Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice. By Marion Holmes Katz

Abstract

Book Reviews document a moment of important social and cultural transformation and can serve as an excellent starting point for future research projects. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfw048 Filippo Marsili Saint Louis University What does it say about the academic study of women and Islam when the discrepancy between rules restricting women’s access to mosques and historical evidence of women’s unceasing presence in mosques has not been investigated until 2014? At least, that is the question raised by Marion Holmes Katz’s book, Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice. There has, until now, been a gap in our knowledge of the actual impact of restrictive norms on women’s religious behaviors as those restrictions have evolved over time. This book endeavors to change that situation. Using mosque-going as a point of entry to study women’s mobility and visibility outside the home, Katz provides a his- torical survey not only of jurists’ and hadith specialists’ discussion of women’s access to mosques, but also how this discussion reflects fundamental ideas about women’s roles as wives, community members, and ritual actors. This well-organ- ized book provides multiple perspectives from which to approach the question of women’s presence (or absence) in mosques, across differences of era, geography, and legal doctrine. Discrepancies and continuity are given a nuanced treatment as Katz balances her discussion of intellectual discourse with reports of women’s presence in mosques. This is no facile account of women’s rights in Islam. Nor does Katz demon- strate the existence of a singular, definitive answer to the question, are women entitled to have access to mosques, and its ancillary questions, who has the authority to deny women’s access to mosques, and for what reasons. She shows that some scholars argued the authority rested with male family members or reli- gious leaders, while others located it with government. Still others supported women’s entitlement to attend public prayers in mosques, based on the well- known hadith, “do not prevent the maidservants of God from [going to] the mos- ques of God,” but devalued their attendance in favor of private worship (e.g., in the remotest, darkest chamber of her home). As for the reasons, Katz points out the contradiction between the Prophet’s admonition in the above-cited hadith and the aptly named “A’isha report,” issued by the Prophet’s wife after his death, which declared, “If the Messenger of God had lived to see what women have innovated, he would have forbidden them from visiting the mosque, as the women of the Israelites were forbidden” (18). How does one navigate the tension between the idealized and inclusive admonition of the Prophet and the subse- quent practical, if not hard-nosed, advice of the Prophet’s wife? The attempt to answer that question is the leitmotif of Katz’s book. Downloaded from http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Santa Barbara on July 25, 2016 Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice. By Marion Holmes Katz. Columbia University Press, 2014. 432 pages. $65.00 (hardcover), $64.99 (e-book).