Women and the Mosque

Muslims are encouraged to congregate for the prayer, but they do not have to. It is very highly encouraged to congregate. Women can go to the mosque and congregate if they like, or not if they do not; it is not encouraged for them. The house is actually where the women generally pray in most Muslim cultures. And there are certain phenomena that relate to this which deserve mention. Traditionally there was no barrier between the men and the women praying. That is a later innovation. It was not the tradition of the Prophet (peace be upon him): the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not have a barrier between the men and the women. That came later. In many Muslim countries there is still no such barrier — in African countries, in North Africa, there is no barrier. In the Middle East and in the Indo-Pak cultures one will tend to find barriers. So that is more of a cultural phenomenon. It is not a religious one; it is not part of the religious tradition.

Even what is called the mashrabiyyah in some mosques — the latticed woodwork between the men and the women — is not from the religion. It is traditional in terms of Muslim culture, but it is not from the religion. The religion does not say that. That is something that people introduced as a cultural phenomenon, and that is important to remember. And there are some countries — a few — where there is an extreme patriarchy, and it is really hard for women to pray in the mosque. That, again, is a cultural phenomenon, because the Prophet (peace be upon him) prohibited that. He said: do not prohibit women from going to the mosques, and it is a sound hadith. Probably on the Arabian Peninsula one will find this in some of the mosques in the villages, but in Mecca and Medina definitely not: there are women praying there.

In pictures of Mecca and the Kaʿbah, the black groupings are generally the women, and the white are the men, because in that country they tend to wear black and white: the men wear white and the women wear black. In Algeria the women wear white. So that again is a cultural thing of colour. In West Africa the women are very colourful; they are like cockatoos, with lots of colour in their ḥijāb. In Morocco it is pretty much a basic kind of unisex dress: they wear a jallābah, and the differences would be in the colours, but the actual jallābah is very similar. Women wear the same dress as the men do, except that the colours distinguish them — most of them do, at any rate.