IB World Religions 5.2.5. Gender and Ritual: Prayer, Purity, Dress and the Mosque Notes

5.2.5. Gender and Ritual: Prayer, Purity, Dress and the Mosque

The pillars and gender

1. All five pillars bind Muslim women and men alike. Shahadah, salah, zakat, sawm and hajj are owed by every adult Muslim of sound mind, and no school of law exempts women from any of them.
2. The differences lie in manner, place and timing rather than in the duty itself. Jurists derive them from particular Qur'anic verses and hadith, so the rulings vary from one madhhab, or school of law, to the next.
3. That variation matters for accuracy. A ruling that holds among Hanafi Muslims in Turkey may not hold among Maliki Muslims in Senegal or among Twelver Shi'ah Muslims following the Ja'fari school in Iran.
4. Custom and law are also distinguishable. Much of what a visitor meets locally, such as who attends a burial or how a prayer hall is divided, rests on regional custom rather than on any ruling every school accepts.
5. Muslim women themselves assess these arrangements very differently. Some read the concessions as recognition of women's circumstances, others as removal from communal life, and the argument is conducted inside the tradition as much as outside it.
6. This article takes the ritual questions: purity, dress for prayer, congregation, pilgrimage timing, shrine visiting and death rites. The wider ethical argument about public dress belongs with akhlaq, moral conduct.

Purity, menstruation and prayer

1. Ritual purity, tahara, governs who may pray. Minor impurity is removed by wudu, and major impurity, janabah, by ghusl, the washing of the whole body.
2. Menstruation and post-natal bleeding place a woman in a state in which salah is not performed. The great majority of jurists hold that those prayers are not made up afterwards, while fasts missed in Ramadan are.
3. The sources explain the asymmetry by frequency. Prayers missed every month would pile up beyond any reasonable repayment, whereas the days of a single Ramadan can be kept later in the year.
4. Schools differ on what else is suspended. Most Sunni jurists restrict touching the Arabic text and sitting in the prayer hall, while some classical Maliki opinion and a number of modern scholars permit recitation from memory and entry to the mosque.
5. Muslim readings of the exemption diverge sharply. Many women describe it as a rest written into the law, while others argue that it also removes them from the congregation for a week in every month.
6. Other forms of worship continue throughout. Du'a, dhikr, listening to the Qur'an, charity and study are unaffected, so what is suspended is a set of rites rather than a woman's religious life.

Dress for prayer

1. Dress for salah is set by awrah, the part of the body that must be covered. The rules are stated for both sexes and are conditions of the prayer's validity rather than general advice on modesty.
2. For men most schools put the awrah in prayer between the navel and the knee. Praying with bare shoulders is widely discouraged, and a cap or turban is customary in many regions without being required anywhere.
3. For women most Sunni schools require everything covered except the face and the hands, and the Hanafi school exempts the feet as well. Ja'fari rulings agree that the face and hands may be uncovered.
4. This produces a dedicated garment in many places. Indonesian and Malaysian women pray in the mukena, a white two-piece covering kept for the purpose, and many Iranian women put on a chador for prayer.
5. Hajj reverses the usual expectation. Men in ihram wear two unstitched cloths, while women wear ordinary modest clothing and most schools require the face to be left uncovered, so the visible marker of consecration falls on the men.
6. The prayer requirement is narrower than the question of public dress. Whether and how a woman covers in the street is argued on grounds of interpretation, law and culture, and Muslims who disagree there may agree entirely about prayer.

Congregation and the mosque

1. Prayer in congregation, jama'ah, is held to bring far greater reward than prayer alone, and on Friday the jum'a prayer replaces the midday salah for those who attend it.
2. Sunni and Shi'ah jurists alike hold jum'a obligatory on adult free men who are resident and able. For women it is recommended rather than obligatory, so a woman who attends discharges the duty and one who stays away incurs nothing.
3. The hadith are read in two directions. One widely cited report forbids preventing women from going to the mosques, another commends a woman's prayer in her own house, and communities weigh the pair differently.
4. Space is normally arranged so that men and women pray apart. Arrangements run from women's rows behind the men in one hall to a screened area, a gallery, or a separate room with the imam's voice relayed into it.
5. Leadership is more restricted. Most schools accept that a woman may lead other women, the Hanafi school discourages it, and the large majority of scholars in every school hold that a woman does not lead a mixed congregation.
6. Provision varies enormously in practice. China has a long tradition of women's mosques led by women serving as ahong, Turkish and Iranian mosques keep well used women's sections, and some mosques elsewhere have little or no space for women, which Muslim women's organisations have campaigned to change.

Hajj timing and mahram

1. Hajj falls on women on the same terms as men, subject to istita'ah, the means and health to go. Nothing in the pillar itself is reduced for them.
2. Timing is the practical constraint. Tawaf requires ritual purity in the view of most schools, so a menstruating pilgrim cannot circle the Ka'bah, although she does perform wuquf at Arafat, the rite without which hajj is invalid.
3. Pilgrims plan around this. Many women now take medication to delay menstruation across the five days, which most contemporary jurists in both branches permit where it is medically safe.
4. The constraint historically pushed women's pilgrimage later in life, and women past the menopause travelled more freely. Cheaper travel and modern medicine have weakened that pattern without removing it.
5. Companionship is the other question. Hanbali and Hanafi jurists have required a husband or a mahram, a male relative a woman may not marry, while Shafi'i and Maliki jurists allow a trustworthy group, and Ja'fari rulings turn on whether the journey is safe.
6. State rules have since moved. Saudi Arabia dropped the mahram requirement for women pilgrims in 2021 and allowed them to register in groups, which removed a long-standing practical barrier without settling the argument among jurists.

Shrine visits and death rituals

1. Ziyarah, the visiting of shrines, is a major feature of religious life in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, South Asia and North Africa, and women are often the more numerous visitors.
2. Access has sometimes been contested. Some Sufi shrines barred women from the inner sanctum, and the Bombay High Court ruled in 2016 that the bar at the Haji Ali Dargah was unlawful, after which the trust readmitted them.
3. Salafi teaching objects to shrine visiting by anyone, holding that it risks shirk. Where that view prevails the question of women's access does not arise, because the practice itself is rejected.
4. Death rites divide by sex rather than exclude. The body is washed, ghusl al-mayyit, by people of the same sex, though most schools allow a husband and wife to wash each other, and the shroud is three cloths for a man and five for a woman.
5. The funeral prayer, salat al-janazah, is open to women in most schools. Attendance at the graveside is discouraged in a good deal of Sunni practice on the strength of contested hadith, and is entirely ordinary in much of Iran, Turkey and West Africa.
6. Mourning has gendered forms as well. Loud lamentation is criticised in hadith the schools cite, a widow keeps iddah for four months and ten days, and Shi'ah women hold their own majlis for Imam ul-Husayn, led by women preachers in Iran, Iraq and South Asia.