Whereas for the premodern period we have an abundance of normative sources and a paucity of information about de facto ritual practice, for more recent times the situation is reversed. Particularly for the later part of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first, growing numbers of ethnographic and social-scientific studies illuminate women’s growing presence in mosques and the religious, political, and gender dynamics surrounding it. Rather than attempting to add to that literature, which goes beyond the textual source-base and methodology of this study, this chapter will bring our discussion full circle by returning to the analysis of the underlying construction of gender in modern legal discussions of women’s mosque access.
ISLAMIC REFORM FROM THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The turn of the twentieth century saw the emergence of newly positive attitudes toward women’s mosque attendance by reformist Islamic thinkers. However, the agenda of these authors was not simply to grant women access to mosques but also to ensure that mosques served as loci for the dissemination of religiously sound practices and doctrines to women. Their receptivity to women’s public prayer and enthusiasm for women’s religious education was balanced by their disdain for many of the mosque-based practices that women had traditionally pursued.
For instance, the Syrian modernist Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī (d. 1914) complains bitterly about women’s visitation of sacred sites within mosques. He notes that it is a women’s custom to visit and circumambulate the shrine of John the Baptist in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus on Saturday mornings; one of their “superstitions,” al-Qāsimī observes with disdain, is the belief that doing so for forty Saturdays will ensure the fulfillment of any wish.1 However, it was precisely in mosques that women were to be disabused of their unorthodox religious ideas and instilled with sound knowledge. “How much women today need a preacher (wāʿiẓ),” he lamented, “particularly since innovations, objectionable practices, deviant beliefs, disobedience of husbands, and uncountable forbidden things have become prevalent among them.” His proposed solution was that the public authorities designate a mosque where women would receive instruction on a specific day, at which time guards should be posted to prevent the entry of men. It is the religious scholars’ misplaced zeal in excluding women from mosques that has contributed to women’s ignorance, al-Qāsimī concludes—and all of this is the inauspicious result of defying the Prophet’s guidance, which clearly prohibits men from excluding women from mosques. As for the report of ʿĀʾisha, by saying that, if the Prophet had seen what women innovated he would have forbidden “them” from going to mosques, she must have meant “the ones who wear perfume.” “For this reason a woman is instructed to refrain from wearing perfume and displaying herself immodestly; otherwise, closing the door [of the mosque] against them completely means opening it to endless ignorance. For they are commanded to acquire knowledge and learn, because it is an obligation of every male and female Muslim.”2
Much like al-Qāsimī, Egyptian reformers sometimes expressed concern about the unorthodox or “superstitious” ways in which women traditionally accessed the sacred space of mosques. Muḥammad ʿAbduh advocated intervention by the state against women’s mosque and shrine visitation practices that had been noted as early as the fourteenth century in the work of Ibn al-Ḥājj. In 1297 AH/1880 CE, he wrote in the official government journal al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣrīya that the authorities should forbid the crowded gatherings that took place in the “famous mosques” on specific days of the week, such as those in the Mosque of Sayyida Zaynab on Sundays and Wednesdays and in the Mosque of al-Ḥusayn on Saturdays and Tuesdays (as well as on the festival of ʿAshūrāʾ). On these occasions, he writes, “women and men mix in a way that is forbidden by both the sacred law and [human] nature (al-sharʿ wa’l-ṭabʿ).” Aside from the repugnant acts that are committed, he claims, these boisterous gatherings make it impossible for worshipers to pray undisturbed.3
In 1904, ʿAbduh’s student Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) published a fatwa in response to an inquiry from a village in the province of Damietta that provides a rare glimpse of women’s activities in a mosque outside of the metropolis. It describes how some women furtively brought a sick child to the mosque and sat under the pulpit during the Friday sermon, hoping that this would bring about healing. The discovery of the group led to their expulsion by the imam (exclaiming, “These are innovations, and [women]4 are not allowed to enter the mosques of God in this way!”) and vigorous defense by the congregation. Riḍā responded briskly that “the imam was correct to forbid women and children from sitting beneath the pulpit to seek healing.”5
In contrast, Riḍā wished to promote women’s participation in congregational prayer. In a fatwa published in 1905, he affirms that women prayed with men in the Prophet’s time without a barrier, “so their praying in the mosque is an established and long-observed sunna whose authenticity has not been disputed by any Muslim.” Ḥadīth texts stating that it is preferable for women to pray at home should be interpreted as applying to prayers that are not performed in congregation. As for the ʿĀʾisha report, “it is on that opinion that the later jurists based the prohibition of women’s going to mosques; [but] it is a legal inference (ijtihād) that cannot abrogate an explicit and definitively-established text and make forbidden what God and His Prophet have made permissible.” He acknowledges the conditions for women’s dress and comportment stipulated by ḥadīth, but holds that it is necessary to exclude only individual women who seem likely to behave seductively.6
In 1911, a few years after Riḍā’s and al-Qāsimī’s contributions to the debate over women’s mosque access, the Egyptian feminist Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif presented the First Egyptian Congress with a list of ten points relating to women’s rights. The “First Proposition” stated: “Women should, in cities, as well as in the villages, be allowed to enter the Mosques for prayer, and for hearing preaching, as was their practice in the days of Islamic Renaissance.” Her manifesto points to the seclusion of women as a source of Muslim decline, particularly in comparison to Jews and Christians, who make their places of worship available to both sexes. Interestingly, her call for women’s inclusion is paired with advocacy for their segregation: “Should the Congress approve of this proposition, then there should be established in each Mosque a special entrance for Women, and inside, raised platforms where they might pray and hear the preaching of the Sheiks, without mixing with men.” She even proposes that “women should enter and leave the Mosques half an hour before the men” to avoid any occasion for any “evil passion” (with the proviso that “the reason I stipulate these precautions is to give no excuse to the old-fashioned or jealous people”).7
Nāṣif also advocates that elementary education be made mandatory for girls as well as boys, that Islamic religious instruction be provided in public and private schools, that more women be trained as nurses to treat other women, that institutes be founded to teach women home economics, and that every school employ “a wise and educated lady whose work would be to watch over the girl’s [sic] conduct and the performance of their religious duties.” Her final proposal was that women be prohibited from participating in funeral processions.8 None of her proposed reforms were enacted. As Valerie Hoffman observes, Nāṣif’s demands “do not defy traditional norms, they uphold them” by emphasizing the inculcation of correct religious beliefs and of gender norms of modesty and domesticity.9 Although from the vantage point of a later age Nāṣif’s program of reform may seem reactionary, it actually involved values that were to a large extent substantively new. The mosque was to become one of the sites for the formation of a new woman who combined knowledge of a newly reformed “correct” Islam with scientifically advanced modern home economics and the technical skills to train and treat other women in an (ideally) segregated society. Only by educating previously “ignorant” mothers, as Nāṣif argued in other writings, would it be possible to raise a healthier and more disciplined generation of Egyptians.10
This new view of the role of mosques in crafting Islamically and socially correct femininity came to be normative in the Egyptian religious establishment, even as it emphasized continuity with the doctrines of the classical madhhabs. A fatwa composed by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Majīd Salīm (d. 1946) and issued by Dār al-Iftāʾ in 1940 surveys the opinions of the four schools and concludes that the most appropriate opinion is the Ḥanbalī doctrine that women’s mosque attendance is permissible, due to its conformity to the content of many ḥadīth texts (and subject to the condition that it not be accompanied by harmful things like the wearing of perfume). He remarks in closing,
The superiority of [women’s] praying at home over their praying in the mosque is interpreted to apply to the case that prayer in the mosque is not accompanied by hearing preaching or the like that is not available to women in their homes. As for if their attending is for the sake of prayer and to hear things that will instruct them about their religion, the raising of their children, and the fulfillment of their husbands’ rights, the most likely interpretation is that their attendance in this case is superior.11
Here again attendance at the mosque forms part of a larger program of inculcating correct religious and social attitudes, including proper gender roles and a modern sense of domesticity.12
If the mosque could be promoted as an arena for the communication of normative messages about women’s role within the family and the home, the growing elaboration of this role also came to be a rationale for the limitation of women’s presence within the mosque. The Syrian Shāfiʿī scholar Muḥammad Saʿīd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī (1929–2013) responds to a question about the legal status of women’s going out to the mosque at night by stating that she may do so under several conditions, including the proviso that her going does not result in “her neglecting a more important Islamic duty, such as taking care of her children or her husband, or the like.”13 Al-Būṭī’s list of conditions roughly parallels that of the ḥadīth tradition (particularly al-Nawawī), but it also modifies it significantly by reducing the fear of fitna to the threat of “exposure to harm” and by giving new emphasis to the woman’s familial duties, thus desexualizing and domesticating the observant Muslim woman. This emphasis contrasts sharply with the fact that, as noted by Asma Sayeed, “the various [classical] jurists … focus resolutely on the disorder that may result from women’s attendance at mosques and pay little or no attention to domestic duties that may prevent a woman from joining congregational prayers.”14
By the mid-twentieth century, scholars also recognized that women were publicly active in, and intellectually and politically engaged with, many activities and trends that competed with Islamic piety for their allegiance. In this context, mosque attendance was an alternative not merely to isolation and ignorance within the home but also to activity in other, secular arenas. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (1910–78), who served as rector of al-Azhar, wrote in this vein: “Since in this age women have penetrated into many of the affairs of life, entered many fields, and have begun to be present in most public places—even if [these activities] divert them from religion, such as the cinema and the like—their going to the mosque for Friday prayers reinforces their faith, strengthens their religion, and increases their [pious] works.”15 In another fatwa, he declared that “if it was a necessary thing for women to pray in mosques and hear lessons in bygone times, it is even more necessary in this time; perhaps the atmosphere of the mosque and the sermons, Qur’anic verses and prophetic ḥadīth they hear in it will guide them towards virtue and repentance.”16
In statements emanating from the Egyptian religious establishment in the last decades of the twentieth century, affirmation of the benefits of women’s mosque attendance coexisted with vigorous reaffirmations of the preference for women to pray at home. A 1977 fatwa from Dār al-Iftāʾ cited the Umm Ḥumayd ḥadīth to demonstrate that it is more meritorious for a woman to pray at home and reasserts the husband’s right to forbid her going in part on the grounds that it is not religiously optimal for her to pray in the mosque.17 In a 1985 fatwa, the muftī of Egypt ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Ḥamza reiterated that it was preferable for a woman to pray at home, although vigorously affirming the legitimacy of women’s instruction in the mosque by a male shaykh (who could inform them not only about “their religion” but also about “the good treatment of their husbands”).18 In the 1980s and 1990s, Shaykh ʿAṭiya Ṣaqr (at that time head of the Fatwa Committee of Majmaʿ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīya at al-Azhar) strongly emphasized reports in which the Prophet encouraged women to pray at home, although he affirmed that it was permissible for a woman to frequent the mosque to acquire religious knowledge—particularly “if it was not possible for her learn at home through reading or through hearing or watching religious lectures in audio or visual broadcasts.”19
However, these views have not gone unchallenged even within the establishment of al-Azhar. In a 1986 study, Suʿād Ṣāliḥ, a female professor at al-Azhar, reviewed the doctrines of the classical schools only to conclude summarily: “Whoever consults the proof-texts available in the purified sunna will see that it is desirable for women to attend congregational prayers with men.” The contention that the merit of attending congregational prayer in the mosque is limited to men, she notes, contradicts the explicit sense of well-authenticated ḥadīth texts.20 By the turn of the twenty-first century, a fatwa issued by a telephone advice line based at al-Azhar stated straightforwardly that it is more meritorious for a young woman to pray in the mosque than at home, citing texts that had traditionally been applied only to men.21
Legal opinions issued by official Egyptian bodies associated with al-Azhar often are based on the opinions of the four Sunnī schools of law, even when they substantively diverge from traditional doctrines; this is also true of scholars such as al-Būṭī. Other major trends in twentieth-century Islamic thought did not simply review, reframe, and modulate the legal frameworks of the classical madhhabs, but advocated fresh approaches altogether. Although the diversity of modern Sunnī legal thought cannot easily be reduced to a small number of labeled categories, two of the most influential trends among Sunnīs in the Arab Middle East can roughly be identified with the Muslim Brotherhood (historically rooted in Egypt) and Salafism, including its Wahhābī form developed in Saudi Arabia.
THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn) originated in British-ruled Egypt in the 1920s and has long been active—although often not officially tolerated—in other countries in the Middle East. Even beyond its formal organizational presence, the Ikhwān (and the style of thinking that it promotes) has had a broad influence. Its approach, sometimes labeled “Ikhwānī” (although not everyone who fits this category belongs to the organization), represents one significant element in the spectrum of contemporary Islamic attitudes in the Middle East. The Brotherhood emphasizes the reform of society and government through the training of Islamically committed cadres that are able to exercise influence in the educational, professional, cultural, and political spheres. Where allowed, the Ikhwān participate in electoral politics; individuals associated with the Ikhwān are often also active (and sometimes dominant) participants in student government and in professional associations.
The movement’s founder, Ḥasan al-Bannā (d. 1949), did not envision a major public role for women within his social and political program. He did emphasize that women are the half of society that most affects the life of a people because they are “the first school” that shapes the rising generation. Girls must be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, and the stories of the exemplary early Muslims, both male and female, in addition to home economics, health, and the principles of child rearing. More than this, al-Bannā cautions, is vain and unnecessary. He further emphasizes the powerful attraction that naturally prevails between men and women, the hazard of fitna, and the consequent imperative of avoiding mixing (ikhtilāṭ) between the sexes. According to al-Bannā, Islam requires gender segregation. It requires the wearing of modest clothing, forbids unrelated men and women from being alone together, and demands that men and women avert their eyes from each other’s charms; it is one of its distinctive rites (shaʿīra min shaʿāʾirihi) that a woman remain within her home even to pray.22 Although women are permitted to attend festival and congregational prayers, as well as to go out to battle in case of dire necessity, these are exceptions.23
For al-Bannā, the ḥadīth-based preference for women’s prayer within the home illustrates a general preference for women to remain within the domestic sphere. Islam prohibits a woman from exposing her body or being alone with an unrelated man, and it encourages her to pray in her home; “can it be said after this,” al-Bannā asks rhetorically, “that Islam does not explicitly prohibit a woman from working in public?”24 He concludes that Islam considers home and children to be the natural and fundamental mission of a woman, which will scarcely leave her time to pursue other tasks; she may work outside of the home only if compelled by necessity.25 In al-Bannā’s discourse, although he does allude to the permissibility of women’s participation in festival and congregational prayers, a strong preference for their praying at home is emblematic of a more general emphasis on their proper absorption with family matters.
In this respect, al-Bannā’s position contrasted sharply with that of his much older contemporary Rashīd Riḍā. In a piece on women’s rights in Islam, Riḍā connected women’s participation in public worship with their involvement in social and political life, characterizing congregational, Friday, and festival prayers as “social acts of worship (al-ʿibādāt al-ijtimāʿīya)” attended by women as well as men.26 In contrast, al-Bannā saw women’s prayer within the home as a corollary of (and a central piece of evidence for) their general exclusion from public roles in society. However, in many ways Riḍā’s view rather than al-Bannā’s presaged the later program of the Ikhwān. As the gender ideology of the Ikhwān evolved over time, the issue of women’s mosque access was gradually reevaluated.
In 1953, the Ikhwān published a short book written by al-Bahī al-Khūlī and titled Women Between the Home and Society (al-Marʾa bayna al-bayt wa’l-mujtamaʿ). In its introduction, the leader of the Ikhwān, Ḥasan al-Huḍaybī, recounted that he had commissioned it to address the concerns of members of the Ikhwān who faced uncertainty about proper Islamic conduct regarding the women of their households; for instance, should they go out in public with their wives, and should they send their daughters to university?27 In treating the issue of women’s activities outside of the home, the book expresses acute awareness of the negative perceptions arising from religious argumentation premised on the inherent sexual volatility of women. Al-Khūlī notes that some people have the impression that opponents of the Western model of women’s rights believe that “a woman is inherently a satanic creature, lustfully awaiting any opportunity [for sexual misbehavior], so that she is entitled only to be treated with suspicion and prevented from seeing the light outside of the home.” This is incorrect; rather, Islamic writers acknowledge women’s full intellectual and ethical capacities, but oppose calls for “licentiousness and libertinism” in a social situation fraught with means of sexual temptation and seduction. It is significant that in this passage the word fitna is associated consistently with the social atmosphere rather than with women themselves.28
Nevertheless, the book emphasizes repeatedly that “the home is the natural arena for the mission of women,”29 and to some extent the danger of neglecting domestic duties takes the place of fitna in limiting women’s activities outside of the home. Al-Khūlī states that a woman “is entitled to go out to prayers—[although] it is better to perform them at home,” and emphasizes that she may go to lectures and the like to improve her mind and learn about her religion.30 Although this work is at pains to repudiate the image of woman as seductress, it is uninterested in promoting women’s engagement with mosques. However, this would change over time.
One figure whose trajectory parallels and exemplifies that of the Ikhwān as a whole (although he ultimately ended his formal affiliation with the organization) is the Egyptian scholar Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1917–96). Al-Ghazālī was a personal associate of Ḥasan al-Bannā and wrote for Ikhwān publications; he was jailed along with other members of the organization in 1948–49 and broke his official tie to the organization in 1952. In his book Min hunā naʿlam, published in the early 1950s, he expresses positions quite similar to those of al-Khūlī: a woman’s essential duties are in the home; she is entitled to pray in the mosque, but it is more meritorious not to.31 “Islam also realized that woman’s occupation at home, the nature of her role in the life of society, and her relation to her children make it hard, if not impossible, for her to go to the mosque for prayer five times a day. In true appreciation of her position, Islam declared woman’s prayer at home more worthy than her prayer in the mosque, and yet reserved for her the right to go to the mosque as often as she could.”32
By the 1980s, al-Ghazālī’s arguments had shifted significantly in favor of a public role for women, including participation in public worship. He returned to the issue at some length in an influential but controversial work on ḥadīth, which cast doubt on the authenticity of a number of widely cited and legally relevant statements attributed to the Prophet. Turning to the subject of congregational prayer, he emphasizes that from the rise of Islam, mosques have been pivotal sites of community activity and solidarity, as well as of piety and contemplation. In addition to raising people’s spiritual level, “repeated meetings preserve private and public relationships, and let the umma face today and tomorrow in a state of mutual recognition, not of mutual ignorance.” The mosque also provides a pure and spiritual atmosphere that removes people from the materialism and self-interestedness of the surrounding society.33
Al-Ghazālī cites the Prophet’s reported designation of one of the doors of the mosque for women, his assignment of the rear rows to the women, and his reprimands of men and women who approached the rows of the other sex as evidence of his accommodation of women’s attendance at public prayers. However, women’s status soon declined to the point that ḥadīth were forged that denied women the right to attend congregational prayers and even asserted that a woman should pray in the gloomiest and most remote corner of her house. Al-Ghazālī declares of the latter report, “The person who transmits this ḥadīth casts behind his back incontrovertibly transmitted practical sunnas (al-sunan al-ʿamalīya al-mutawātira) from the Prophet (ṣāḥib al-risāla). He regards a praying woman as if she were an impurity (adhan) that must be contained in the furthest and most restricted area.”34
It is notable that the very ḥadīth that al-Ghazālī so fervently disavows was highly praised by Ḥasan al-Bannā, who cited it in support of his argument that Islam consecrates the woman to the domestic sphere. In contrast, al-Ghazālī finds the content of the ḥadīth inherently preposterous and expects his reader to do so as well. He argues that in addition to demeaning women, it is incompatible with the fact that the Prophet allowed women to attend prayers at all hours of the day: “Why did he not counsel them to stay in their houses instead of [making] this vain effort?” Al-Ghazālī’s argument here is clearly inspired by that of Ibn Ḥazm, whom he later cites explicitly. However, he again qualifies his arguments for the importance of congregational prayer in light of women’s domestic duties:
A well-authenticated sunna establishes that a woman is a shepherd in her home, and is responsible for her flock. There is no doubt that the needs of children, particularly infants, and the preparation of the home to receive the man when he returns home from his work, all of that impedes a woman from regular attendance at the five daily congregational prayers. For that reason, we are of the opinion that she must attend congregational prayers [only] after she finishes her household tasks. If she has performed her duties, her man is not permitted to prevent her from going to the mosque.35
In other works as well, al-Ghazālī combines an affirmation that women’s congregational prayer in mosques is equally as meritorious as men’s with the qualification that its desirability is conditional on her fulfillment of her duties as a wife and mother. He asserts (unlike many classical scholars) that the ḥadīth stating that congregational prayer is “twenty-seven degrees” more meritorious than individual prayer applies to both sexes, but continues:
I do not agree with Ibn Ḥazm that both men and women are equal in the sunna of congregational prayer. My opinion is that the woman is a shepherd in her husband’s house and she is responsible for her flock. If the man and the children need food to be prepared or relaxation to be provided, the woman must remain in her home and she is not permitted to go to the mosque and leave the home neglected and bereft; she will [still] receive the reward for congregational prayer. As for if she has fulfilled all of her household duties, then it is better for her to go to the mosque and participate in congregational prayers.36
He observes in a somewhat later work, “There is no doubt that [a woman’s] refraining from going to the mosque for the sake of her responsibilities in the home makes her deserving before God of the reward for congregational prayers, even if she did not attend them.”37
For al-Ghazālī, the legitimacy and merit of women’s attendance at mosques were not merely a theoretical issue; he saw the exclusion of women from mosques as a genuine problem that both disadvantaged observant Muslim women in comparison with their secular sisters and disadvantaged Islam in the world marketplace of religions. A conversation with a friend whose Christian maid had asked for time off to attend church evoked the wistful response that at home, “neither ladies nor maids desire to go to the mosque, because extremists have poured it into their ears that going to the mosque is forbidden.”38 Whereas women of every other faith could participate in public worship, he lamented that “there are tens, nay hundreds of thousands of mosques where the shadow (shabaḥ) of a woman cannot be glimpsed in the villages and cities.”39 He reported sympathetically the plight of a group of women who had attempted to pray in the back of a mosque (whose location he does not specify), only to be upbraided by the imam, who cited Qur’anic verses to “prove” that women are forbidden to attend mosques.40
By the late twentieth century, the Ikhwān’s strong emphasis on the training and deployment of highly qualified individuals committed to their religious program was explicitly framed to include women. Although it continued to emphasize the primary and unique role of women as wives and mothers, it did not envision this role as precluding significant involvement in other spheres of activity. The Ikhwān argued that mothers, as the primary moral, religious, and intellectual influence on their children in the formative years of their lives, must have a sound religious education and an informed grasp of the contemporary world in order to raise a generation of Muslims prepared to undertake the reform of society. Furthermore, most women could be expected to fulfill the task of childbearing and early childhood care by the time they reached middle age, at which point they might choose to take on a larger role in public life.41 For authors associated with or influenced by the Ikhwān, the mosque is one of the venues of Islamic consciousness-raising and training where the mobilization of women for the Islamic reform of society should occur.
One of the most influential Islamic scholars emerging from Egyptian Ikhwān circles is Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī. An Azhar-trained ʿālim who nevertheless has adopted the more fluid role of the contemporary dāʿī,42 he has attained international prominence as the featured scholar of a regular show on the al-Jazeera satellite channel, as the founder and supervisor of the popular Islamic website IslamOnline, and as the chair of the European Council for Fatwa and Research.43 Al-Qaraḍāwī writes at length about women’s presence in the mosque during the lifetime of the Prophet in a fatwa responding to an inquiry about the issue of ikhtilāṭ, the mixing of unrelated men and women. Al-Qaraḍāwī asserts that this term is alien to the authentic vocabulary of Islamic law and that exaggerated emphasis of this human concept has deprived women of their rightful role in the life of the Muslim community, up to and including participation in warfare (which they partook of in the early days). Here mosque-going is associated with the acquisition of knowledge and with active participation in the life of the umma.44
Al-Qaraḍāwī’s interest in women’s mosque-going is not exclusively focused on its capacity to foster social and religious engagement; neither is his approval unconditional. His most concrete comments on women’s mosque access occur in a fatwa on women’s attendance at the special nighttime prayers (tarāwīḥ) held during the month of Ramadan. After affirming the meritorious (although not obligatory) character of tarāwīḥ prayers, he continues:
This includes both men and women, except that it is better for a woman to pray in her home than in the mosque, as long as there is no other benefit resulting from her going to the mosque other than prayer alone, such as hearing a religious exhortation or a lesson in [religious] knowledge, or hearing the Qur’an from a reverent and excellent reciter. Going to the mosque for this purpose is more meritorious and more appropriate, particularly since most men in our time do not instruct their women in the religion.
Furthermore, many women would not “find the desire or resolve that helps them to perform the tarawīḥ prayers alone, unlike in the mosque and in congregation.” Al-Qaraḍāwī affirms that a wife must seek her husband’s permission to go out of the house, “even to the mosque,” because of his general authority over the affairs of the house. Nevertheless, he may not forbid her without a valid reason, such as “if the husband is sick and needs her to remain by his side to serve him and take care of his needs, or if she has small children who will be harmed by being left alone in the house for the time required for prayer and there is no one to watch them.” In closing, al-Qaraḍāwī points out that it is irrational to exclude women from mosques when they have access to all other arenas of contemporary life: “Modern life has opened doors to the woman; she has gone out of her house to the school, the university, the market, etc., and [yet] has remained deprived of the best spot and the most superior place, which is the mosque.”45
In this fatwa, the importance of women’s mosque attendance lies in its potential for the acquisition of religious knowledge, as well as in its capacity to evoke pious feeling and motivate acts of worship. Indeed, al-Qaraḍāwī’s emphasis on the benefits to the woman’s spiritual and devotional life (as opposed to simply her acquisition of knowledge, particularly of gendered norms of behavior) is distinctive and striking.46 However, he subordinates these considerations to the woman’s fulfillment of her familial role, subject to the lawfully exercised authority of her husband.
More overt thematic development of the political importance of women’s mosque access is present in the work of other Egyptian scholars who moved in the same circles. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Abū Shuqqa (1924–95), who was a personal associate of Ḥasan al-Bannā and involved with the Ikhwān (among a diverse set of scholarly and religious contacts and influences), embarked in the 1950s on a project focusing on the role of Muslim women during the lifetime of the Prophet. This resulted two decades later in an influential multivolume compilation titled The Liberation of Women in the Era of the Prophet’s Mission (Taḥrīr al-marʾa fī ʿaṣr al-risāla), with prefaces by Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī.
Abū Shuqqa places his extensive treatment of women’s presence in mosques in a section titled “The Muslim Woman’s Participation in Social Life and Her Meeting with Men,” where the multipurpose site of the mosque features prominently among the “public arenas” where the earliest Muslim women took part in communal life.47 Although he emphasizes that a woman’s primary and paramount role revolves around the home and family,48 he depicts her presence in the Prophet’s mosque as enabling a broad engagement with society:
The mosque is the first institution in Muslim society; firstly, the center of worship; secondly, the center of knowledge; and thirdly, the center of social and political action. Additionally, it is the hall for public meetings and the athletic field when necessary. Due to all of these factors together, the woman was given free scope in the prophetic period to visit the mosque whenever she was able. Her occasional visiting of the mosque gave her a direct connection to the public life of the Muslims. In addition to her participation in worship and hearing the Qur’an recited in prayer, she hears lessons on religious knowledge and words of public guidance. She knows something of the social and political news of the Muslims.
For this reason, he asserts, it is not permissible for anyone to deprive a woman of her right to visit the mosque or to force her to pray at home on the pretext that it is more meritorious.49
A much younger Egyptian female scholar, Hiba Raʾūf (b. 1965), has put women’s mosque access into an even more explicitly politicized context. A political scientist by training, she has independent views and has sometimes been critical of the Muslim Brotherhood; yet her views have clear elements in common with the trend established by thinkers of the Ikhwān.
The study of the rules of the sharīʿa makes clear that the intent of the Lawgiver was to raise the consciousness of the Muslim community through the acts of worship. The objective of connecting political and social activity with the mosque as an arena of worship was to ensure the continuation of political participation and the development of political consciousness for the Muslim individual. … This is something that makes it extremely difficult to falsify his consciousness, divert (taḥyīd) his role or marginalize his opinion in the political process, as long as the mosque plays its role.50
Raʾūf observes that some studies have examined the way in which, over the course of early Islamic history, various functions originally performed by the mosque branched off and developed as independent institutions. However, “there is a school that holds that the principle is that the [various] cultural functions should remain connected to the mosque, so they do not lose their religious spirit and complementarity continues between that which is religious and that which is social and political in the framework of tawḥīd [the unicity of God and of society].”51
Raʾūf argues that, even though women suffer no permanent or intrinsic deficits of intellect or competence, a woman may be affected by a temporary deficit in knowledge of public affairs when she is near-confined to the home by pregnancy or breast-feeding. In addition to the role of modern mass media, she emphasizes that in this case the religious duties of a Muslim woman—including public worship—will provide her with at least the minimum degree of awareness of public events requisite for political participation.52 She stresses that it is obligatory for all women to attend the two yearly festival prayers (a position that is well founded in ḥadīth texts, although not held by most classical scholars). At the festival prayers, “the affairs of the umma are discussed,” thus ensuring “the minimum degree of consciousness necessary for all women who may be prevented by family responsibilities from attending gatherings like the Friday and congregational prayers.” She continues, “As for women who enjoy special competency (ahlīya) and a higher degree of consciousness, and whose circumstances permit them to attend Friday and congregational prayers, the prophetic guidance has guaranteed that to them and commanded the man not to prevent them from going.”53
Because these discussions take place outside of the framework of the madhhab system, many of the timeworn tropes of the premodern debate over women’s mosque attendance simply disappear. The distinction between old and young women is not mentioned in these texts even to be critiqued. Although it may occasionally be acknowledged that only in middle age will most women enjoy leisure from domestic duties, it is not suggested that younger women are barred from participation by anything but the practical demands of childbearing and housework. Perhaps the most fundamental shift in these thinkers’ construction of gender is that femininity is now defined in terms of domesticity and nurture rather than in terms of sexual allure and social danger. Even when Muḥammad al-Ghazālī admonishes that women should go to the mosque modestly dressed because “they have not gone out to a beauty contest or a fashion show,”54 his concern seems to be more with the religious seriousness of the women than with their potential for sexual volatility. Indeed, the word fitna—for centuries the focal point of analyses of the legal status of women’s public worship—is largely conspicuous for its absence. Whereas Ḥasan al-Bannā did emphasize this traditional theme, his successors in the later twentieth century elide it (at least in this particular context) in favor of evocations of women’s maternal and conjugal duties. The paradigmatic woman is now a desexualized mother and wife; even in her marital role, she is represented less as a source of sexual satisfaction (the key issue in many premodern discussions of limitations of the wife’s right to leave the marital home) than of domestic labor and of restful solace from the husband’s strivings in the outside world.
In part, this reframing of the issue of women’s mosque access may be apologetic. Whereas in classical discussions women’s public religious participation was subordinated to concerns about public propriety, in these modern discussions it is often subordinated to concerns about the multiple demands on the Muslim homemaker. Given that these authors are acutely aware both of the gaze of non-Muslims and of the scrutiny of informed and vocal Muslim women, this reinterpretation may seem strategic rather than substantive; fear of women as a sexual threat is replaced by solicitude for them as harried wives and mothers, but in both cases women’s participation at the mosque is subordinated to other values. However, the reframing of the problem is more than cosmetic. By the 1980s, these scholars were affirming that women’s attendance at mosques was positively desirable—a position that had been affirmed by some (and not all) classical scholars only in the case of elderly women and usually not for all prayers.
Furthermore, all of these thinkers place the value of women’s mosque attendance at least partially in the opportunities for education and personal development that it affords. Whereas an eagerness to attend preaching, acquire religious knowledge, and engage in religiously sanctioned sociability is clearly discernible in descriptive accounts of women’s activity in premodern mosques, these considerations played little role in juristic works’ treatment of the issue of women’s mosque attendance. In these modern discussions, the value of the mosque as a venue for women’s acquisition of religious, social, and political awareness looms far larger than in any premodern analysis. In part, this may reflect these contemporary scholars’ livelier and more direct responsiveness to the actual demands and concerns of female Muslims; unconstrained by the conventions of traditional legal genres and functioning in contexts where women have easier access to learned and popular media, they address women’s aspirations more immediately than did their premodern predecessors. Their affirmation of the mosque as an arena for women’s participation also reflects their desire to maximize the mobilization of a religiously committed sector of the community that often appeared marginalized by other trends within elite society and their recognition of women as a relatively untapped social and political resource.
Because of shifts in women’s social roles in the surrounding society, the significance of the theme of domesticity in the discussion of women’s mosque access shifted appreciably from the early to the late twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, reformers such as Rashīd Riḍā, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī, and Malāk Ḥifnī Nāṣif saw women’s isolation within the home as a source of religious “superstition” and deviance, as well as of ignorance and backwardness. In part, their encouragement of women’s religious and educational participation in the public sphere sought to penetrate and control the autonomy of women’s religious life by bringing them more firmly within the purview of official Islam. By the end of the century, scholars tended to base the desirability of women’s mosque attendance less on the need to stamp out deviant folk practices than on the need to make Islamic guidance and inspiration equally as accessible as other educational, political, and social activities available to women.
SALAFISM
Another major current of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islam is Salafism, a modern movement that seeks a return to the pristine Islam of the earliest generations of Muslims (the salaf). This movement denies the authoritativeness of the classical schools (madhāhib), advocates direct consultation of the revelational texts of the Qur’an and ḥadīth, and rejects the complex hermeneutics of the medieval jurisprudential tradition in favor of the assertion that these texts are fundamentally transparent. The reformism of modernists inspired by the work of Rashīd Riḍā can also be seen as a form of Salafism, but in contemporary practice the term is applied to groups that combine direct reference to the primary sources in the field of law with a theological stance rooted in the thought of early figures such as Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal.55
The rise in Saudi oil wealth in the final quarter of the twentieth century, combined with the prestige of presiding over the Islamic holy places of the Ḥijāz, enabled the international dissemination of the form of Salafism rooted in the thinking of the eighteenth-century reformer Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb himself wrote primarily about doctrinal and theological matters; to the extent that he dealt with issues of normative behavior, he focused primarily on devotional acts (such as shrine visitation and the wearing of amulets) whose theological implications he believed to conflict with the central Islamic tenet of tawḥīd (the unicity of God). Formally, the legal thinking of the Saudi religious establishment that claims his legacy is based both on direct reference to the Qur’an and ḥadīth and on an underlying continuity with Ḥanbalī doctrine.
To the extent that the early Wahhābī movement manifested distinctive attitudes toward women’s mosque attendance, these seem to have been mixed. Women are recorded to have been present at Friday prayers in some early communities within the movement, and in the nineteenth century Richard Burton could identify the “two principal tenets” of Wahhābīs as “public prayer for men daily, for women on Fridays, and rejection of the Prophet’s mediation.”56 Nevertheless, as time passed Wahhābīs were also known for their severity in limiting women’s presence in mosques; describing Mecca in 1925, just after the Saudi conquest, Eldon Rutter writes that “the Wahhâbîs discourage the presence of women in the Mosque, even at prayer time. They do not obstruct female hâjjis, but in the months when Mekka was empty of hâjjis, I have seen the Aghas, and also special guards from the Sharta, or City police, drive Mekkan women from the Haram with blows of their sticks.”57
Nevertheless, Saudi scholars do not appear to have produced formal arguments for the exclusion of women from the mosque. In a fatwa dated 1374/1955, the powerful Muftī of Saudi Arabia, Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Āl al-Shaykh, wrote that “women are not to be prevented from going to mosques with their children during Ramadan; the sunna indicates that women went to the mosque with their children during the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him!).…” It is significant that the issue raised by the questioner was specifically the presence of small children accompanying the women and that the one reservation expressed by the muftī was that women should take care that their youngsters did not soil the mosque. The specific reference to Ramadan probably reflects local practice, as there is nothing in the textual evidence or argumentation of the fatwa that is specific to Ramadan.58
Probably the most influential Saudi scholar of the second half of the twentieth century was ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ibn Bāz (1909–99), who served as Grand Muftī of Saudi Arabia (appointed in 1992), head of the Council of Senior Scholars, and president of the Permanent Council for Research and Fatwas in addition to a number of other important posts. In a widely circulated fatwa, he is asked by a female questioner, “Is it permissible for a woman to pray in the mosque if she is [fully] covered and modest, has not applied perfume, and does not engage in vain display and she does so only out of devotion to God, except that her husband is not pleased with her [doing so]?” Ibn Bāz replies, “A woman is entitled to pray in the mosque if she is [fully] covered and does not wear perfume; her husband is not entitled to prevent her from doing so if she adheres to proper comportment as defined by the sharīʿa, because the Prophet said, ‘Do not forbid the maidservants of God from [going to] the mosques of God.’” He continues to emphasize that this applies “even if her husband is not happy.” Nevertheless, “if she prays in her home and does not go out in order to please her husband and avoid causes of fitna, it is better, because the Prophet said, ‘Do not forbid the maidservants of God from [going to] the mosques of God, and their homes are better for them.’”59
Other fatwas issued by the Saudi religious establishment express the same basic position: it is permissible for a woman to attend prayers in the mosque as long as she adheres to sharʿī standards of modesty and gender segregation; her husband may not forbid her from doing so, provided that she fulfills these conditions; nevertheless, it is more meritorious for her to pray at home. This stance corresponds closely to classical Ḥanbalī doctrine, as expressed by such scholars as Ibn Qudāma, Ibn Taymīya, and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīya. The Saudi Permanent Council for Fatwas consistently supports women’s right to attend mosques, even when it conflicts with established custom or with traditional legal doctrines. For instance, one fatwa responds to a query from a recent convert to Islam in an unnamed location who attempted to attend Friday prayers with his (also newly converted) wife, only to have her turned away by an imam who claimed that women were forbidden to attend mosques. The fatwa resoundingly affirms that a properly attired woman may not be forbidden from attending the mosque.60 In another case, the council responds to a questioner who states that “in our country” (one published version of the fatwa specifies Tanzania) a controversy has arisen over the claim that women may not enter mosques because they are ritually impure, a position that the council briskly refutes.61 Yet another fatwa summarily dismisses a query whether women are entitled to pray in the mosque “in this time,” a clear allusion to the postclassical doctrine (dominant among Ḥanafīs and, to a lesser extent, among other schools) that women should no longer be admitted to mosques in the decadent conditions of latter-day Muslim societies.62
Nevertheless, these Saudi fatwas are distinguished both by their insistence on the superior merit of women’s worship within the home and by their more general concern about women’s public visibility. The fatwa responding to the new convert, although affirming his wife’s right to attend the mosque, states severely that “if she is exposed so that some part of her body that unrelated men are forbidden to look at is visible, or she is wearing perfume, in this case it is not permissible for her to leave her home, let alone to go out to the mosque and pray there, because of the fitna that this involves.”63 It is notable that, whereas contemporary fatwas issued by scholars associated with al-Azhar or with the Muslim Brotherhood tend to deemphasize the issue of fitna and instead focus on women’s domestic duties, official Saudi fatwas continue to invoke women’s sexual allure as the rationale for the limitation of their access to mosques—and indeed of any mobility in public. Like most classical scholars, these Saudi scholars emphasize the inherently superior merit of women’s prayer within the home (rather than alluding to the likelihood that they will be busy with their obligations as wives and mothers). The emphasis on the educational and spiritual benefits of mosque attendance is also notable by its absence. To a leading question about whether it is better for a woman to pray during the nights of Ramadan at home or in the mosque, “particularly if there are sermons and admonitions in [the mosque],” Ibn ʿUthaymīn responds briskly that it is always superior for a woman to pray at home because of the ḥadith to this effect and because of the fear of fitna; as for sermons and other instruction, she can listen to tapes.64 The contrast with al-Qaraḍāwī’s fatwa on the same subject could not be more acute.
The influential Ibn ʿUthaymīn summarizes his views on women’s mosque attendance in a commentary on a widely studied Ḥanbalī legal manual, where he states that, although (based on the relevant ḥadīth) a man may not forbid wife to go to the mosque, he nevertheless should dissuade her from doing so, due to the corruption of the times. He may actually forbid her from going to the mosque for purposes other than prayer (for instance, for sightseeing or to attend a lecture), and he must forbid her if she is perfumed or the like. Ibn ʿUthaymīn hermeneutically resolves the tension between the Prophet’s command not to bar women from mosques and his preference for women’s prayer within the home by positing that they are directed to different addressees: the command not to forbid women is addressed to men, and the statement that “your homes are better for you” is directed to women.65
The opinions of Saudi establishment scholars are characterized by their direct references to the relevant ḥadīth texts,66 by a clear continuity with Ḥanbalī doctrine, and by a lively concern with the issue of fitna and the hazards of women’s public mobility and visibility. As Khaled Abou El Fadl has analyzed in great detail, overall the concept of fitna plays a pivotal role in Saudi scholars’ legal reasoning on issues relating to women.67 Indeed, within Saudi Arabia the official scholars’ overt affirmation of women’s right to attend the mosque seems to have had less practical impact than their emphasis on the relative undesirability of women’s public worship and the perils of their visibility to men.68 Nevertheless, their consistent and emphatic assertion of women’s entitlement to pray in mosques contrasted with customary practice and received doctrine in many parts of the broader Islamic world in which their fatwas have been consumed.
Another of the scholars most influential among late-twentieth-century Salafīs globally was Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī (1914–99), an Albanian whose family migrated to Damascus when he was a child. A self-taught ḥadīth expert, al-Albānī taught in Saudi Arabia in the early 1960s, but he was expelled from the country in 1963 as a result of his insistence that face veils were not mandatory for women, and ultimately settled in Jordan. He also objected to the lingering Ḥanbalī loyalties of the Wahhābī scholars.69 His reevaluations of the authenticity of ḥadīth, though sometimes controversial,70 have become an almost universal point of reference among Salafīs71 and are influential even outside of their circles. His followers have made large numbers of his legal opinions available on the Internet, largely in the form of audio clips of Arabic question-and-answer sessions with groups of his followers.
Women’s mosque access is one of the many areas where al-Albānī’s opinions are both distinctive and influential. Al-Albānī notes that there is an apparent discrepancy between the ḥadīth texts establishing that it is more meritorious for a woman to pray at home and the fact that women in the Prophet’s lifetime zealously attended the mosque. The seeming contradiction is resolved by the fact that worshipping in the mosque provided them with an opportunity to acquire knowledge about religious obligations (farāʾiḍ) that they could not obtain in their homes.72 Asked whether it is preferable for a woman to pray at home or in a mosque, al-Albānī replies that it is preferable for her to pray at home unless there is a lesson or preaching at the mosque from which she will learn; in this case, the legal ruling is reversed, and it becomes more meritorious for her to pray in the mosque. If all she is going to do in the mosque is pray in congregation, on the other hand, it is better for her to stay at home.73 (Elsewhere he elaborates that “it is better for a woman to pray in her home, indeed, in her own private room; the more she is removed from sight, the better it is for her.”74)
Like Ibn Bāz, al-Albānī takes the textually literalist position that a man is actually forbidden to prevent his wife from going to the mosque—a question that he dispatches with the citation of the relevant ḥadīth and the curt observation, “The text is explicit about that.”75 However, elsewhere he affirms that a man can (and presumably should) forbid his wife from visiting the mosque if there is fear of fitna (for instance, if she has perfumed herself with incense). He argues that this does not conflict with the prohibition on preventing women from going to the mosque; what is actually prohibited in that ḥadīth is “the jealousy (ghayra) that issues from arrogance, rather than the fear of fitna.”76
To this point, al-Albānī would appear to be promoting a view rather similar to that of the Ikhwān. The emphasis is on the educational value of a woman’s presence in the mosque, which can outweigh other considerations. However, al-Albānī ultimately has a far more restricted concept of women’s public Islamic activities, including those pursued in the mosque. Al-Albānī does acknowledge that some women can (and should) obtain a degree of religious knowledge that will allow them to advise and instruct other women; indeed, he notes that many women are hesitant to consult male scholars about their private affairs. Nevertheless, he has significant reservations about the nature and location of their religious activities. (Indeed, he alludes with some bitterness to “Islamic groups [jamāʿāt]” that organize women to engage in religious activity or activism [nashāṭ].)77
Asked about female preachers (dāʿiyāt) who visit other women in their homes to give them religious instruction, he first objects to the label and role of the “preacher” (dāʿī) as a contemporary innovation.78 He asserts, based on verse 33:33 of the Qur’an, that women are to “remain in their houses” and that it is not legitimate for a woman to travel about as if she were a man, which he considers an instance of gender-inappropriate behavior (tashabbuh) forbidden by the sunna.79 Instead, women should visit such a female authority in her home. (This appears to be preferable because it involves individual forays outside of the home by a number of women rather than constant professional mobility by a single woman.) It is different, in his view, for an individual woman to visit the mosque in order to acquire knowledge (which he affirms to be legitimate) than for a woman to hold lessons in the mosque or to mimic male behavior by traveling about as a religious teacher. Al-Albānī laments, “Things have gotten to the point in our country [presumably Jordan] and perhaps in other countries that [the female preacher] ascends the pulpit in the mosques and delivers lessons to women; there may be men in the courtyard of the mosque, and when the time comes for them to pray in congregation, they come in and pray! There is no doubt, and I do not hesitate to say, that this is an innovation!”80 On another tape, he mournfully recounts an anecdote in which he and a group of men are refused entrance to a mosque because it is full of women listening to a female preacher. He declares it to be “an innovation without basis in the sunna” for a woman to teach in a mosque.81
In yet other respects, however, al-Albānī took positions on women’s usage of mosques that were strikingly liberal. For example, he firmly rejects the classical position that menstruating women should not tarry in mosques (or, according to other scholars, that they should not even enter). He argues this point on the basis of two proofs, one negative and the other positive. The negative proof is the juristic axiom that the default setting for all acts is permissibility; prohibition requires textual evidence. Al-Albānī argues that, although there are several widely cited ḥadīth prohibiting both menstruating women and persons in a state of janāba (major impurity occurring after sexual intercourse or emission) from entering the mosque, none of them are authentic according to rigorous standards of ḥadīth criticism. Thus, the relevant ḥadīth do not have sufficient evidentiary value to override the original presumption of permissibility. The positive proof is an anecdote in which the Prophet is on the ḥajj and tells his wife ʿĀʾisha, who has gotten her period, that she can do everything except circumambulate the Kaʿba and pray. Al-Albānī infers from this statement that a menstruating woman can do anything else a pilgrim might do in the Great Mosque and that, if the Prophet had intended to bar her from the mosque altogether, he would have said so explicitly. Al-Albānī also cites a ḥadīth in which the Prophet asks ʿĀʾisha to fetch something for him from the mosque; when she objects that she is menstruating, he declares that “your menstruation is not in your hand.”82 Al-Albānī is not unique in his approach to this question; the influential Egyptian Salafī Muṣṭafā al-ʿAdawī, the author of a popular manual on women’s ritual practice, similarly argues that a menstruating woman may spend time within the mosque.83
The extent to which the elimination (or at least the questioning) of menstrual purity concerns might transform women’s mosque access should not be overemphasized because (as we have seen in the first chapter of this study) ritual purity was not an issue that played a central role in the discussion of women’s mosque attendance in classical legal works. The assumption of some modern studies that women’s mosque access has historically been limited primarily by purity strictures is thus unfounded, at least on the level of formal legal discourse.84 However, it does appear that in some regions of the Islamic world the possibility of menstrual pollution has been used as a rationale for the general exclusion of women from mosques or for the exclusion of premenopausal women.85 Furthermore, even in contexts where the issue of menstrual pollution is not raised as a bar to the access of women in general, it could present challenges for individual women (particularly in the case of regular classes located in the mosque). As one of Richard Gauvain’s female Salafī informants in Cairo observed, because a woman has her period every month, “I just don’t see the good in stopping her studies every time. I mean, haram! (smiling) It’s enough that we have to leave our prayers. It’s ok for some of the sisters to say that we can just study at home, but what if the classes take place in the mosques…?”86 Nevertheless, the question remained controversial even within this network of Salafī women. Continuous attendance at mosque lessons inevitably revealed that a woman was not avoiding the mosque during menstruation (particularly when she abstained from prayer), giving rise to comment and debate. As another woman observed, “There will always be someone whispering something about her [i.e., the woman assumed to be menstruating]. Actually, sometimes it’s not whispering. Many of us aren’t shy!”87
In addition to his distinctive views on ritual purity, al-Albānī passionately opposed the relegation of women to separate and enclosed prayer spaces from which they could not see or (often) even hear the imam. Rather, he emphasized that women in the time of the Prophet had prayed in rows behind the men without a physical barrier and that this is the preferable arrangement if the mosque can accommodate it. Although it is permissible for women to pray on another level by hearing rather than seeing the imam, this is a suboptimal arrangement to which they should resort only if no space is available on the same floor where the male worshippers are located.88 Separate women’s prayer rooms, al-Albānī argues, are a religious innovation (bidʿa)—a devastating accusation to be made by a Salafī in a ritual context. Al-Albānī’s position here is one of textual literalism, although the emotional tenor of his response—he speaks repeatedly of the “confinement (ighlāq)” or “imprisonment (ḥabs)” of women in enclosed women’s sections—suggests a genuine personal distress at the exclusion of women from the main prayer space. He vigorously rejects the argument that new arrangements have been necessitated by the corruption of society. It is true that women are now entering mosques improperly dressed, in short jilbābs (overdresses) or transparent stockings, which motivates people to remove them from men’s view by enclosing them in separate prayer rooms. However, the correct approach is to restore society to its proper Islamic character—and women to their proper Islamic dress—rather than to introduce innovations that may invalidate women’s prayer. Defying a long history of legal argumentation that we have encountered in previous chapters of this study, he asserts that it is impermissible to create new legal rulings deviating from the sunna as a remedy for problems created by the decadence of society; the solution is to reform society, not to exclude women from the main space of the mosque.89 As long as women are properly covered, there is no need to conceal them from unrelated men—and thus no reason to erect a barrier in the mosque.90
Overall, in his affirmation that it is meritorious for a woman to go to the mosque if it affords her religious instruction, his denial of her husband’s entitlement to detain her from the mosque without cause, his dismissal of the purity concerns surrounding menstruation, and his firm rejection of women’s relegation to separate and isolated prayer spaces, al-Albānī presents a strikingly positive attitude toward women’s usage of mosques. His views are both clearly grounded in ḥadīth (as one would expect based on his methodological approach) and occasionally outspoken in their distaste for exaggerated limitations on women’s religious practice. However, his sunna-based inclusiveness toward women is significantly tempered by his broader view of gender roles, which posits that women’s activities are fundamentally defined by a primary commitment to house and home. As he states in another fatwa, “The basic principle … is that a woman should know that she was created to remain in her home, serve her husband, and bring up her children if she has children.”91 However, his ultimate concern is not with public versus private space, but with issues of gender and authority; he repeatedly emphasizes that a woman can go to the mosque to learn, but denies that she can do so to teach. Although the theme of fitna is not completely absent from his arguments, he is much less preoccupied with the potential sexual volatility of women’s presence in mosques than with the maintenance of proper role distinctions between men and women. It is characteristic that in his work denying any obligation for women to cover their faces, he cites the superior merit of women’s prayer within the home in the context of the rule that women must avoid any resemblance (tashabbuh) with men in their dress and comportment.92 In al-Albānī’s view, women’s concealment from the male gaze is not merely an issue of physical allure but also inextricably intwined with proper femininity as mandated by the Qur’an and sunna.
The practical impact of al-Albānī’s teachings in the circles where his scholarship is revered can be determined only by further research. It seems possible that his affirmation of women’s right to presence (and even visibility) in the main space of the mosque could be wielded advantageously by Salafī women. However, in other cases his reservations about women’s public teaching may have helped to diminish the existing magnitude and variety of women’s mosque-based activities. Anne Sofie Roald reports that in 1991 she attended women’s lessons in a mosque in Jordan, but “[w]hen I returned to Jordan in the beginning of 1992 I discovered that these lessons had been moved to private homes. It was explained to me that al-Albānī had proclaimed a fatwa that women should not have meetings in the mosques.”93 The fatwa in question was presumably the one discussed above that suggests that women preachers should hold sessions privately in their homes.
Al-Albānī is somewhat unusual for explicitly scrutinizing and critiquing the very existence (as well as the nature) of separate women’s prayer space within mosques. The legal legitimacy and parameters of enclosed women’s prayer space are not a subject that is extensively discussed in the classical fiqh literature. As we have seen in chapter 2, it is clear that over time there were various forms of accommodation for women within mosques that involved different degrees of spatial and architectural separation (including maqāṣīr enclosed by openwork screens and eventually upstairs balconies). As emerges from the North African fatwas discussed there, the construction of such barriers could evoke both approval and critique; even though they served a widely accepted purpose (concealing women from the view of unrelated men), they could also be questioned as a potential bidʿa (innovation).
The history of different forms of architecturally separate women’s prayer space in mosques (particularly outside of Andalusia and North Africa) remains to be written, and their development may be difficult to reconstruct. However, it appears that in many cases separate women’s accommodations were introduced quite late. For instance, in the Prophet’s mosque in Medina it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that an enclosed women’s prayer space was constructed.94 The enclosure for women’s prayer is referred to in nineteenth-century sources as a “cage (qafaṣ)” made of wood, probably openwork (one source describes it as a “lattice,” shabaka).95 It is notable that contemporary Arabic sources refer to the women’s enclosure as something that was “newly created” or “innovated” (uḥditha), an expression that ordinarily has negative connotations in the context of Islamic ritual practice (although clearly none are intended in this case).96
The lengthy inquiry that elicited the fatwa on women’s mosque attendance from the Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʿ in 1940 suggests the degree to which the legitimacy of separate women’s prayer rooms within the mosque remained debatable at the time. It carefully specifies that the walls of the proposed women’s room, adjacent to the main body of the mosque, would stop two meters below the roof, allowing the women to hear preaching and participate in prayer. The resulting fatwa applies the criteria for valid prayer leadership from classical sources, which in some cases allow someone to follow an imam from a separate building or across a visual barrier.97 By the late twentieth century, muftīs rarely bothered to address the legitimacy of separate women’s accommodations and often stated that designated women’s space is desirable without specifying the nature of its visual and aural access to the imam.98
In accordance with their general allegiance to the patterns mandated by ḥadīth, establishment Saudi muftīs sometimes allude to women’s prayer in rows behind the men without a barrier as a valid, or indeed normative, option.99 However, other fatwas affirm that the introduction of enclosed women’s sections has rendered obsolete the ḥadīth instructing women to seek out the back rows of the congregation by removing its rationale; women who are completely separated and concealed from men should seek out the front, rather than the back, row.100 Indeed, anecdotal evidence about arrangements in Saudi mosques suggests that (outside of the anomalous, if symbolically potent, context of Mecca) in contemporary Saudi mosques, complete architectural separation of women’s sections is the norm, including (at least in some cases) such innovative measures as the installation of one-way glass.101 Thus, the norms applied within Saudi Arabia do not appear to correspond to the textually literalist model promoted in some of the opinions of its most august fatwa-issuing body. Overall, it is surprising how little formal legal discourse has addressed the location and quality of women’s prayer space and the visual and aural accessibility of the imam. For instance, the rise and spread of the “women’s balcony” as a norm for large and official mosques in the twentieth century is architecturally unmistakable, but textually near-invisible in the legal sources.102 Given the concerns that are being raised by some Muslim women, this issue is likely to generate more legal debate in the future.
CONCLUSION
The proliferation of legal opinions supporting women’s mosque access, beginning in the early twentieth century and reaching full flower in the 1980s, has certainly been accompanied by substantial increases in women’s mosque attendance in many parts of the Middle East. However, causality is difficult to gauge. Did the development of normative justifications for women’s mosque attendance by influential thinkers embolden women to attend mosques (and motivate mosque administrators to accommodate them), or did many women’s increasingly successful assertion of their desire to be present in mosques ultimately lead to acknowledgment by religious thinkers? Although it is likely that there was a complex interrelationship between the two, only fieldwork-based case studies can elucidate the process in specific contexts. The following remarks, which place the legal developments analyzed above in the context of documented developments in concrete practice, can only be general and provisional.
In many cases, access to mosque space is clearly a demand raised by women wielding contemporary forms of religious legitimation. Soraya Duval quotes a female member of the Ikhwān as declaring, “During the time of the Prophet women attended the prayers from dawn to sunset. No man has the right to deprive a woman from her Islamic mission.” Another Egyptian woman interviewed by Duval, this one a Salafī, “expressed her anger at a man who didn’t want her to attend to her lesson with a group of children in the main part of the mosque—usually the men’s domain.” The woman reported, “I thought to myself, I am wearing the Islamic dress, and am totally respectable in every way, so I just gave him my back and ignored him totally.”103 The claim that proper dress and comportment entitle a woman to her place in the mosque, already articulated by some medieval scholars, is here asserted with new vigor and assurance.
However, historical examples suggest that the encouragement of women’s mosque attendance does not always spring from the wishes and advocacy of women—or even from a simple recognition of women’s human equality or pious aspirations. Rather, in some cases religious activists and authorities have sought to encourage women’s mosque participation when the role of Islam in society is disputed, making it strategically important to maximize the mobilization of observant Muslims. This appears to have been the case, for instance, in some Muslim regions in the early decades of the Soviet Union.104 (Conversely, authorities seeking to limit political and religious mobilization overall may discourage women from going to mosques.105) The same has been true of some politically activist Shīʿīs in the late twentieth century. Classical Imāmī Shīʿī jurisprudence emphasized the desirability of women’s worship within the home,106 but Ayatollah Khomeini asserted that, if women could shield themselves from the view of men, it was better for them to pray in the mosque.107 Similarly, the Lebanese Ayatollah Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh (who is widely revered in Ḥizb Allāh circles and strongly supports women’s Islamic mobilization) writes that “there is no distinction in terms of the desirability of prayer in the mosque between men and women.”108 Certainly these developments have been promoted and welcomed by many women; however, others have had reservations about the use of the mosque to promote political and governmental agendas, including the definition of gender roles.109
Thus, modern advocates of women’s mosque attendance have sometimes sought to co-opt women, as well as to liberate them—although both projects can and do coexist and women are by no means passive objects of these enterprises. Advocates may seek to assimilate women into their normative frameworks, as well as to mobilize them for their sociopolitical programs. Heba El-Kholy, examining the mosque participation of lower-income women in Cairo in the late 1990s, emphasizes the salience in Friday sermons and women’s mosque classes of “the articulation of appropriate roles for women,” including such themes as “the need for women to demonstrate modesty, hishma, and to fulfill their obligations to their husband and children.”110 Studies of other locations have reached similar conclusions.111 However, other work has demonstrated both that women’s engagement in mosque instruction leads to opportunities for active appropriation and reinterpretation of religious gender norms and that women’s mastery of religious knowledge and techniques of pious self-cultivation may be empowering even in the absence of overt challenges to established norms.112 Ultimately, women’s ability to master such norms empowers as well as constrains them.
Despite the widely attested expansion of women’s mosque attendance in many places in recent decades, developments in women’s relationship to mosque space should not be described simply in terms of a unidirectional progress toward greater affirmation and inclusion. For instance, even within the Middle Eastern and North African region examined in this study, the expansion of women’s access often does not apply to village mosques or to small neighborhood mosques.113 To the extent that women have come to participate more extensively and in greater numbers in mosques shared with men, it can be argued that women’s mosque usage has been reconfigured and restructured rather than that women have simply gained mosque access where they had earlier lacked it. Writing of her fieldwork in Cairo in the 1970s, Evelyn Early describes how working-class women use the mosque: “while baladi men tend to gather at the coffeehouses, baladi women’s one acceptable meeting place is in the mosques, where they not only pray but also sit in the quiet coolness, a welcome respite from the dusty streets outside.” Furthermore, although these women prayed in specially demarcated areas during congregational worship, “at other times they move[d] freely throughout the mosque.”114 This fluid pattern of use of mosque space resembles that documented for earlier centuries.
As we have seen in earlier chapters of this study, before the “Islamic revival” of the 1970s and 1980s in many cases women did use mosque space, but often at different times and for different social and ritual activities than men; strict spatial separation of the sexes was often limited to the specific context of congregational prayer. The developments of the late twentieth century, in contrast, have tended to draw more women into the mosque at the same times, and for the same activities, as men.115 Thus, for instance, attendance at Friday prayers has become a more salient feature of many women’s religious lives. As the temporal patterning of women’s mosque usage has shifted toward greater parallelism with men’s (although in most places they are still by no means identical), in some cases the spatial patterning of mosque space has tended to become more rigid. Renata Holod and Hasan-Uddin Khan remark that the rise of the women’s balcony as a quasi-standard feature of major mosques in the second half of the twentieth century has had
a paradoxical impact on the place of women in the mosque. Insistence on a clearly defined physical separation for them, unlike the more flexible arrangements adopted in the past, has in practice limited the actual and potential use of the space by women. On the other hand, by making the provision of some space for them nearly obligatory in a new mosque, the programming has ensured the inclusion of facilities for women in instances where they had previously been denied access.116
In her moving memoir A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed reflects on Islam as she received it from the women of her family and contrasts it with some aspects of the Islamic literary heritage. She argues that this “women’s Islam” was sustained in the past in part by women’s limited ability to read works of religious scholarship and in part by the fact that “mosque going was not part of the tradition for women at any class level. … Women therefore did not hear the sermons that men heard. And they did not get the official (male, of course) orthodox interpretations of religion that men (or some men) got every Friday.” Nevertheless, “visiting mosques privately and informally to offer personal prayers” was something “which women have always done.”117
Of course, historically women have not always been excluded from the formal and learned Islam propagated in mosques, nor have they always found it inimical to their interests. Furthermore, as we have seen in earlier chapters, mosques have by no means been sites for the practice and dissemination of a monolithic “orthodox” Islam. To the discomfiture of many scholars, both preaching and ritual practice have been responsive to the demands of their audiences, which often (at least in the times and places we have examined) included women as well as men. In some cases, modern mosques are subject to more extensive bureaucratic control by the state, limiting the pluralism of the messages communicated there. Furthermore, major modern mosques are often not the vital and populist multipurpose spaces that they sometimes were in centuries past. Only by appreciating the long and varied history of women’s usage of mosque space can we recognize the ways in which mosques have historically functioned as women’s space as well as men’s, and the complex issues of inclusion and autonomy raised by recent developments.