Women in the Mosque, Marion Holmes Katz

WOMEN mOSQUE in the

A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice

marion holmes katz

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Introduction

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n the mid-1830s, the Englishwoman Julia Pardoe (then resident in Istanbul) visited the mosque of Hagia Sophia with a group of more recently arrived visitors. She writes, “A group of Ulemas were engaged in prayer as we entered . . . and almost in the centre of the floor knelt a party of women similarly engaged, while a couple of children, who had accompanied them, were chasing each other over the rich carpets.” The sight of women worshipping in a mosque was one for which she had not been prepared when she began her sojourn in Turkey; as she observes, “An erroneous impression has obtained in Europe that females do not attend, or rather, I should perhaps say, are not permitted to enter, the mosques; this, as I have just shewn, is by no means the case.” Other members of the party, however, had yet to correct their misconceptions. Pardoe comments, Those who were lately from Europe could scarcely believe their eyes; and when, in reply to the remark of a person who stood near me,

expressing his astonishment at such an apparition, I explained to him

that the presence of females in the different mosques was of constant

and hourly occurrence, he looked so exceedingly annoyed at the sweep-

ing away of his ancient prejudices, that I verily believe he thought the

deficiency of the whole female Empire of Turkey must be transferred to my own little person.1

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The assumption that women have been largely excluded from mosques for much of Islamic history is one that that has long prevailed in academic scholarship, as well as in more popular circles. Although acknowledging some exceptions and variations, scholars have emphasized the early emergence of a broad and effective consensus against women’s mosque attendance among Muslim jurists and its persistence until the modern period. In Leila Ahmed’s influential survey Women and Gender in Islam, the decline in women’s mosque access serves as an index of the erosion of their status in Islamic society after the time of the Prophet. She writes that the second caliph, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, sought (although, for the moment, unsuccessfully) to exclude women from mosques and that in the ʿAbbasid period (starting in the mideighth century CE) women “are not to be found, as they were in the previous era, either on [the] battlefield or in mosques.”2 In contrast, modern Muslim women are “reclaiming the right, not enjoyed for centuries, to attend mosque.”3 Other authors similarly emphasize the broad and durable Islamic scholarly sentiment against women’s attendance at public worship (and the consequent marginalization of women from mosque space), which is contrasted both with women’s participation in mosque activities in the time of the Prophet and with the resurgence of mosque-based activities among Islamist (and other) women since the 1970s.4 A number of authors have observed that, historically, neither scholarly disapproval of women’s mosque attendance nor the absence of women from mosques was uniform or monolithic. Johannes Pedersen has noted the presence of designated women’s space in important mosques over the centuries, and Christopher Melchert and Behnam Sadeghi have demonstrated a degree of diversity in legal doctrines, as well as change (largely in the direction of greater restrictions on women) over time.5 Scholars have also noted both anecdotal accounts and visual images of women’s presence in premodern mosques.6 As Asma Sayeed has observed, “legal prescriptions . . . did not always determine historical realities,” and “women’s mosque attendance and participation is characterized by tremendous diversity across time and place and dependent on numerous factors.”7 Nevertheless, there has as yet been no significant effort to gather and evaluate the evidence for women’s activities in (or their absence from) mosques in the period

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between the generation of the Prophet and the modern Islamic revival or to analyze the relationship between such practices and the evolving juristic debates over the legal status of women’s presence in mosques.

The significance of the legal discourse on women’s mosque attendance lies largely in what it reveals about the evolution of normative assumptions about gender. Because mosque-going was a paradigmatic case of women’s mobility and visibility outside of the home, discussion of its permissibility or merit was an occasion for the expression of fundamental ideas about women as wives, community members, and ritual actors. Logically prior to the articulation of concrete doctrines about women’s mosque attendance—rarely overtly debated, but underlying the very terminology used in discussing the issue—was the question of whether women constituted a monolithic category at all.

Early jurists universally presumed that women of different ages or statuses were subject to significantly different standards of behavior; there was no assumption that a consistent rule could be applied to “women” as a group. Women might also be divided in terms of physical allure, religious learning, or personal propriety. A central factor in the development of legal doctrines in this area is the progressive ascent of the concept of fitna (a multivalent term whose semantic range embraces sexual temptation and social disorder). Although the centrality of fitna to fiqh discourses on women has been widely recognized, the history of this concept has yet to be written; this study tells one central aspect of that story.

Jurists debating women’s mosque access also grappled with questions about the authority structure of the family and the limits of governmental power: If it was undesirable for some or all women to go to mosques, who (if anyone) was empowered to prevent them? Finally, changing attitudes toward women’s mosque attendance raised significant issues of legal theory: Did the practice of the community in the time of the Prophet establish a concrete and detailed model for the interaction of men and women for all future times, or must standards of conduct be revised as society changes (perhaps pursuing the early community’s standards of piety and propriety by quite different means)? Although the long-term constriction of the latitude afforded to women is an important element of this story (one that Sadeghi has eloquently illustrated for the Ḥanafī case), the history of the debate

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over women’s mosque access is not a linear progression from freedom to oppression for Muslim women. Instead, it manifests lively competition among alternative approaches to women as social and religious actors, one in which restrictive or misogynistic trends were by no means always victorious.

On a concrete, behavioral level, the question of women’s access to mosques is significant for several reasons. One is that assumptions about women’s exclusion from mosques may, tacitly or overtly, inform our understanding of the motivations and constraints conditioning Muslim women’s religious choices. Numerous studies emphasize the historical prevalence of Muslim women’s rituals that are neither performed within the mosque nor mandated by Islamic law.8 To the extent that this emphasis reflects the realities of many times and places, it raises several questions. Have women historically sought religious fellowship and fulfillment in other venues (and often in normatively problematic ritual activities) because they have been marginalized or excluded from mosques?9 If so, does their (relative or absolute) avoidance of mosques reflect their acceptance and internalization of restrictive legal norms or simply their inability to defy male authorities? Alternatively, to the extent that women have, in fact, avoided mosques in favor of other religious venues, might this largely reflect their own religious priorities and agendas? The question of women’s access to mosques is relevant to wider issues of power, authority, and agency.

Although mosques have never been the exclusive venues of Islamic religious instruction, reconstructing the history of women’s mosque attendance also helps us determine the degree to which women were exposed (through preaching, teaching, and shared ritual performance) to the ideas and practices familiar from the normative Islamic sources or (alternatively) the extent to which their religious lives were separate and autonomous from those of men. Medieval scholars sometimes explicitly expressed their awareness that women suffered from a religious ignorance (that is, of the forms of Islam favored by the scholars themselves) that arose directly from their relative seclusion. However, the same authors often discouraged women from frequenting mosques even when this limited their exposure to the religious norms that the scholars themselves sought to instill.

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For instance, the twelfth-century Baghdadi scholar and preacher Ibn al-Jawzī laments that “a girl ordinarily grows up in her inner chamber (mukhdaʿ); she is not taught the Qur’an, and does not know how to purify herself from menstruation; she is also not taught the obligatory components of prayer (ṣalāt), and no one talks to her before marriage about her husband’s rights.”10 Nevertheless, even as he acknowledges the lawfulness of a woman’s attending the mosque, in the same work he strongly emphasizes the superior merit of her remaining at home and praying in her inner chamber.11 The fourteenth-century Cairene scholar Ibn al-Ḥājj notes that “men have more frequent contact with religious scholars than women”; in contrast, “women are secluded and have been reared in ignorance, hence they are more prone to adopt innumerable vile habits contrary to the shari’a.”12 Nevertheless, as we shall see, he emphatically prefers that women pray at home and expresses a deep dismay at women’s presence in sessions of public teaching at mosques and madrasas.13 Reconstruction of the degree to which women attended mosques—and of the activities in which they engaged when they were there—adds to our understanding of the kinds of religious knowledge and practice to which women were exposed and the extent to which these overlapped with those cultivated by men.

Furthermore, the belief that women have historically been excluded from mosques in part reflects an implicit equation between presence in the mosque and performance of specific normative rituals. Shampa and Sanjoy Mazumdar have noted that “the non-presence of women in mosques, referred to in the literature, is contextual and is primarily associated with Jumma (Friday) prayers”; thus, descriptions of women’s relative exclusion do not “address the diversity of mosques and the multifaceted roles they play in the lives of Muslim men and women.”14 Although these authors are primarily referring to the contemporary period, their observation also applies to premodern contexts. People have used (and continue to use) mosques for many purposes, both sacred and profane; the question of women’s presence or absence in mosques should not be conflated with that of their participation in specific activities, such as Friday prayer.

Although mosques always varied widely in size, in the range of functions performed in them, and in the numbers of people that they

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served, they were rare public spaces in the urban fabric of premodern Middle Eastern cities. (Village mosques and small neighborhood mosques, although they will appear fleetingly in this study, are generally outside of the scope of our textual sources.) The great mosques were often places where ordinary people took naps, ate meals, peddled wares, sought legal redress for their grievances, and sometimes took up temporary or long-term residence.15 With the exception of the marketplace, before the rise of the coffeehouse in the sixteenth century the mosque was one of the few places where an adult could tarry and socialize outside of the domestic courtyard or the neighborhood cul-de-sac.16 When European travelers and colonialists began to visit mosques, they were sometimes shocked (and in other cases impressed) by the wide variety of sacred and profane activities mosques embraced and the diverse social strata they accommodated.17 However, mosques in the premodern Middle East were not only in some ways more profane than is often imagined but also more sacred.

It is a widely stated fact that Muslims can validly perform ṣalāt (the prayer ritual) in any place that is free of ritually impure substances.

There is no necessity to pray in a mosque; only the Friday congregational prayers must be performed in a formally designated public place of worship, although classical scholars unanimously exempted women from this duty. Nevertheless, the frequentation of mosques is far from religiously neutral. All Sunnī scholars hold it to be desirable for men to perform their obligatory prayers in the mosque, and Ḥanbalīs hold it to be obligatory in the absence of a valid excuse. Ibn al-Ḥājj enumerates a staggering ninety-two pious intents that may be framed by a man as he goes out to the mosque, yielding copious quantities of religious merit. The goals and benefits mentioned include gaining and imparting religious knowledge, correcting one’s ritual practices through the example of learned and holy men, and learning and sympathizing with the fortunes of the Muslim polity.18 Major mosques (and even minor ones) often contained physical features or locations that were credited with powerful blessings (baraka) or where it was believed prayers would be answered by God.19 Mosques (and particularly pulpits) were believed to carry an aura of holiness that would deter false oaths by parties to legal cases.20 The secondary literature has often sought to distinguish mosques (assumed to be

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neutral sites of communal prayer) from shrines (assumed to be sites characterized by contagious blessings, often conferred by the presence of holy remains); however, we shall see over the course of this study that the dichotomy between mosques and shrines is, in fact, as porous and questionable as the dichotomy between “normative” and “folk” Islam onto which it is often mapped. (This is not to deny that the distinction may be relevant in emic or functional terms in specific times and places, but merely to indicate that it is problematic as an analytic tool on a general level.)

One of the overall conclusions emerging from this study is that historically women’s mosque usage often differed significantly from that of men. Scholars seeking evidence of women’s presence in mosques have often taken male duties and activities as representative of mosque usage in general and simply examined the extent to which women did or did not partake of these same religious pursuits (most notably, attendance at Friday congregational prayers). However, to foreground activities that were obligatory or salient for men disregards the degree to which women’s preferred usage of mosque space may have diverged in timing and nature. As we shall see, for instance, in the Ḥijāz over a period of centuries Thursday evening seems to have eclipsed Friday noon as a time for women to gather in the mosque, and postchildbirth rituals represented a major and locally respected mode of women’s usage of the great mosques. Women’s mosque-based activities were not simply more limited or constrained versions of men’s.

In a study on the geography of gender in Renaissance Italy, Robert Davis writes that “the gendered valence of urban space was not only ‘defined’ through the edicts of male elites, but was also the result of an ongoing process, a continuing social interplay between the sexes and between social groups that helped maintain, extend, or challenge prevailing notions that certain areas of the city should be reserved for men and others for women.”21 Rather than framing women’s usage of mosque space either as being dictated by male-generated legal norms or as ignoring or defying them, this study will similarly assume that the gendering of mosque space was subject to ongoing negotiation.

The gendered allocation of space was not static, but temporally varied; as we shall see, mosque space that was dominated by men during Friday prayers might be dominated by women at other times of

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the day, week, or year. Fadwa El Guindi writes of “the Arab cultural construction of space that connects space to time and gender,” noting that “Arab and Islamic space . . . is characterized by the spatial and temporal interweaving pattern. . . . Sacred space and rhythmic time are both public and private.”22 Rather than seeing this temporal fluidity as characterizing Arab or Islamic culture in binary opposition to Western others, however, this study posits that such fluidity and negotiability may potentially characterize the gendering and sacralization of space—and its construction as “public” or “private”—in any given context.

The scope of this study is broad, yet also limited. It deliberately brackets issues of historical reconstruction regarding the lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad. The authenticity and dating of ḥadīth (reports recounting the statements and actions of the Prophet) are highly contested, and any detailed reconstruction of women’s ritual practices during the Prophet’s life would be contingent on hotly disputed methodological issues that this study does not attempt to resolve.23 For our purposes, it is less important whether a ḥadīth is literally true (in the sense of recording words uttered or acts performed by the Prophet Muḥammad) than that it was held to be authoritative by scholars in the time and place in question or that a given scholar selected and emphasized ḥadīth texts reflecting one attitude rather than another from those available to him. Similarly, little attention will be given to the precise time or place where a given legal doctrine first appeared.

Rather than assuming that a doctrine’s significance can best be illuminated by identifying its point of origin, we will focus more centrally on the longer process by which certain ideas spread and prevailed.

Furthermore, the study is limited to the question of whether women were encouraged or discouraged to attend mosques; whether they, in fact, did so; and, if they did attend, what they did while they were there. It brackets a number of related questions that, although important, are too large to address here. Women’s involvement in the foundation of mosques began very early and included some of the most important mosques in the Islamic world.24 However, women’s patronage of mosque construction is a separate issue that does not necessarily correlate with the magnitude and nature of their physical presence in mosques.25 The important issues of women’s religious

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learning and scholarly authority will be discussed here only in terms of women’s participation in teaching and learning activities within mosques. Finally, the issue of women’s ritual leadership (imāma) will not be addressed; it is treated separately from the question of women’s mosque attendance in the legal sources and does not feature in the reports of women’s activities in mosques examined here.26 The first chapter of this study examines legal texts associated with the four classical schools of Sunnī law (with the addition of the work of the Ẓāhirī scholar Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), both because he played a role as an interlocutor of the Andalusian Mālikīs and because his arguments were in part assimilated into those of the major schools).

These were not historically the only schools of law even within the tradition that gradually crystallized as Sunnism, although they achieved almost exclusive domination of Sunnī legal discourses and institutions by the fifth century AH/eleventh century CE. Not only would the many schools of law that proliferated in the early period be worthy of investigation, but also other legal traditions (such as those of Imāmī Shī’ism and Ibāḍī Khārijism) that survived and prevailed in later centuries could offer examples fully as rich as those explored here. The four Sunnī schools have been selected not because they reflect the full breadth and diversity of Islamic legal thought, but because they are important sample cases that offer rich and accessible bodies of legal literature associated with specific geographical areas where recorded behavior can usefully be compared with prevailing doctrines.

The chapter traces the evolving debate over women’s mosque attendance in these schools from their emergence in the eighth to ninth centuries CE approximately to the nineteenth century (although the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries are the least thoroughly examined and would merit further study). The broad chronological scope of this survey is made possible by the relative conservatism of the legal discourses in question. The authority structures of the schools ensured that even significant departures from earlier attitudes were framed in an idiom of deference to school precedent (taqlīd). Nevertheless, as we shall see, major trends and changes are discernible over time, and turning points in the debate are identifiable. In addition to tracking the development of legal doctrine on this point, the study seeks to discern and analyze the deeper assumptions underlying it.

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In the past, Islamic legal texts have sometimes been studied as a proxy for social history. It was assumed (either tacitly or explicitly) that one can infer actual behavior from the dictates of legal manuals originating in the time and place in question.27 This assumption, less often made in such relatively “profane” areas as economic or sexual behavior, is more tempting in the field of ritual, where people’s activity might be imagined to be more consistently aimed at satisfying pious standards. However, copious evidence (such as the many works denouncing religious “innovations,” or bidaʿ) demonstrates that even in the area of religious ritual, scholars often strove in vain to recruit the broader population for their agendas. Furthermore, divergent ritual activities did not simply represent the unruly exuberance of “popular” piety; they also often represented—even among the unlearned—powerful alternative views of Islamic normativity.28 The subtitle of Huda Lutfi’s wonderful piece on Ibn al-Ḥājj, Female Anarchy Versus Male Shar’i Order in Muslim Prescriptive Treatises,29 perfectly captures the tone of this austere jurist’s laments; however, in our own analyses we must be careful not to accept uncritically male scholars’ polemical depiction of women’s religious activities as anarchic, even if their structuring logic is not directly available to us in the surviving sources. The meaning of women’s ritual activities is not exhausted by their failure to conform to standards constructed by (some) male scholars. Furthermore, particularly in the case of ritual, the degree to which women adhered to—or were even aware of—the finer points of legal doctrine as expounded by male scholars is at least partially related to the very question we are examining, their access to the spaces where these doctrines were disseminated and modeled.

Nevertheless, we will not assume that normative discourses were completely divorced from social realities or that they existed in an abstract space unaffected by the scholars’ interactions with the world around them. Rather, instead of presuming that scholars unilaterally dictated behavioral norms that were unquestioningly carried out (or even defiantly ignored) by ordinary women and men, we will argue that legal norms were in a more complex dialogic relationship with actual behavior. For instance, in several cases it is demonstrable that the most vehement and categorical prohibitions on women’s mosque attendance were produced in contexts where women were highly

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visible in at least some mosques (a fact that was sometimes explicitly cited by the very authors who produced the prohibitions). This situation suggests less that women were oblivious to the dictates of scholars than that these scholars were deeply affected by the activities of women, if only in the sense that they were spurred to vigorous opposition.30 Of course, it is also likely that scholars’ norms had significant influence over the behavior of many women, even if those norms were themselves rarely unanimous.

This study does not assume that all Muslim women have naturally or necessarily desired to frequent mosques. As reflected in the work of scholars like Ibn al-Ḥājj, who exhorted men to attend prayers in the mosque while acknowledging that even religious scholars sometimes preferred not to, mosque-going was a cultivated desire (indeed, one among multiple alternatives, including pious seclusion) whose existence could not be taken for granted even among the devout.31 However, it is notable that the premodern Islamic legal tradition quite consistently represents mosque-going as a female desire and a male concern, addressing questions such as “May a woman go to the mosque?” and “May her husband prevent her?” (rather than, for instance, “Should a husband encourage his wife to go to the mosque?”).

It may be that this pattern reflects a genuine legacy of women’s seeking access to mosques in the face of male opposition or that it is a convention of the legal discourse to treat all kinds of public mobility as female privileges that must be examined in light of male claims to control. In either case, it constrains our analysis. Thus, the first chapter of the study (which deals with legal discussions) will examine only whether a woman “may” go to the mosque, not whether (or why) she might or might not wish to do so. In contrast, the second chapter of the study (which examines descriptions of actual behavior) will start with the working assumption that women in a given time or place may or may not have sought to access mosque space. The absence of women cannot thus be assumed to be the result of effective male prohibition; rather, the possibility of alternative preferences on the part of women will also be considered.

The second chapter turns to nonlegal sources for reports of women’s actual presence and behavior in mosques (or, alternatively, of their absence from mosques or their preference for other sites of religious

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activity) in a selection of specific locations. This chapter draws on an eclectic array of genres, including descriptions of mosques in geographical texts, accounts from travelers’ narratives, and incidents recounted by chroniclers or (later) memoirists. It also draws from texts inveighing against the innovations (bidaʿ) being committed in mosques.32 Although these texts certainly have normative agendas, they also provide more circumstantial detail about actual behavior in mosques than any comparable premodern genre. Given the paucity of premodern sources for women’s religious conduct, they are indispensable to a study of this kind, even if their polemical force introduces an unmistakable bias into their descriptive accounts.

Historians of the Islamic Middle East are, in comparison with historians of Europe, hampered by a severe lack of archival sources before the Ottoman period. In this particular case, the lack of systematic archival data is not alleviated even by the advent of the Ottomans. Unlike premodern churches or synagogues, which historically sometimes rented pews or seats to individual congregants, mosques did not provide seats (assigned or otherwise) and ordinarily did not keep records of individual attendance.33 Although there are instances of disciplinary action being taken against men who failed to attend Friday congregational prayers, all scholars agreed that women were never actually obligated to attend prayers in the mosque. Thus, unlike in some early modern Christian societies where women were disciplined for failing to attend church, Muslim women were never tried or disciplined for their nonattendance at mosques.34 As a result, neither women’s presence in mosques nor their absence from them generated documentation that could provide systematic evidence of their ritual behavior. For this reason, even Ottomanists (who enjoy a wealth of archival evidence in many other areas) have sometimes been forced to resort to the anecdotal accounts of Western travelers when trying to reconstruct women’s attendance or nonattendance at mosques.35 Because accounts produced by Western travelers pose particular interpretive and ideological problems, an examination of this issue precedes the discussion of travelers’ accounts of Ottoman mosques.

However, texts produced by male Muslim scholars are in some sense also outsider descriptions of women’s practices. We cannot always assume that the categories and assumptions of the preserved texts

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reflect the values, terminology, or underlying assumptions of the women involved. For instance, scholars consistently represent women’s self-adornment as an issue of vanity and seductiveness.

However, there are other dynamics that may have been relevant to women who adorned themselves for the mosque. On the one hand, men were encouraged to use fine dress and perfume when going to the mosque, honoring the sacredness of the place and time. Although the scholarly tradition inverted this model with respect to women (asserting that they should be plainly or even shabbily dressed and unperfumed), some women may well have believed that they, too, should honor sacred times and places with sweet smells and festive attire. Furthermore, self-adornment may have communicated important messages about wealth and status rather than simply expressing personal flirtatiousness. Women’s possible motivations for displaying finery are suggested by a thirteenth-century report of a criminal whose wife-accomplice would tell their female victims that there was a wedding or feast in the neighborhood and that “a number of highranking women have gathered there, so don’t leave off any adornment so you can show off well among them” (the unfortunate women were then robbed and murdered).36 As we shall see in chapter 3, fine dress and jewelry seem to have played an important role in status maintenance—even, or perhaps especially, in the mosque—among women in sixteenth-century Mecca.

It should also be remembered that even formally nonnormative sources, which are overtly descriptive rather than prescriptive, often pursue agendas that complicate our effort to reconstruct the nature and extent of women’s use of mosque space in the past. In all cases, observers were far more likely to record behavior that shocked, surprised, or (less often) delighted them than activities they found routine and unexceptionable. Collecting references to women’s presence in mosques from such sources does correct the impression communicated by the legal manuals, which often deemphasize or deprecate women’s presence in mosques to the point that one might assume that mosques were consistently empty of women. Recourse to other genres allows us glimpses of many women using many mosques for many different purposes, although (as we shall see) both the accessibility of mosques and women’s interest in frequenting them seem to

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have varied widely over time and space. However, given the inevitable underrepresentation in our sources of behavior considered normal and unproblematic, there is a danger that we may replace the notion that mosques were always empty of women with an equally unbalanced notion that mosques teemed with unruly women engaged in normatively problematic activities. It is always necessary to remember that the routine participation of women in religiously uncontroversial activities such as congregational prayer is the kind of activity least likely to achieve salience in our sources; even observers who considered such behavior technically undesirable were presumably more likely to polemicize against more vivid instances of alleged misbehavior. Thus, our historical reconstruction will necessarily remain partial and provisional, despite attentiveness to the biases of our sources.

Information about women’s usage of mosques is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere—scattered in the most diverse sources and yet rarely concentrated enough to provide a complete picture of practice in a given time and place. Because incidental (yet valuable) references to women’s presence in mosques may emerge from the most unexpected contexts, it is not possible to conduct a thorough survey of all possible sources for such information—particularly when one takes into account the wide range of literary sources that may provide an evocative sense of people’s assumptions about gendered behavior, even if they do not document concrete examples of mosque-based activities by actual women. Thus, the historical survey in the second chapter of this study is necessarily provisional and must be supplemented and corrected as new materials emerge. However, because the accumulation of anecdotal material is unlikely ever to be superseded by comprehensive archival data (if only because such data were usually never recorded in the first place), the present study provides a useful step toward a necessarily fragmentary assemblage of information about women’s usage of mosques.

Although analyses of Islamic legal discourses have often drawn connections with social behavior and historical works have often invoked the norms of Islamic law, this study is centrally structured around the relationship between normative discourses and social practice. By attempting to reconstruct broad patterns of women’s behavior, even in the face of limited data, it strives to recognize that this behavior may

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have been informed by broad and enduring patterns and objectives of its own. It strives to be attentive to the ways in which women’s practice and scholars’ legal constructs mutually influenced and informed each other. This juxtaposition of evolving legal discourses with the greatest currently practical collection of reports about women’s behavior over time (and in several of the most important locations where the legal debates in question occurred) provides new insight into the dynamics of premodern Islamic law and society.

This study is in different ways both dauntingly broad and severely limited. Its chronological and geographical sweep will be disquieting to those who enjoy richer bodies of sources on specific times and places (such as Europeanists or people working on better-documented issues in Islamic history). It is the frustratingly low density of relevant data that has led me to bring together information about such a broad range of times and places, thus using the coherence of the overall patterns to compensate for the lacunae in our knowledge about specific contexts. Despite its sweep, this study is also limited in terms of both geography and language, covering only the Arabic-speaking Middle East, North Africa, and Andalusia. The final section of chapter 2 uses Western travelers’ accounts to reconstruct some aspects of practice in Ottoman Istanbul, seeking some insight into practice in a context strongly dominated by Ḥanafīs. Other major regions of the Islamic world—including sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia— are not covered. This limitation results from the nature of my own linguistic and historical training, as well as from the already unmanageable volume of sources involved. The degree to which the Middle Eastern patterns examined here were typical of the broader Islamic world can be clarified only by research on other regions.

The diffuse nature of the sources in the first and second chapters of the book is balanced by the specificity of the third chapter, which takes as a case study the best-documented instance of contestation of mosque space in the premodern Islamic world. This is an incident in which the authorities in Mecca decided, in 937 AH/1530 CE, to bar women from the Great Mosque of Mecca during the nighttime hours.

This episode gave rise to a fierce, if short-lived, regional legal debate over the regulation of women’s mosque access. A unique manuscript describing the sequence of events in Mecca, which appears never to

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have been discussed in the secondary literature, is the most extensive and circumstantial account of women’s actual usage of a mosque— and its contestation by scholars and political authorities—before the twentieth century. Although the Great Mosque of Mecca is in many ways unique, it has also been paradigmatic for Muslims, and in this case it evoked serious reflection about women’s mosque access in general (as well as about issues specific to Mecca, such as pilgrimage and circumambulation of the Kaʿba). By combining an account of women’s active (and ultimately successful) resistance to the restriction of their mosque access with legal opinions that were generated in the immediate context of this debate, this remarkable account makes direct connections between social practice and normative discourse that can only be inferred in most other cases.

The final chapter of the book examines legal sources of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Unlike in the earlier periods, for which it was useful to collate scattered evidence of women’s presence and activities in mosques, for this period a wealth of evidence about actual practice is available and continues to be generated. Rather than attempting to construct an overall account of women’s evolving presence in mosques, this chapter thus focuses on shifts and transformations in the legal discourses against the background of changing patterns of women’s participation documented in other studies.