine a high degree of visibility in the mosque with an otherwise striking devotion to the ideal of female modesty and concealment.

Although it is always difficult to gauge the comparative magnitude of women’s participation in different mosque-based activities, the evidence seems to suggest that preaching sessions held a particular appeal and were widely frequently by women in various parts of the Islamic world. In a polemic exchange about ṣūfī audition (samāʿ) with Muwaffaq al-Dīn Ibn Qudāma (d. 620/1223), whom he succeeded as the head of the Ḥanbalī school in Damascus, Nāṣiḥ al-Dīn Ibn al-Ḥanbalī (d. 634/1236) argues that the gathering of men and women for pious purposes such as congregational and Friday prayers, preaching sessions, or judicial sittings is not religiously objectionable; indeed, “it is the current practice (al-ʿāda al-jāriya) on holy occasions (al-mawāsim) with this scholar and jurisprudent and his followers (ʿinda hādhā’l-faqīh al-muftī wa-jamāʿatihi), and in sessions of preaching (lit., “reminding”) in all Muslim lands (majālis al-tadhkīr fī sāʾir bilād al-islām).”171 It is interesting that women’s participation along with men at special times in the religious calendar is here presented as a distinctive practice of the Damascene Ḥanbalī establishment, whereas women’s attendance at preaching sessions is posited as a ubiquitous Islamic custom.

If women’s presence at mosque preaching sessions was a widespread phenomenon, however, it seems to have been particularly salient in Damascus and other parts of Syria. In the sixth/twelfth century, the Syrian al-Shayzarī writes about preaching sessions in his manual for muḥtasibs in a passage dealing with the gathering places of women (emphasizing, as was by now routine, that they should be separated from men by a screen).¹⁷² Women could participate in such sessions not only as members of the audience but also as preachers in their own right. Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176) observes of his Damascene contemporary Fāṭima (Sitt al-ʿAjam) bint Sahl that “she used to preach to women in some of the mosques.”¹⁷³ A century and a half later, Fāṭima bint ʿAbbās ibn Abī’l-Fatḥ (d. 714/1315), whose activities as a religious teacher began in Damascus and continued in Egypt after she moved there sometime after 700 AH, was particularly known for the fact that “she used to ascend the pulpit and preach to the women.” The circumstance of her preaching from the minbar was particularly disturbing to Ibn Taymīya until he had a dream in which the Prophet Muḥammad himself assured him of her virtue.¹⁷⁴

The enthralling preacher Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 654/1256) attracted crowds of men and women alike to his preaching sessions in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus and the Jāmiʿ al-Jabal (also known as the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī or Jāmiʿ al-Ḥanābila, the Mosque of the Ḥanbalīs). His contemporary Abū Shāma recounts that the gatherings at these mosques were crowded with innumerable men and women, with “the women separated from the men (bi-maʿzal ʿan al-rijāl).” Interestingly, his description of Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī’s preaching forms an admiring mirror image of the very qualities and practices that were denounced by al-Ghazālī a century and a half earlier. Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī’s physical charm and pleasant voice, his dress, and his movements all contributed, according to Abū Shāma, to make his preaching sessions “one of the adornments and pleasures of this world (min maḥāsin al-dunyā wa-ladhdhātihā).”175 Abū Shāma’s description is almost defiantly worldly, positioning al-Jawzī’s preaching as a gratification in this life (al-dunyā) rather than a reminder of the next (al-ākhira). Despite Abū Shāma’s unabashedly appreciative attitude, his description confirms pious complaints that preaching sometimes constituted a form of mass entertainment.¹⁷⁶

One of the richest sources for another form of publicly accessible religious instruction is the collection of Damascene samāʿāt, records of formal readings of individual works (ḥadīth collections, legal treatises, and the like), compiled by Stefan Leder, Yāsīn al-Sawwās, and Maʾmūn al-Ṣāgharjī. These documents, dating from 550/1155 to 750/1349, record the dates on which the works were read and the names of those who performed the reading, presided over it, and attended it. In most cases, they also state the location of the reading, sometimes only in general terms (for instance, “Damascus”), but more often identifying a specific mosque, madrasa, dār al-ḥadīth, or private home. The samāʿāt in the collection were compiled as a representative sample from a flourishing period in Syrian intellectual life. Even though the incomplete nature of the record—both of the surviving samāʿāt in general and of the compiled selections in particular—precludes absolute or quantitative conclusions about the locales of women’s formal learning activities, these documents do provide a unique window into thousands of concrete incidents of religious learning. The samāʿāt in this collection make it clear that women participated actively in educational gatherings in mosques, as well as in all of the other venues where such readings occurred. However, they also suggest that women’s participation was proportionately quite limited as compared to that of men.¹⁷⁷

For instance, based on the index of the collection, four of the samāʿāt record sessions that occurred in mosques were presided over by women (in three out of the four cases, alongside men).178 Of these, two took place in the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī on Mount Qāsiyūn, one in the Masjid al-Bayāṭira of Damascus, and the last (exceptionally) at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina rather than in Damascus. At least thirty-five of the samāʿāt record female auditors at readings that took place in mosques.¹⁷⁹ Of these, strikingly, eighteen are recorded to have occurred in a single mosque, the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī. Of the remaining sessions, five took place at the Umayyad Mosque, two at the Masjid al-Bayāṭira, and three at the Ḥanbalī mosque in the town of Baʿlabakk. The rest took place at a scattering of other mosques. The incidence of women’s participation appears to reflect different patterns for individual mosques; for instance, women appear to have been present at a small fraction of the many sessions recorded for the Umayyad Mosque, but at a relatively high proportion of the smaller numbers recorded for the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī and for the Ḥanbalī mosque of Baʿlabakk.¹⁸⁰ It is significant that both of these mosques were associated specifically with the Ḥanbalī madhhab; the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī (also known as the Jāmiʿ al-Ḥanābila) served the important Ḥanbalī community on Mount Qasyūn.

In his study of the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī, Muḥammad Muṭīʿ al-Ḥāfiẓ identifies seven samāʿāt documenting sessions of ḥadīth transmission at that mosque presided over by one or more female authorities.¹⁸¹ He observes that it was a distinctive practice at that particular mosque for ḥadīth sessions to be held under the auspices of a group of people authorized to transmit the text rather than of an individual; such sessions were unusually likely to include female scholars (who otherwise might prefer to hold sessions in their homes).¹⁸² One session held in 707/1307 was presided over by fourteen shaykhs, including six women.¹⁸³

Overall, the evidence of these Damascene samāʿāt suggests that mosques (particularly certain individual mosques) were accessible to women who wished to attend readings of scholarly works. Nevertheless, mosques were not the main venue where they did so, and their numbers were comparatively small. Konrad Hirschler notes that in the Damascus samāʿāt, “the relatively low importance of mosques as venues for readings under female authorized teachers contrasts with the overall figure … where 29 percent of all readings were held in mosques.” However, it would be difficult to draw sharp categorical distinctions between (for instance) madrasas and mosques, which tended to be multifunctional spaces; madrasas in this period were places of regular congregational prayer and often housed pulpits for the Friday sermon, and mosques routinely functioned as places of both formal and informal group instruction. The two terms were sometimes used interchangeably for the same institution.¹⁸⁴

There is reason to think that at least some women preferentially participated in sessions held in private homes (and perhaps, in some cases, in madrasas). For instance, the prominent ḥadīth authority Zaynab bint al-Kamāl is recorded to have co-led at least three sessions in the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī.185 However, of the thirty-four sessions that she is recorded to have led or attended in the samāʿāt collected by Leder, al-Sawwās, and al-Ṣāghirjī, only one is explicitly stated to have been held in a mosque, as compared to thirteen in her home and eight in madrasas.¹⁸⁶ Zaynab bint ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān presided over four readings of one specific text between 706 and 718, all of them in her own home, but apparently did not participate in readings of the same work in 705 or 708 at the Umayyad Mosque.¹⁸⁷ Several other women listed in the index show similar patterns of selectively attending readings in private homes.¹⁸⁸ Of course, without further information (which is unavailable for many of the women listed in the samāʿāt) it is impossible to isolate many of the factors that might have kept some women away from readings held in mosques. As Asma Sayeed has observed,¹⁸⁹ Zaynab bint al-Kamāl was very elderly at the dates of all of the samāʿāt recorded in the collection; it may be that the privileges of age allowed her greater public activity than would have been possible in her youth or that her prestige as a transmitter rose with the death of others who had heard ḥadīth from the same authorities. Not all of the women who presided over ḥadīth sessions in mosques were in their dotage; Ḥabība bint Ibrāhīm al-Maqdisīya is reported to have been born in 654 AH, which would have made her fifty-three lunar years old at the time of the session she co-led in the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī in 707 (she lived another thirty-eight years, until 745/1344–45).¹⁹⁰ Fāṭima al-Maqdisīya, who participated in the same session and died in 734 at “over eighty,” was probably in her mid-fifties.¹⁹¹ These women may have enjoyed the privileges of maturity, but they were not crones, and their role cannot be attributed to their outliving other transmitters.

It is probably not coincidental that a number of scholars who affirmed women’s entitlement to visit the mosque were linked with the Syrian Ḥanbalī milieu and with the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī of Damascus in particular. Muwaffaq al-Dīn Ibn Qudāma came from the Jerusalem area (where, as we shall see, there was a history of women’s attendance at Friday prayers) and moved with his family to the Ṣāliḥīya quarter of Damascus, where he served at times as imam and khaṭīb of the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī.192 The Ḥanbalī ḥadīth network of al-Ṣāliḥīya also influenced traditionists of other origins and schools. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī spent time there and studied extensively with at least one female scholar, as well as spending time in the Jāmiʿ al-Muẓaffarī; it seems likely that he encountered women traditionists within the mosque.¹⁹³

The fragmentary but fascinating evidence of the Damascene samāʿāt suggests both that a number of women functioned (often with great distinction) in the public arena of formal textual transmission and that it was quite possible for them to do so in at least some mosques (particularly within the Ḥanbalī community). The relatively small proportion of women reflected in the published selection of samāʿāt also suggests, however, that this form of educational participation may have been limited to a relatively small sector of the female population as compared to attendance at preaching and teaching sessions where believers listened without playing a part in the formal process of textual transmission. (It also involved a relatively small proportion of the overall male population, of course, although male participants far outnumbered women.) Women (like men) identified in samāʿ documents represented a wide socioeconomic range, from craftsmen’s daughters to members of the ruling house;¹⁹⁴ however, those with the training to preside over sessions enjoyed some degree of social and religious prestige. A taboo against women’s presence within mosques would not unilaterally explain the relative paucity of women at sessions of formal transmission or the most famous female transmitters’ apparent preference for other venues. It may be that the relatively high social status and distinctive piety of women who distinguished themselves as ḥadīth transmitters, rather than any categorical difficulty in venturing into mosques, contributed to the overrepresentation of female-led sessions in other locations.

The widespread, but (to some scholars) sometimes disturbing presence of women at preaching sessions is addressed in a fatwa by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Bukhārī (d. 841/1437), whose legal reasoning has already been discussed in the first chapter of this study.195 Al-Bukhārī spent the later years of his life in Syria, and this fatwa is preserved in manuscript in Jerusalem, leading to a strong inference that it was composed in the Syrian period of al-Bukhārī’s life (although it is possible that he received the question from farther afield). As is the case with many inquiries directed to legal scholars, this one is carefully crafted to elicit a specific response through an alarming description of the existing reality. The beginning of the question (istiftāʾ) reads as follows:

What do their honors the religious scholars … say about some of the preacher-storytellers (quṣṣāṣ) who sit in the mosques while throngs of women gather around them so that the gathering is packed with [women]; [the preacher] is sitting on a seat (kursī) and they [feminine plural] are sitting in front of him, to his right, and to his left; sometimes [the women] are by themselves, no man being with them, and sometimes there are men in the gathering sitting in it with [the women]—is this right, or is it one of the objectionable matters (al-umūr al-munkara) that the rulers are obligated to denounce and change, and to prevent the preachers from [holding] them and prevent the women from attending them?¹⁹⁶

Al-Bukhārī responds to this anguished inquiry as if he is personally well aware of the phenomenon in question; rather than expressing incredulity or surprise, he implies that it is both perfectly familiar and personally distressing. In his answer, he refers to “those ignorant quṣṣāṣ holding the mīʿād for women in mosques and other locations.”197 Al-Bukhārī’s remark suggests two things. First, by stating that the preachers “hold” or “convene” (ʿaqd) such sessions “for women,” he implies that women were not simply present at spontaneous instances of storytelling and preaching that occurred informally within the mosques. The word mīʿād (literally, “appointment”) inherently designates a regularly scheduled session, and according to al-Bukhārī some preachers were holding such sessions specifically “for women.” Writing about contemporary Cairo, Berkey has observed that the word mīʿād came to designate a regular (often weekly) lesson intended to disseminate general religious knowledge to a broader public.¹⁹⁸ Relatively accessible religious texts, particularly ḥadīth, seem to have predominated. Although these sessions were “popular” in the sense of being directed broadly and inclusively at the Muslim public, one must not conflate broad accessibility with “popular” or “folk” Islam; as Berkey observes, “becoming a shaykh al-mīʿād [the officially designated teacher of such a session] required considerable training, as did any other educational post.”¹⁹⁹ Similar caution is in order in interpreting “preacher-storyteller” (qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ), as used by the questioner in his inquiry. Even though the term can evoke an uneducated purveyor of wild tales (and is probably selected by al-Bukhārī and his disapproving questioner for precisely this reason), preaching and storytelling in mosques were also legitimate religious functions that were exercised by many individuals of genuine learning and unquestionable orthodoxy.²⁰⁰ The accusation that such sessions were convened by “ignorant quṣṣāṣ” is probably polemical, although we cannot know the precise nature of the knowledge these unnamed individuals purveyed.

Regardless of the precise content of the preaching or teaching involved, al-Bukhārī’s fatwa manifestly reflects a situation where large audiences composed partially or completely of women routinely attended sessions in many mosques. Both the questioner and al-Bukhārī himself seem to regard this as an existing social reality, although they are far from being resigned to it on religious terms; as we have seen in chapter 1, the prevalence of women’s presence in mosques spurred al-Bukhārī to an unprecedented level of normative condemnation of women’s mosque attendance. Other evidence similarly suggests that women’s presence in the mosques of Damascus in the Mamlūk period was widespread, but sometimes controversial. The diarist Ibn Ṭawq writes of Shawwāl of 889 (October–November 1484):

It occurred that women attended the congregational mosque (ḥadatha ḥuḍūr al-nisāʾ fī’l-jāmiʿ) in the aforementioned month every night; al-Najmī emboldened them (qawwāhunna) to do that. When the day that the completion of the reading of the [Prophet’s] life story (yawm khatmat al-sīra) came, their numbers increased greatly—may God not increase his [al-Najmī’s] or their likes!—and they mixed (ikhtalaṭna) with the men. There is no might and no power except in God! The same thing happened in Jāmiʿ al-Manjak and Masjid al-Aqṣāb, [the women] mixing with the men. Shameless things increased in quantity and magnitude; there is no power except with God! We ask God for that to pass away, and that He not hold us accountable for our bad actions.²⁰¹

These sincerely appalled remarks, recorded in a personal diary rather than in a scholarly polemic, suggest that women’s unsegregated presence in Syrian mosques at night was sufficiently unusual to evoke shock and wonderment from a contemporary observer. It is also notable that Ibn Ṭawq names an individual who has apparently actively encouraged the women’s attendance, suggesting that it was not completely routine.202 However, it was also clearly not unique, as the same thing was occurring in at least two other mosques in Damascus. It is unclear whether Ibn Ṭawq would have been equally offended if the women had attended the mosque without “mixing” with men.

In any case, the mass presence of women and children on such occasions was far from unique. Around the beginning of the same century, the Damascene Ibn al-Naḥḥās (d. 814/1411) had complained—echoing concerns expressed by predecessors such as Ibn al-Ḥājj, but quite clearly describing the sordid details of practice in his own time—of the excesses that occurred at al-Aqṣā and other mosques (al-jawāmiʿ wa’l-masājid) on the night of the Miʿrāj (celebrated on the twenty-seventh of Rajab) and on Niṣf Shaʿbān, when richly illuminated mosques were thronged with riotous crowds of men, women, and children. He describes in particular detail the sanitary problems caused when women and children spent the night in the mosque and soiled its carpets.²⁰³

As in other parts of the Islamic world, in Syria the mosque was also the site for activities other than worship and religious teaching. As recorded in Ibn Ṭawq’s diary, marriages were often concluded in mosques, although the bride would not necessarily have been present on such an occasion. Nevertheless, women sometimes attended; in one case, Ibn Ṭawq states that the female matchmaker (khāṭiba) was present at a marriage solemnized in a mosque.²⁰⁴ Despite the disapproval of the prevalent Shāfiʿī school, judicial sessions continued to be held in mosques in medieval Syria. Al-Shayzarī’s manual for muḥtasibs states that those officials ought to “frequent the sessions of the judges and arbiters and forbid them from sitting in the Friday prayer mosques and ordinary mosques to judge between the people” because menstruating women and other ritually impure people often must appear before them; furthermore, loud altercations disturb the peace of the mosque.²⁰⁵ Although al-Shayzarī states that these things are forbidden (ḥarām), he also clearly assumes that they occur.

In the early sixteenth century, a prominent Shāfiʿī scholar from the northern Syrian city of Hama wrote a series of works touching on the issue of women’s presence in mosques. ʿAlī ibn ʿAṭīya al-Ḥamawī, known as al-Shaykh ʿAlwān (d. 936/1530), was a legal scholar and celebrated ṣūfī who was also well known for his preaching.206 His critique of the conduct of his contemporaries in Syrian mosques suggests that Muslims of both genders continued to flock to hear popular preachers. He writes in one work,

As for the praise-chanter (maddāḥ) of [our] time, if he is a preacher (wāʿiẓ) his main concern is to make an ostentatious show of his voice, to attract the regard of women and men and have them crowd around him … so that a woman will tell her [female] friend that “So-and-so the preacher has a voice that would bring the birds down from the trees” and she will have a yen to see him and hear his voice, and will go out without her husband’s permission, disobeying God and His Prophet. If [the preacher] sees that his gathering (majlis) is packed with women he becomes conceited about his voice when he chants.²⁰⁷

Furthermore, the sight of the handsomely turned-out preacher may inspire envy and discontent in women with less well-dressed and attractive spouses.²⁰⁸ He concludes,

Shaykh ʿAlwān goes on to complain of the preacher whose pretentious comportment discourages ordinary listeners from inquiring about things that they do not understand, while eliciting their admiration for his erudition. He also caters to his audience’s lower tastes by playing on their emotions, so that “women and men come from the lesson (al-mīʿād) deluded and dazzled by its attractiveness because of the corrupt gratifications their lower souls enjoyed from it, saying, ‘Today the faqīh made the men and women cry until the gathering was in a clamor.’”²¹⁰ He also criticizes the preacher’s recitation of erotic and mystical verses. In response to an anticipated objection that the Companions are reported to have recited poetry in the mosque in the presence of the Prophet himself (who sometimes smiled in response), he asks rhetorically, “See if they had with them in their gathering women who surrounded them, displaying their charms (or adornments: zīna) to them, and the men too displaying their charms to [the women], neither of the two groups casting down its eyes from the other?!”²¹¹

Shaykh ʿAlwān’s discussion of this problem insistently observes that it affects both men and women, who may be left without the knowledge correctly to discharge such basic religious duties as ablution and prayer.²¹² He exhorts preachers to remedy this situation by lecturing on the elementary knowledge that believers need in order to fulfill their religious obligations. False modesty should not prevent them from explaining necessary (if embarrassing) matters such as the rules of menstrual purity.²¹³

In a work of the “mirrors for princes” genre, Shaykh ʿAlwān counsels that the doors of mosques should be kept locked except at prayer time and that “seductive women (al-nisāʾ al-muftināt) should be prevented from entering them when there is fear of insult [to the mosque] or of corruption.” It is also necessary to “prevent preachers and traditionists (al-muḥaddithīn) from bringing together women and men without a barrier (ḥijāb) [between them].”214 Nevertheless, this does not seem to have been the practice in reality. In another work, Shaykh ʿAlwān complains of what is done by “some of those who claim to be scholars and sit in the neighborhood or Friday mosque (al-masjid wa’l-jāmiʿ) on the preacher’s seat (kursī) to recite the ḥadīth of the Prophet.” He describes how “a group of men and women gathers around him without a barrier [separating them] or any shame; he recites to them things that will ingratiate him to them and for which they will praise him, such as special dispensations (al-rukhaṣ) and ḥadīths related to hope [of God’s mercy],” as if he were trying to lure them into sin. All of this, he declares, is motivated by the preacher’s desire to win money from the poor (presumably by attracting donations from a maximally large audience).²¹⁵ In support of his objection to this practice, Shaykh ʿAlwān then presents lengthy verbatim citations of the relevant opinions of al-Ghazālī and Taqī al-Dīn al-Ḥiṣnī, who both (as we have seen in chapter 1) emphasize the alleged statement of ʿĀʾisha as grounds for the position that latter-day women should not attend mosques at all.²¹⁶ Resuming his discussion of contemporary ḥadīth scholars and preachers, Shaykh ʿAlwān exclaims,

How remarkable for someone who knows this [i.e., the authoritative doctrine of al-Ghazālī and al-Ḥiṣnī], has affirmed it, memorized it, and taught it—how he sits with women in the worst of generations [i.e., the present one] in the houses of God—glorious and exalted is He!—without a curtain or barrier, [the women] being mingled with young men, single men, and the like, and sees them commit various kinds of objectionable actions with respect to their wrappers, the “cockscomb” caps²¹⁷ that they wear on their heads, and the like, including thin clothes, fragrant scents, noise, the crying of children and their urinating on the carpets, [the women’s] omitting to perform the dawn prayer, and other things. Sometimes a woman among them enters the congregational mosque (al-jāmiʿ) when she is in a state of pollution from menstruation or sexual intercourse because of her ignorance; and not one of them asks her husband’s permission [to go out].²¹⁸

One of the mixed-gender practices that Shaykh ʿAlwān singles out for censure is the completion of a full recitation (khatm) of the ḥadīth compilation of al-Bukhārī, which was not only an authoritative source for the statements and actions of the Prophet Muḥammad but also a work of enormous sanctity whose ritualized recitation was considered highly auspicious.219 Writing about the reforms that were introduced to his own mosque by his ṣūfī master ʿAlī ibn Maymūn, a North African well versed in Mālikī law, Shaykh ʿAlwān states,

Our mosque used to be prepared to receive guests and for people to eat food in it at weddings and condolence gatherings (al-ʿazāʾ); this continued until God facilitated [its abolition] and protected [the mosque] from the refuse of food, bones, and dogs entering. Many innovations were eliminated from it, including [the fact] that we used to recite [the Ṣaḥīḥ of] al-Bukhārī and men would mingle with women without a barrier [between them], which is a sin. He [i.e., ʿAlī ibn Maymūn] allowed us to recite it only with a barrier erected between us and the women.²²⁰

In another passage, Shaykh ʿAlwān expresses his remorse for his own past participation in this practice and again complains of the innovations (bidaʿ) associated with it, particularly the mixing of men and women.²²¹ It is perhaps significant that both references to mixed-sex audiences at readings of the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī occur in immediate conjunction with critiques of practices associated with weddings; it is possible that such ceremonies were used to generate religious merit on the auspicious occasion of a marriage, although Shaykh ʿAlwān does not state so explicitly. The presiding reader was paid by the sponsor of the ceremony (ṣāḥib al-qirāʾa) and was apparently showered with costly items on the occasion of the reading, which were then returned when the sponsor paid the cash that was owed. The reading seems to have culminated with the scholar leading a celebratory procession of both sexes, the women ululating festively.²²²

Shaykh ʿAlwān describes the mosque as a lively community space where people gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to partake of religiously edifying entertainment. What emerges most vividly from his frequent and passionate remarks about the presence of women in mosques is the sharp tension between his religious conviction that women should not be present (or at least visible to men) in mosques and his factual recognition that they are. Although his description of women’s dress and behavior in the mosque is fundamentally shaped by stereotyped language drawn from the normative sources of the Qur’an and ḥadīth (and by the polemics produced by his ṣūfī master), his rueful recognition of women’s high visibility in mosques is clearly an acknowledgment of social realities in contemporary Syria and in his own local mosque. He writes,

[Women] go out to mosques, [religious] gatherings, graveyards, public baths, and visits of congratulation and condolence in a seductive way and with an objectionable appearance, flaunting their adornments [c.f. Qur’an 24:60], “swaying and sashaying, their heads like the humps of lean camels”223 with fillets, “cockscomb” headdresses (al-ʿaṣāʾib wa’l-muqanzaʿāt) and the like. The curse of God is upon them, so they are accursed, and they will not smell the scent of Paradise or enter it, as is authoritatively transmitted in many reports. And they are not rebuked for this (lā yunkar dhālika ʿalayhinna); rather, in [religious] gatherings and Friday mosques (al-majāmiʿ wa’l-jawāmiʿ) they are mixed with the men, and surrounded by forbidden gazing.²²⁴

A few pages later in the same work, he laments the “afflictions and calamities observed in our land,” averring that “I am honest and not lying in what I report!” He continues,

How little and insignificant is the manly honor (murūʾa) of someone who enables his daughter to be present at these corruptions! The valid legal ruling (al-fatwā) in this time of ours, according to those possessing religious knowledge and piety, is that [women] should be forbidden from going to mosques—nay, ʿĀʾisha (may God be satisfied with her!) [already] gave a legal opinion to this effect in her own generation, the best of generations, so what do you think of the corrupt tenth century [of the hijra]? You should not imagine that she was the only one who held this opinion; rather, a vast number of earlier and later religious scholars held it.²²⁵

The tension between normative condemnation of women’s mosque attendance—at least on the part of a vocal minority of religious scholars—and its apparent de facto prevalence is also reflected in the work of Shaykh ʿAlwān’s religious mentor, the Maghribī ṣūfī master Abū’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Maymūn (d. 917/1511).226 Ibn Maymūn came from North Africa and settled for a time in the Ṣāliḥīya neighborhood of Damascus, where in 910/1504–5 he wrote a polemic condemning what he considered to be the religiously deviant practices of religious scholars and ṣūfīs in the Islamic East (al-mashriq)—practices that (he states in the introduction to the work) he had not observed in North Africa.²²⁷ Embarking on his polemic against preachers, he begins by inveighing against

their satanic practices (aḥwālihim al-shayṭānīya) in Damascus and other [localities] in its province (ʿamal) of bringing together men and women without a barrier [separating them] in neighborhood and Friday mosques (al-masājid wa’l-jawāmiʿ), the women trailing their finery of jewelry and robes, mincing, perfumed, seductive, swaying and sashaying, with [headdresses] on their heads “like the humps of lean camels.” This misguided and misguiding, rebellious sinner mounts the preacher’s seat above them in the garments of his worldly adornment.²²⁸

Although the preacher cites verses of the Qur’an and ḥadīth texts, Ibn Maymūn continues, he himself is condemned and cursed by them. In particular, he is acting in contravention of verse 33:53 (which instructs the Believers that, if they must ask the wives of the Prophet for something, they should do so “from behind a curtain” or barrier, ḥijāb) and verse 33:33 (which instructs the wives of the Prophet to “remain in your homes” and not to flaunt their beauty, as was done in the pre-Islamic Time of Ignorance).²²⁹ He characterizes those who gather men and women together without a barrier in the houses of God as causing more corruption to Islam than tavern keepers or fornicators; everyone recognizes that the latter are sinning, and thus no one emulates them.²³⁰ Not only the preachers but also their audiences are condemned by their participation in mixed preaching gatherings. Ibn Maymūn’s lurid description of the men’s and women’s mutual gazing culminates with the assertion that they are effectively committing adultery (zinā) with their eyes and leave accursed by God and His angels.²³¹

Significantly, Ibn Maymūn’s comments make it clear that he considers mixed preaching gatherings to be distinctively a feature of religious life in Damascus and its environs. Certainly it would appear that, whatever the presence of women in North African mosques in his time, Syrian women’s high level of visibility in such gatherings struck him as noteworthy and offensive. It is also significant that Shaykh ʿAlwān appears to have been a full and unquestioning participant in mixed-sex readings of al-Bukhārī before becoming the disciple of ʿAlī ibn Maymūn; only retrospectively does he regard his own participation in this custom as cause for repentance and remorse. On this issue as well as others of the same kind, Shaykh ʿAlwān would appear to have had an unusually censorious attitude toward the social and religious practices prevalent in his environment.232 As we have seen, evidence from North Africa suggests that in that region there was a long tradition of architecturally and visually distinct women’s space in mosques. It is possible that the crowded gatherings of Syrian preachers, where women often seem to have sat in full view of men, would have been genuinely novel to a Maghribī observer. Of course, disapproval of women’s activities in Syrian mosques was not a completely new or alien phenomenon; objections had already been expressed by Syrians such as al-Ḥiṣnī. The glaring discrepancy between Shaykh ʿAlwān’s normative sentiments on women’s mosque attendance and the realities of contemporary Syrian religious practice probably reflects both a systemic dissonance between religious discourses and local practice and this particular scholar’s exposure to influences rooted in another region of the Islamic world.

The case of the Aqṣā Mosque of Jerusalem is sufficiently distinctive to warrant separate attention. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a small but lively subculture of female ascetics lived in pious retreat there in the early period. Again, the available evidence dates from a later period and may reflect a lasting awareness of women’s presence in the mosque in Jerusalem more than the concrete circumstances of women in the historical period when the anecdotes are set. Omaima Abou-Bakr has noted that such references are particularly plentiful in the Ṣifat al-ṣafwa of Abū’l-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200).233 Ibn al-Jawzī’s hagiographical accounts of often anonymous early figures show little interest in historical specificity; however, overall the anecdotes suggest that extended or permanent retreats in the mosque (iʿtikāf) were a particularly prominent feature of the pious practice of some women in Jerusalem. In one, a visitor reports, “I saw many women wearing chemises of wool and veils (khumur), dwelling in retreat in the mosque (muʿtakifāt fī’l-masjid), not speaking during the day.”²³⁴ In another, a group of men encounters a young woman (jāriya) in the mosque wearing a hair chemise and a woolen veil.²³⁵ In both of these cases, the women’s attire clearly signifies asceticism and self-mortification. Another anecdote speaks of a group of about ten female devotees who have brought their spindles to the mosque “and leave it only for a polluting bodily function (ḥadath) or a necessary errand (ḥāja).”²³⁶ Although historically unspecific, based on their (admittedly rather casual) attribution these anecdotes would appear to be set in the late first or the second century AH. However, the culture of female devotees resident in the Aqṣā Mosque seems to have survived for centuries. In the first half of the twelfth century, Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148) reports, “I saw in the Aqṣā Mosque chaste women who did not go out of their place of religious retreat (muʿtakafihinna) until they died as martyrs there.”²³⁷

Descriptions of the Aqṣā Mosque also suggest that it had several enclosures (maqāṣīr) reserved specifically for women. Writing at the turn of the tenth century CE, Ibn al-Faqīh notes that “within the mosque are three enclosures for women, the length of each enclosure being seventy cubits (dhirāʿ).”238 Early in the same century, Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih writes that “in the mosque there are three enclosures for women, each of which is eighty cubits long by fifty cubits in width.”²³⁹ It is ambiguous, however, whether such descriptions of the “mosque of Jerusalem” refer exclusively to al-Aqṣā or to the entirety of the Ḥaram—that is, the enclosed complex of holy sites also known as the Temple Mount. In the context of the sanctuary at Jerusalem, the term masjid was used in both ways.²⁴⁰ The large reported size of the women’s enclosures suggests that they may not have been within the mosque proper. If the women’s enclosures were indeed in the plaza surrounding the Aqṣā Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, this suggests extensive female attendance at the large communal prayers—on Fridays and festivals—when the plaza itself would have been one large place of worship, with rows of both male and female worshipers filling the pavement. This would leave open the nature of women’s accommodations within the mosque building.

In later centuries, one of the buildings contiguous to the Aqṣā Mosque came to be known as the Women’s Mosque (Jāmiʿ al-Nisāʾ). It seems natural to assume that this name originated with the use of the structure as a women’s prayer space; however, available sources do not appear to provide further information about such use. In the first half of the fourteenth century CE, Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī points out that the Women’s Mosque, like the Mosque of the Moroccans, is colloquially known by the term designating Friday mosques (jāmiʿ) despite the fact that it does not have a Friday sermon; each of them simply has an imam who leads the five daily prayers.²⁴¹ He says nothing about an exclusively female congregation, perhaps implying that by his time “Women’s Mosque” was a traditional label rather than a current functional description. Nevertheless, his other remarks reflect the existence of facilities for women’s prayer activities in the Ḥaram complex in his own time. Describing one part of the complex, he mentions an arcaded space nineteen and one-half cubits long and nine cubits wide, “where some women now perform the five prayers behind the imams.”²⁴² Al-ʿUmarī also indicates the existence of separate sanitary facilities for women, which also suggests the significant presence of female worshipers.²⁴³ In any case, even if special accommodations were provided for women’s group prayer at times of communal worship, women clearly also used space within the main body of the mosque. Mujīr al-Dīn refers in passing to “the place where the women sit near Biʾr al-Waraqa,” a location within the Aqṣā Mosque.²⁴⁴

In the late fifteenth century, Félix Fabri provided a rather detailed (and frankly admiring) description of women’s presence in the Aqṣā Mosque. Whatever separate or external spaces might have been reserved for women at times of particular crowding, he makes it clear that they also have space (apparently unenclosed) within the mosque proper: “Women have a door of their own, through which they enter both the temple and the courtyard thereof, and their own aisle in the temple, wherein they pray apart from the men.”245 Comparing the cleanliness and reverent atmosphere of the mosques of Jerusalem favorably with the disorder and disrepair of Christian churches (in Jerusalem and elsewhere), Fabri writes with some pathos:

O human brother, would that thou couldst see at Jerusalem how reverend is the appearance of this temple of the execrable Mahomet … how bright and neat everything is kept, how devoutly the worshippers enter therein, how gravely they bear themselves in praying, how modestly the women show themselves there, with their faces always veiled, and how the men pray in silence apart from them! Couldst thou see this, thou wouldst be deeply shocked and grievously wroth with the neglect and irreverence shown by the faithful in our own churches.²⁴⁶

Greater separation of men and women may have been asserted somewhat later; toward the end of the seventeenth century, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī describes how “to the left of someone entering the Masjid al-Aqṣā … there is an enclosed space (makān maḥūṭ) that has only a door opening in the direction of the qibla, which is provided for the women to pray in on Fridays and festivals.”²⁴⁷ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the traveler Ali Bey observed that “the three naves to the left on entering the temple, are inclosed by a wall about seven feet high; this is the place destined for the women.”²⁴⁸ Because the ceiling is elevated far more than seven feet, the enclosure would have been open at the top, allowing women to hear prayers and sermons.

Al-Nābulusī’s remark suggests both that women’s participation in Friday and festival prayers at al-Aqṣā was a routine occurrence and that they may not have been confined to that specific area of the mosque outside of special occasions of communal prayer. Despite the existence of an enclosed section reserved for women’s congregational prayer, it seems that in his time women participated in other ritual activities in the main space of the mosque. Writing of a ceremony in commemoration of the Prophet’s birthday (the mawlid al-nabawī) held in the Aqṣā Mosque after the nighttime prayer, he describes how “the people gathered according to their ranks, the lords (mawālī) and grandees, the religious scholars and learned men, the prayer leaders and preachers, the elite and common men—even women (dhawāt al-ḥijāl), gathered in one area (nāḥiya) of the mosque, and with them the small boys and girls.”249 Here the women are modestly separated from the men, but apparently visible to them.

In any case, the magnitude of women’s participation in congregational prayer in the Aqṣā Mosque appears consistently to have impressed visiting observers, both Muslim and European. Taqī al-Dīn al-Ḥiṣnī (d. 829/1426) argued that women should be forbidden from attending Friday prayers in his own decadent time because of the corruption and mixing with men that could result from their participation, as had actually come to pass, particularly in pilgrimage sites such as Jerusalem.²⁵⁰ Eugène Roger, a Franciscan who traveled in Egypt and Syria and made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1634, states that “women never go to the mosque at all, but on Fridays [the women] of Jerusalem go to the Temple [i.e., the Aqṣā Mosque], and every day in Ramadan.”²⁵¹

In a polemic of the first half of the seventeenth century against objectionable practices current in the Aqṣā Mosque, one of the abuses listed is “the mixing of women with men on Friday without a barrier (ḥāʾil) between them; indeed, some of [the women] remove the horsehair veils²⁵² from their faces, despite their beauty, adornment, and perfume—and what temptation (fitna) could be greater than that?! By God, [the women] sit in various [study] circles among the men, as if the men were close relatives (maḥārim) of theirs, or they were in their homes.” Male food vendors noisily hawk their wares; to the author’s horror they wander among the women and even sit down among them.²⁵³ The author of this work, Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Dajjānī (d. 1071/1661), appears to be concerned less with women’s attendance at Friday prayers than with their participation in study circles and their presence in the audience of preachers (al-wāʾiẓ) without any barrier between the sexes.²⁵⁴ Significantly, he does not represent the presence of mixed audiences at preaching sessions as a phenomenon specific to al-Aqṣā; it appears in a list of “innovations” that are practiced in neighborhood and congregational mosques (al-masājid wa’l-jawāmiʿ). He also describes mosques as the sites of celebrations (ḍiyāfa) for weddings and circumcisions and of judicial transactions such as the documentation of bridal payments and khulʿ divorces.²⁵⁵

Much like Ibn al-Ḥājj several centuries before, al-Dajjānī describes major noncanonical festivals as occasions for carnivalistic behavior in mixed crowds. On the eighth of the month of Shawwāl, a holiday celebrated in honor of the Virgin Mary, “you see, O my brother, men and women, throng upon throng, troop upon troop; lads hop and shriek in it [i.e., the mosque],” while “vendors sell sweets, pan-pipes (zamāmīr), spinning-tops, drums, tambourines, pictures, and other things.” Even worse is a festival known as the “days of visitors,” when the mosque turns into a fair full of vendors’ booths; “everyone who has wares guards a spot and puts his things there to sell them, and among them are women.”256 Al-Dajjānī also complains of mingling among men and women on more conventional religious occasions, such as the night of Niṣf Shaʿbān, when the mosque was illuminated with thousands of lamps.²⁵⁷

It is striking that on a normative level al-Dajjānī seems to be advocating women’s almost complete exclusion from the mosque, largely by citing the comments of al-Ghazālī. Elsewhere, when listing undesirable elements and practices that should be excluded from the mosque, he states (in between references to dirty sandals and noisy children) that “women should not be allowed to enter it.”²⁵⁸ It is unclear whether al-Dajjānī makes such statements in a legal or a hortatory mode. In any case, the sharp contrast between al-Dajjānī’s stated ideal (a mosque with a minimal female presence) and his depiction of reality (mosques with a significant and lively female presence) again suggests the degree to which normative statements on the subject of women’s mosque attendance often wistfully respond to social practice rather than imperiously dictating it.