IB World Religions 5.5.4. Gender and Religious Experience: Prayer, Pilgrimage and Female Mystics Notes

5.5.4. Gender and Religious Experience: Prayer, Pilgrimage and Female Mystics

The Qur'anic frame

1. The Qur'an addresses men and women together when it sets out what religion asks. One much cited verse pairs believing men with believing women through ten qualities in turn and promises both the same reward.
2. Muslims take taqwa, awareness of Allah, as the only measure that ranks people, on the basis of a verse saying the most honoured among you is the one most conscious of Allah.
3. Duties are not distributed identically, and the details belong with the rituals rather than here. What matters for religious experience is that the difference gives women and men different settings for the same obligations.
4. Muslim writers often describe the effect as two routes to one end. Women's duties fall more heavily at home and men's more heavily in public, while the inward requirement is held to be identical.
5. Interpretation of the difference varies widely. Traditionalist scholars read it as complementarity assigned by Allah, while scholars such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas argue that the Qur'an's egalitarian verses should govern how the rest are read.
6. Both readings appeal to the same sources. The argument is over which verses and hadith set the frame for the others, not over whether women and men stand equally before Allah.

Prayer at home and mosque

1. Salah is required of women and men alike, and Muslim women describe the five daily prayers as the backbone of their religious life exactly as men do. The difference lies in where the prayer is usually performed.
2. A hadith often quoted in favour of home prayer says a woman's prayer in the inner part of her house is better than in the mosque. Some read it as a lasting preference and others as a concession to the conditions of seventh-century Arabia.
3. Women who prefer praying at home describe it in terms of khushu, the absorbed humility the tradition asks for, saying a quiet room delivers it more readily than a crowded hall.
4. Others report the opposite experience. The sound of the imam's recitation, the rows standing shoulder to shoulder and the shared silence are what many women say they most miss when access is limited.
5. Access varies enormously by country. Mosques in Senegal, Indonesia, Turkey and much of North America hold large women's congregations, while many mosques in South Asia and parts of the Arab world have no women's section at all.
6. The Prophet's instruction not to prevent women from attending the mosques is quoted constantly in this argument, both by campaigners for prayer space and by imams who already provide it.

Women on the hajj

1. Hajj is required of every Muslim with the means and health to perform it, women included, and women are close to half of the pilgrims each year. The pilgrimage is where the experience of women and men converges most closely.
2. Pilgrims of both sexes circle the Ka'bah in the same crowd and stand together on the plain of Arafat. Women's accounts return repeatedly to that undivided crowd as the thing they were least prepared for.
3. Ihram, the consecrated state, marks the levelling. Men wear two unsewn white cloths and women wear ordinary modest dress with the face uncovered, and pilgrims of both sexes describe rank and wealth as invisible while it lasts.
4. Hagar is present throughout the rites. The sa'y, hurrying seven times between Safa and Marwah, retraces her search for water for her son, so a central act of the pilgrimage repeats a woman's desperation and rescue.
5. Pilgrims drink from the well of Zamzam for the same reason, since Muslims hold it sprang up for Hagar and her child. Nothing in these acts is marked as women's devotion, and every pilgrim performs them.
6. Women's accounts also record difficulty, including crowd pressure, cost, and the requirement in most schools of a mahram, a male relative travelling with them, which Saudi authorities have relaxed for organised groups since 2021.

Rabi'a and the early ascetics

1. Rabi'a al-Adawiyya of Basra, who died late in the eighth century, is the best known woman in Muslim spirituality and is counted among the founders of Sufism as a whole.
2. Sold into slavery as a child and later freed, she lived in deliberate poverty and refused repeated offers of marriage, on the ground that she had no attention left over from Allah.
3. Her contribution is mahabbah, disinterested love. She is remembered for praying that if she worshipped Allah from fear of hell He should burn her in it, and if from hope of paradise He should shut her out.
4. A story told of her has her carrying a torch and a pail of water, meaning to burn paradise and put out hell so that people would worship Allah for Himself alone. Later Sufis treated the image as a summary of the whole path.
5. She was not an isolated case. Early biographical works record many women ascetics in Basra and Syria, and Fatimah of Nishapur was cited by the male masters of her generation as a teacher rather than a curiosity.
6. Other women stand behind all of these in Muslim memory. Khadijah, A'ishah and Fatimah are held up across Sunni and Shi'ah devotion as models of belief, learning and endurance.

Later female mystics and scholars

1. Women continued as teachers and transmitters long after the early period. The muhaddithat, women who transmitted hadith, appear in the chains of the standard collections and taught men openly in mosque circles.
2. The scale was substantial. A modern survey by Mohammad Akram Nadwi runs to dozens of volumes and names several thousand women who taught hadith across the centuries.
3. A'ishah al-Ba'uniyya, a Damascene writer of the fifteenth century, left more surviving works than any other Muslim woman before the modern period, among them Sufi poetry and a manual of the path.
4. In West Africa Nana Asma'u, daughter of the founder of the Sokoto caliphate, built a network of women teachers called the yan taru in the nineteenth century, and her verse in Fulfulde, Hausa and Arabic is still recited.
5. Women have also guided orders. Sufi lineages record shaykhas and murshidas with disciples of their own, and the tombs of women saints such as Sayyida Nafisa in Cairo became major centres of visitation.
6. Shrine culture has often been the religious space open to women with least argument. Women are the majority of visitors at many shrines in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and India, where they bring petitions about illness, childbirth and marriage.

Women's spaces and current debate

1. Purpose-built women's mosques exist in China, where the nüsi of Henan and Shaanxi have had their own buildings and their own female prayer leaders, called ahong, for several centuries.
2. Elsewhere women's institutions grew inside the mosque rather than beside it. The Qubaysiyyat, a women's teaching movement founded in Damascus, spread through Syria and the Gulf under women teachers.
3. Qur'an memorisation circles for women are now widespread. A woman who has memorised the whole text is called a hafiza, the female form of the title given to men who do the same.
4. The sharpest contemporary argument concerns leading mixed prayer. When Amina Wadud led a mixed Friday congregation in New York in 2005, most Sunni and Shi'ah scholars judged it invalid, while her supporters argued that no text forbids it.
5. Almost every school accepts that a woman may lead other women in prayer, and Chinese practice takes that further than most. The disagreement is about mixed congregations rather than about women leading at all.
6. Gender shapes men's religious experience as well. Friday attendance, the funeral prayer and public leadership fall on men in most communities, and Muslim writers describe this as a burden of duty rather than a privilege.