Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses [1st ed.] 978-3-030-13584-3, 978-3-030-13585-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 1-14
Visiting the Nisha Miskii (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 15-30
Dimensions (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 31-64
Narratives of Place (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 65-97
Locating Women’s Mosques (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 99-136
Locating Women’s Roles (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 137-170
Contexts and Discourses (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 171-200
Closures and Conclusions (Jacqueline H. Fewkes)....Pages 201-216
Back Matter ....Pages 217-220

Citation preview

Jacqueline H. Fewkes

LOCATING MALDIVIAN WOMEN’S MOSQUES in GLOBAL DISCOURSES

Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses

Jacqueline H. Fewkes

Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses

Jacqueline H. Fewkes Honors College Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, FL, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-13584-3 ISBN 978-3-030-13585-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932962 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover art by Lisa Volta This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book is an extension of my previous work on Muslim women’s scholarly and leadership roles in Asian Muslim communities. My interest in the Maldives specifically began when a colleague mentioned visiting there. His casual statement of appreciation for the place prompted my perusal of sources on the Maldives to learn more about the region. My research interest was piqued upon finding a newspaper article about a crime on one island in the Maldives. The crime itself I have forgotten now, but what caught my attention was a section where the journalist interviewed “the imam of the women’s mosque” for an opinion on the social impact of that crime. I was surprised, as I had recently read a book about women’s mosques in China and had been led to believe that they did not exist in other parts of the world. A few weeks later and after a great deal more research, I was intrigued to learn more about the hundreds of women’s mosques that existed there and was poised to visit the Maldives to investigate. I have met colleagues who are surprised or puzzled by this etiology of my research in the Maldives, and one who challenged, “what makes the Maldives the ideal place to study women’s mosques?” At first, I found such questions odd—why does it have to be the ideal place to study women’s mosques at all? We are anthropologists and surely have become accustomed to works where the questions, as well as the answers, arise from the cultural settings themselves. This, after all, is what the inductive research approach allows us to do so well; it is what enables anthropologists to ask questions that really matter within the v

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communities within which they are studying and helps us in the dance to straddle between emic/etic perspectives in our work. Yet questions about the “applicability” or “representativeness” of the Maldives are valid—I do not consider the Maldives to be a testing ground, representative of anything more than the Maldives itself, and yet I am using the region as a starting point to discuss much larger issues associated with women’s mosques, issues that have global significance. Indeed, I will argue that it is necessary to negotiate between the local, the specific, meanings and those associated with the global, or general. The exact relationship between my work in the Maldives and my thoughts on the relationship between the Maldives case study and the larger questions associated with women’s mosques is therefore relevant. The etiological significance of my initial introduction to the Maldives is the surprise I experienced when finding out about women’s mosques in the region. It is a surprise and curiosity that I have seen mirrored in many works, both scholarly and popular, and one that bears further examination. What expectations about women, prayer, and sacred spaces in Islam are housed in these moments? Many people are surprised to find out about women’s mosques as they have never heard of them before; books about mosques and women’s roles in Islam rarely mention these spaces. We could ascribe this omission to biases, products of common uninformed notions about the role of Islam in social relations that circulate in popular discussions. Certainly, this is the case in some authors’ work, particularly popular journalistic works. For example, the author of the magazine article titled “Getting Ready for the World’s First Women’s Mosque” who claims “the first women’s jamaat in the world may well lead to the first women’s mosque in history” (Anand, 2004) is so focused on the image of a women’s mosque as a form of protest for gender equality that he leaves little room coverage of the actual history of mosques in Muslim communities. Similarly, the author of “First Mosque for Women in Kabul: God Isn’t Only There for Men” claims a contemporary building as the first official mosque for women as part of a narrative about social progress, as she/he claims “women in Islamic countries have become more self-­assertive” in more recent years, thus allowing them to claim their own spaces (Shamel, 2006). In these cases, the authors bring to their writing preconceived notions about unequal gendered spatial dimensions in Muslim communities and therefore have not felt the need to investigate whether their perceptions of Muslim spaces conform to reality,

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ignoring the women’s mosques that have existed for centuries in various communities. But similar errors occur in academic works as well, by authors who contest that the women’s mosques that they have found are unique to the cultural area in which they work or anomalous as Islamic spaces. Holding academic researchers to alternate standards from those of popular media writers, these errors are products of something more than casual biases. They may indicate the Orientalism of the Muslim Other that produces, as Edward Said has written, knowledge that “no longer requires application to reality” and “gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another” (Said, 1979, p. 1). This deeply ingrained Orientalism fundamentally shapes scholarship as certain ideas are thought to be so basic, so much a part of common knowledge, that the ways in which they are “propagated and disseminated anonymously, […] repeated without attribution” have allowed scholars to think of them as unalterable facts (Said, 1979, p. 1). The construction sites of this common knowledge do not exist only in academic works; as I will explore in this book knowledge about Muslim spaces are produced by discourses and uses of community spaces, both in the imagined local and global Muslim communities. By using the term “imagined” here, I mean to reference Benedict Anderson’s sense of the term, as having shared identities and interests (Anderson, 1983). As I will explain in more detail in this book, the phenomenon of the missing women’s mosques may be thought of as an epistemic one that originates from a divide between ways of knowing spaces associated with local and global Muslim communities. This divide, however, is not absolute and highly problematic. The Maldives will play an illustrative role in this exploration, as the region ethnographically anchors my discussion of the broader issues in this book. Practices associated with Maldivian women’s mosques offered me initial views on challenges to common notions of Muslim women’s roles in public and private spaces, challenges that come from many parts of the global Muslim community. Just as culturally specific ideas of space, known spaces and boundaries, are the most relevant way individuals have for conceiving of abstract relationships between the one/ self and the many/other—for example, national boundaries represent “us” and “them” in complex identity discourses—so too do anthropologists need a specific ethnographic site (the one) through which to

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conceptually explore any broad category of experience (the many), such as “being Muslim.” To discuss an ethnographic setting in this sense is to understand it as a lens through which to view other settings, rather than a test case or as representative of other sites. The practice should serve to remind us in comparative studies that we are talking about real people in real times/places, even when we may not know all the dimensions of those people/places/times. This narrative device can, ideally, stop us from conceiving of other cases as existing wholly in the literature that is referenced. This in turn can help to avoid the fallacy of conceptual reification, where we think of the general concept as existing in real life and thus miss out of the full complexity of how that concept interacts with actual settings. Furthermore, the use of ethnographic settings serves to remind both writer and reader of the role of perspectives in this discussion, providing a place from which to view the issue in a landscape, as opposed to peering down upon a theoretical globe. The Maldives is a unique lens; the complex sociopolitical history of the Indian Ocean region enables us to explore several different landscapes and associated narratives. While historical transnational trading networks have clearly informed many common Islamic practices in the region, contemporary global movements influence some practices as well. Still, other ways of being Muslim—aspects of the lived religion— may be specific to the nation of the Maldives. The Maldivian practice of maintaining women’s mosques seems, upon first glance, to be in the latter category. Until 2009 these mosques, like the men’s mosques of the Maldives, were government institutions; thus, the women’s mosques were run by government-hired women, who led the prayers for other women and acted as caretakers for the buildings. Yet local and transnational communities have also played significant roles in the development of Islamic spaces in the Maldives, and all three conceptualizations of Islamic gendered spaces—local, national, and transnational—inform spatial practices associated with Maldivian women’s mosques. Thus in this case, as in the others discussed in this book, the epistemic divide between sites of local and global Muslim communities is porous. The challenge here is not merely to understand how/why the divide exists, but to also interrogate its limitations and account for the myriad spaces in Muslim communities that transcend this divide while

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still considering the categorization of spaces as variously local or global as useful. What follows is my exploration of these complex cultural issues through the lens of Maldivian women’s mosques. Jupiter, USA

Jacqueline H. Fewkes

References Anand, S. (2004). Getting Ready for World’s First Women’s-Only Mosque. Outlook India. Retrieved from http://www.countercurrents.org. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism (1st ed.). New York: Vintage Books. Shamel, R. (2006). First Mosque for Women in Kabul: God Isn’t Only There for Men. Retrieved from http://en.qantara.de/God-Isnt-Only-There-forMen/7707c166/index.html.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the people related to this research who gave generously of their time and for sharing with me their viewpoints. The directors and staff of the Maldives Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research in Male and the collections staff of the Maldives Qaumee Kuthubukhaanaa (National Library), as well as the representatives of the Ministry of Gender and Family, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Tourism were all instrumental in helping me to complete this work. A special thanks in the Maldives go to all of the mudahim that met with me and allowed me to visit their mosques and the women of the nisha miskii who shared their thoughts on the topic. I was honored by the support of many in Malé, especially the following friends: Fathimath Thoufeeqa, Mahamood Shougee, Ainth, and Hamidiyyah. This research was generously funded through support from the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in Asian History from the American Historical Association, the Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant from Florida Atlantic University, and Library of Congress Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship. Thanks are also due to the staff at the University of California Berkeley libraries and the Library of Congress, as well as the Florida Atlantic University library staff, particularly April Porterfield from the interlibrary loan division who, through the intrepid tracking of several sources, provided invaluable assistance. I am fortunate to have the support of many peers who have provided me with assistance on details in this book and given general collegial support. I therefore wish to give general thanks to all of my colleagues xi

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at Johns Hopkins University, University of Pennsylvania, and Florida Atlantic University. I owe a special thanks to Rachel Corr, Chris Ely, Rebecca Fewkes, and Abdul Nasir Khan for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this manuscript, providing constructive criticism and insightful suggestions. I am grateful for assistance with particular aspects of this work to Shinu Abraham, Espelencia Baptiste, Liz Faier, Praveena Gullapalli, Amy McLaughlin, William O’Brien, Miguel Ángel Vázquez, and Uzma Rizvi. I also appreciate the feedback on my working paper from participants in the Conference on Women’s Studies at Eastern Mediterranean University in 2009, particularly Zeynep Alat and Burkay Pasin. I would like to express my deepest appreciation for the following individuals who have been faculty mentors at different stages of my education—Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Erik Mueggler, Paula Sabloff, Peggy Sanday, Elizabeth Sheehan, Greg Urban, and Brackette Williams. I am particularly grateful for the continued excellent guidance of Brian Spooner, whose encouragement and advice have helped to make me who I am today. I hope that this work honors the memory of my mentors who are no longer with us: Sidney Mintz, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Gregory Possehl. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the initial manuscript for this book, whose comments have helped me in revision, and to all of the people at Palgrave Macmillan who contributed to producing this volume, particularly my editor, Mary Al-Sayed and editorial assistant Madison Allums. On the personal side, there are several more people who deserve particular mention. I remember and honor William Joseph Cumpston, who left us too soon and is always missed. To my family members in the USA and India, I would like to say thank you for the continuing years of support in my work: Robert C. J. Fewkes, Mary Anne Fewkes, Rebecca Fewkes, Robert W. Fewkes, John Farrow, Renee Sekel, Ramazan Khan, Attiya Kousar, Rubina Kousar, Abdul Rauf, and Abdul Mateen. My nieces and nephews also deserve mention for having shared so much joy, thank you to Aaman, Adil, Arju, Ayaan, Dash, Eleanor, Henry, Maggie, Miranda, and Tanu. My final heartfelt words of everlasting gratitude and the dedication of this book are for the three people who have supported me every day in countless ways—Nasir, Amina, and Zayd.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 “The World in General” or “The World Around Here”? 2 Islam/Muslims and Religion/Practice 6 Research Methods and Sources 8 Book Organization 9 References 13 2 Visiting the Nisha Miskii 15 Searching for Women’s Mosques in Malé 16 Local Histories: One Island, One Nisha Miskii, and Three Mudahim 18 The New Mudahim: Saeeda 21 The Refugee Mudahim: Anisha 24 The Former Mudahim: Fathimath 26 Reflections 29 References 30 3 Dimensions 31 Maldivian Mosques and Their Spatial Contexts 32 Constructing Muslim Spaces 40 Gendered Muslim Spaces: Public/Private Dichotomy 41 Gendered Muslim Spaces: Hijab or “the Veil” 46 Gendered Muslim Spaces: The Ummah 52 xiii

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Sites of Islamic Practice as Muslim Spaces 56 Moving Beyond Space 59 References 61 4 Narratives of Place 65 Space and Place 70 Time, Space, and Place 75 The Indian Ocean Perspective 78 The Archaeology and History of Mosques in the Maldives 82 Whence Women’s Mosques? 87 References 94 5 Locating Women’s Mosques 99 What Makes a Mosque? 102 A Seated View: Mosques as Sacred Spaces 108 Defining Women’s Mosques 111 Patronage and Place 112 Women’s Mosques as Traditional Institutions—In China 113 Historical Hints—The Lakshadweep Islands 116 Historical Hints—Mainland India 118 Historical Hints—The Comoros Islands and Mayotte 119 Historical Hints—Coastal Kenya 121 What Counts as a Mosque—Surau in Malaysia and Indonesia 123 What Counts as a Mosque—Jakka Jigeen in Senegal 125 Women’s Mosques Initiatives—Gabiley, Somalia 127 Contemporary Women’s Mosques—Communities and Spaces 128 Themes of Place 130 References 133 6 Locating Women’s Roles 137 The Otinchalar of Uzbekistan 139 The Pandei of the Philippines 141 The Nyai and Muballigha of Indonesia 142 The Ahong of China 144 The Alima of India 147 Women’s Mosque Communities 150 Maldivian Mudahim Revisited—Roles and Duties 154

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Mudahim and Prayer 159 Is a Mudahim an Imam? 161 References 166 7 Contexts and Discourses 171 The Maldives, Island and Nation 174 Transnational Flows—Historical Indian Ocean Travel 180 Transnational Flows—Tourism 183 Transnational Flows—Development Agencies 185 Imaging and Belonging in the Global Ummah 188 Locating Women’s Mosques in the Silences 195 References 197 8 Closures and Conclusions 201 The End of the Nisha Miskii 201 Locating the Nisha Miskii 205 Reconciling Through Place 209 Global Discourses and Ummah 210 References 216 Index 217

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1

An aerial view of islands in the Maldives with an inhabited island (center front), a resort island (left), and two small uninhabited islands (center back and right) (2006) A closer view of an inhabited island in an outer atoll (2006) A view of Malé looking across a section of the airport on Hulhulé (2006) An ariel shot of the Masjid al Shaikh Qasim bin Muhammad al-Thani in Hulhumalé, 2005. The mosque construction was just being finished at this time, and around the mosque area are both newly developed and undeveloped sections of the island (2006) Interior of a mosque on a north atoll island. Note the fabric panel partitions to separate the women’s and men’s sections (photographed from the men’s side), as well as the presence of the minbar. The mihrab and minbar are not visible from the women’s side, which is located adjacent to the men’s side (2006) A well in a courtyard of a women’s mosque, northern atolls. The area is used for washing, but this well was also traditionally a key source of water according to the mudahim of the mosque (2006) Coral stone tombstones in the cemetery surrounding the Hukuru Miskii in Malé (2005) Long dippers for wudu outside the side entrance of the Hukuru Miskii. The mosque’s multiple layers of foundation are shown here (2006)

20 21 33

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Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5

View of the minaret of the Hukuru Miskii from the streets of Malé (2006) Men’s mosque on a northern atoll island. There is a minaret on one side of the building, where the call to prayer from the island is broadcast. Inside is a large open prayer area; the wall opposite the main entrance features a minbar next to the mihrab (2006) Exterior of a damaged women’s mosque in the northern atolls of the Maldives, on the same island as the men’s mosque in the last figure. There is no minaret on this building; the yard contains a well in the front (2006) Interior of the same mosque in the last picture, displaying considerable unrepaired damage from the tsunami. This women’s mosque had neither minbar nor mihrab, although the room was oriented directly toward qibla (2006) An exterior view of the verandah on a well-maintained women’s mosque on a northern atoll island (2006) Interior of the women’s mosque in the last photograph. The qibla wall is clearly marked with a recessed mihrab and small stair-like minbar (2006)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Over one thousand low-lying coral islands in the Indian Ocean are a part of the island nation of the Maldives. You can fly over the country and see these islands grouped in atolls scattered through the deep blue waters of the Indian Ocean, small specks that are visually isolated in the vast watery landscape. Despite appearances, the Maldives is far from isolated. Through a regional history of international trade, the Maldives was once a busy trading crossroads between the Middle East and Asia. Today, the Maldives islands welcome other types of voyagers, as they participate in international trading routes and have also become popular tourist destinations. Both the historical and contemporary movement of visitors has created powerful sociocultural legacies in the region. Most noticeably, twelfth-century maritime trade brought travelers and facilitated the spread of Islam into the Maldives. Today the population of the Maldives, numbering approximately 440,000, is reportedly 100% Sunni Muslim, with Maldivian identity being closely intertwined with Muslim identity. While many common Islamic practices in the region are clearly directly informed by the historical Maldivian trading connections, as well as contemporary Islamic global movements, some of the practices associated with Islam in this region seem to differ from those found in neighboring countries. One of the most striking of these is the Maldivian practice of maintaining women’s mosques, called nisha miskii.1 Maldivian nisha miskii are separate buildings, run by mudahim—the female equivalent of © The Author(s) 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0_1

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a mudimu, or male mosque caretaker—women who lead the prayers and act as caretakers for the buildings. Women’s mosques are not found in all parts of the Maldives, and those visiting the capital island, Malé may not have the opportunity to see such buildings. This is because the mosques in Malé, including the prominent national mosque, have separate balcony areas or curtained sections for women within the larger mosque area. Yet the construction, maintenance, and use women’s mosques are widespread practices in the rest of the Maldives; on most of the outlying islands women have their own mosque(s), and in 2005, there were an estimated over 250 women’s mosques on the nation’s 200 inhabited islands.2 These mosques are sites of complex cultural significance as multiple dynamic sociocultural worlds play a part in constituting Maldivian women’s mosques as gendered religious sites and practices located in nisha miskii challenge common notions of Muslim women’s roles. The significance of gendered practices within and around the nisha miskii are crucial to developing an understanding of the construction of these gendered spaces as they have become the locales for competing discourses concerning the role of women as leaders in Islam. Many questions arise from attention to the practices associated with these women’s mosques. One line of questioning to pursue is the ontological implications of these sites. How does the existence of women’s mosques shape experiences of being Muslim with these communities? How do these experiences relate to transnational Muslim community and practice? There are also a number of questions about the women’s leadership roles linked to women’s mosque sites. Are the mudahim of nisha miskii “imams3”? What does the presence (or absence) of a female “imam” in a Muslim community signify? I hope, in the course of this book, to explore possible answers to these questions.

“The World in General” or “The World Around Here”? One way of beginning to recognize Maldivian women’s mosques, and women’s leadership roles in the Muslim communities where these mosques are found, is to frame them within common ideas about the social constitution of space in Islam—using dichotomies such as public/ private, inside/outside, and global vs. local. As discussed in Chapter 3, this has been a fruitful endeavor for some scholars who have helped us to

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interpret spaces in Muslim communities better through the use of such dichotomies. I eschew an understanding of Maldivian women’s mosques as purely dichotomous spaces as this method crucially depends on there being only one distinct way of “being” Muslim—for example, in the global/local dichotomy one that is decidedly global or decidedly local— that simply cannot be found. In Chapter 4 of this book, I will discuss further the pitfalls of such an approach and demonstrate that dichotomized models need to be reconsidered, since the global Muslim community is informed by the local as much as vice versa. The presence of women’s mosque sites should prompt us to think about Muslim spatial practices as located in the relationships between multiple spatial planes/ categories. This allows us to examine these sites as a part of productive processes and enables us to ask about how the locations of power and processes of imagining shape the construction of these relationships. Participants in a discussion that refuses to conceive of Muslim spaces purely in dichotomous terms must then use different terms to describe them; thus, I am motivated to look for new ways of speaking and dealing with spaces to deploy a new epistemology of mosque spaces. My first step toward considering these spaces more fruitfully is to switch my focus from women’s mosques as spaces to the ways in which they are places, or perhaps even more crucially the processes by which these mosque spaces are turned into places. Places, as geographer Tim Cresswell succinctly phrased it, are “things to be inside of” (Cresswell, 2004). The term “place” became prominent among human geographers in the 1970s to deemphasize the physical location of a space and allow for a more complete recognition of the ways in which meanings are assigned to those spaces. Places can be, as geographer John Agnew has noted, both locale—lived experiences of spaces—and location—the area comprised of precise geographic coordinates (Agnew, 1987). One of the most engaging ways of discussing places that I have found is that by Yi-Fu Tuan, who wrote in 1977 in the book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience: What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. Architects talk about the spatial qualities of place; they can equally well speak of the locational (place) qualities of space. The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space

4  J. H. FEWKES as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. (Tuan, 2001, p. 6)

This articulation of the notion of place highlights the active nature of the relationship between space and place. Tuan’s “place as pauses” emphasizes, as Charles Withers has suggested, place as “a way of ‘being in the world’” in Heidegger’s notion of the phrase (Heidegger, 1962; Withers, 2009, p. 640). Tuan’s work also demonstrates how place can be studied anthropologically; the pauses that are transformative moments can be understood, and therefore observed, as social and cultural events. Those pauses, Cresswell has noted, can serve as the boundaries of places as well (Cresswell, 2004). He further observes that geographers such as David Harvey see these boundaries made of pauses as a sites of tension—the tension between geographically fixed places and the mobility of events and practices (Cresswell, 2004). In Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference that which is “mobile” is global capital (Harvey, 1997). We can enlarge this definition to include the mobile here as people, ideas, or for that matter anything else moving along/through Arjun Appadurai’s “scapes” (Appadurai, 1990, 1996). There is indeed a potential for tension between the boundedness of place and fluidity of these experiences, demonstrated in the popular saying “you can’t go home again” (i.e., you cannot revisit your past through visiting sites of the past). As I will discuss in this book, however, place is not necessarily in conflict with fluidity. Place can also, as we shall see in the case of women’s mosques, tie together spaces and create a “grounding point” for people and fluid categories. Place from this perspective becomes a site through which to gather differing pauses, recognize overlapping boundaries, and negotiate the relationships between them. Place is dynamic and allows space access to a chronological dimension. To go back to the earlier example, we can recognize that although we may not be able to revisit the past, visiting a past home can help us to interact with memories related to the site, making it a place that is not wholly of the past but informed by the past. Place as a “container” of meanings, a notion commonly attributed to Plato, then is transformed into something more promising—less static and more nuanced—that can reflect complex and shifting meanings through time, as we shall see through a discussion of Henri Lefebvre’s work on space (Lefebvre, 2009).

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What I will discuss in this book are these “pauses,” the dynamic processes of fixing meaning in time and space, associated with the experience of being Muslim in a little-known community in Asia. In looking at the places of these communities, I hope to illustrate how their experiences of being Muslim are simultaneously shaped through multiple notions of community, complicated by historical and contemporary social trends, but reconciled through place. This work is about considering women’s mosques as symbolically constructed sites of alternative spatial materialities, places that allow religious and social practices to be objectified, reorganized, and hence known by participants and observers in new ways. Results of this approach suggest marked benefits to studying Muslim communities in this manner. The first insight gained from recognizing that women’s mosques constitute and reconfigure sites typically supposed as central to a notion of being “Muslim,” is that rather than conceiving of “being Muslim” as a set of fixed traits we can perceive it as a dynamic process. This insight has been remarked upon before, as we shall see later, but it is certainly one worth revisiting. The second insight derived from this study is that we can explore sites such as the Maldivian women’s mosques as notable alternatives to public and intellectual narratives where the spatial practices in mosques have become synecdoches for gender relations in Muslim communities. As Clifford Geertz reminds us in the “Afterword” of Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s Senses of Place, For it is still the case that no one lives in the world in general. Everybody, even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving, lives in some confined and limited stretch of it – “the world around here.” The sense of interconnectedness imposed on us by the mass media, by rapid travel, and by long distance communication obscures this more than a little…. The ethnography of place is, if anything more critical for those who are apt to imagine that all places are alike than for those who, listening to forest or experiencing stone, know better. (Geertz, 1996, pp. 261–262)

Engaging in this ethnography of place—looking at the ways in which women’s mosques are constructed as places in the Maldives and taking seriously the notion that the world is indeed comprised of “the world around here”—allows us to challenge ubiquitous generalized narratives about mosque spatial practices.

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As discussed briefly in the preface of this book and developed in more detail in Chapter 5, women’s mosques are not unique to the Maldives. Scholarly and popular sources suggest that women’s mosques are seen in countries around the world. Given the widespread nature of movements for women’s mosques—as well as global examples of many different spaces in which women express their roles in Islamic rituals, perform their beliefs in community spaces, and play a role in Muslim community life—it is reasonable to consider Muslim women’s public institutions within larger cultural arenas. We can begin to inform global discourses about Islam through an examination of cross-cultural connections between the ways in which places such as women’s mosques, as well as other gendered Islamic institutions, shape the practices of “being Muslim.” While cross-cultural studies of such phenomena are therefore called for, there are also other ways for social scientists to engage with the topic of women’s mosques fruitfully for the purpose of a broader understanding. As in this case study in the Maldives, focused ethnographic studies of one cultural setting can illustrate interconnections between multiple cultural spheres. The Maldives case study provides us with a site of geographic and cultural crossroads, where women’s mosques are simultaneously constituted at multiple social levels, thus intertwining local, national, and global interests while maintaining a focus on the experiences of real people, those who reside in Geertz’s “the world around here.”

Islam/Muslims and Religion/Practice Several times during the course of writing this manuscript I have found myself alluding to the concept of “being Muslim”—practices/ideas/ discourses associated with the culturally situated and lived religion. The boundaries of this line of inquiry should be evident. While the topic of this study is inescapably tied to religious issues, the study itself is anthropological rather than religious in focus. The significance of this distinction is that in this book we are looking at what Muslims do, what “being Muslim” denotes to people around the world, in contrast to a theological perspective of Islam. There are some authors who have considered this distinction difficult to make in the context of Islam, due to orthopraxy (e.g., Denny, 1985; Graham, 2010). When studying lived religion, however, as religious historian Robert Anthony Orsi points out,

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[r]eligious practices and understandings have meaning only in relation to other cultural forms and in relation to the life experiences and actual circumstances of the people using them; what people mean and intend by particular religious idioms can be understood only situationally, on a broad social and biographical field, not within the terms of a religious tradition or religious language understood as existing apart from history. (Orsi, 1985, pp. xix–xx)

Religion can act as a worldview that may guide its participants, but those participants are also situated in distinct social, economic, historical, and political, etc.—contexts that influence and guide their behavior as well. This perspective of lived religions then can allow us to see how orthopraxy itself arises within a set of particular political, economic, and/or social circumstances. An examination of the intertwining of these influences on being Muslim can help us to improve our comprehension of the relationship between various facets of the experiences of diverse Muslim communities. This line of inquiry into Muslim practice has been addressed previously by anthropologist John Bowen, who examines the sociopolitical meanings embedded in the discourses surrounding salat in Indonesia (Bowen, 1989). Bowen points out that salat is a significant site of inquiry for studies of the Islamic community, as the practice is frequently iconic of belief, and a fundamental identifier of Muslim identity in relation to both other believers and to non-Muslims (Bowen, 1989, pp. 612–613). This centrality of salat is a noteworthy notion that we must return to later in this book when discussing women’s leadership in the role of mosque imams. Here, we can recognize that in spite of the centrality of salat, the practice resists definition through a unified theory as it is “not structured around an intrinsic propositional or semantic core,” and therefore, must be considered in relation to “particular spiritual, social, and political discourses” (Bowen, 1989, p. 615). Therefore, even such a fundamental, and seemingly orthodox, feature of Muslim practice is best viewed anthropologically through the lens of lived religion. In this book, I have informed my ethnographic exploration of being Muslim with religious perspectives derived from both Muslim scholarly and lay views and privilege each equally. I use religious texts in this work as references only to demonstrate the textual traditions that many Muslims refer to in the course of discussions about these subjects—the interpretations of the texts by informants are again products of particular sociohistorical contexts and must be viewed as such.

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Research Methods and Sources There are three main forms of data used in this book—ethnographic accounts from my own work in various sites, accounts from published works by other authors, and multimedia materials from popular sources. All three sources contribute critical information toward construction of an understanding of women’s mosques in local and global communities. Each source must be understood, and assessed, in slightly different ways. My ethnographic fieldwork in the Maldives forms the heart of this book. As discussed in the preface, this is the lens through which we can view all other discussion. The existence of women’s mosques in the Maldives is not merely a starting point for exploring broader issues related to gendered roles and spaces in Muslim communities. Instead, the ethnographic setting provides us with a critical sense of place. In discussing women’s mosques in the Maldives as real places in which women’s scholarship, prayer, and other Islamic dialogues/practices occur, we can escape Geertz’s unpeopled “world in general.” This allows us to engage in an ethnography of place that ideally challenges preconceived notions of Muslim spatial practices. A majority of the ethnographic work was conducted in the Maldives in the summer of 2006, in Malé (the capital of the Maldives), nearby islands, and in an unnamed northern atoll. While in the Maldives, I was able to conduct anthropological fieldwork using a mixture of participant-observation, rapid assessment procedures, and interview data collection methods. The names of specific places and people in the ethnographic accounts in this book have been changed or omitted to respect the privacy of my informants. When necessary other identifying details may have also been omitted or changed slightly to maintain the confidentiality of our exchanges, I have also chosen not to use photographs of people here to further protect the privacy of my informants. The field-based perspective on the Maldives in 2006 presents a view of women’s mosque spaces that highlights the relationship of these places to both the past (accessed through historical sources) and the future. The survey of published works on a cluster of related topics—women’s mosques, female Islamic scholars, and women as religious leaders, most located in Asian Muslim communities—represents a significant undertaking. There are few academic sources that bring together this material, and the fact that it is rarely gathered in one place has most likely contributed to the scholarly silence on women’s mosques discussed in the preface of

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this book. Thus, the collection and presentation of this material are more than a survey of literature—it is a challenge to readers to reassess what is “known” about the topic and the foundation of an argument about the relationship between local and global in Muslim communities. In presenting this information I hope to offer a perspective on gendered practices in Muslim communities that necessitates critical examination of the ways in which Islamic institutions are situated within multiple sociocultural spheres. The third source is based on a personal collection of English-language Maldivian multimedia sources that I have gathered from 2006 to the present, which complements the ethnographic data by providing a diachronic view of mosque-related issues in the Maldives. The collection includes a wide range of materials including newspaper articles, magazine clippings, television clips, and blogs. I have used these materials to perform textual interpretive and content analyses on topics related to women’s scholarly, leadership, and spatial roles in the Maldivian community. While this source of information is meant to ground the discussion in the Maldives in a manner similar to the ethnographic data, it additionally makes it possible to interpret the recent political changes in the Maldives that impacted women’s mosques in the country and therefore play a role in these sites’ place building processes.

Book Organization I have arranged the ensuing chapters with the intent of leading the reader through a series of ideas that will help to structure later information about women’s mosques in the Maldives to clarify the role of these mosques both in the Maldives and in the global Muslim community. Heeding my own call for attention to the local, however, I start with the actual sites, beginning Chapter 2 “Visiting the Nisha Miskii” with ethnographic accounts of visits to women’s mosques in the Maldives. Here, I describe the locations and introduce some of features of interest through accounts of interviews with Maldivian mudahim, the women in charge of the nisha miskii. I present three women’s stories to bring forward a number of common themes associated with being a nisha miskii mudahim and convey a sense of the varied experiences grounded in these places. The women’s stories in Chapter 2 reveal how mudahim conceptualize their role in highly individualized ways, although each organizes her notion of a mudahim around the physical space of the nisha miskii

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and emphasized mosque places as consequential sites of women’s identification. In all the accounts presented here, women’s mosques in the Maldives, while sites of social interaction, serve as sacred places for island women seeking a space for reflection and/or a site for personal religious development. Chapter 3, “Dimensions,” is then focused on spatial dimensions of women’s mosques through a discussion of the role of religious spaces in the Maldivian context, as well as literature on space in Muslim communities in general. I begin the chapter with a discussion of mosques in the Maldives, considering specific mosque sites in the country. I then go on to discuss common ideas of what could be regarded as “Muslim spaces.” In this chapter, I am examining concepts of space separately from the concept of place to explore ways in which location/locale and its material conditions specifically contribute to the significance-building process. I therefore examine common spatial tropes about Islam and Muslims to outline how spaces are conceptualized in relation wide variety of spaces associated with Muslim community, particularly in relation to ideas of gender. In doing so I problematize common dichotomous models of Muslim spatial practices such as public/private or inside/outside divides and scrutinize the spatial dimensions of concepts such as “the veil” and the ummah. The chapter ends with a deliberation of the variety of specific formal and informal Islamic spaces in Muslim communities. In Chapter 4, “Narratives of Place” I bring ideas of place into this discussion of Muslim spaces. In this chapter, I chart the relationship between space and place, using time as a way to conceive of geography as a fluid and active participant in history. I explain how place and history are formed, taking into account the silences in the narratives of the latter. Contemplating the construction of Muslim places in the Maldives, I highlight contemporary Maldivian discourses on the local introduction of Islam and explain the roles of historical trade and travel in the Indian Ocean have played. I finish the chapter by discussing the construction of women’s mosques in the Maldives as meaningful places, exploring some of the contradictory etiologies offered in discussions about women’s mosques in the Maldives. Having established the significance of conceiving of Maldivian women’s mosques as places for “being Muslim,” I step back in Chapter 5 “Locating Women’s Mosques” to examine the concept of a mosque in more detail, asking a series of questions about how we define these spaces, and recognizing a variety of perspectives on the significance of

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mosques. Defining women’s mosques broadly as Muslim places of worship that are solely for women, with prayers for women led by women, I consider how these spaces are related to the women’s prayer rooms found in many Muslim communities. I then review the general phenomenon of women’s Islamic prayer spaces through case studies of spaces that have been called women’s mosques, in Egypt, China, Kenya, Senegal, Somalia, the Lakshadweep Islands, the Comoros Islands, India, Malaysia, and the Maldives. In an analysis of the case studies, I reflect on the common themes that draw these examples together. Chapter 6 “Locating Women’s Roles” begins with a focus on the relationship between place and human action/roles. We therefore turn our attention in this chapter to women’s roles in the mosque, specifically women’s leadership roles in prayer and other mosque-based activities. Recognizing the long history of scholarly and leadership roles for women in Muslim communities around the world, I focus here on a few examples from Asian Muslim communities that offer insights into Muslim spatial practices, foregrounding the relationship between mosque spaces and women’s religious work, and highlighting patterns of women’s religious leadership that can shed further light on the Maldivian case. I end the chapter with a discussion of what it might mean to call a woman “imam” in these cases, noting that an exploration of the category of imam in relation to Muslim women leaders highlights the heterogeneity of experiences for both male and female clerics, drawing into question the very notion of an imam. In Chapter 7, “Contexts and Discourses,” I return to the issue of the widespread perceived novelty of women’s mosques and contemplate the silences related to women’s mosques in global conversations about the histories of Muslim communities. To this end, in this chapter I recognize the role of the local—island and national—in Maldivian women’s mosques and go on to deliberate upon the role of the global in two ways: First, in terms of how transnational processes such as the historical Indian Ocean trade and development agencies have contributed to the signification of women’s mosques in the Maldives, and second, how the concept of the global ummah, a shared notion of a worldwide Muslim community, relates to these places. In the conclusion of this book, Chapter 8 “Closures and Conclusions,” I discuss changes in the Maldives since the time of this fieldwork, and how these shape our perceptions of the nisha miskii. I return to the notion of the “pauses” that transform space into place and

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deliberate on how these are related to “being Muslim,” rather than to Muslims as a category. Here, I argue that while grounding discussions of Muslim community in the local is essential, to limit one’s attention to women’s leadership roles and women’s mosques in Islam only to this level is to accept the idea that conceptualizing these on a broader level has no utility. The degree to which the public, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, discusses “women in Islam” as a generalized category suggests a need for us to sift through these examples and to make sense of them in more general terms. I recommend consideration of women’s mosques as part of the spectrum of Muslim experience, and recognition of how these sites, even in their silences, are a part of the process of ascribing meaning to global Islamic institutions and associated spaces.

Notes 1. I use the present tense here and in other sections to refer to nisha miskii, although these institutions were mostly all closed by the Maldivian government in 2009, as I will discuss in more detail in the final chapter of this book. The present tense is used here to convey the sense of an “ethnographic present” at the time that I visited them in 2005. Writing in the ethnographic present—the use of present tense to speak of a cultural setting that was studied in the past—has been soundly critiqued as being a distancing device that contributes to the atemporal and ahistorical pretense of ethnographic accounts (e.g., Fabian, 1983; Stocking, 1985). While recognizing these critiques valid, I have chosen to use the ethnographic present self-consciously, in agreement with Kirsten Hastrup’s argument that it is a “necessary construction of time, because only the ethnographic present preserves the reality of anthropological knowledge,” which is an “encounter outside of time” (Hastrup, 1990, pp. 45, 51). Rather than creating an atemporal and ahistorical notion of time here, I would like to use the ethnographic present as a way of foregrounding the temporal specificity of ethnographic observation. Additionally, as Narmala Halstead has suggested, use of the ethnographic present can serve to demonstrate that, “doing fieldwork and writing ethnography [are] an ongoing and reflexive process” (Halstead, 2008); the ethnographic present, then, draws attention to the fact that knowledge is produced at the time of writing as much as the time of ethnographic inquiry, which together create a separate temporal landscape. As such I will use past tense when relating first-person narratives of time in the Maldives, but the ethnographic present when discussing women’s mosques in general. Readers should note that

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most present tense references to nisha miskii are referring to their state at a point in time at least 13 years prior to the final written version of this book, until the final chapter of the book, at which point I will re-contextualize the women’s mosques and use present tense only as a reference to the time of writing, that of the re-contextualization. 2. See the note above and contents of Chapter 8 for an explanation of why more recent numbers are not provided for women’s mosques in the Maldives. 3. An imam is generally conceived of as a Muslim religious leader. I will present a more complete, and nuanced, discussion of the meaning of this term and its connotations later in this book.

References Agnew, J. (1987). Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society. Boston and London: Allen & Unwin. Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture, 2, 1–23. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large (Vol. 1). London: Minnesota Press. Bowen, J. (1989). Salat in Indonesia: The Social Meaning of an Islamic Ritual. Man, 24(4), 600–619. Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Denny, F. M. (1985). An Introduction to Islam. New York: Macmillan. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, C. (1996). Afterword. In S. Feld & K. Basso (Eds.), Sense of Place (pp. 259–262). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Graham, W. A. (2010). Islam in the Mirror of Ritual. In S. Farnham (Ed.), Islamic and Comparative Religious Studies: Selected Writings (pp. 87–103). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Halstead, N. (2008). Introduction: Experiencing the Ethnographic Present: Knowing Through “Crisis”. In N. Halstead, E. Hirsch, & J. Okely (Eds.), Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present (pp. 1–20). New York and Oxford: Berghann. Harvey, D. (1997). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hastrup, K. (1990). The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention. Cultural Anthropology, 5(1), 45–62. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2009). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

14  J. H. FEWKES Orsi, R. (1985). The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (2nd ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Stocking, G. (1985). History of Anthropology: When/Whither. In G. Stocking (Ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (pp. 3–12). London: University of Wisconsin Press. Tuan, Y.-F. (2001). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Withers, C. (2009). Place and the “Spatial Turn” in Geography and in History. Journal of the History of Ideas, 70(4), 637–658.

CHAPTER 2

Visiting the Nisha Miskii

In the summer of 2006, on the way back from conducting research in Indonesia, I traveled to the Maldives in hope of visiting the nisha miskii, the women’s mosques of the Maldives. I wanted to learn more about these institutions that I had only seen mentioned in newspaper clippings and tourist brochures and discover why they were absent in scholarly discussions about women’s mosques, as well as public discourses about women’s spaces in Islam. My time in the Maldives was initially spent actively searching for these spaces, a puzzling and sometimes frustrating process. The attempt to physically locate nisha miskii within the Maldives slowly became a meaningful process, one that taught me my first lessons about the Maldives as a region, and that ultimately suggested the need to interrogate what is “known” of as Islamic spaces more broadly, in order to conceptually locate the nisha miskii. For these reasons, I would like to share some parts of this process, particularly finding nisha miskii in the Maldives, visits to the sites, and related interviews with Maldivian mudahim, the women who work at the mosques. There are many things that these ethnographic accounts should not be. Geertz reminded us long ago ethnographies are no longer able to pose as narratives featuring an intrepid anthropologist-hero who has risked all to present tidily organized facts to a homogenous group of readers interested in Others (Geertz, 1988). Such narratives can only forward an Orientalist propagation of “knowledge” as critiqued in this book’s introduction in the mode of Said, co-opting local stories and reshaping them into the utterances of dominating narratives (Said, 1979, 2014). As © The Author(s) 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0_2

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Ruth Behar points out in “Ethnography in a Time of Blurred Genres,” however, well-written ethnographic description can bring forward voices from the field, shed light on the dialogic nature of fieldwork, and prompt anthropologists to methodological innovation; the strengths of the many engaging works she discusses suggest that ethnographic description is neither passé nor undesirable (Behar, 2007). My hope is to present glimpses of my experiences in the Maldives that would allow readers unfamiliar to the region to gain a sense of the setting, while sharing with all readers—those from the Maldives, those who have never been there, and those anywhere in between these two points of experience—a sense of how this account was shaped by my own questions and experiences. In addition, I aspire to accomplish several contrasting goals. I would like to give a generalized sense of the settings of women’s mosques in the Maldives, but also present an approach that is firmly rooted in the local. Furthermore I aspire to bring forward a number of common themes associated with being a nisha miskii mudahim, yet convey these in such specific ways as to honor voices of the individuals involved and emphasize the variety of experiences associated with these places. I am guided in part by Kirin Narayan’s observations on the value of engaging readers with stories based on real people, narratives that provide details that allow us to peer into the particularity of setting in other communities, as well as her exhortation to consider what we ourselves like to read (Narayan, 2012). While reading these accounts consider the presence and absence of mosques on various islands, as well as each mosque’s positioning, condition, and uses. Listen to the women’s stories for a sense of how I understood the mudahim to conceptualize their roles—the source of their authority, scope of their duties, pride in their work—as well as how they related notions of being a mudahim to the physical space of the nisha miskii. Note the presence of other women in these spaces as well; where they are, how they interact, the movements and pauses. Consider the potential varied significance of these mosques, e.g., as sites of prayer, social places for island women, women’s only spaces, and/or a site for personal religious development. I will reflect upon some general themes in these accounts later in the chapter and will revisit many details from here in later chapters.

Searching for Women’s Mosques in Malé Landing in the Maldives airport at night, I was disappointed to miss the spectacular view of these Indian Ocean islands as pictured in the regional tourism literature, but once down in the airport my arrival was much like

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that described by other travelers to the region. Entering into the selfdescribed 100% Muslim country—“to be Maldivian is to be Muslim” many of my informants would tell me, echoing the Maldivian Government literature on religion—I was greeted with welcome signs accompanied by signs outlawing the import of liquor, pork, pornography, and religious items from non-Islamic traditions. I expected, based on those much-studied travel accounts, to have my bags searched, but was waved though after a polite inquiry into the contents of my bags and the purpose of my stay. Everything that first night in the Maldives was surprising and novel, even simple transportation choices such as taking a taxi boat from the island to the town or experiencing a ride in a car on this tiny island, which was only a little over 2 square miles large, yet one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The most intriguing sight to me that night was seeing the number of people out of the streets late at night shopping, strolling with families, or enjoying meals and coffee at the cafés, a surprise as I was only beginning to consider the social implications of the hot tropical sun and the dense island population. The number of Maldivian women out at night with their families and friends was unexpected, even shocking, based on my work in other parts of South Asia, an assumption about arrangements of gender and space that I would consider later in more detail. In the glaring daylight of the ensuing weeks, I quickly came to appreciate evening strolls and meetings, as well as comprehend the sheer number of people that lived in Malé. The 2005 census had been delayed due to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but I would later find out that in 2006 Malé was home to over 100,000 of the 298,968 people who lived in the Maldives as a whole (National Bureau of Statistics, 2014). The island was constantly busy; schools were so crowded that parents told me their children attended school in shifts to accommodate more students. One of the main roads on the island, Majeedhee Magu Rd, seemed always choked with traffic, although the crowds of people walking along the sidewalks could still move quickly between the grocery markets, clothing shops, gift stores, and cell phone dealers that lined the street. I spent my first few weeks walking back and forth on these roads, as I visited the National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research, the Qaumee Kuthubukhaanaa (National Library), Ministry of Gender and Family, Ministry of Education, and a few local NGOs. Everywhere I visited I was received politely, but able to gather little information about women’s mosques in the Maldives. Interviews with

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officials at the Ministry of Gender and Women confirmed that yes, the women’s mosques did exist, but only on “the islands.” Meetings at a national NGO confirmed the same as they partnered with women’s mosques, but only on “the islands.” Use of the phrase “the islands” at first puzzled me, as we were already on an island in Malé. I soon realized that “the islands” referred in daily conversation to a specific set of islands. Snippets of conversation—e.g., “When I lived with my family on the islands…”, “People at the resorts only come through Malé and never see the islands…”, “That’s only on the islands…”—helped demonstrate that “the islands” were those in other atolls. “The islands” referred to inhabited islands in other atolls, constructed in contrast to Malé and its surrounding areas, resort islands, and uninhabited islands. Malé was filled with mosques, including inviting smaller neighborhood centered mosques, the historic Hukuru Miskii (a beautiful example of traditional coral block architecture), and the ornate Grand Friday Mosque. These were all well attended by men as I perceived, but had amply illustrated to me one Friday afternoon when I went out just after Friday prayer ended and suddenly faced streets completely full of men of every age headed home. I was told—and sometimes shown by hosts— that some of these mosques had separate women’s areas, balconies, and screened off sections, while others were described as men’s only spaces. Women’s mosques, it seemed, were indeed only on the islands. My work in Malé was therefore limited; after visiting the museum, meeting and interviewing some local officials and academics, and working in the National Library, I faced the challenge of how to leave Malé, and explore “the islands.”

Local Histories: One Island, One Nisha Miskii, and Three Mudahim When I planned my trip to the Maldives, I had thought carefully about showing up in a country where I knew no one, and the difficulties of such a scenario. It was unlike any of the long-term fieldwork I had done in the past. I had tried to think about who I might know connected to the Maldives, and searched my social networks—at that time limited to physical communities, rather than virtual ones—unsuccessfully for friends of friends. One day while scouring the Internet for general travel information, I came across a discussion of education issues in the country, which made me realize that while I did not know any particular person

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in the Maldives, I was familiar—at least categorically—one group of people: female academics. I found online a few e-mail addresses for women in academic institutions living in Malé and sent “cold-call” messages, introducing myself and asking for advice. To my great relief, I received some gracious answers, which turned into meetings in Malé, and eventually into a friendship. After a few weeks in Malé, one of my new friends, who worked for the Ministry of Education, offered me the opportunity to visit some islands in the northern atolls with her. I eagerly agreed to come. Given the limited answers to my questions about women’s mosques in Malé, I sincerely hoped that getting out into “the islands” would give me the chance to actually find women’s mosques. An anthropological colleague of mine was about to come to visit me from India and was graciously included in our travel plans; arrangements were quickly made and I was deeply grateful for the international sisterhood of academia. On the appointed morning we met to take the water taxi from Malé to the airport on Hulhulé Island. Staying in Malé I had always thought of Hulhulé simply as “the Airport Island” as the rectangular island next to Malé seemed only large enough for the runways that dominated the landscape. I would later learn it had its own history of settlement and change. Once at Hulhulé, we walked around the international airport facilities where I had arrived, to the seaplane terminal. Behind the terminal building, we boarded an airplane from a concrete dock, stepping down into a small seaplane that would fly us into the northern atolls. The gleaming new plane carried 19 passengers—most destined for resorts in the region—plus a barefoot pilot and his copilot. While the twin engines with propellers were noisy in flight, the journey itself was pleasant with fresh ocean air breezing from the open boarding door through the cabin, and the copilot pointing out landmark islands in the aqua-blue waters below. Hanging cautiously back from the door, I was able to finally catch my first glimpse of the Maldive islands sitting in the Indian Ocean from above—Malé a tightly wound mass of buildings with boats streaming out from all directions, uninhabited tropical dots with empty white sand beaches and dense tangles of trees, towns condensed into small grids of buildings edged by rectangular harbors (“the islands”), and strangely contorted shapes where resort development had carved out jagged shorelines to maximize beachfront views.

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Fig. 2.1  An aerial view of islands in the Maldives with an inhabited island (center front), a resort island (left), and two small uninhabited islands (center back and right) (2006)

Less than an hour later our plane circled around one of the resort islands, avoiding the strings of over-water bungalows to land nearby and float gracefully into a long dock. Resort staff members greeted us, then herded our fellow travelers into the resort, leaving our small party of researchers standing on the dock. Only a few minutes later, a motorboat pulled up to the dock, and an assistant to the atoll chief claimed us. A few minutes by motorboat brought us to a small island, perhaps only a half mile by a quarter mile in size, where the atoll chief, a government-appointed administrative head of the atoll district, welcomed us to the area and invited us to stay in the guesthouse for government visitors. After a brief discussion with my friend from the Ministry of Education, the atoll chief gave me permission to conduct interviews on the island

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Fig. 2.2  A closer view of an inhabited island in an outer atoll (2006)

and then began speaking with my traveling companions about the educational assessments they were planning to conduct on the island. On the other islands I would visit later on this trip, there would be only one nisha miskii and one mudahim per island. At this point, I was unaware of that though and therefore was unsurprised when the women I spoke with here identified three mudahim associated with their nisha miskii. Depending on where I went, I was variously told I should speak with the “new” mudahim, the “refugee” mudahim, and/ or the “old” mudahim. Meeting with each of these women, I was struck by the convergences and divergences in their stories. Our conversations suggested common themes associated with being a mudahim in a women’s mosque, and yet conveyed personal experiences associated with these places.1

The New Mudahim: Saeeda When I had first asked at the atoll office about meeting the island’s mudahim, I was told to speak with a woman named Saeeda. My friend from the Ministry of Education, her associates, my colleague, and I all set out to find Saeeda that first day. Since it was almost time for Dhuhr (afternoon) prayers, we walked to the nisha miskii just a block away, which was really only a few buildings. What should have been a pleasant

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stroll between whitewashed coral rock buildings down the island’s clean main avenue, a wide road of ground coral and shells, was uncomfortable in the heat and the streets were empty in the hot midday sun. Just off the main road was the nisha miskii, a squat concrete building with a slightly rusty tin roof. The walls of the mosque were whitewashed and the floors covered with a clean patterned vinyl sheeting that ran from the verandah in front into the one simple room inside the building. Skirting the concrete well in the finished concrete courtyard, we found Saeeda on the verandah just in front of the nisha miskii and spoke with her. She agreed to meet me later for an interview and invited us to remain for afternoon prayers. We agreed and settled in the courtyard to talk with others as women and girls began arriving. Older women walked slowly to the front of the room, dressed in the traditional Maldivian clothes of Dhivehi libaas—comprised of a libaas, an embroidered red tunic top, worn over the feyli, a wrap-around skirt. They sat down on the floor quietly. Younger women quickly performed wudu (ritual ablutions) at the well in the courtyard before coming in, greeting each other before settling into their prayer. At the last minute, a group of girls came rushing into the nisha miskii, pulling long cotton head covers and prayer skirts over their t-shirts and jeans as they sorted themselves into the back rows of the women and began to pray. Our group waited outside until the prayers were over. After Dhuhr prayer, the order reversed; the girls quickly took off their prayer clothes and skipped away while looking at us, the visitors in the yard, and giggling among themselves. Middle-aged women chatted quietly as they gathered their belongings, some staying to settle on the floor along the sidewalls and read the Qur’an in the mosque. Others rolled up their prayer mats, wedging them in the open slats of the mosque windows, before hurrying back to homes and work. Many of the older women stayed sitting longer, engaged in further prayer; as they slowly finished individually most lingered to greet each other before leaving the building. In the evening, Saeeda came by herself to talk with our group in a small outdoors area set with rope chairs near the government buildings. Dressed in a long loose cotton dress with brightly colored patterns called a dhigu hedhun, a type of Maldivian women’s dress developed in the 1950s, and a solid colored hijab pinned in the front to fit smooth around her face, she was friendly, although quiet, and spoke in a soft voice about her experiences.

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Saeeda told us that she had been the mudahim of the island’s women’s mosque for four years. She was originally from this island, and for religious education had studied Qur’an in a small class on the island when she was younger. She explained that before she was the mudahim, there was an older woman in the position; the older woman had poor health and therefore could no longer lead island women in prayer. Saeeda heard about the need for a mudahim in an announcement at the women’s mosque one day—she had not really studied to become a mudahim, but felt she might be able to do the work as she knew how to pray and recite the Qur’an. At that time, she was working at the government hospital as an auxiliary nurse, but she applied for the mudahim position with the government office on her island and got the job. Speaking about being mudahim, Saeeda indicated repeatedly that she saw it as a government job similar to her former position as a nurse, a position that required her to provide a certain defined set of services for her community and be compensated as a government employee in return. She was responsible, as the women’s mudahim, for cleaning the mosque, leading the women in prayers, and reading prayers for others. Once a month, she organized people to clean the well in the women’s mosque courtyard, and at least once a week, she organized women of the community to sweep the whole area of their mosque. She did not teach any religious classes and felt that her role should be limited to leading prayers for other women, and acting as the mosque caretaker. The women’s mosque, Saeeda said, was full most of the time, and she explained that it had been even busier in recent months as there was a community of refugees living on her island. The government had temporarily resettled this community from an island that had been destroyed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The increase in island population meant that the women required more space to make room for everyone to pray in their nisha miskii, so at times women had to pray outside the mosque in the courtyard. When asked about what measures had been taken to address the lack of prayer space for women, Saeeda commented that there was another, new, mosque that was recently built on the island using community funds. In the new mosque, the islanders had initially built a separate section for women, but, Saeeda noted, none of the women had attended prayers in the new mosque and the women’s section was eventually removed. She commented that there was a third mosque on the island with a prayer section for women as well, and that some women did

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attend that mosque occasionally. Many women, Saeeda observed, also chose to pray at home. I asked the mudahim why some women pray at the women’s mosque, while others pray at the coed mosque and still others pray at home. Saeeda said that she thought that women’s choices about where they prayed were related to their home life—for example, some women did not go to the mosque as they were unable to go out and leave their housework or children. She believed that other women came to the mosque because they lacked the space in their houses to pray properly. She commented that in general she felt that women who prayed outside the home preferred to come to the nisha miskii if they could, pointing out that at the nisha miskii women felt like they were part of a community when praying together, and they felt “better” that way. Saeeda was in her late forties at the time of our discussion, and when asked how old the mosque was, she said that she could clearly remember the time when it was built, estimating that the building was a little more than twenty years old. She remembers that there was another women’s mosque before this one, where the older mudahim on her island once worked. I was curious about the degree to which mudahim worked, and identified, with each other and asked Saeeda about mudahim “networks”—did they exist? Saeeda said that she had only ever met two other mudahim: the older woman who used to be the mudahim, Fathimath, and the women’s mudahim living in the tsunami refugee resettlement area, Anisha. She mentioned that she and Anisha worked together, so if she was unable to go to the mosque to lead prayers for any reason—if, for example, one was menstruating, busy, or sick—then Anisha will take over on that day. They were, Saeeda said happily, sharing the responsibilities and work of the women’s mosque. But these were the only two other women mudahim Saeeda had ever met, and she observed that she had never been to, or heard of, any central government, atoll, or other regional functions/training for mudahim. “It is a job, not a community,” she said.

The Refugee Mudahim: Anisha After our discussion, Saeeda suggested that I try to meet the other mudahim if possible. My local hosts were unsure if the older mudahim would be able to meet with me, but suggested that we walk to the resettlement camp on the other side of the island to find Anisha, the refugee

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mudahim. In a smaller group—myself and three other women—we went through several more coral- and shell-paved streets, hemmed neatly by the whitewashed walled household compounds. We then left the road to walk a dirt path over a low sand dune into the resettlement area. A few small palm trees and tufts of grasses in the dunes made the area the most “wild” environment that we encountered in what was otherwise a settled island. Just off the coast I could see a large platform standing in the water that looked like an offshore oilrig, but was outfitted with large bucket excavators and a tall pile drive hammer instead of pumps. On land, we had reached the refugee resettlement area and stood among rows of shacks with cramped lanes between them, the way crowded with large black water tanks labeled with the logos of international aid agencies. The alleys were full of children playing and curious people peering out of their doorways. After asking directions from a few residents, we were shown the way to the mudahim’s family quarters. Anisha, a middle-aged woman also dressed in Dhigu hedhun, met with us in a small room with many people—her extended family, she said— listening from the doorway. She was initially somewhat concerned about the reason for the meeting, asking several people if we were aid workers, but graciously agreed to talk with us after she heard I was interested in learning more about the mudahims’ work. We assembled in the sitting area in one corner of her family’s room and began to talk. Anisha told me that she had been the mudahim of a women’s mosque on another nearby island, which had been destroyed during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Her island had been larger and originally had over four thousand people and five mosques on it. Before the tsunami, their island had been crowded, and prone to flooding; the tsunami had destroyed their homes and made it uninhabitable. Now Anisha was living in this temporary refugee resettlement camp on the new island, with about two thousand people from her island. There had been a community meeting with the central Maldivian Government earlier in the year to discuss what islands they could live on, and the displaced people had voted on the islands they preferred. She was now waiting, with her fellow displaced islanders, to hear what the Maldivian Government would do with their settlement for a long-term solution. She had heard the meeting had resulted in plans to resettle them on a nearby island, an area that was currently being reconstructed and strengthened by dredging up coral using the offshore construction rig we had seen earlier in our walk. She hoped to see the project completed.

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Anisha reminisced that before the tsunami she had worked as a government-employed mudahim in the women’s mosque for eleven years. She had first begun the job because her older sister was working as the mudahim and she wanted to help her sister. She and her sister then worked together as mudahim on their island. Anisha said that to her being a mudahim was about family responsibility more than community leadership, she mentioned self-deprecatingly that she had not been a member of the women’s committee on her island or involved in any other social leadership roles. Anisha has never received any training to become a mudahim, but had studied Arabic and the Qur’an at school as a girl. Also in her late 40s, she remembered that the women’s mosque had been built on her native island when she was a very young girl, perhaps about 45 years ago. I wanted to know, and asked, if the women’s mosque was commonly used on her former island. Anisha said that it was, explaining that before the tsunami the mosque was regularly filled to capacity with women for prayers. When I asked her why she thought women visited the mosque, Anisha said that she felt women came there specifically because it was their own space and they liked having a separate area that was just for them. She believed that most of the women on her island preferred having their own mosque over praying in a women’s section in the main coed mosque because they felt uncomfortable in the main mosque as it was “not theirs.” As a refugee, Anisha pointed out, her role was limited here, but she sometimes worked with the mudahim on this new island, helping out at the mosque as Saeeda had also described. Our discussion concluded with Anisha voicing concern about her position and women’s mosques in the future—she was unaware of any plans for building a women’s mosque on the new island where her community was going to be resettled and was unsure about the government’s plans for mosque spaces in the new island community. Without plans for a women’s mosque, Anisha felt unsure about her future.

The Former Mudahim: Fathimath So many people on the island had mentioned the former mudahim that I was curious to meet her, and eventually delighted to receive an invitation to come and visit her in her home. Fathimath was an older woman in her 70s. The home in which we met was a tidy little one-room apartment

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where she sat on her bed to talk with us. This former mudahim had a strong physical presence; she was well dressed in Dhivehi libaas, and heartily greeted each person who came in her room. She had a distinct callus mark on her forehead that spoke of decades of prostrations in regular prayer. She began by informing me that she was not in good health, but insisted she was happy to meet with us and related stories about her younger days with a great deal of enthusiasm. Seated regally on her bed Fathimath speaking quickly and forcefully, with confidence. She was a charismatic speaker and the Maldivian scholars who came with me were so fascinated by her stories that they began interrupting, asking their own curious questions. When asked about the beginning of her career as a mudahim, Fathimath was not sure of the exact dates, but said that she knew that she was working as a mudahim on her island before Ibrahim Nasir became the first Maldivian prime minister, which would be since around the 1950s. She reminisced that when she was younger there was an old nisha miskii made of palm leaves for the women of the island and that it had been right in front of her house. She remembered the mosque with the palm leaves in her earliest memories of childhood. It was a simple structure with a low roof, so low that she could easily reach the rooftop even as a girl. She and her friends learned how to read and write Arabic there as girls. When she was young there was a group of a few women who would lead prayers there and they would take turns doing so. Fathimath felt that the small nisha miskii must have been on the island earlier than the 1950s, remembering that during World War II the women’s mosque was used as a central meeting point. She recalled that every woman would have their names written on a small piece of wood at the mosque, and when a woman had performed her prayers, she would turn the wood piece around to let people know that she had done their prayers for the day. This was necessary to do since if they did not perform their prayers and mark their names they would not get their daily rations from the government. When I asked about how she became the mudahim of the women’s mosque, Fathimath said that when she was younger, she saw that the women in the mosque would all ask each other to lead the prayers and in the absence of one of the women who typically led them there was confusion about how to do so properly. So she asked a knowledgeable older woman to teach her how to do the prayers properly so that she could lead others. This woman, Fathimath recounted, was an Islamic

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scholar who taught children on the island to read the Qur’an and how to pray. Fathimath sat behind the woman in prayers, watched how she prayed, and learned to lead other women in prayer that way. During this time, Fathimath also studied Arabic and learned how to read the Qur’an through classes the older woman held in her home. And that, Fathimath said, was how she started to work as the mudahim of the women’s mosque on her island. This was how, she summarized, she became “a leader among the women.” Fathimath went on to say that at that time she was unmarried—she was unsure exactly how old she was, but thought that she was perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old. It was her decision to lead prayers herself; at that time, it was not a government position, instead the islanders decided who would lead prayers and take care of the mosque on their own. When I expressed surprise that she took on the job at such a young age, Fathimath smiled and said that this was not her only work with women of the island—she also became a midwife at thirteen or fourteen. As the mudahim of the women’s mosque, Fathimath said, she taught Qur’an to girls in the mosque, worked as a midwife, and also prepared women’s bodies for burial. She was clear in expressing that she saw all these tasks as a part of her work as a mudahim. Moreover, she emphasized, since she was not a government employee when she first started this work, Fathimath did not receive any salary for any of it. I asked her how she became a midwife as well, and Fathimath said that while her grandmother was a midwife she was unable to learn it from her, and was self-taught. She recalled that before she became the mudhim there was a time that there was no midwife on her island. One day when a woman was in labor another woman came and told Fathimath that the woman in labor was in a lot of pain and there was no one to help her, asking, “Why don’t you come and help her?” So Fathimath came to help, and learned how to deliver babies on her own. She proudly mentioned that only later she received some formal training in midwifery. Fathimath was quick to point out that she was selftaught in other ways as well. She had studied the proper way to bury a person and gained a great deal of experience. Fathimath told me a story as an example of her knowledge, explaining that once there was a person from another island who came during a burial, who claimed that she had formally studied Islam and knew how to prepare bodies for burial correctly. Fathimath said that she found that the woman was doing

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it incorrectly; she lamented that this woman, while washing the corpse, was not pouring the water to reach the back of the body. She told me proudly that she corrected the woman, who accepted the correction, and Fathimath told the scholar that if she had studied properly while in school she would not be doing things this way. I was amazed at the experience that Fathimath had gathered in the course of her career and asked her if there had been any obstacles to her work. She said that generally there were none—she was able to continue to work as the mudahim after she was married and had no difficulties in fulfilling her duties after marriage. The main difficulty she remembered having as a mudahim was logistical; in the past the only clock they had on the island was in the men’s mosque, so she had to constantly check with the Malé imam to see what time it was for the prayers, even going to ask him during in the night. But, she reminisced, if the clock was not working they could still look at the stars to know the approximate time. Fathimath was feeling tired and began to end our interview by mentioning again that now because of health reasons she was retired. She still prayed regularly on her own, but had difficulty getting to the mosque regularly. These health issues meant that the government official had given her position at the nisha miskii to the new mudahim, Saeeda. When I expressed sympathy about these changes, Fathimath was positive, explaining that she is still busy, felt connected to everyone, and continues to teach religious lessons to her granddaughter. Her final comments were about her role as a mudahim: “I was a leader among women,” she concluded, “By serving them. I knew and helped all the women on this island from birth to death, and everything important in between.”

Reflections I have selected these stories to illustrate some common themes in interviews that I had with a number of nisha miskii mudahim in the Maldives. There are various sources of mudahim authority, such as the role of kinship, as I will develop further in Chapter 6. It is clear in these stories, as well as the interviews with other mudahim, that the younger generation of mudahim conceptualizes their work as government employees with clearly defined required tasks. Older mudahim, in contrast, follow an alternative model for the position and are more likely to be associated with a number of community leadership positions in addition to their

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work in the women’s mosque. These interviews, with others, indicated a notable shift in Maldivian ways of thinking about mudahim within the past few decades, which demonstrated the impact of national policies under President Gayoom had on the religious practices of the Maldives. The governmentalization of religious spaces in the Maldives has obviously created a new way of thinking about the relationship between social practices and religious spaces. In all three of the cases presented here women’s mosques in the Maldives served as significant social places for island women seeking a space of their own, and sites for prayer and personal religious development. While the interviewed mudahim all indicated that the contemporary women’s mosques were constituted through national political practices, we can hear allusions to role of the local in mosque development as well, both in historical and contemporary choices. The mudahim that I spoke with commonly distinguished between home and mosque activities, and suggested that choices of practice between these two spaces were significant for women on their island. These spatial themes will be addressed in more detail in the next few chapters as a part of a discussion on mosque spaces and the development of place.

Note 1. To respect the privacy of my informants, all names and some identifiable details have been changed here, although every effort has been made to ensure that the stories represent the actual experiences of individual Maldivian mudahim.

References Behar, R. (2007). Ethnography in a Time of Blurred Genres. Anthropology and Humanism, 32(2), 145–155. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Narayan, K. (2012). Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. National Bureau of Statistics. (2014). Maldives Population and Housing Census. Malé, Maldives: Ministry of Finance and Treasury, Government of the Maldives. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Said, E. W. (2014). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House.

CHAPTER 3

Dimensions

Maryam lived and worked in Malé. When we first met, she, as a friend of a friend, recommended a store and offered to take me there. We spent time walking together, and later talking over coffee. At some point in our conversation, I mentioned to her that I was fascinated by the idea of islands with individual purposes; Hulhulé the “airport island,” Thilafushi the “rubbish island,” and other such nicknames for islands surrounding Malé spoke of islands as functions, rather than simply existing as places where people lived. She pointed out to me that islands could have both, citing Hulhumalé where she herself lived. The artificial island had been constructed through a land reclamation process specifically to provide overflow housing for Malé, and while it could be labeled “the housing island,” it was still their home. Hulhumalé had opened for settlement in the last year, and her family had moved into an apartment building there a few months ago. I had to ask her, does it somehow feel different to live on an artificial island? “It is not like in the islands,” she commented, referring to an island in the southern atoll where she had lived before moving to Malé. “But Hulhumalé is less crowded than Malé. And once the government built the mosque on Hulhumalé—it is really a beautiful mosque that you should see—the island became a place that you could live.” At the time, I thought Maryam’s statement was metaphorical, and I still believe that she was alluding, at least in part, to the symbolic value of the mosque. Once I perceived more about official settlement patterns in the Maldives, however, I realized that she also meant that the mosque © The Author(s) 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0_3

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made Hulhumalé habitable quite literally. As many Maldivians pointed out to me, inhabited islands necessarily had mosques—official establishments that were funded and staffed by the national government—and the presence of a mosque building signified that habitation was legal on an island. A few weeks after our café conversation, Maryam invited me to Hulhumalé to visit her home and meet her family. A short water taxi ride away, it was indeed less crowded than Malé, although even with barely half-filled apartment blocks Hulhumalé was already teeming with people. Still, there were quiet beaches for our evening stroll. As we walked along the sand, Maryam suddenly looked over toward Hulhulé and added to our earlier conversation, “You know, that isn’t just an airport island either. People used to live there too.” Later research in the national library yielded more information about the past Hulhulé settlements and a story of displacement. A group of aboriginal people of Tamil descent had historically lived on Giraavaru island in the Kaafu Atoll, but due to the gradual erosion of their island their community began to shrink in size (Maloney, 1980, pp. 274–275). In the late 1960s or early 1970s, the community became so small that it could not provide enough adult males for Friday prayers at the mosque—a government requirement for inhabited islands—and they were moved to Hulhulé in 1968 (Maniku, 1983, p. 35). They were forced to relocate again when the airport was expanded in 1976, and resettled by the government in Malé (Maloney, 1980, pp. 274–275; Romero-Frías, 2003). Giraavaru island is now the site of a resort, located adjacent to the “rubbish island”.

Maldivian Mosques and Their Spatial Contexts Mosques in the Maldives—called miskii (variously written as miskii, miskiiy, or miskiit) as a local adaptation of the Arabic term “masjid”—are obviously significant sites, at the center of social, cultural, and political processes that impact the daily lives of Maldivians in a variety of ways. In this chapter, I would like to consider a few contemporary mosque sites in the Maldives to situate a discussion on religious spaces in Muslim communities. I am focusing on concepts of space and examining sites separately from the notion of place—which I will discuss further in the next chapter—to tease out the ways in which location/locale and its material conditions specifically contribute to the meaning development process.

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Fig. 3.1  A view of Malé looking across a section of the airport on Hulhulé (2006)

One of the easiest places to start a conversation about mosque sites in the Maldives is with the Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanual-A’z’am, as it is a highly visible landmark in Malé, where its goldtipped minaret rises gracefully above the leafy green canopy of a surrounding park. This modern-looking mosque—nicknamed the Grand Friday Mosque—is a part of the Maldivian Islamic Center, which in 2005 housed the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (now known as the Ministry of Islamic Affairs), a bureaucratic division of the national government. The Islamic Center was built in 1984 under President Abdul Gayoom’s administration, funded in part with donations from the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Malaysia, and Pakistan (Department of Religious Affairs, 1984, p. 5). President Gayoom invited award-winning Malaysian architect Abdul Majid Hajeedar to design the mixed-use building that housed both the Islamic Center and mosque. Hajeedar, who was trained at Portsmouth Polytechnic (UK), is known for his Malay mosque designs that emphasize multi-use spaces and maximize airflow for ventilation (Ismail, 2018).

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The front of Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu-al-A’z’am is dominated by wide steps that rise in a pyramid shape, open on three sides, to the open-arched doorway framed by rows of towering arched windows; behind this façade lie access hallways and stairs to an airy multi-storied open prayer area that can accommodate approximately 5000 people in prayer. The prayer hall of the masjid is oriented directly toward quibla in the front of the room, evidenced by a carved wood arch around the recessed mihrab, with a minbar next to it at the head of the room. It is decorated with calligraphy, chandeliers, and woodcarvings on its walls and balconies. Outside of Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu-al-A’z’am is one tall minaret, the most identifiable feature marking the building as a Muslim space, as the tower links the building to Islam through both design and function. The design of the minaret is based on contemporary architectural conventions commonly used in other mosques around the world—featuring a long slender tower with regularly spaced balconies and a gold domed top—rather than the minarets of historical Maldivian mosques, and symbolizes a particular form of Muslim community to many viewers. The functional features of the tower enable aspects of Muslim practice, providing an elevated site through which the call to prayer can be clearly broadcasted to the community. The minaret of Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu-al-A’z’am differs in design with that of a historical mosque only a few blocks away, Hukuru Miskii. Hukuru Miskii, one of the oldest mosque structures in the Maldives (reportedly built between 1656 and 1658), is flanked by a solid-looking coral stone tower that was built in approximately 1675. While the tower’s elevation again enables Muslim practice, its design does not evoke as clear a symbolic connection to contemporary global Muslim community, as I will write about in more detail later in Chapter 4. Returning to Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu-al-A’z’am, we find that in contrast to the minarets the lower portion of the building has few architectural elements to signify its use as a Muslim space, through a traditional local lens of Muslim design. The polished surfaces of white marble in this sprawling modern building emphasize openness and cleanliness, and in design, it shares more with contemporary Malaysian mosques than historical Maldivian ones (e.g., in contrast to coral stone materials on the exterior and the multi-chambered interior of the late eighteenth-century to early nineteenth-century Malé Hukuru Miskii,

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covered in the next chapter). The wide steps up to the entrance invite the passersby inside, although signs outside the mosque slightly alter the architectural message, with announcements that non-Muslim visitors must only visit during certain times and are required to check into the Islamic Centre for permission. An informal conversation with one of the mosque employees outside of the mosque suggested that the signs’ instructions for non-Muslims were intended for any foreign visitors, regardless of their religion; a government official later informed me that this was not the “correct” policy. Having received approval to visit inside Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu-al-A’z’am, I was invited to see the prayer hall described earlier, but instructed not to take pictures. Inside the mosque, the attendant informed me, in answer to my questions, that there was a women’s space on the second floor, but that was rarely used. Most women that I spoke with in Malé confirmed this, saying that they themselves did not regularly pray in a mosque, but that women in Malé who wanted to pray in mosques could do so in a separate area, usually (as in the case of Masjid-al Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu-al-A’z’am) in the balcony section of the mosque of one of the neighborhood mosques. This method for partitioning off a section of the mosque for women seemed to be a function of spatial constraints in the over-crowded city of Malé, where every tall building seemed to be in the process of growing upward, rather than a culturally preferred spatial arrangement. Limited space for women in Malé is long-standing; one author has noted that before 1985 there were few public facilities for women in the capital to pray in, and that these women generally prayed at home (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, p. 21). The smaller neighborhood mosques in Malé are numerous and have a well-documented history; in the 1940s, Bell noted a total of 32 mosques in Malé, while in 1980 Maloney documented 35 (see Carswell, 1976; Forbes, 1983; Maloney, 1980). Neighborhood mosques vary considerably in architectural style; some are smaller rectangular buildings with cement walls and tin roofs, while others are newly reconstructed sites featuring larger multi-storied mosques with minarets. Across the water from Malé, we can find a number of mosques on the newly constructing island of Hulhumalé, where Maryam and her family had settled, as well. Hulhumalé is the product of an extensive, and expensive, government project that began in 1997; as I will discuss later, we can link island and mosque construction processes in several ways. In Hulhumalé, the Maldivian Ministry of Construction

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and Public Works worked with two Belgian firms—International Port Engineering and Management and Dredging International—to create an island by dredging up sand, coral, and shells from the ocean floor. The initial reclamation work for Phase 1 of the project was completed in 2002. The Hulhumalé Development Unit was formed by presidential decree in 2001 to oversee urban planning and development for the artificial island; in 2005, this task was taken over by the Housing Development Corporation Limited, established as a limited liability company, but owned by the Maldivian Government, with oversight from the Ministry of Finance and Treasury (Ahmed, 2005, p. 68). The first phase of Hulhumalé’s development focused on housing units, with some commercial and industrial land grades, and the construction of large public works such as the large modern mosque, Masjid al Shaikh Qasim bin Muhammad al-Thani. In Hulhumalé, establishing the foundation of the mosque required the literal construction of an island, and the symbolic foundation of the island was the construction of a mosque. Masjid al Shaikh Qasim bin Muhammad al-Thani was reportedly built with financial support from Qatar and named after a member of the Qatari Al Thani family; the Maldivian consultancy firm Riyan Private Limited oversaw the project. On the exterior, the mosque is modern, featuring a large distinctive golden dome in its center, and inside has a modern minimalist look. Its minaret has a sleek, streamlined look as well, with a slightly concave cylindrical shape topped by a gold dome. The shape of the minaret, paired with the dome-focused design of the mosque, makes the design of this mosque reminiscent of the Hamad International Airport Mosque in Qatar (Fig. 3.2). Many of the people that I spoke to who lived on Hulhumalé, which had only been settled a year before I visited the Maldives, mentioned the mosque as an attractive public work that the government, as one young man said, “built to persuade people that this would be a good place to live.” Given the urban crowding in Malé, and the difficulty of owning land on other inhabited islands, few people seemed to need persuading to sign up for the high demand housing created on the island of Hulhumalé. Yet, the perception that the grand modern mosque was an incentive, or perhaps a bonus, for living on the island remains. In addition to the large mosque, Hulhumalé’s neighborhoods each have their own mosques, supported by the government, although individual patrons reportedly finance some of these neighborhood mosques.

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Fig. 3.2  An ariel shot of the Masjid al Shaikh Qasim bin Muhammad al-Thani in Hulhumalé, 2005. The mosque construction was just being finished at this time, and around the mosque area are both newly developed and undeveloped sections of the island (2006)

Faizal comments that privately built mosques have existed for decades in the Maldives, although their administration is usually handed over to the government after construction (Faizal, 2013, p. 152). Moving still further outward from Malé are the island mosques of the Maldives. All the mosques in the islands are government owned and operated buildings; their maintenance is the responsibility of the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs.1 As noted earlier, the presence of these mosques is an official condition of island habitation.

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This bureaucratic role of island mosques in the Maldives is longstanding; Forbes wrote during his mid-1970s research in the Maldives that all islands with at least 40 males needed to have their own khutbah (Friday) mosque, and noted that this was the same in the early seventeenth century when Francois Pyrard de Laval wrote an account of his time in the Maldives (Forbes, 1983, p. 68).2 Furthermore, as the mudahim Fathimath recounted in the last chapter, mosques were used for demographic tracking and subsequent supply rationing during World War II. According to my informants, and suggested by several authors in connection with the Giraavaru islanders story earlier in this chapter, if the number of people attending the mosque is too small, the government can relocate the island population. In the book The Islands of the Maldives, Hassan Ahmed Maniku documents a number of “depopulated” Maldivian islands (Maniku, 1983).3 Thus, a mosque site can actually make or break an inhabited island. Many of the island mosques that I visited were simple rectangular structures, with coral stone or cement walls. Quite a few have long open verandahs along the front of the building, with columns or arches. Most island mosques have yards enclosed by walls, with a well inside the boundaries, and are capped by tin roofs, although several older women that I spoke with suggested that, as Maloney noted, up until the mid-twentieth century Maldivian mosque roofs were made of palm thatch (Maloney, 1980, p. 212). On the islands, there is frequently more land for building than in Malé, and mosques that accommodate both men and women often have a women’s section set apart on the horizontal axis. Women’s sections in islands mosques are frequently a section of the prayer room separated by a curtain or fabric partitions, a common arrangement in many mosques around the world (Fig. 3.3). On the islands, women’s mosques present an additional gendered mosque space arrangement. The spatial and material conditions of women’s mosques in the Maldives vary greatly from island to island, as I will discuss later in this book. All these diverse Maldivian mosque sites are linked through their political context. President Gayoom’s Protection of Religious Unity Act of 1994 made what was known as the national Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (now renamed the Ministry of Islamic Affairs) responsible for all mosque affairs, outlawed prayer congregations that were not sanctioned by the government, and banned religious literature import

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Fig. 3.3  Interior of a mosque on a north atoll island. Note the fabric panel partitions to separate the women’s and men’s sections (photographed from the men’s side), as well as the presence of the minbar. The mihrab and minbar are not visible from the women’s side, which is located adjacent to the men’s side (2006)

from other religions. Under the Religious Unity Act, the Maldivian Government regulated leadership in mosques. The Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs is responsible for hiring imams, both male and female, for all mosques in the Maldives. While reported legal code requires that the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs certifies imams after proving their credentials and taking an exam, my interviews with mudahim at the women’s mosques suggest that these women do not take any exams for their positions. Once certified and hired, imams are still required to follow strict guidelines from the national government. The Friday sermon—or khutbah—is written by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and delivered to island mosques for reading by the imams. The Maldivian Government claims that measures such as these

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are meant to insure cohesive national theological standards and to prevent extremist movements in the country by guarding against fundamentalism in mosque teachings. Government publications from Gayoom’s regime stress mosques as multi-dimensional institutions, acting as places of prayer, as well as traditional centers of learning and teaching (Department of Religious Affairs, 1984).

Constructing Muslim Spaces Thus far, I have spoken of these mosques as Maldivian mosques, and their significance has been—at least at first glance—located in Maldivian contexts (albeit within an international arena). Maldivian mosques are, from this perspective, sites of locally oriented (e.g., the island mosque) and nationally bordered (e.g., bureaucratic structures) ways of interacting with particular places as spatial practices. In using the phrase “spatial practice,” I mean to refer here to Henri Lefebvre’s use of the term, as he defines it in “The Production of Space”—spatial practice consisting of “a projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements, and moments of social practice” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 8). Spatial practices invoke the ways in which conceptual spaces are mapped onto physical landscapes and particular places. While there are obviously key aspects of the spatial practice of these mosques that are specific to the Maldives, many architectural features of Maldivian mosques—e.g., minarets, prayer halls, mihrabs, wudu areas—and practices associated with the mosques—khutbah, prayer, the role of teaching and learning—are easily recognizable in global Muslim narratives. This link across cultural boundaries, a patterning of spatial elements, suggests that we can talk about these mosques as “Muslim spaces” beyond the Maldivian context. If “Muslim spaces” exist, they should exist in discernible forms. Since I am focusing on how these spaces exist in discourses, one way to start dissecting those forms is through a critical examination of common spatial tropes about Muslims/Islam. I begin with spatial tropes—commonly reoccurring motifs and clichés about space—such as the public/ private divide and “the veil” that are so commonly invoked as to become hackneyed, rather than specific sites (although specific sites such as Mecca certainly play a role in constituting those tropes). As David Parkin points out, spatial tropes are “useful fictions” that allow us to focus on particular spatial patterns and make sense of them (Parkin, 2000, p. 1).

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These common spatial tropes about Islam and Muslims illuminate how spaces are conceptualized in relation to a wide variety of spaces associated with Muslim community, particularly in regard to ideas of gender. These are recognizable patterns of spatial use and associated behaviors, although they are not rules, predictive or descriptive. Spatial tropes are, of course, not the only way to theorize Muslim space and so I will later consider other sites of Muslim practice. At this point, I am deliberately focusing on space rather than place. I am examining space to focus analysis on the ways in which a location/locale and its material conditions specifically contribute to the meaning-building process of women’s mosques. While space, as well as spatial practices, contributes to the construction of place, examining it separately from place allows for a more detailed engagement with the ways in which physical/material spatial dimensions of Muslim spaces have been conceptually developed in academic literature and, at times, diffused into popular discourses.

Gendered Muslim Spaces: Public/Private Dichotomy Perhaps the most commonly invoked spatial practice associated with gender issues in Islamic practice is the public/private—also called inside/ outside—divide. In its most simplistic gendered form, the idea of a Muslim public/private spatial dichotomy is used to propagate images of secluded Muslim women who are sequestered from public life, e.g., the stereotypical Ottoman harem. Even when comprehended in more precise terms, this polarity is often considered a primary social distinction of Muslim communities that many social scientists discuss as a fundamental, cross-cultural element of Muslim social life. For example, in some of her earlier work, Katherine Ewing argues that, “[g]ender in Muslim societies, for instance, is spatially organized and bounded… creating a sharp differentiation between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ located within a broader terrain of a borderless, potentially global community (umma)” (Ewing, 1998, p. 263). Here Ewing implies that the inside/ outside (or private/public) spatial practice supersedes that of national/ cultural territories, and hence is a spatial practice associated with Islam that takes precedence over other spatial practices in the concerned people’s lives. She also claims that the inside/outside dichotomy is linked to the spatial organization of gender. While Ewing’s later work explicitly criticizes the conflation of Islam and culture, this claim about Muslim

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societies existing as a global ummah with a shared culture—for what else can we call beliefs and roles that together suggest symbolic ways of organizing behaviors—forefronts the idea of Muslim spaces. Discussions of gendered public/private divides in Muslim communities benefit from a “lived religion” approach to the topic, as a number for studies that utilize this polarized spatial model to understand social relations within gendered spaces in Muslim communities tend to investigate these spatial practices—whether the author intends to or not—as a part of what Muslims do, as opposed to a practice informed by Muslim identity. For example, in one study of gender patterns within a Muslim community in Norway, Line Nyhagen Predelli views the gendered distinction between public and private spheres to be so fundamental that it underlies her central research question, “[w]hat are the views and practices of immigrant Muslim women in terms of gender relations in the domestic sphere of the household and in the public sphere of work” (Predelli, 2004, p. 476). Predelli claims labor practices within the Muslim families she studied construct homes as women’s domains, which are “private” insofar as they are contrasted with the public domain where men participate in the workplace, and argues that the “values of each gender are so clearly associated with two separate spheres” (Predelli, 2004, p. 486). Yet, she also notes that, The distinctions these women apply between private and public, and between family and work, are gendered, but they are not clear cut. The lines are challenged and contested most importantly by women who participate in the labor market but also by men who take on duties in the home. The gender ideology promoted by the Norwegian state gives strong support to the interchangeability of women’s and men’s roles at home and in the work force. (Predelli, 2004, p. 490)

Thus, Predelli identifies the state—and later in her article particularly state economies—as a key motivating force in the spatial practices that interact with a public/private divide in the lives of her informants. This is particularly notable in conjunction with Ewing’s earlier mentioned claim that the public/private divide in Muslim social life can supersede national boundaries, and in consideration of a global ummah. Predelli’s informants’ gendered versions of public/private divides seem to be Muslim only insofar as they exist within a Muslim community; she notes later that the community does not uniformly consider any particular religious

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tradition to require women’s work in specific domains. This role of state economies in maintaining a public/private divide in the work of Muslim women has been observed in a number of studies in Indonesia as well (e.g., Adamson, 2007; Brenner, 1998; Sen, 1998). Social science discourses about the public/private divide are frequently entangled with concern for the boundaries of the state. This of course follows from the classic construction of the public sphere as developed by Jurgen Habermas (1991). While the particular historical patterns that have given rise to it are debated, Habermas’ public sphere is generally agreed upon to have developed in the mediation of relationships between societies and states, and the intertwining of these bodies (Fraser, 1990). This version of the public sphere underlies many academic conversations about public vs. private; for example, Suad Joseph argues, based on a case study in Lebanon, that the public/private divide is a “purposeful fiction” of patriarchies aligned with states, designed to support state-building processes (Joseph, 1997, p. 73). Religious studies scholar Mohsen Kadivar has argued through an Islamic religious framework a similar perspective on role of the public spaces in the spatial practices that comprise a public/private divide (Kadivar, 2003). Kadivar claims that while the idea of public vs. private is a fundamental distinction used in “fields of Islamic ethics, law and jurisprudence,” the two terms themselves “are not rooted in the heart of Islamic doctrine,” as they do not occur in either the Qur’an or traditions from the Prophets and/or Imams (Kadivar, 2003, p. 659). Kadivar therefore defines the terms based on Islamic tradition, doing so in a manner that contrasts with earlier models as he begins with the private sphere. Kadivar emphasizes an individual’s relationship with others, that which is “kept secret or rendered inaccessible” vs. that which is not (Kadivar, 2003, p. 662). He suggests that Islamic interpretation of the prophetic tradition constructs the private space of the home through recognition of a person’s rights over their own property; public and private spaces from this perspective are created from a society’s recognition of an individual’s right to ownership and the limitations of that recognition (Kadivar, 2003, pp. 661–662). The public sphere here is a regulated space that is not owned by individuals, but rather by citizens of a political structure and therefore subject to social codes and laws. Kadivar notes, …as soon as the individual enters public domain, there are limitations that are imposed on him/her by the law, in any society. Individuals in public

44  J. H. FEWKES domain are limited in the way of clothing, sexual behavior, and certain ways of social conduct that may vary from one culture to another. In an Islamic society—one in which the principal rulings of Islam underlie the penal code—specific limitations in public domain are imposed on the individuals, which could be compared to other cultures including those in the West. (Kadivar, 2003, pp. 669–670)

As Kadivar writes, public and private spaces are co-constituted through a meeting of the spatial practices of an individual and those of a community in the form of a social or political unit. Islamic tradition informs this meeting most clearly through the private, in the form of the home, but Islamic tradition is not necessary for the public domain to exist. According to this perspective the right of society to determine the structure and expectations of the public domain, it is not particular to Islamic tradition; the particular content of those determinations, however, can be Islamic (e.g., in the form of particular specific dress codes). This structure provides a tidy explanation for how religious tradition and political/social patterns may inform each other in the building of contrasting public and private domains. Furthermore, the role of Islamic tradition in defining the private and its neutrality in constituting the public, a category build through civic participation, fits well with the previous secularist approach to the relationship between the two, while benefitting from recognition of the conceptual complexity of the private sphere. The utility of the public/private dichotomy for understanding Muslim space is that it can highlight the variety of spaces included in this category—the public/private distinction demonstrates that it is incorrect to privilege formal institutional spaces, such as mosques, as sites of Muslim community. Muslim homes, schools, markets, etc., are all sites of Muslim community through this framework. Even as national boundaries may be deemphasized, as Ewing suggests, larger spatial units such as nations can be perceived as Muslim spaces insofar as they are perceived of as “inside” or “outside” what is a particular Muslim space. The public/private distinction is indeed a central spatial practice in a number of ethnographic cases; it does not, however, provide a complete theoretical framework for “Muslim spaces.” This model of contrasts excludes spaces such as Muslim graveyards or public washing areas, both central to aspects of Muslim praxis, and does not facilitate the assessment of specifics within a Muslim site, such as the presence or absence of a mihrab within a mosque space, or the architectural style of a minaret.

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The public/private distinction is, at best, an incomplete model for recognizing the spaces of Muslim communities. The imperfect nature of this dichotomy is also evident when we examine several culturally specific assemblages of this “public/private” divide, as the actual spatial practices and accompanying systems of social meaning that are mapped onto local geographies can vary significantly. Alexandrine Guérin’s archaeological study of Mysake village in southern Syria, an Islamic settlement period from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, identifies a number of architectural features that created a bridge between the public and private in Mysake (Guérin, 1999). Vestibules in the front of each house allowed for movement between public and private spaces—these were transitionary spaces that might be viewed as liminal within the public/private dichotomy, but cannot be relegated to the status marginal spaces, as they were a key feature of both domains. Guérin also identifies raised platforms called mastaba that were used for conversational areas. While some mastaba were built inside houses, and therefore private, others were built in public spaces such as the mosque. A third category of mastaba straddled the public/ private divide; they were built outside and were public insofar as they are outside, but considered private as they belonged to households (Guérin, 1999, p. 51). The settlement also featured “communicating rooms,” which connected groups of houses, extending the private domain in ways that challenged a neat divide of inside/outside homes (Guérin, 1999, pp. 51–52). Vestibules, mastaba, and communicating rooms are all architectural features in this case study that demonstrate how pinpointing the actual location of a distinction between public and private spaces can be an arbitrary exercise in some cultural contexts. Political scientist Mary Ann Tétreault suggests that the formal mosque space itself, central to many definitions of Muslim space, can challenge assumptions of a strict inside/outside or public/private contrasts as well. In her work on women’s rights in Kuwait, Tétreault demonstrates that the mosque is a public space protected by law from state intrusion, and as such shares more spatial meaning with the home—a classic “private/inside” domain—than with other public spaces (Tétreault, 1993, p. 278). In the Kuwait case, when the mosque is a public space constructed politically as a private domain, the spatial polarization of Muslim public/private spaces is shown to have little analytical rigor. While this spatial configuration of the mosque is particular to the political landscape of Kuwait, Tétreault suggests that it is common in the Middle East.

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Similarly, geographer Sarah Halvorson writes about how the gendered spaces of Muslim women are organized by multiple complex spatial coordinates; in this case study, women’s spaces among the Gilgit communities in Pakistan may be shaped by geographic spaces (mountains, valleys, etc.), political spaces (peripheral regions vs. central regions), class spaces, demographic spaces (rural vs. urban), and age (girlhood and womanhood have their own spaces) (Halvorson, 2005). In yet another example of the limitations of the public/private, Ousseina Alidou notes that in Niger common models of a gendered public/private divide are shaped in as much by class as by gender, creating distinctions between beggar women and housewives (Alidou, 2005, pp. 14–15). Alidou also points to other ways of thinking about the spatial dichotomies within the Muslim communities that can help us to gain more detailed knowledge about the diverse communities commonly homogenized through the label of the “Muslim world.” She alludes, for example, to the significance of regional spaces in constituting Muslims through discourses about cultural divisions between what is “Arabic” and what is “African,” as well as Arab nationalist sentiments in relation to a global ummah (Alidou, 2005, pp. 5–6). While public/private and outside/inside dichotomies may therefore be thought-provoking conceptual tools, they do not provide a holistic framework for appreciating the complex and varied roles of space in every—or even a majority of—Muslim communities. The public/private divide is not simply incomplete; it has, more problematically, become a reified category in academic works—a label for spatial practices that has come to over-emphasize notions about gender divides in Muslim communities and may obscure our comprehension of actual practices.

Gendered Muslim Spaces: Hijab or “the Veil” The spatial practices of the hijab or veil can be, and often are, ascribed to the public/private dichotomy, a problematic approach as actual practices of creating spatial boundaries are varied and nuanced. There are many ways in which the hijab is a spatial practice, so numerous that I will summarize them here with a few brief examples to illustrate each point. The first spatial aspect of hijab is the literal meaning of the term; while hijab is colloquially used in many cultures to refer to a piece of clothing, its actual meaning is about a spatial practice hijab is literally translated as

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a separation, boundary, curtain, or divider. Asma Barlas has deliberated upon the twofold nature of the Qur’anic treatment of hijab, which may have a material form (a head covering) or may be relational or spatial in nature; it is in the last sense of the term that Barlas writes, “the real veil is in the eyes/gaze” (Barlas, 2009).4 Fatima Mernissi further divides the meaning of hijab into three parts: (1) a visual dynamic, based on the root verb hajaba, which means “to hide”; (2) a spatial boundary or border between two areas; and (3) an ethical injunction against that which is in the realm of the forbidden (Mernissi, 1991, p. 93). All three of these meanings have spatial dimensions. We can see here that the hijab can be an enactment of the public/private notion, separating that which is private from that which is public, which brings the concept into practice and maps it onto bodies. When used as a spatial trope, hijab is often more simply referred to as the practice of “veiling,” with focus on the covering of women’s b ­ odies. Veils in this sense were common visual tropes in countless Orientalist paintings—Fabio Fabbi’s The Blue Veil, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Veiled Circassian Beauty, Addison Thomas’ Entrance to a Harem immediately spring to mind as examples—where Muslim women were depicted with veils to represent an exoticized and eroticized other that, as Said points out, renders the other as uncivilized and works to symbolically emasculate these cultures to justify the power imbalances of colonialism (Said, 1979). These Orientalist depictions of veils as clothing were frequently used to represent social boundaries of other types, including social boundaries between genders, the crossing into “forbidden places,” or a line between “civilizations.” Many contemporary Euro-American public depictions of hijab are descendants of these Orientalist perspectives, some focused with a prurient interest on unveiling women’s bodies (as in television shows, movies, and novels about the Middle East), while others, as Faegheh Shirazi aptly demonstrates, use exoticizing images of women hijab to sell cigarettes, Jeeps, fashion, and more (Shirazi, 2003). As Nilüfer Göle has succinctly observed, “…no other symbol than the veil reconstructs with such force the ‘otherness’ of Islam to the West” (Göle, 1996, p. 1). Even from a more balanced perspective, limiting notions of hijab to ideas of covering, modesty, control, etc., provides at best an incomplete theoretical framework. We can recognize hijab as a far more complex and nuanced concept when we locate it as a spatial practice.

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Barlas points out that considering the hijab as a relational/spatial practice has significant implications for Muslim spaces. She argues that the Qur’anic injunction for believers to “cast down their eyes,” means that Muslims …must, in fact, be free to look upon one another publicly. If men and women were segregated … it would not be necessary to cast down one’s eyes, and thus this ruling the Qur’ān would be unnecessary. If anything, therefore the Quran’s ruling establish that women can freely enter public arenas. (Barlas, 2009, p. 158)

Barlas’ work thus provides an engaging textual approach for challenging how Muslim spaces are conceived of on the most fundamental levels, as spaces informed by Islamic belief. The significance of the hijab as a spatial practice varies between cultural settings and has diverse spatial implications that extend beyond both bodies and the public/private. For example, in Afghanistan, purdah and veiling are common practices in some areas, but not in others, and both social class and regional background can play a role in whether or not women choose to wear a veil. Furthermore, in some areas of the country, purdah is an discursive ideal rather than a bodily practice; Davis observes that Koochi women in Afghanistan do not routinely observe purdah, but when asked men of the community will report that they always do so (Davis, 2005, p. 79). Alidou notes that the hijab in Niger has a particular geopolitical context, as use of the phrase “hijab woman” invokes an urban identity related to Islamist politics (Alidou, 2005, p. 159). Similarly, Elizabeth and Robert Fernea write that village women in parts of Egypt and Berber women in Northern Africa do not veil themselves as their communities are thought of as one extended family, and covering is associated with larger urban areas where there are strangers (Fernea & Fernea, 1986). Hijab wearing is used discursively to define Muslim spaces—a common trope in classic ethnographies and travel writing that echoes the interests of Orientalist paintings. This genre of writing and its engagement with the notion of the veil has been well documented in a number of critical studies (e.g., Harrigan, 2008; Yegenoglu, 1998). Orientalist travel writers and scholars used the frequency of women covering their heads as a visual barometer, an indicator of gender equality in Muslim communities and sometimes even of the presence of Islam

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itself.5 This has been true of accounts of the Maldives as well; when the German Carl Wilhelm Rosset visited the Maldives in 1885, for example, he wrote that Maldivian women are better treated than in “other Mohammedan countries,” offering in support of the contrast only the vague claim that Maldivian women have “a great deal of liberty” and that they “never veil their faces” (Rosset, 1886, p. 415). Christopher Hanby Baillie Reynolds, a linguist who studied in the Maldives in 1947, quoted Ibn Battuta’s historical observation that, “[t]he women of these islands do not cover the head: the sovereign herself does not do so… Most of them wear only a cloth, covering them from the navel to the ground: the rest of the body remains uncovered”; Reynolds links this historical tidbit to the “remarkably free position of women in the Maldives,” which, he comments, is “a very notable feature today” in 1947 (Reynolds, 2000, p. 16). The wearing of hijab is also closely tied to the identity of national spaces. Historically, it was used to justify and ideologically infuse European colonial presences in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. For example, Marnia Lazreg writes about how the French colonial government actually held nationalistic events where women were unveiled in “well choreographed ceremonies” to represent the strength of the colonial presence in Algeria (Lazreg, 1994, p. 135); Leila Ahmed writes about a similar colonial interest in the symbol of the veil in British Egypt (Ahmed, 2011). Lila Abu-Lughod has clearly documented that contemporary imperialism has a similar tendency, when discussions of the US military presence were justified through cultural narratives that used women and veils as central symbols (Abu-Lughod, 2002). Hijabs, and other forms of Muslim women’s coverings, continue to be a focal point in contemporary discourses about national identity around the world, as governments debate and legislate hijab in its material form. Many countries have had court cases and/or legislative actions concerning women’s rights to wear hijab, including Austria, Canada, and the USA. Even more countries have enacted specific legislation regulating women’s coverings, whether in the form of a ban on hijab in schools, universities, and/or government workplaces in some combination (e.g., France, Kosovo), a ban on wearing niqab (a veil that includes face covering) or a burqa in public (e.g., Austria, Belgium, Cameroon, Chad, some parts of China, Denmark, France, Latvia, and the Netherlands) regardless of the small numbers of women who wear such clothing in many of these countries, outlawing the wearing of niqab in schools and universities (e.g., Norway

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and Syria), forbidding the use of niqab for state workers (e.g., Germany and Malaysia), and requiring the use of hijab in all public spaces (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia). Veiling agency—women choosing to cover their heads—can be linked to processes of creating spaces as well. At times, these spaces are relational, such as in the case of the women of Egypt who, Saba Mahmood writes, wear hijab as an act of virtue and piety, and in doing so craft a new identity within their society (Mahmood, 2012). Women’s coverings can be used to transform spaces, as anthropologists Hanna Papanek and Lila Abu-Lughod have both noted about the burqa. Papanek wrote about the burqa in Pakistan as “portable seclusion,” allowing women to move freely in segregated public areas (Papanek, 1982). Abu-Lughod talks about this role of the burqa as a “mobile home,” mode of protection for women as it signifies that they belong to particular communities and families, shielding them from harassment in the public realm by invoking “the inviolable space of their homes” even while moving in the public sphere (Abu-Lughod, 2002, p. 785). The utility of considering the hijab as a spatial practice is in expanding upon the concept of the public/private; attention to the hijab as a spatial practice allows us to bypass use of the dichotomous divide as an immutable aspect of gendered Muslim spaces and acknowledge the processes by which such patterns of dichotomies may be created or subverted. Switching analytical focus from specific locales (e.g., arguing that this particular place is “public,” while that one is “private”) to patterns of relations, beliefs, individual choices, and varied meanings in this way may allow a discussion of the patterns of public and private distinctions to develop into a more nuanced analysis of spatial practices, enacted in a myriad of specific, varied, and mutable ways. Unfortunately, similar to (and often in conjunction with) the use of the public/private dichotomy, invoking the “veil” as a spatial practice has become reified and has frequently been applied with little analytical rigor. As mentioned earlier, authors arriving in the Maldives have frequently gauged their assessment of the gendered dynamics of Muslim society in terms of the number of women that they see wearing hijab, without going into detail about the practices and its meanings to those wearing it. One frequent sight that I enjoyed while strolling in Malé was watching families swimming at the artificial beach, a small inlet area that had been reclaimed with the help of Japanese-built concrete tetrapods. The artificial beach was a favorite picnicking and swimming spot

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for Male residents; many women swam there, some while wearing hijab and others not. Contrary to many outsiders’ expectations, in this case the practice of covering did not firmly dictate a woman’s choices and behavior in public places. There are many reasons why women wear hijab; associating “veiling” with one single set of social meanings and spatial practices is rarely analytically useful for understanding what people do, and why they do it. Spatial tropes such as veiling and the public/private dichotomy support each other and are often used in conjunction as code words that are meant to invoke a whole set of preexisting knowledge from existing scholarship; that something is “known” should invoke Said’s Orientalism as reviewed in the introduction. Code words are discursive practices that allow their users to link their utterances to other sets of knowledge, simple terms that, by referencing other discourse, add multiple layers of meaning to what is spoken. For example, Maloney wrote in the 1980s that purdah (women’s seclusion, Persian for “veil” or “curtain,” thus linked to discourses of the veil) existed in the Maldives in 1970s, claiming that women never went out to visit up until the mid-twentieth century and would not use the front room of the house if men were in it (Maloney, 1980, p. 365). Rosset suggests something similar in his writing in 1885, noting about Maldivian women: … the only restriction to which they are subjected is that they are not allowed out at night, which is not any great hardship for them, as the fear of meeting the devil is already a sufficient inducement for them to remain at home. The Maldive women seemed very shy, when I was called into their different homes, to give them medical help. In the beginning I had to stand in front of the house’s room curtain, that separated the men’s and women’s space for each other, when I was to examine the woman. At once there were six to ten hands sticking out from the drapery, when I wanted to find out the heart-pulse. Whoever the arm belonged to I did not know, as I never saw the women behind the curtain. (Rosset, 1886, p. 416)

These claims are surprising, as many authors have noted that Maldivian women’s work historically extended outside the family buildings and traditional family houses in the islands were large open areas; other accounts do not indicate that Maldivian women were strictly segregated in the past. Rosset suggests that gendered spaces may have more complex and nuanced social connotations than use of the term “purdah”

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would suggest, noting directly after the passage above that, “[a]fter some time, the women became more open and associable, as they got acquainted to my information and approaches, and I was able to examine them properly” (Rosset, 1886, p. 416). Maloney seems to refute a simplistic notion of purdah as well; at other times in the same book, he claims that Maldivian women have a great deal of freedom of movement. Rosset and Maloney may have observed some intriguing gendered spatial practices in Malé; however, mentions of “purdah” (directly or through reference to a curtain) in their works obscure a clear view of the situation; instead of discussing women’s actual roles and social worlds, their use of purdah as a code word links their writing to other sets of European knowledge and contexts, bringing with it the accompanying biases, motivations, and interests. In this case, reliance on a spatial trope as a code word invokes what is “known” from an Orientalist perspective about gendered spaces in Muslim communities, instead of a detailed description of, and inquiry into, what actually exists.

Gendered Muslim Spaces: The Ummah The term “ummah” literally means “community” in Arabic and is used in the Qur’an to refer to a community that is religious in nature (Denny, 1975, p. 189); the Qur’an also establishes that there are multiple ummah and mentioned that each ummah has been sent a prophet/­messenger (e.g., Qur’an 16:36), and the “People of the Book”—Jewish and Christian—are individually referred to as an ummah.6 As such, ummah appears in both singular and plural forms in the Qur’an (Geaves, 1996, p. 11). The term existed in this sense in pre-Islamic Arab communities as a way of referring to religious communities, and Qur’anic usage of ummah additionally emphasized the notion of oneness, or human unity, ideally unified by belief (Denny, 1975, pp. 48–49). In spite of this etymology, many people today think of “ummah” as having an intrinsically political meaning. This may come from modern understandings of nations and an assumption that the existence of a global Muslim community draws into question the role of the geographically defined nation; it could also be derived from the manner in which the term is used in a number of books and articles pertaining to international Islamist movements and invoked by members of those movements. Varied English translations of the Qur’an itself may have contributed to this impression; if we look, for example, at translations of

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Surah 16 Ayat 36 of the Qur’an we can see that while Muhammad Asad translates “ummah” as “community,” Marmaduke Pickthall (a classically popular translator) renders the term as “nation” (Asad, 1992; Pickthall, 2009).7 While the role of the nation and international political movements are significant aspects of the discursive use of ummah, I would like to focus here more on ummah as an religious identity, one that is spatial only insofar as it is oriented as a spatial practice of Muslim community. This approach may take into consideration the aforementioned political dimensions of the ummah by discussing how notions of the ummah intersect with political identities and roles; such an approach is demonstrated in Michael Appleton’s studies of British Muslim students, where youth expressed how their identification with the ummah did not contest with their British identities, but informed their globally oriented political views, prompting them to be more politically engaged in the British political arena (Appleton, 2005a, 2005b). The ummah as a religious identity community is fundamentally different from a geographically located nation, and indeed, there are contrasting terms for these ideas in Arabic, where the term sha’b is used to refer to a nation and its inhabitants in a political or geographic sense. As Samah Selim’s work points out, “sha’b” has traditionally been used to refer to communities as a political sense, while “ummah” has been used to refer to community from a historical perspective, and/or one that expresses shared interests such as religion (Selim, 2017, p. 152).8 Even functioning primarily as a religious identity group, the ummah may take on many conceptual forms. Islamic religious participation can give rise to identification with the ummah; for example, Hew Wai Weng notes that conversion to Islam in China is thought to “often [be] followed by a change in world view and transnational subjectivity,” identification with an Islamic ummah (Weng, 2014, p. 643). In the community that Weng studied, the ummah is one of many possible transnational identities for Muslims and is specifically linked to ideas such a desire to be able to perform Haj in Mecca and a concern for the plight of Muslims in around the world (Weng, 2014, p. 643). In the British Muslim student communities mentioned earlier, identification with the ummah can be linked specifically to Muslim minority identities and political consciousness development (Appleton, 2005a, 2005b). The term ummah can be invoked to refer to the intellectual traditions of Muslim communities worldwide, with literacy (frequently in Arabic) functioning as a

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device for participation in a religious ummah that extends beyond local understandings of religious practice; this sense of the ummah is alluded to in Alidou’s work with women in Niger, and in Judith Nagata’s work on historical Malaysian communities (Alidou, 2005; Nagata, 1997). It can also shape other intellectual traditions, as in academic discussions of what an “Islamic Anthropology” would/should be, which have proposed the ummah as a central analytical concept that through which to research culture and society in general (Davies, 1985, 1988; Tapper, 1995). A central theoretical tension arises when attempting to reconcile ideas of the ummah as a unified community with an understanding of the cultural heterogeneity of the Muslims around the world; following the suggestion that there is such a thing as a “Muslim community” in the former can lead to denial of the latter. As Ron Geaves notes, this ironically unifies unlikely collaborators, as both “[m]illions of Muslims and some prominent orientalists portray Islam as a transnational community that transcends ethnic, racial, linguistic and national identities” (Geaves, 1996, p. 10). It seems similarly problematic, at first glance, to label the ummah as a gendered Muslim space; if the ummah is an abstract and unmapped religious community, it is in an ideal form cultureless and therefore devoid of social roles such as gender as well. Yet, the ummah has sociospatial implications (e.g., transnational links, social consciousness, religious practices, etc., as outlined above). Although the ummah as a Muslim identity community is not located in a geographic sense, it can be thought of as oriented toward—perhaps comprised of or organized by—several significant sites, with physical locations. Perhaps the most significant shared sacred landscape for Muslims are the sites associated with Hajj—a conceptual landscape where social boundaries are simultaneously reinforced and abolished. The focal location of Haj, the holy city of Mecca, is a clearly delineated sacred territory, with access only to Muslims within the markers of Mecca. The markers, physically reinforcing religious boundaries, serve also to the beginning of the state of ihram, religious purity. The preeminent mosque for Haj in Mecca is Al-Masjid Al-Haram. The role of this site in the ummah is complex; there is no one “correct” mosque in the ummah, but this mosque is often cited as an example for all mosques. At the same time, Al-Masjid Al-Haram is perceived differently from all other mosques in the world; it is part of an alternative sacred landscape as several key spatial features set

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it apart from all other mosques. First, Al-Masjid Al-Haram has the Kaaba as a central point, the reference point for all mosques in the world, which means that prayers in Al-Masjid Al-Haram are oriented toward a central focal point in contrast to all other mosques where the entire site has a shared linear directional focus. The architecture of the masjid is therefore distinct from all other mosques, counter to common spatial configurations for Muslim practice within the ummah. Second, there are spatially oriented activities in Al-Haram (e.g., tawaf, circumambulation of the Kaaba; sa’i, between the hills of Safa and Marwa) that are specific to the practice of Haj. Mosques in general can be thought of as sites of ummah as well. As Doyoung Song writes, many communities regard the architectural style choices of new mosques as a medium for expressing the diverse cultural influences in Muslim communities and their own place in that mix, spatial expressions of the interplay between the local and the ummah (Song, 2016). In these examples, the ummah, through participation in its spatial practices, has gendered dimensions. Those gendered dimensions are varied; in Al-Masjid Al-Haram, women and men may pray together—they are sometimes grouped into areas, however, there are not separate prayer sections for each gender—while it is common (although not universal) in mosques around the world for men and women to pray in separate sections. Culturally specific expectations of gender roles can be transformed into these spaces of the ummah. Although it is located in Saudi Arabia, where women’s faces are commonly covered in public places, women remove their face coverings to pray in Al-Masjid Al-Haram. When entering Mecca for Haj, the state of ihram has gendered dimensions as well, informing what a man wears vs. what a woman wears. This gender distinction may supersede cultural notions of gender, as demonstrated in Sharyn Graham Davies’ ethnography about gender in the Bugis community of Indonesia, where individuals going on Haj conform to gender roles associated with the ummah in contrast to the gender roles they enact in their own cultural communities (Davies, 2007). Thus, spaces of the ummah demonstrate how this abstract community is embodied in crucial sites. As in the cases of the other spatial tropes discussed earlier, mentions of the ummah illuminate how notions of Muslim community are assembled and maintained discursively, and provide recognizable patterns of spatial use and associated behaviors.

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Sites of Islamic Practice as Muslim Spaces One other way to approach the concept of Muslim spaces is to take the opposite direction from an examination of spatial tropes; rather than starting with prevalent abstractions of Muslim spaces and tie them to site and behaviors, we can begin with physical sites of Islamic practices and consider their implications in forming a category of Muslim spaces. Mosques are the “super-star” spaces in such an approach and so commonly recognized as Muslim spaces (and indeed covered as such already in this book) that little more mention is needed about them at this point. Other sites of Islamic practice that have been well studied include religious schools, prayer gatherings, and pilgrimage sites (e.g., Mahmood, 2012). Some less commonly discussed sites of Islamic practice that we should consider in more detail include prayer spaces in homes, religious markets, washing areas, cemeteries, and virtual spaces as formed by religious digital media. Islamic prayer spaces in homes have several associated spatial practices of interest to this discussion. Prayer spaces in homes are commonly invoked as appropriate prayer spaces for women by those who say that women should not pray in the mosque and are frequently cited as a accepted place where women can lead prayers (as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 6). These are often spaces where men and women—as family members—pray side by side. Home prayer spaces may have spatial implications beyond the family setting as well. In many Muslim minority countries, such as the USA, small mosque communities may initially begin meeting in private homes to pray together if they do not have the number of people and/or finances to support the procurement of a dedicated mosque space; furthermore, in these same communities, mosques are often established in former homes converted for community use. Both of these scenarios represent a blurring of the distinction between home and community prayer spaces. While washing spaces, areas for performing wudu, the ritual ablution for prayer, are frequently found within mosques, there are meaningful variations associated with these sites. The arrangements for incorporation into the mosque space—whether inside the building, outside the mosque building in the public areas accessible to the street (e.g., Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul), or within a larger complex associated with the mosque (e.g., in the mosque courtyard, as in many Maldivian mosque sites)—can have implications for both social interaction and religious practice, as does the issue of whether wudu space is provided for each

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Fig. 3.4  A well in a courtyard of a women’s mosque, northern atolls. The area is used for washing, but this well was also traditionally a key source of water according to the mudahim of the mosque (2006)

gender. In the Maldives, the distinctive concrete wells, round or square and adorned with dippers on long poles, are found in many mosque courtyards, both men’s and women’s (Fig. 3.4). Wells occupy a liminal space positioned outside of the mosque building itself, but inside the mosque compound. In addition to their use for wudu, these wells are reportedly a source of neighborhood water. In American mosques established in existing buildings and/or with limited financial resources, the lack of proper, or sufficient, wudu facilities can be an issue of concern and cited as a reason for the need of the new mosque facility; in well-funded American mosques that have been designed and built as mosque spaces the presence of extensive wudu areas for both men and women can serve as a point of pride and a symbol of the status of the establishment. Non-mosque spaces utilized only for the busy Eid prayers in many communities may not have dedicated wudu areas at all. These washing sites are also archaeologically noteworthy;

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for example, the presence of water sources in the Maldives can indicate the site of ancient mosques, as demonstrated by the number of mosque ruins in the Maldives that have bathing tanks situated nearby and the many accounts of remains of wells located near the ruins of mosques on now uninhabited islands, e.g., Finolhas (Baa Atoll), Hulhudhuffaaru (Raa Atoll), Iguraidhoo (Noonu Atoll), and many others (Maniku, 1983, pp. 26, 44, 48). Similarly, cemetery spaces signify an aspect of Islamic practice— burial—in spatial terms and as such can represent notions of Muslim spaces that provide a perspective on events and individuals of the past. In the Maldives, coral stone tombstones are visible markers of past Islamic history with inscriptions that bear testament to individual lives and roles. The distinctive shape of Maldivian tombstones—curved at the top for women and pointed at the top for men—denotes gender; many of the stones have carved designs and/or inscriptions that may indicate status as well (Fig. 3.5).

Fig. 3.5  Coral stone tombstones in the cemetery surrounding the Hukuru Miskii in Malé (2005)

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In some cases in the Maldives, such as in the now uninhabited island of Kothaifaru (Raa Atoll), tombstones can be archaeological markers of settlements, as they remain after people have left and the mosque is no longer standing (Maniku, 1983, p. 62). Inscriptions on tombstones can represent the linkages of historical travel, such as the tomb of Sayid Shareef Ali of Mecca, on Matheerah (Haa-Alif Atoll), suggesting avenues for study of the spread of Islam in the region (Maniku, 1983, p. 83).

Moving Beyond Space How do these ways of thinking about space help us to better understand women’s mosque sites? We can return to thinking about Maryam’s home, Hulhumalé, which is simultaneously a geographic curiosity as a constructed island, a political endeavor and economic project as a government housing site, a religious interest as the site of an attractive contemporary mosque, and a sociocultural location as a home, or consider Maldivian mosques in general, which I have identified as variously functioning as sites of prayer, legal requirements for island habitation, aesthetic statements, public monuments, historical markers, neighborhood institutions, and international collaborations. The spatial configurations of these mosques can be boundaries that separate Muslims from non-Muslims, women from men, Malé from the islands, inhabited islands from uninhabited islands; furthermore, the arrangements associated with these distinctions may reconfigure other aspects of the mosque (e.g., a mosque on an island has a different configuration for women and men than a mosque in Malé). This myriad of meanings for mosques located in Maldivian contexts is further complicated by the spatial practices of mosques that are shared across cultural boundaries, the common patterning of spatial elements that we might discuss as “Muslim spaces.” Cross-cultural spatial tropes for gendered Muslim spaces such as the public/private dichotomy, the veil, and the ummah provide speculative tools for recognizing patterns of engaging with space, but do not provide a holistic conceptual framework for understanding the varied roles of space in Muslim communities. These approaches are at best incomplete and at worst reified categories that over-emphasize divisions, obscuring an understanding of the actual experiences of being Muslim. Aspects of the discussion of public/private and veiling tropes demonstrate the need to reconsider context in these spatial discussions and the diachronic nature of those contexts.

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The contrasting approach to Muslim spaces, locating physical sites of Islamic practices and exploring their roles as Muslim spaces, shows a great deal of promise as they represent concrete starting places for exploring the relationship between space and the experience of being Muslim. Spaces such as home prayer areas, religious markets, washing areas, cemeteries, and perhaps even virtual spaces formed by religious digital media suggest crucial areas of inquiry if we can contextualize their spatial practices within broader systems of meaning and (again, as in the case of the spatial tropes) recognize the diachronic nature of those contexts. This complexity of a space—whether of an island, a mosque, or other— ultimately suggests the need for attention to the dimension of time.

Notes 1. The government ownership of island mosques should hardly surprising in the Maldives, where the government owns a majority of the land, and land leased for commercial purposes. Most Maldivians who own their homes have inherited rights to the use of their land; the only exceptions to this that I have heard are in Malé, where some small pieces of land are privately owned. 2. The requirement of 40 men for Friday prayers is clearly based on Shafi’i madhhab, which is commonly followed in the Maldives. According to many interpretations of Shafi’i jurisprudence Friday prayers are only valid if the congregation has a minimum of 40 Muslims. 3. Maniku’s notes suggest that population is not based solely on a strict criteria of 40 adult males. For example, in the entry for Hodaidhoo Island (Haa-Dhall Atoll), he notes that the island was depopulated in 1968 when there were only 99 people, but that they were resettled on the island in 1975, at which time there were “30 males, 22 females above the age of 15 years, and 27 males and 20 females below the age of 15 years” (Maniku, 1983, p. 43). 4.  Note that in this quote Barlas is referring to a particular Ayah of the Qur’an, and the meaning of “the veil” in that Ayah. In this section of the book, she discusses how there are two concepts of “the veil” presented in the Qur’an; one is about the body/dress (material) and the other is about the eyes/gaze (behavioral/relational/spatial). 5.  For a bizarre version of this type of writing, see Alexander William Kingmaker’s insulting discussion of Bedouin women in his Orientalist travelogue, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East. Kinglake describes Bedouin women in a negative manner, his racism and misogyny clearly

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expressed; his limited understanding of women is summed up clearly in the sentence “[Arab women] may have been good women enough, so far as relates to the exercise of the minor virtues, but they had so grossly neglected the prime duty of looking pretty in this transitory life…” (Kingmaker, 1845, p. 138). He makes the claim that “[t]he Bedouin women have no religion” based, in part, on his observation that they did not cover their heads properly, mourning that they “are not treasured up like the wives and daughters of other Orientals… the feint which they made of concealing their faces from me was always slight…” (Kingmaker, 1845, pp. 137–138). 6. Denny asserts that the ummah is necessarily a human community as well; however, Geaves points out that the term is used in the Qur’an to refer to non-humans such jinn as well (Denny, 1975; Geaves, 1996, p. 12). 7. A quick comparison of translations on the popular site www.islamawakened.com demonstrates that out of 34 “Generally Accepted” English translations of the Qur’an, “ummah” is translated into English as “nation” 13 times (38% of group), as “community” 11 times, and as “people” 9 times. Also of interest on this site is that in English translations designated “Controversial” and “Non-Muslim and/or Orientalist Works” (total 17 works), 10 translate “ummah” as “nation” (59% of group) while only 4 choose “community” and 3 choose “people.” 8. Although this distinction is born out in several historical examples, it has also been complicated by the historical use of the terms in similar ways as religion and politics are brought together in myriad ways. Nevertheless, in this discussion, I will preserve the distinction to help explore one facet of the term “ummah.”

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 783–790. Adamson, C. (2007). Gendered Anxieties: Islam, Women’s Rights, and Moral Hierarchy in Java. Anthropological Quarterly, 80(1), 5–37. Ahmed, A. H. (2005). Private Housing Development: Refining Rational Choice (PhD thesis). University College London. Ann Arbor, Ml: UMI Dissertation Publishing. Ahmed, L. (2011). Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Alidou, O. D. (2005). Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

62  J. H. FEWKES Appleton, M. (2005a). The Political Attitudes of Muslims Studying at British Universities in the Post-9/11 World (Part 1). Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 25(2), 171–191. Appleton, M. (2005b). The Political Attitudes of Muslims Studying at British Universities in the Post-9/11 World (Part 2). Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 25(3), 299–316. Asad, M. (1992). The Message of the Qur’an. Chicago: Kazi Publications. Baksi-Lahiri, S. (2004). Women’s Power and Ritual Politics in the Maldives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Barlas, A. (2009). Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brenner, S. (1998). The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carswell, J. (1976). China and Islam in the Maldive Islands. Balsham, UK: Oriental Ceramic Society. Davies, M. W. (1985). Towards an Islamic Alternative to Western Anthropology. Inquiry (June), 45–51. Davies, M. W. (1988). Knowing One Another: Shaping Islamic Anthropology. London: Mansell. Davies, S. G. (2007). Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders Among the Bugis in Indonesia. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. Davis, D. (2005). A Space of Her Own: Women, Work, and Desire in an Aghan Nomad Community. In G.-W. Falah & C. Nagel (Eds.), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion and Space (pp. 68–90). New York and London: The Guilford Press. Denny, F. M. (1975). The Meaning of Ummah in the Qur’an. History of Religions, 15(1), 34–70. Department of Religious Affairs, R. o. M. (1984). The Mosques of Maldives. Malé, Maldives: Department of Religious Affairs, Republic of Maldives. Ewing, C. P. (1998). Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries: Metaphors for Negotiating Multiple Identities. Ethos, 26(2), 262–267. Faizal, M. (2013). Civil Service in an Emerging Democracy: The Case of the Maldives (PhD thesis). Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Fernea, E. W., & Fernea, R. A. (1986). Symbolizing Roles: Behind the Veil. In J. Spradley & D. W. McCurdy (Eds.), Conformity and Conflict (pp. 241– 247). Boston, NY: Pearson. Forbes, A. D. W. (1983). The Mosque in the Maldive Islands: A Preliminary Historical Survey. Archipel, 26, 43–74. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80.

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Geaves, R. (1996). Sectarian Influences Within Islam in Britain with Reference to the Concepts of ‘Ummah’ and Community. Leeds: University of Leeds. Göle, N. (1996). The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Guérin, A. (1999). Some Features of a Village Architecture in Transition from Antiquity to Islam. Al- ‘Usur al Wusta, 11(2), 49–52. Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Boston: MIT Press. Halvorson, S. H. (2005). Growing Up in Gilgit: An Exploration of Girls’ Lifeworlds in Northern Pakistan. In C. Nagel & G. W. Falah (Eds.), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion, and Space. New York and London: Guilford Press. Harrigan, M. (2008). Veiled Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Ismail, A. S. (2018). The Role of the Architect as an Educator in Design Education Towards the Development of a Sustainable Society: A Case Study of Hajeedar. Advanced Science Letters, 24(6), 4546–4549. Joseph, S. (1997). The Public/Private—The Imagined Boundary in the Imagined Nation/State/Community: The Lebanese Case. Feminist Review, 57(1), 73–92. Kadivar, M. (2003). An Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islam. Social Research, 70(5), 659–680. Kingmaker, A. W. (1845). Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East. Auburn, NY: J.C. Derby & Co. Lazreg, M. (1994). The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Mahmood, S. (2012). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maloney, C. (1980). People of the Maldive Islands. New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd. Maniku, H. A. (1983). The Islands of Maldives. Malé, Republic of Maldives: Novelty Printers & Publishers. Mernissi, F. (1991). The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (M. J. Lakeland, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. Nagata, J. (1997). Ethnonationalism Versus Religious Transnationalism: NationBuilding and Islam in Malaysia. The Muslim World, 87(2), 129–150. Papanek, H. (1982). Purdah in Pakistan: Seclusion and Modern Occupations for Women. In H. Papanek & G. Minault (Eds.), Separate Worlds (pp. 190–216). Columbus, MO: South Asia Books. Parkin, D. (2000). Inside and Outside the Mosque: A Master Trope. In D. Parkin & S. Headley (Eds.), Islamic Prayer Across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque (pp. 1–22). London: Curzon.

64  J. H. FEWKES Pickthall, M. W. (2009). The Glorious Qur’an: Translation. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Quran. Predelli, L. N. (2004). Interpreting Gender in Islam: A Case Study of Immigrant Muslim Women in Oslo, Norway. Gender and Society, 18(4), 473–493. Reynolds, C. H. B. (2000). The Maldive Islands. In V. Grover (Ed.), Maldives Government and Politics (pp. 13–21). New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd. Romero-Frías, X. (2003). The Maldive Islanders: A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom. Barcelona: Nova Ethnographia Indica. Rosset, C. W. (1886). The Máldive Islands. The Graphic, pp. 413–416. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Selim, S. (2017). Languages of Civilization: Nation, Translation and the Politics of Race in Colonial Egypt. In S. Selim (Ed.), Nation and Translation in the Middle East. London: Routledge. Sen, K. (1998). Indonesian Women at Work: Reframing the Subject. In K. Sen & M. Stivens (Eds.), Gender and Power in Affluent Asia (pp. 35–62). London: Routledge. Shirazi, F. (2003). The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Song, D. (2016). Ummah in Seoul: The Creation of Symbolic Spaces in the Islamic Central Masjid of Seoul. Journal of Korean Religions, 7(2), 37–68. Tapper, R. (1995). ‘Islamic Anthropology’ and the ‘Anthropology of Islam’. Anthropological Quarterly, 68(3), 185–193. Tétreault, M. A. (1993). Civil Society in Kuwait: Protected Spaces and Women’s Rights. Middle East Journal, 47(2), 275–291. Weng, H. W. (2014). Beyond ‘Chinese Diaspora’ and ‘Islamic Ummah’: Various Transnational Connections and Local Negotiations of Chinese Muslim Identities in Indonesia. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 29(3), 627–656. Yegenoglu, M. (1998). Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Boston: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Narratives of Place

There are many versions of the Rannamaari origin myth, a popular narrative of the Maldives’ twelfth-century conversion to Islam that was written down by Ibn Battuta after his stay in the Maldives from 1343 to 1344. This story about an encounter between Abu al-Barakat Yusuf al-Barbari (a Muslim merchant-traveler) and Rannamaari, the eponymous evil demon, is commonly taught in schools in the Maldives, related by Maldivians as a form of religious history, and recounted as a local myth in tourism guides for the Maldives. Albert Gray’s, Ibn Battuta in the Maldives and Ceylon, begins a popular version of the tale by explaining that population of the Maldives was, at that time, “idolaters” who were visited every month by, an evil spirit from among the Jinn, who came from the direction of the sea. He resembled a ship full of lamps. The custom of the natives, as soon as they perceived him, was to take a young virgin, to adorn her, and to conduct her to the boudkhânah, i.e. an idol temple, which was built on the sea-shore and had a window by which she was visible. They left her there during the night and returned in the morning, at which time they were wont to find the young girl dishonoured and dead. (Gray, 2004, p. 14)

The islanders regularly sacrificed their daughters to the Jinn, drawing lots each month to choose the next victim. This went on for some time, until the arrival of Abu Al-Barakat (or “Abou’lbérécât” in Grey’s account),

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who is described by Grey simply as a person who had memorized the entire Qur’an. While in Malé Abu Al-Barakat was staying with an old woman who had one daughter. One day Abu Al-Barakat came back to the house to find the old woman surrounded by all of her relatives, weeping because her daughter had been chosen as Rannamaari’s next victim. Grey writes: Abou’lbérécât said to the woman: ‘I will go ton-night in thy daughter’s stead.’ At that time he was entirely beardless. So, on the night following, after he had completed his ablutions, he was conducted to the idol temple. On arrival there he set himself to recite the Koran. Presently, through the window, beholding the demon to approach, he continued his recitation. The Jinni, as soon as he came within hearing of the Koran, plunged into the sea and disappeared; and so it was that, when the dawn was come, the Maghribin was still occupied in reciting the Koran. When the old woman, her relatives, and the people of the island, according to their custom, came to take away the girl and burn the corpse, they found the stranger reciting the Koran. They conducted him to their King, by name Shanúrdza, whom they informed of this adventure. The King was astonished; and the Maghrabin both proposed to him to embrace the true faith, and inspired him with a desire for it. (Gray, 2004, pp. 14–15)

Grey’s rendition leaves out a few details commonly included in other printed and oral versions; most oral traditions note that the girls were dressed in bridal clothes when presented for sacrifice and that Abu al-Barakat dressed as a woman to go in the daughter’s stead, likely why Grey noted that he was beardless at the time. In spite of these variations, much of the information remains consistent between retellings; the version presented in Xavier Romero-Frias’ Folk Tales of the Maldives is similar to Gray’s account here (Romero-Frías, 2012, pp. 74–75). The Rannamaari concludes with an explanation for the general conversion of the Maldives to Islam. Here, the King of the Maldives—generally identified as Dhovemi Kalaminja Siri Thiribuvana-aadiththa Maha Radun, who ruled 1141 to approximately 1176 according to Maldivian texts—told Abu Al-Barakat that if he defeated the demon that he, and his people, would convert to Islam. Abu Al-Barakat convinced the King to convert even before the jinn was defeated, and the ruler changed his name to Sultan Muhammad ibn Abdullah. Al-Barakat was later also successful in ensuring that the demon did not return. According to Ibn Battuta’s

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account, the news of conversion was sent out to other islands and the whole of the Maldives became Muslim. Maldivian discussions of the Rannamaari indicate that many people see this as a story about Islam being introduced to save women in the Maldives from the excesses of evil and a society that was willing to sacrifice young women to appease evil. Particular threads of the narrative—such as that it is older women’s concerns for younger women that are answered through Islam and/or that it is the text of the Qur’an that triumphs over superstition—are also sometimes emphasized by Maldivian narrators. Folklorist Xavier Romero-Frías has pointed out the name Rannamaari is the name of a South Indian goddess, observing that many Maldivian folk tales feature dangerous female spirits, and that, “[t] abundance of women killing or eating people is one of the most distinctive features of Maldivian folklore” (Romero-Frías, 2012, p. xxix). Other Maldivian commentators consider this origin myth to be about religious politics, suggesting that the setting of the boudkhânah, a Buddhist temple, indicates that the Maldivian rulers of the period looked to traveling Muslim clerics to help destabilize the power of Buddhist clerics in the region. Popular accounts on the last section of the Rannamaari diverge; some Maldivians relate the end of the story with a twist, saying that Al-Barakat stayed in the temple until the monster came near and fought with it. Upon winning the fight he found that the monster was actually the king of the Maldives, who had been working with temple priests to subjugate the people. According to this narrative, Al-Barakat was able to persuade the king to convert through threat of exposure. Historian Alessandro Vanoli has presented a thoughtfully authored argument that the popularity of the common narrative of the introduction of Islam by Abu Al-Barakat represents the aspirations of contemporary political regimes. He claims that although records about Maldivian history are limited in general, there is little documentation for Abu al-Barakat’s visit prior to the late twentieth century and argues that the historical account can most fruitfully be interpreted as a myth that has been propagated with contemporary interests (Vanoli, 2005, pp. 83, 89). Maldivian historical texts, the Arabic literature tarikh (or thaareekhu as rendered in Divehi) and the raadavali (epigraphic chronicles), refer to the role of one Shaykh Maulaama Yuusuuf Shams al-Din al-Tabrizi (from Tabriz)—also known as Sheikh Yusuf Shamsuddin—who brought

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Islamic knowledge to the Maldives and linked the establishment of Islam in the Maldives to the pre-presidential sultanate dynasty (Bell, 2002, pp. 18–19; 2004, p. 58; Vanoli, 2005, p. 88). Gray noted a similar point in the late nineteenth century, writing that, [v]estiges of this romantic legend of their conversion to Muhammadanism live in the traditions of the Islanders to this day. But with more probability, they assign to a Shaikh Yúsup Sams-ud-din of Tabrij the honour, which Iban Batúta not unnaturally would claim for a Maghrabin. (Gray, 2004, p. 16)

Bell recorded the role of al-Tabrizi in the Dhivehi Tarikh and wrote that it was not until Ibn Battuta, from Tangier, mentioned Abu Al-Barakat that the development of Islam in the Maldives was ascribed to this figure (Vanoli, 2005, pp. 88–89). Vanoli claims, as Gray implies in the previous quote, that Ibn Battuta had a vested interest in representing Islam in the Maldives as originating from his own town in Morocco, rather than from Tabriz in Persia. Such a claim would have lent Ibn Battuta more authority as a qadi, an Islamic judge, in the Maldives islands (Vanoli, 2005, p. 89). The historical accuracy of Ibn Battuta’s accounts is a subject of some debate. A few of Battuta’s contemporaries contested parts of his work, and a number of historical and contemporary scholars continue to do (Waines, 2010, p. 6). Undoubtedly, a number of these historical critiques have arisen within Orientalist literature; classic early twentiethcentury authors had difficulty accepting non-Eurocentric histories by non-European authors. More recent critiques of his work raise concerns about the validity of his reports on certain areas (e.g., Euben, 2006, p. 65). At the same time, many historians see Battuta’s work as reliable, albeit with a strong sense of authorship in his writing. In this particular section, however, Battuta is careful to cite two Maldivian sources for this tale, something he does not do for every piece of information in his work (for more commentary on this see Gray, 2004, p. 14; Vanoli, 2005, p. 84). Two scholars of South Asian politics and policy who have written about the Maldives, Urmila Phadnis and Ela Luithui, support Ibn Battuta’s version, noting that the royal conversion occurred in 1153 AD and that Ibn Battuta claimed that al-Tabrizi was not yet alive then; they suggest that Bell was misled by local historians, a point emphasized to them in interview with Maldivian Government employees in 1981

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(Phadnis & Luithui, 1985, p. 4). Historian Hassan Ahmed Maniku has argued that the actual date of Islamic conversion in the Maldives was 1147–1148 AD, and that the tarikh that support al-Tabrizi’s version are flawed (Maniku, 1986/1987, p. 80). Maniku places more value on evidence that supports Ibn Battuta’s version, found on the carved inscriptions of a fourteenth-century panel that hangs in the Friday Mosque in Malé (Maniku, 1986/1987). Yet, linguist Jost Gippert notes that the Gan filā fatkolu, another inscription on a wooden board dating to the seventeenth century, supports the claims for al-Tabrizi. As Gippert aptly points out, however, this does not prove one version of the history, but does suggest that the al-Tabrizi version prevailed in the seventeenth century (Gippert, 2000, pp. 45–46). Gipperts’ point raises a crucial issue in this debate about the Rannamaari story. Regardless of the historical accuracy of any of these accounts, one fact remains; while there are multiple versions of this story, only the historical documents associated with one version have been privileged in contemporary discussion and literature. As Vanoli observes, the contemporary discursive reliance upon sources that support Ibn Battuta’s narrative in preference of others is a deliberate choice. The narrative was used by Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s Government of the Maldives— Gayoom included the Rannamaari narrative in his officially sanctioned biography and in a 1993 speech in Morocco—to create a specific set of political discourses concerning the introduction of Islam into the Maldives; it is also propagated in tourist literature and stamps (Ellis, 1998; Vanoli, 2005, p. 85). Vanoli argues that these discourses simultaneously link the contemporary Maldives to the Maliki school of Islamic thought, deemphasize the religious legitimacy of monarchical power, and evoke a trusted historical source of Islamic knowledge for the contemporary global ummah in the form of the recognizable historical narrator, Ibn Battuta (Vanoli, 2005, p. 92). It is implied here that the presence of Abu Al-Barakat, as documented by Ibn Battuta, has more authority in global Muslim discourses than that of Shaykh Maulaama Yuusuuf Shams al-Din al-Tabrizi, as documented by local Maldivian texts. I will return to some of the further implications of these ideas—Maliki influences and Maldivian legitimacy in the global ummah—for women’s spaces in the Maldives in Chapters 6 and 7, however, right now I am interested in this story because of its role in creating an etiological narrative of Muslim spaces in the Maldives, and, in turn, what we can learn about the relationships between space, place, and time from this process.

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Space and Place In the last chapter, I focused primarily on spaces, exploring Maldivian spaces through discursive Muslim spaces and praxis-oriented spaces of Islam. While the mosques and other praxis-oriented spaces were based on physical locations, the discursive spaces such as the public/private dichotomy were an attempt to map concepts of spaces onto physical locations. In these presented spaces, I have tried hard to focus on space as a physical location, without bringing in other dimensions such as time. This was an exercise in futility; as shown in Maryam’s story in the last chapter and in the Rannamaari narrative here, it is impossible to discuss spaces as timeless—lacking particular contexts such as historical, social, and political—and from a general omniscient view, as opposed to a particular situated perspective. Nevertheless, I attempted to apply this distinction as much as possible, in order to draw attention to the relationship—both in divergences and in convergences—between the concepts of space and place. In this chapter, I am focusing on the conceptual relationship between space and place, using time, particularly in the form of narratives about the past, as a way to recognize geography as a fluid and active participant in history, and vice versa. Historical trade and travel in the Indian Ocean have played a significant role in the construction of Muslim places in the Maldives. As demonstrated above in the Rannamaari narrative, segments of transnational regional histories are highlighted in contemporary Maldivian discourses on the local introduction of Islam, and attention to narrative patterns within these discourses allows readers to deconstruct how Muslim place in general, or women’s mosques in particular, are constructed in the Maldives. Much of the literature on place referenced in this book’s introduction was from the point of view of human geographers, who initially developed a literature surrounding the concept in the 1970s to deemphasize the physical location of a space and focus on the meanings assigned to those spaces. Cresswell names places as “things to be inside of” (Cresswell, 2004, p. 10). Tuan, in contrasts, calls places “pauses,” transformative moments that turn space into something more (Tuan, 2001, p. 6). While both ideas of place are compelling, I am particularly fond of Tuan’s definition of place as it serves to highlight the dynamic relationship between space and place. Tuan’s study of place reflects his larger theoretical engagement with “being-in-the world” in the physical

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and emotional senses of the phrase. Informed by existentialist and phenomenological works, particularly those of Heidegger, Tuan’s writings on place center on human experience, focused on the close connections between people and their geography; thus, Tuan is explicit that place should be studied “from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning” (Tuan, 1979, p. 387). Tuan’s understanding of place is therefore an emic one, contrasting it with other human geography terms such as “landscape,” which is also subjective experience of space, but an etic one rather than the emic one of place (Cresswell, 2004, p. 10). It is that emic perspective on space and its meanings that inspires my attention to the quote from Clifford Geertz mentioned in the introduction of this book; as Geertz wrote, “no one lives in the world in general. Everybody…lives in some confined and limited stretch of it – ‘the world around here’” (Geertz, 1996, p. 262). We make sense of the world through grounded experiences, and thus when we explore the significance of women’s mosques in global discourses about Muslim communities the sites cannot only be understood in the generalized spatial terms outlined in the last chapter—public vs. private, the veil, the ummah, or any other spatial terms that have become a synecdoche for gender relations in Muslim communities—but rather need to be explored intimately on the local level, “the world around here.” The study of place therefore necessitates a study of people and their actions within a site, whether conceptualized as the pauses that Cresswell has noted, which serve as the boundaries of places, or Harvey’s mobility of events and practices associated with a site (Cresswell, 2004, p. 57; Harvey, 1997). Appadurai’s notion of “scapes” expands this view to all “things” associated with people as well, including money, ideas, beliefs, technologies, media, etc. (Appadurai, 1990, 1996). Place from these perspectives is clearly dynamic, requiring that we view it as having a chronological dimension. Place is space on which meaning has been ascribed, however, space also ascribes meaning; space itself is integral to the process of producing place. Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of space has helped to further develop my thoughts on the significance of this dialogical engagement. In his book The Production of Space, Lefebvre wrestled with how to create a theory that would help to connect the physical, mental, and social aspects of space, to understand the space of social practice (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 11). As a neo-Marxist philosopher, Lefebvre saw this task as political, highlighting the political nature of space itself. According to Lefebvre, place is produced, and produces, in a diachronic

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manner through the interaction of three forms of space: perceived, conceived, and lived spaces. The perceived spaces are those based on everyday life and perception, that which people experience themselves; Lefebvre’s perceived space is active, physical, and use/action orientated, and closely related to Tuan’s definition of place. In contrast Lefebvre’s conceived spaces include planned and professional engagements space; it is a “place for the practices of social and political power; in essence, it is these spaces that are designed to manipulate those who exist within them” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 222). Lived or representational spaces are symbolic ones that have an origin; Lefebvre explains this origin at one point as potentially being in a person’s childhood, hence, lived space has a history that can be studied and traced (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 362). Lefebvre would have taken issue with stopping at Cresswell’s definition of places as “things to be inside of”; he explicitly refuses to consider spaces merely as “a container waiting to be filled by content” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 170). Pointing out that space, although not an agent, plays a significant active role in shaping social practices, Lefebvre prompts his readers to ponder, “could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 11). This argument is based on ideas he develops later in the book, that space plays an active role in “place” production, while it is medium, he notes, it is an “instrument” and a “goal” as well (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 411). Tuan suggested the foundation for such an argument through comparison with the body, observing that just as bodies exist with functions separate from thought and intent, so too does space exist in its own form (Tuan, 1979, p. 389). Similar to Tuan’s human-centered consideration of place, Lefebvre’s space is anthropological in nature. Lefebvre is clear that he is concerned with actual spaces and people, rather than the production of space in abstract or metaphorical terms. He critiques the idea of simply “reading” a space, ala Barthes, writing that while it is possible to decode aspects of space, it “can in no way be compared to a blank page on which a specific message has been inscribed (by whom?)” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 142). It is that last small aside—“by whom”—that speaks volumes to me as an anthropologist interested in locating the human role in all we explore and recognizing agents in the process. Lefebvre expounds:

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… space indeed speaks, but it does not tell all… Its mode of existence, its practical reality (including its form) differs radically from the reality (or being-there) of something written, such as a book. Space is at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also a stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies… (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 142)

Thus, Lefebvre’s space is not only a human experience, but a dialogue, the product of interactions between the various forms of space and agents; its meaning is not inscribed upon it in a coherent fashion, and our task in researching space is not so much to read it as to follow its discourses, which have contexts—historical, social, political, etc. This understanding has provided me with a practical approach to the study of space. For example, when Lefebvre addresses the dialectical nature of the production of space, situating place diachronically and in relation to active roles, he directly draws into question several aspects of the public/ private dichotomy raised in the last chapter. He writes: Is it true, or sufficient, to say that a temple in Kyoto has a public part, a part set aside for rites, and a part reserved for priests and meditators? I grant that your scheme explains something very important: difference within a framework of repetition. Consider in its various contexts, for example, the Japanese garden remains the same yet is never the same: it may be an imperial park, an inaccessible holy place, the accessible annex of a sanctuary, a site of public festivity, a place of ‘private’ solitude and contemplation, or merely a way from one place to another. This remarkable institution of the garden is always a microcosm, a symbolic work of art, an object as well as a place, and it has diverse ‘functions’ which are never merely functions. (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 157)

Lefebvre’s example highlights a fundamental flaw in the public/private dichotomy; while a space might be designated purposively as public or private, its myriad uses, meanings, aspects, histories, etc. may not always conform to that divide in the expected way. Furthermore, the last sentence in the above quote reminds us that place cannot be oversimplified as simply spatial practice (or even a set of practices); the use of a space for any particular purpose is one possible aspect of its role as a place. In the case of the Maldivian mosques, we are therefore prompted to contemplate mosques in their full complexity—as sites of prayer, legal

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requirements for island habitation, aesthetic statements, public monuments, historical markers, neighborhood institutions, international collaborations, and all of the other functions explored in the last chapter—rather than trying to assert the primacy of just one (or a few) of these functions. Andrew Merrifield has argued that Lefebvre’s dialectical conceptualization of space addresses the shortcomings of much of the literature on place by offering a way to address “the basic ontological nature of place,” which in turn permits “the formation of a robust politics of place” (Merrifield, 1993, pp. 516–517). According to Merrifield, Lefebvre’s work is able to do this through a commitment to recognizing that the dialectical nature of space production requires that it is part of a whole system of meanings that can only be understood in relation to each other and to the whole, and that attention to that system is necessary in order to make sense of the contradictions in particular iterations. This is, quite simply, an acknowledgment that Lefebvre’s approach to spatial production calls for what is known as the holistic perspective in anthropological terms. Establishing the complexity of place through Lefebvre’s model allows us as researchers to separate out several linked spatial practices, and recognize how each plays a role in the space/place relationship. We do not have to choose between the many perspectives on space and place mentioned earlier—e.g., landscapes and emic places, place as pause vs. place as movement—but are freed to recognize all of them and encouraged to explore how these aspects of space/place are linked. Merrifield’s commentary suggests that the strength of Lefebvre’s approach in the above critique of public/private distinctions in a temple in Kyoto is his avoidance of the pitfall of using one conceptual model through which to comprehend place. Merrifield lauds Lefebvre’s focus on “the totalizing nature of capitalism without itself being a totalizing theory,” pointing out that as Donna Haraway has warned us, “the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now” (Haraway, 1990, p. 223; Merrifield, 1993, p. 517). This observation echoes Michel Foucault’s rejection of the “unitary discourses” of comprehensive approaches such as Marxism, and in turn prompts us to reconsider Foucault’s call to examine the relationship between space and power/ knowledge (Foucault, 1997; Rabinow, 1980).1

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These perspectives on the study of space and place have helped me to think more carefully about spaces that are not “geographic” or physical in nature as well, such as digital spaces (e.g., virtual shrines or communities located in apps) or metaphorical spaces, non-physical planes that are “accessed.” As an example of the latter, Alidou’s aforementioned work with Muslim women in Niger suggests literacy as a spatial dimension, raising additional questions about non-geographic Muslim spaces and their relationship to physical spaces. Alidou points out that Sahelian women “did not have access to Islamic literacy” and therefore relied more heavily on local religious idioms; key Muslim spatial practices were therefore shaped variously as locally or globally (ummah) oriented, spaces constituted fundamentally by the practice (or lack thereof) of reading but also by a space (literacy) with limited access (Alidou, 2005, p. 63). Eleanor Abdella Doumato presents a related case of the similar consequences of women’s restricted access to sacred spaces in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (Doumato, 2000). Clearly access to metaphorical spaces can be recognized as playing a role in dialectical nature of Muslim space production; metaphorical spaces derive and give substance to the system as a whole, as outlined in Lefebvre’s holistic perspective.

Time, Space, and Place Lefebvre’s writing on the dialogical nature of spatial production illustrates how the place is a product of interactions between the various forms of space and agents; the need to recognize the contexts of those interactions to understand their complexity and not relegate a space to a single function is a call for attention to the element of time. Places are spaces with functions that interact with agents who interact back with the spaces and that have histories. Every account of place can be located in a historical context with social, cultural, political, economic, and other dimensions. Recall for example Rosset’s description of gender roles (including head coverings and curtains between areas of the home) in the Maldives in 1885, as discussed in the last chapter. There was a particular sociopolitical context that made Rosset’s comparison with “Mohammedan” countries a relevant engagement with the Maldives as a place; use of the term “Mohammedan” directly links Rosset’s account to the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century European colonial writing. This connection

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is supported further by details in his account, such as the fact that he arrived via ship with his passage arranged by the English government and suggests that he views the Maldives within a landscape of countries under European colonial power. The historical perspective helps make sense of how Rosset viewed the Maldives, reconciling at times contradictory aspects of his description and contextualizing other aspects of his writing. As I noted previously, spatial terms such as “curtain” and “head covering” were used Rosset’s accounts as code words to invoke other sets of European knowledge (as biases, interests, motivations, etc.) about Muslim communities and gender roles. The coded spatial terms allow for contradictory accounts of the Maldivian community because they are part of the place-making process, located in dynamic processes of the dialectic between space and those who interact with it. Thus, Rosset’s Maldives was not one particular place, but a series of negotiations between perspectives—including his personal experience, political role, historical biases, as well as those of all others that he interacted with—as well as functions, physical aspects of the environment, and moments in time. This critical evaluation of Rosset’s narrative, which can be extended European narratives of the Maldives in general, brings us to another realization about the relationship between space and time in place-building processes. The past is, of course, never accessed in itself; we interact with the past through intermediaries—narratives, whether historical, personal, or somewhere in between. Places that have a past, which should include all places in some way, are therefore perceived as they have been constructed through those narratives. We can see this clearly with the Rannamaari story about the origins of the Maldives as a Muslim place; the narratives of conversion—whether in myth form, in the written histories of the tarikh,2 the copper inscriptions of the lomaafannuu, or the retellings in contemporary contexts—are all versions of the past that act to construct the Maldives as a Muslim place, rather than the actual past. Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has written about this challenge to understanding the past, and spaces associated with the past, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Trouillot, 1995). Trouillot’s work complements that of both Lefebvre and Foucault, drawing attention to the role of power in the construction of meaning. In this case, Trouillot is focused on meaning construction in history, looking at the silencing of certain voices associated with moments such as the Haitian Revolution. He demonstrates how these silences are not

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simple omissions, but part of a process that includes both unconscious and deliberately enforced silences. Trouillot’s history is intensely spatial, linked to particular sites, as well as (at times) objects within those sites. In one section of the book, he documents a visit to Sans Soucis, the ruins of an old palace in Haiti, which was built by Henry Christophe, a Haitian revolutionary who became the King of Haiti after Haitian independence in 1804. Trouillot’s recounting of this history is rooted in the site and perspectives on it, framed as a narrative of visiting the place; he narrates each historical point as what a particular person might—or might not—tell you (the visitor to Sans Souci) while walking around the ruins. It is in the course of examining the silences in this narrative that Trouillot reveals that there are actually three Sans Soucis; it is the name of: (1) the site that is being visited (Christophe’s palace in Milot), (2) a rebel commander that refused to acknowledge the revolutionary hierarchy and was killed by Christophe a decade before the palace was built, and (3) yet another palace built by the Prussian Emperor Fredrick the Great in Potsdam, just outside of Berlin (Trouillot, 1995, pp. 33–45). Trouillot muses over the relationships between these three versions of Sans Souci, noting which are mentioned in public visits to the Sans Souci-Milot site, which are usually omitted in historical documents, and what the silences in these narratives suggest. Trouillot reviews how he himself has written the narrative of Sans Souci, pointing out which parts of the narrative were assumed, inserted, or omitted. He goes on to observe: Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded. There is no perfect closure of any event, however one chooses to define the boundaries of that event. Thus whatever becomes fact does so with its own inborn absences, specific to is productions. In other words, the very mechanism that make any historical recording possible also ensure that historical facts are not created equal. They reflect differential control of the means of historical production at the very first graving that transforms an event into a fact. (Trouillot, 1995, p. 49)

Trouillot concludes by noting that while critiques of history as a form of power have made us more aware of how narratives of the past are “solidly anchored in the present” (as in the case of Vanoli’s evaluation of the Rannamaari myth), they still do not take into account the silences,

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“not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production. We also know that the present is itself no clearer than the past” (Trouillot, 1995, pp. 152–153). The three Sans Souci section of Trouillot’s work reminds me of Lefebvre’s earlier quoted comment that spaces cannot be read because they are not merely containers of neatly bounded narratives. Sans Souci is not only its history, for its history contains silences that are a part of the space itself. In one way, studies of space can fill in these gaps; history is a narrative, but space, we have established, is far more messy and may contain the unknowable, offering hints of what else might be “known.” This is demonstrated in the many historical archaeological studies that offer new voices relevant to silences in histories, such as perspectives on slave life in the early USA.3 Power clearly has a role in history and place construction, as highlighted by Trouillot, Lefebvre, and Foucault. Yet, space is no more entirely knowable than the past. Thus, any study of space much be approached with a healthy respect for the silences in the narrative, or perhaps in more spatially orientated terms, the gaps in what is accessed. In the case of Maldivian women’s mosques, these gaps shape the relationship between local/global, as I will address further in Chapters 7 and 8.

The Indian Ocean Perspective Narratives of history and place are no more obviously intertwined than in settings—the roads, waterways, and borders—of historical trade routes. The dusty trails of the Central Asian Silk Route and windy courses of the Indian Ocean trade demonstrate how spaces function as dynamic parts of historical processes rather than as passive stages for historical events. In the sites of these two famous trade systems, versions of Asia were formed through the imagining of spaces that transcended a geographic feature and defined boundaries. Some of my previous work has examined these issues in the context of the Silk Route (e.g., Fewkes, 2008; Fewkes & Khan, 2015). Here, I would like to reconsider the idea in the Indian Ocean arena. The Indian Ocean encompasses a very wide area even from the most literal perspective, as a body of water bound by Asia to the north, Africa to the west, Australia to the east, and Antarctica to the south. As a cultural region—or perhaps more accurately as a zone with shared patterns of human activity—it is generally thought to include the eastern coast

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of Africa, port areas of the Middle East (particularly Yemen and Oman), coastal South Asia, and island countries such as Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Maldives, and the Seychelles. Attention to the historical influence of Indian Ocean trade could extend this definition even farther, drawing into consideration northern Europe, the Mediterranean world, China, Indonesia, and beyond. Adopting an Indian Ocean centered perspective on place and history is a paradigmatic shift that affords scholars the opportunity to disassemble spatial boundaries to focus on how regions such as South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are co-constitutive. Using the Indian Ocean perspective, for example, analysis of colonial South Asia—which is commonly constructed through referential orientation to the subcontinent—may be benefit from examination in relation Portuguese maritime movements, or even in reference to the Gulfstream waterways that acted as conduits for access to commodities of the Americas (e.g., Fewkes, 2017).4 Historian Nile Green has addressed similar ideas about adopting an Indian Ocean approach from the Middle Eastern studies perspective, writing about the potential shift in focus from political to commercial centers and noting that such a change, …leads us to liminal spaces away from the standardizing pressures of political power and cultural hegemony to maritime frontiers that are porous and creole. Such a shift settles our gaze before and beyond the age of nationalism to see the motley populations of ports and coasts who have been all but written out of history, even when they have been crucial to state formation. There are the Italians of Suez, the Indians of Jeddah, the Africans of Bushire, the Americans of Abadan, the Iranians of Bahrain, the Baluch of Muscat. What does being Arab, or Iranian, or Indian, or even Muslim, mean in those mottled spaces? And how in turn do those categories look from other sites amid the old circuits of the ocean, where many Indians and Africans also lay claim to be Persians and Arabs? What does it mean to be a sayyid in an ocean of slaves?… Such issues push us towards a paradigm shift from autochthonous and discrete culture areas to interactive and mutually constitutive ones. (Green, 2016, p. 747)

As Green expresses, a focus on the Indian Ocean destabilizing the dominant narratives of nations and centers of political power, to allow us to look more carefully at fluid cultural identities, pointing out variations within cultural categories that fundamentally draw into question the distinctions between those categories. This focus allows scholars to cross

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temporal units, transcend normative periodization, and creating new eras that challenge notions of linear histories with static fixed points, focusing on ways in which geography and history can be dialogic. If the Indian Ocean is a paradigmatic shift for both Asian and the Middle Eastern regional studies, what can it lend to a study from the center (or at least near to center) of the region itself? I would argue that the Indian Ocean perspective on history and space diverges from a Maldivian one, but is so closely intertwined that to attempt to detach one from the other is an academic exercise useful not for distinguishing between the two, which would depend on false dichotomies, but simply for examining place-building narratives in a manner that requires attention to dynamic processes rather than fixed moments or coordinates. Indian Ocean trade involved the Maldives in some of the earliest documented global cosmopolitan networks. Historical accounts demonstrate that Maldivians traveled to the court of the Roman Emperor Julianus in the fourth century CE, bringing gifts in an attempt to solidify political relations between the area and the Roman empire, which would have been of interest due to trade, and doing the same with the Emperor of China during the Tang Dynasty in the mid-seventh century CE (Mohamed, 2005, p. 7; Pelliot, 1904; Rolfe, 1950). The Maldives’ geographic location in the Indian Ocean made the area an ideal stopping place for voyagers traveling between diverse ports in the Middle East, South Asia, the eastern coasts of Africa, and Southeast Asia. A number of Arab traders documented their visits to the Maldives prior to the twelfth century, and graves on islands in Addu Atoll attest to the presence of Yemeni settlers in the pre-Islamic twelfth century (Mohamed, 2005, pp. 5–6). Participation in these trade networks shaped Maldivian culture. Time and space were intimately connected through Indian Ocean trade; the directional monsoons used for trade were so integral to Maldivian life that they formed Dhivehi terms for seasons (Mohamed, 2005, p. 5). Sailors would use the southwest monsoon to travel east to Southeast Asia, and the northeast monsoon to the Middle East and Africa. Historically, Maldivian men were transportation specialists in this system, known for their ability to use the monsoon winds to travel quickly over long distances. The shallow atoll waters surrounding the Maldives islands were navigational obstacles that required the participation of skilled local sailors and boat builders/repairers, and Maldivian men played a role in historical trade in these positions as well. Maldivian women traditionally

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contributed to Indian Ocean trade as well by producing two of the main products of the Maldives, coir (coconut fiber) rope and collected cowry shells. While women were responsible for the manufacture of coconut products, they were reportedly not involved in their sale (Phadnis & Luithui, 1985, p. 14). Maldivian products such as coir rope and dried fish were regional products that may have only traveled to nearby ports; in contrast cowry shells from the region circulated in world markets as currency as early as the mid-ninth century, and until the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries (Chaudhuri, 2005, pp. 18–19). Maldivian cowries traveled far through the trade routes; they have been found in archaeological excavations in the Harappan Valley port city of Lothal (approximately 2400 BCE), as well as in a Yin Dynasty (1401–1122 BCE) tomb in China, and fourth to seventh century CE graves in Norway (Heyerdahl, 1988; Mikkelsen, 2000; Vilgon, 1991). Maldivian cowries were valued as decorative items and used in jewelry and/or as a currency in many parts of the world. Historical global trade networks of the Indian Ocean provided ample opportunity for the spread of new ideas, and with its diverse cultural influences came to Islam. In 1153, the Maldivian ruler converted to Islam, establishing an Islamic sultanate that lasted through Portuguese occupation from 1558 to 1573, the Dutch protectorate in the seventeenth century, and the British protectorate from 1796 to 1965; the sultanate was only replaced when the country became a presidential republic in 1968. As demonstrated in the Rannamaari example, the introduction of Islam to the Maldivian public sphere is discursively treated in ways that emphasize the intertwining of social, religious, and political interests of the islands. Green points out that Indian Ocean connections signify that the historical spread of Islam occurred horizontally between multiple areas in the region, rather than as an outward diffusion from the Middle East as the spread of Islam is commonly modeled (Green, 2016, p. 747). Muslim travelers to the region contributed historical records of Islamic religious practice in the Maldives. Green writes, for example, about Muhammad Kazim Barlas, a north Indian traveler who wrote an Urdu travelogue of the Maldives at the end of the nineteenth century (Green, 2018, pp. 859–860). Historical Arabic and Persian travelogues, as well as the colonial literature of his time period, informed the language and contents of Barlas’ work. He wrote in terms of difference, recording for example that Maldivian Muslims practiced their religion in a manner that was recognizable to those from other regions, praying

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and reading the Qur’an, but that their faith was “imperfect” as they also brought local beliefs such as “black magic” into their practice (Barlas, 1900; Green, 2018, p. 860). Green notes that in many of the works by Muslim Indian Ocean traders, “…as much as Islam functioned as an idiom of universalism and cosmopolitanism, […] it equally served as a vernacular discursive measure of difference, whether in terms of disparities of doctrine, ritual, law, social organization, or degree of civilization” (Green, 2018, p. 871). Through such accounts the Maldives were constructed in historical global discourses as a Muslim country with Islamic religious practices influenced by local practices; the islands were conceptualized as places that had influenced the spread of orthodox practices. This model for Islamic transmission to the Maldives lacks consideration of other interlocal influences in the forms of Islam brought to the islands, ignoring the diverse influences in religious knowledge transmitted through the Indian Ocean arena.

The Archaeology and History of Mosques in the Maldives Using a site-centered approach to the study of Muslim places in the Maldives, the history of mosques in the region demonstrates how the mechanics of recording histories can, as Trouillot pointed out, create silences in those narratives. Histories of the Maldives document mosques in the region through a variety of written sources: Maldivian loamaafaanu (copper plate inscriptions), pronouncements on wooden panels, carvings on tombstones, Arabic tarikh, and colonial travelogues. These narratives can be contextualized through studies of the spaces themselves, through archaeological surveys and architectural observations. Each narrative contributes its own discursive perspective, omitting some information and including others. Archaeological and historical evidence both support the generally agreed upon idea that the Maldives was predominantly Buddhist before the advent of Islam in the region. Archaeological evidence of Buddhism in the Maldives includes many fragments of artifacts, ruins of temples, and other finds, some of which are currently on display in the National Museum in Malé. Most contemporary histories concur that pre-Islamic Buddhist influences in the Maldives were of the Hinayana tradition, transmitted along trade routes through Sri Lanka; the earliest textual

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evidence of such Buddhist influences dates to the sixth century and is recorded using a script similar to early Sinhalese (Reynolds, 2000, p. 15). Stone artifacts preserved in the contemporary National Museum in Malé—such as a coral stone box with a Sanskrit inscription in the Nagari script and trishula symbols dated to the ninth century CE (Ragupathy, 1994)—feature a range of Buddhist motifs, suggesting alternative religious geographies as well. Contrary to what the Rannamaari suggests, the introduction of Islam in the Maldives was most probably not a dramatic event that immediately culminated in nationwide conversions in the twelfth century. The Maldives islanders were introduced to Islam in the seventh century through Indian Ocean trade and travelers. The events of the national twelfth-century conversion are more clearly documented in the loamaafaanu, which are thought to have once hung in all of the mosques in the Maldives, that demonstrate mosques were key sites for the enactment of this change. Jost Gippert argues that language of the loamaafaanu demonstrates both Buddhist and Islamic influences (Gippert, 2000, p. 34). The Islamic influence is apparent in use of an Islamic dating formula; the Gamu loamaafaanu documents the laying of the foundation of a mosque as “in the 582nd [year] after the Great Muhammad the Prophet attained heaven,” although it is not clear if the document is referring to the Prophet Muhammad’s death or using Islamic calendar to refer to the date of the Hijrah (Gippert, 2000, p. 34). Gippert also notes that while many of the terms used to reference Islamic concepts in the Gamu Loamaafaanu are Arabic, some of them—indeed the oldest ones— reflect a Persian influence instead. This includes the adaptation of Persian terms such as namadu (prayer) and roda (fasting), in lieu of the Arabic salat and sawm, and perhaps suggests Persian origins for the Maldivian word for a mosque, miskit (Gippert, 2000, p. 42). While only a few loamaafaanu remain today, those on display in the National Museum document land grants to mosques. Thus, some of the earliest histories of the Maldives, such as the Isdhoo Loamaafaanu and the Dhan’bidhoo Loamaafaanu (named after the locations of their discovery), are concerned with documenting royal support of mosques from 1195 to 1197 (Vanoli, 2005, pp. 86–87). The Dhan’bidhoo Loomaafaanu (approximately 1193–1196 CE) are particularly relevant for thinking about the introduction of Islam to the Maldives, as they document a violent rebellion against the king’s edict to convert to Islam, and the subsequent

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government orders for systematic destruction of Buddhist institutions and sites throughout the Maldives (Disanayake & Wijayawardhana, 1986/1987, pp. 65–67). In a similar manner, the Isdhoo loamaafaanu documents royal decrees for the destruction of Buddhist monasteries and the construction of mosques on their sites (Al Suood, 2014, p. 28). Historical Maldivian mosques bear witness to these events architecturally, as seen at the Malé Hukuru Miskii, commonly called the “Old Friday Mosque” in Malé. The existing Hukuru Miskii structure was built in 1658 by the Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar I, on the foundation of a historical mosque that was reportedly constructed by Sultan Muhammad ibn Abdullah upon his conversion to Islam in 1153. This beautiful coral stone mosque has a minaret that is patterned after historical Arab constructions—reportedly constructed after the Iskandar returned from Haj to reflect what he saw in Mecca—rather than more modern Middle Eastern minaret designs and is surrounded by a graveyard filled with the unique carved coral tombstones of the Maldives.

Fig. 4.1  Long dippers for wudu outside the side entrance of the Hukuru Miskii. The mosque’s multiple layers of foundation are shown here (2006)

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Fig. 4.2  View of the minaret of the Hukuru Miskii from the streets of Malé (2006)

There are several features of Hukuru Miskii that embody the revelations of the loamaafaanu on how the oldest mosques built in the Maldives were built in conjunction with the destruction of Buddhist buildings. Some of these buildings used coral stones from older buildings— presumably monasteries or temples—that feature Buddhist iconography, motifs that Maloney claims are of medieval Sri Lankan original (Maloney, 1980). The coral stone work in the lower level of the Hukuru Miskii displays such carvings, including a Buddhist-ascribed lock and key motif, mentioned by a number of foreign scholars studying mosques and history in the Maldives (e.g., Forbes, 1983, p. 58). As the foundations of these buildings were not originally laid for mosques, early historical mosques were not aligned properly toward quibla for prayer. According to historians in Malé, the original Hukuru Miskii was also constructed on the foundation of a Buddhist building and the rebuilt structure

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followed the same pattern. Thus, inside the Hukuru Miskii the prayer carpets, which are aligned toward quibla, are at an oblique angle to the walls of the building. The Hukuru Miskii occupies a curious role in Malé; while it is not the original structure associated with the advent of Islam in the country, it is still an influential historical site. Its architecture has Islamic and Buddhist features, and its history suggests that the foundations have shaped the construction of three very different types of structures. The Hukuru Miskii is not the main Friday mosque on the island, but it is probably the most well known outside of the Maldives. Its surroundings—graveyard and minaret—have their own site histories as well. The liminal nature of the Hukuru Miskii is perhaps best expressed in its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where it has remained on the “Tentative List”—a list comprised of submissions from state parties that have not yet been approved by the global organization—for the past 5 years. Although representative of a significant part of global Muslim history, the spread and continuance of Islam in the Indian Ocean, the building is recognizable as such primarily through a local perspective on global narratives, through which is possible to incorporate the diverse features of this space into a coherent narrative of place. Although there is a growing appreciation for the unique features of the coral stone mosques of the Maldives among scholars today, when Rosset visited in the late nineteenth century, he noted that there were a number of mosques in Malé, but that, “they offered no peculiarity either of structure or ornament which would entitle them to special notice,” although being “well built” and “kept very clean” (Rosset, 1886). From Rosset’s colonial perspective, Maldivian mosques offered neither novelty nor spectacle to comment upon; they were not places in his view of Muslim spaces. In spite of their national significance for denoting the stability of settlements on the islands and their presence as historical monuments in many parts of the Maldives, mosque sites in the country are dynamic and changing. These changes can be literal; for example, Reynolds, who studied Maldivian mosques in the 1980s, noted that of the 33 mosques named by Bell in 1921, at least 15 have disappeared between 1960 and 1984 (Reynolds, 1984, p. 64). Some of this change was due to development, as Reynolds notes that a number of historical mosques in Malé pulled down in the late 1970s and rebuilt to accommodate larger congregations (Reynolds, 1984, p. 62). The dynamic nature of Maldivian mosques is also more figurative, based on a perception of the

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sites as lived spaces in Lefebvre’s sense of the term; these are essential symbolic sites whose origins can be studied and traced by scholars. That history has been recorded in a variety of ways—in loamaafaanu, tarikh, colonial travelogues, archaeological artifacts, and architectural details— providing a rich representational space, each version with its own silences. Maldivian mosques have been conceived and constructed in the context of national historical narratives with contemporary political implications. They embody global significance in their religious geographies and are co-constitutive with other Muslim places such as graveyards and wells. These general patterns that shape mosques as places in the Maldives are significant frames for understanding women’s mosques in the country, particularly since women’s mosques do not explicitly appear in a majority of Maldivian religious histories.

Whence Women’s Mosques? Just as there are multiple versions of the story about the introduction of Islam to the Maldives, there are also differing, even contradictory, etiologies for Maldivian women’s mosques. Before traveling to the Maldives, I had seen countless Web sites and brochures noting that there were “724 mosques and 266 women’s mosques” in the Maldives; these numbers seem to originate from a Library of Congress country report edited by Helen Chapin Metz (1995). Whether the 724 mosques included women’s mosques, or if the 266 women’s mosques were enumerated separate from “mosques” as a general category was unclear; additionally, none of the popular sources that noted women’s mosques gave information about their history in the Maldives. Available literature on the Maldives that might have clarified the situation was similarly ambiguous. In archives in the USA, I found no historical mentions of women’s mosques in the Maldives, although I discovered some sources that covered related issues. For example, Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century CE travelogue documents that the ruler of the Maldives at the time of his visit to the area was a woman, Sultana Khadija, who was responsible for appointing mosque officials and judges of Islamic law (Dunn, 2005, p. 131). Thus, we know that historically women had a national role in shaping Maldivian Islamic institutions, which may have had some connection to the tradition of women’s mosques. Harry Charles Purvis Bell, a British civil servant in Sri Lanka who researched the archaeology and culture of the Maldives, published

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several early twentieth-century works on the Maldives (e.g., Bell, 1923). Bell noted in a publication from the late nineteenth century that girls and boys studied the Qur’an in formal religious classes; he did not discuss the spaces in which these activities took place but did mention that many of the islands had a number of separate mosques (Bell, 2004, pp. 58–59). While not proving that Maldivian women’s mosques existed in the late nineteenth century, his work seemed to suggest that possibility, documenting that girls were engaged in the type of activities that would have taken place in women’s mosques and that there was a pattern of multiple mosques in larger communities that made a separate women’s one possible. Women’s mosques did appear in later scholarly publications about the Maldives more explicitly. Forbes notes that he was told in 1976 that women’s mosques used to exist in the Addu Atoll, but were “replaced by private namad-ge attached to dwelling places”; he goes on to observe that the former head of the WHO in the Maldives visited women’s mosques in Guradu Island (Kaafu Atoll) and Muli Island (Meemu Atoll) in the 1970s (Forbes, 1983, p. 73). Curiously Maloney, who claimed in the previous chapter that Maldivian women were traditionally secluded in purdah, also documented in 1974–1975 that, “[i]n the northern half of the country, most islands have women’s mosques, usually one to each ward, but these are for praying only, as there is no Friday sermon” (Maloney, 1980, p. 213). Maloney wrote that some islands have namaadhugé, prayer spaces for women associated with homes, while other have women’s mosques, which are a distinct type of space (Maloney, 1980, p. 215). Reynolds’ 1984 article on mosques in the Maldives contained a picture of a women’s mosque from Toddu Island in Ari Atoll, simply captioned “women’s mosque on Toddu” (Reynolds, 1984, p. 63). Years after my fieldwork in the Maldives, I encountered a study that focused on solely women’s mosques in the Maldives; an excellent Ph.D. dissertation written by anthropologist Sudeshna Baksi-Lahiri, titled Women’s Power and Ritual Politics in the Maldives, which is based on fieldwork from this same time period (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004). Baksi-Lahiri worked in “Duafaru,” a pseudonym for an unnamed island in the northern atolls, in 1981–1983 and 1990–1991; as such she presents a unique perspective on women’s mosques that spans almost a decade. BaksiLahiri claims that women’s mosques in the Maldives are a unique feature of “Maldivian Islam,” which she defined as a system of local beliefs based

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on Maldivian perspectives on Islamic texts, influenced by Maldivian cultural traditions (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, p. 12). Baksi-Lahiri records that in the early 1990s men’s areas of worship on the island she worked in were called “miskiy” (masjid), and women’s were referred to as “namaadhugé” (prayer house); she writes that in 1991 women’s mosques were much more common in the northern atolls than the southern ones and absent in the Malé area (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, pp. 21–22). When I first arrived in the Maldives equipped with information from foreign libraries, and searching in Malé for evidence of the women’s mosques, I met with an official from the Ministry of Family and Gender. I spoke with her hoping to hear about how women’s mosques fit into gendered roles and institutions in the Maldives as a whole, but was instead told that women’s mosques were not “significant” for discussions of gender and religion in the Maldives. The official informed me that Maldivian women’s mosques were not traditional religious institutions; their construction was associated with the government’s social initiative to provide public spaces for women to, as she put it, “get women outside of the home.” The mosques were sites developed by women’s committees on the islands, which had been formed by the 1979 National Women’s Committee (NWC), in preparation for the 1985 United Nation’s World Conference on Women in Nairobi.5 At the end of our meeting, the ministry official gifted me with copies from some government publications that, she said, would further clarify the history of women’s mosques in the Maldives. Upon later perusal, I found that these government publications generally corroborated her information. The first, from the government Department of Information and Broadcasting, outlined the 1979 formation of the NWC, its relation to the “International Decade for Women,” and its relationship to Island Women’s Committees that convened in a national conference in 1984, “to assess and evaluate the status of women in the country and to formulate a programme of action for the future” (Department of Information and Broadcasting, 1985, p. 21). This publication was shared to give me more information about the NWC, but did not mention women’s mosques explicitly. A slightly later publication from the Office for Women’s Affairs noted women’s mosques by name, Women’s organizations did not exist until 1979 when the National Women’s Committee was established preparatory to the International

90  J. H. FEWKES Women’s Conference in Nairobi. Subsequently, on each island, an Island Women’s Committee was also established. It must be noted, however, that long before this period, women as a group were traditionally active in clean-up campaigns and other community activities. On 16 July 1986, the National Women’s Committee changed its name to the National Women’s Council. Office for Women’s Affairs was created in the government, with Mrs. Fathmath Jameel, the President of the National Women’s Council serving as Director. […][E]ach island has a women’s committee (similarly, there is one for each of the four wards in Malé.). The voluntary and unpaid activities of these committees, which in fact work closely with the island chiefs, are generally devoted to tasks that benefit the community as a whole. These committees serve a modest but useful purpose in improving life on the islands. Of special benefit to women is their promotion of island cleaning and the construction and maintenance of women’s mosques. These women’s committees provide the most positive ways in which women at the grass-roots level are able to make a collective contribution to the life of the country. (Office for Women’s Affairs, 1989, pp. 7, 36)

Thus, these reports documented the development of women’s mosques in the Maldives for the purpose of meeting international standards of gendered civic roles, and how the women’s institutions were intended to train women into those roles in the Maldivian context. Since this time I have found a few other publications from that time period that support this etiology of Maldivian women’s mosques. Phadnis and Luithui, for example, wrote in 1985 that NWC offered leadership training for women from all atolls in June 1981; one woman from each atoll participated in a three month training course to initiate change for women in the islands to improve their lives, changes that would have included women’s mosques (Phadnis & Luithui, 1985, p. 48). A contemporaneous publication from the Department of Religious Affairs, which would have overseen women’s mosques as religious institutions, acknowledges mosques in the Maldives in a general sense, noting that they are traditionally centers of learning and teaching as well as places of prayer, but does not refer to women’s mosques at all (Department of Religious Affairs, 1984). A 1989 UNICEF report on “The State of Maldivian Women” documents women’s mosques as one of the Island Women’s Committees’ projects, writing that they, …organize weekly cleaning of the island (a task traditionally done by the women) and have contributed labour to community projects on their

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islands. The most popular project and a priority for IWCs in most islands, has been the construction of women’s mosques for which they worked enthusiastically. (UNICEF, 1989)

A later publication that discusses the early 1990s mentions that Island Women’s Committees, established by the National Women’s Council in 1993, funded women’s mosque construction, suggesting a similar relationship between government projects to develop women’s public roles and the maintenance of women’s mosques (Dayal & Didi, 2001, p. 63). The stakeholder report for a 2001 UNDP project detailed the construction of women’s mosques on Kihadhoo Island and Maalhos Island (both in Baa Atoll) by the islands’ Women’s Development Committees, with assistance in Kihadhoo from the Youth Association; Women’s Development Committees on Fuladhoo Island (Baa Atoll) were repairing and renovating an existing women’s mosque, while the same group in Keyodhoo Island (Vaavu Atoll) were seeking funding to begin construction on a women’s mosque (Sirur, 2001). Based on this documentation—primarily comprised of government documents, international NGO reports, and politically oriented scholarship—it seems clear that women’s mosques in the Maldives were the outcome of internationally inspired and nationally organized development projects conducted by locally organized women’s committees. Representatives of the Maldivian national government who claimed that government specifically promoted women’s mosques as an alternative to women’s prayer inside the home, to “get women outside of their homes,” suggested that Maldivian women’s mosques share some elements of domain-bending with mosques in Tétreault’s Kuwait, as discussed in the last chapter. The mosque in this case becomes a place “outside” the “inside” of Muslim homes, while being “inside” the Muslim community and Muslim practices. Furthermore, the mosque, as a formal public government building, becomes a women’s space, challenging notions of women’s spaces as private Muslim domains within this conceptual framework. Maldivian women’s mosques had a clearly conceived spatial role from the government perspective, one that seemed informed by the public/private dichotomy, accepting it as one that existed to change, yet still challenged the boundaries of that dichotomy. A number of questions remained in my mind after reading this material. If women’s mosques only began as a government project in 1979, why did Colton and Maloney write about them in the early 1970s as existing institutions (Colton, 1995, pp. 177–178; Maloney, 1980, p. 213) and

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Forbes write in 1976 that women’s mosques used to exist in the Addu Atoll, but had been replaced since then (Forbes, 1983, p. 73)? Why would the women’s committees have initially decided upon women’s mosques as a project? If women’s committees existed in Malé too, why did the only the Island Women’s Committees decide to construct women’s mosques? Furthermore, it seemed that none of these documents actually proved that women’s mosques only began in 1979; the documents from the government stated that women’s committees were established in 1979, but did not state the same for women’s mosques, only that the Island Women’s Committees built some women’s mosques. The Office for Women’s Affairs publication notes that although women’s committees did not exist before 1979, an informal (or perhaps not nationally recognized) local organization of women would collaborate on civic projects, an idea alluded to in the UNICEF report as well; if other forms of local women’s groups existed before the government organizations started in 1979, I thought, it was possible that women’s mosques did as well.6 When I left Malé a few weeks later to visit other atolls, where I was able to actually find women’s mosques and meet with the mudahim, I was confronted with narratives of women’s mosques in everyday life that also did not fit well with the government explanations. Women’s mosques’ roles in Maldivian island life as perceived spaces suggested a far more complex etiology. As related in Chapter 2, one of the mudahim I met with, Fathimath, was an older woman who was in her 70 s. She claimed to have been working as a mudahim before Ibrahim Nasir, became the first Maldivian prime minister in 1957—well before the establishment of women’s committees in the late 1970s. Furthermore, she remembered an older nisha miskii made of palm leaves from her childhood, which was used by the Government of the Maldives to count citizens for rations during World War II. Several other older women that I interviewed in northern atolls echoed details of Fathimath’s story, remembering women’s mosques as a part of their childhoods in the 1950s. While a few of the mudahim mentioned their connections (or lack thereof) to Island Women’s Committee, many of the older mudahim also discursively linked their roles in the women’s mosques to diverse forms of female leadership on the islands, such as being a midwife, being of a certain family, and/or being a “head woman.” If perceived space is a part of how people use the space—active, physical, and use/action orientated—then, what people are actually doing in those spaces have as much to offer in explaining their roles as places as

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official explanations of how they came to be built. These earlier dates for the development of women’s mosques are significant in a larger pattern that includes women’s discussions of their roles in the mosques, patterns of use in the spaces, the funding and treatment of these sites, and other behaviors that I will explore in more detail in Chapter 6. Both the government and women’s narratives about the development of women’s mosques in the Maldives have symbolic dimensions with differing origins. The government narratives are clearly worth considering in relation to other government discourses about mosque spaces, which, as we have seen, are built upon the relationship between a mosque space and an island space as inhabited part of the nation. Women’s narratives have more personal and varied symbolic histories. A third source of symbolic histories for these places that contribute to their construction as lived or representational spaces in Lefebvre’s sense of the terms is the Indian Ocean past covered earlier in this chapter. Women’s mosques are reportedly present in three Islamic areas of the Indian Ocean: the Maldives, Comoros, and Lakshadweep (Laccadives) Islands. The presence of Islam in these three areas is generally attributed historically to links between separate culture areas and the Middle East; trade routes linked the Arab peninsula to East Africa (and thus the Comoros), and to South India (hence the Maldives and Lakshadweep). Furthermore, women’s mosques have existed historically (and in some cases in the contemporary period) in more distant areas that were linked to the Maldives through the historical Indian Ocean trade system, including areas of Indonesia and distant China. The existence of a possible tradition of women’s mosques in Yemen as well as the historical movement of Yemeni traders through the Indian Ocean routes suggests one possible route for historical connections between these areas. There is obviously a historical pattern here, which I would like to explore further in the next chapter as I document cases of women’s mosques throughout the world.

Notes 1. For an application of Lefebvre and Foucault to historical inquiry, see for example, Christopher Ely’s Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia (2016). 2. For more on tarikh, see The Islamic History of the Maldive Islands (Al-Din, Al-Din, & Al-Din, 1984).

94  J. H. FEWKES 3. Archaeologists Lindsay Bloch and Anna Agbe-Davies have given a good example of such a case with their work in southeastern US plantation sites, which starts with an excerpt from a 1756 Maryland Gazette, where the author notes the sale of “… sundry other sorts of small ware too tedious to mention,” an omission in the historical narrative that is addressed through analysis of data from the Digital Archaeology Archive of Comparative Slavery (Bloch & Agbe-Davies, 2017). 4. This discussion of the Indian Ocean perspective on South Asia is derived from an unpublished work co-authored with archaeologist Praveena Gullapali, Rhode Island College. 5. The 1979 NWC is also called the “Gender Committee” by some authors. Its formation had an impact on all levels of Maldivian bureaucracy; the committee became the Gender Department in 1989, was renamed the Gender Ministry in 1993, became the Ministry of Gender and Family sometime before 2005, and was renamed the Ministry of Law and Gender in 2010 (Elhorr & Pande, 2016, p. 14). 6. The former existence of informal, or at least not nationally organized, local island women’s civic groups suggests a fruitful direction of study for those interested in thinking more about Maldivian power and politics on the local level. This scenario brings to mind Fernanda Pirie’s book Peace and Conflict in Ladakh: The Construction of a Fragile Web of Order, particularly aspects of the work that focus on local community groups in the Ladakhi region of northern India, which may organize neighborhood cleanings and adjudicate water disputes, and represent key power structures in the wider region (2007).

References Al-Din, H. T., Al-Din, M. M., & Al-Din, I. S. (1984). The Islamic History of the Maldive Islands. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. Alidou, O. D. (2005). Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Al Suood, H. (2014). The Maldivian Legal System. Malé, Maldives: Maldives Law Institute. Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture, 2, 1–23. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large (Vol. 1). London: Minnesota Press. Baksi-Lahiri, S. (2004). Women’s Power and Ritual Politics in the Maldives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Barlas, M. M. K. (1900). Sayr-i Darya. Moradabad.

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Bell, H. C. P. (1923). Excerpta Maldiviana. The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 29(76), 194–214. Bell, H. C. P. (2002). The Maldive Islands: Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy. Malé, Maldives: Novelty Printers & Publishers. Bell, H. C. P. (2004). The Maldive Islands: An Account of the Physical Features, Climate, History, Inhabitants, Productions and Trade. New Delhi: Asian Educational Servuces. Bloch, L., & Agbe-Davies, A. (2017). ‘With Sundry Other Sorts of Small Ware Too Tedious to Mention’: Petty Consumerism on U.S. Plantations. In B. J. Heath, E. E. Breen, & L. A. Lee (Eds.), Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity. London: Routledge. Chaudhuri, K. N. (2005). Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colton, E. O. (1995). The Elite of the Maldives: Sociopolitical Organization and Change (PhD thesis). London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dayal, R., & Didi, S. M. (2001). Country Briefing Paper: Women in the Republic of the Maldives. Malé, Maldives: Asian Development Bank. Department of Information and Broadcasting, Republic of the Maldives. (1985). Maldives Social Development. Malé: Department of Information and Broadcasting. Department of Religious Affairs, R. o. M. (1984). The Mosques of Maldives. Malé, Maldives: Department of Religious Affairs, Republic of Maldives. Disanayake, J. B., & Wijayawardhana, G. W. (1986/1987). Some Observations on the Maldivian Loamaafaanu Copper Plates of the Twelfth Century. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka Branch, 31, 62–71. Doumato, E. A. (2000). Getting God’s Ear: Women, Islam, and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. New York: Colombia University Press. Dunn, R. E. (2005). The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elhorr, J., & Pande, R. (2016). Understanding Gender in the Maldives: Toward Inclusive Development. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. Ellis, R. (1998). A Man for All Islands: A Biography of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom President of the Maldives. Singapore: Times Editions. Ely, C. (2016). Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Euben, R. L. (2006). Journeys to the Other Shore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fewkes, J. H. (2008). Trade and Contemporary Society Along the Silk Route: An Ethnohistory of Ladakh. London: Routledge.

96  J. H. FEWKES Fewkes, J. H. (2017). How the American West Was Won in Central Asia: Silver, Synthetic Dyes, and Other American Commodities Along the Silk Route from the Late 19th to Early 20th Century. Paper Presented at the American and Muslim Worlds circa 1500–1900, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Fewkes, J. H., & Khan, A. N. (2015). Manuscripts, Material Culture, and Ephemera of the Silk Route: Artifacts of Early Twentieth Century Ladakhi Trade Between South and Central Asia. Asian Highlands Perspectives, 39, 73–127. Forbes, A. D. W. (1983). The Mosque in the Maldive Islands: A Preliminary Historical Survey. Archipel, 26, 43–74. Foucault, M. (1997). ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (D. Macey, Trans.). New York: Picador. Geertz, C. (1996). Afterword. In S. Feld & K. Basso (Eds.), Sense of Place (pp. 259–262). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Gippert, J. (2000). Early New Persian as a Medium of Spreading Islam. In L. Paul (Ed.), Persian Origins—Early Judaeo-Persian and the Emergnece of New Persian: Collected Papers of the Symposium, Gottingen 1999 (pp. 31–47). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Gray, A. (2004). Ibn Batuta in the Maldives and Ceylon. New Delhi: Asian Educational Publishers. Green, N. (2016). The View from the Edge: The Indian Ocean’s Middle East. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 48, 746–749. Green, N. (2018). The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean. American Historical Review, 123(1), 846–874. Haraway, D. (1990). A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (pp. 190–233). London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1997). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Heyerdahl, T. (1988). The Maldive Mystery: A New Adventure in Archaeology. London: Unwin Hyman. Lefebvre, H. (2009). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Maloney, C. (1980). People of the Maldive Islands. New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd. Maniku, H. A. (1986/1987). Conversion of the Maldives to Islam. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka Branch, 31, 72–81. Merrifield, A. (1993). Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation. Royal Geographical Society, 18(4), 516–531. Metz, H. C. (1995). Indian Ocean: Five Island Countries. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division.

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Mikkelsen, E. (2000). Archaeological Excavations of a Monastery at Kaashidhoo. Malé, Maldives: National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research. Mohamed, N. (2005). Maldivian Seafaring in the Pre Portuguese Period. Malé, Maldives: The National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research. Office for Women’s Affairs. (1989). Status of Women: Maldives. Bangkok: UNESCO. Pelliot, P. (1904). Deus Itineraires de Chine en Inde a la fin du Villie Siecle. Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient Bulletin, 4, 359–362. Phadnis, U., & Luithui, E. D. (1985). Maldives: Winds of Change in an Atoll State. New Delhi: South Asian Publications. Pirie, F. (2007). Peace and Conflict in Ladakh: The Construction of a Fragile Web of Order. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Rabinow, P. (Ed.). (1980). Foucault, Power/Knowledge. New York: Vintage Press. Ragupathy, P. (1994). The South Asian Heritage of Early Maldives. Malé, Maldives: National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research. Reynolds, C. H. B. (1984). The Mosques in the Maldive Islands: Further Notes. Archipel, 28, 61–64. Reynolds, C. H. B. (2000). The Maldive Islands. In V. Grover (Ed.), Maldives Government and Politics (pp. 13–21). New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd. Rolfe, J. C. (1950). Ammianus Marcellinus with an English Translation (Vol. II). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Romero-Frías, X. (2012). Folk Tales of the Maldives. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Rosset, C. W. (1886). The Máldive Islands. The Graphic, pp. 413–416. Sirur, H. H. (2001). Socio-Economic (Community Stakeholder) Report— Revised UNDP GEF Project: Conservation and Sustainable Use of Coral Reef Biodiversity in the Maldives. Malé, Maldives. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Tuan, Y.-F. (1979). Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective. In S. Gale & G. Olsson (Eds.), Philosophy in Geography (pp. 387–427). London: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Tuan, Y.-F. (2001). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. UNICEF. (1989). The State of Maldivian Women. Malé, Maldives: UNICEF. Vanoli, A. (2005). Tradizione e Invenzione Nell’identita Islamica delle Isole Maldive. Religioni e Societa, 51, 82–92. Vilgon, L. (1991). Maldive Odd History: The Maldive Archipelago and Its People. Stockholm: L. Vilgon. Waines, D. (2010). The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 5

Locating Women’s Mosques

After my visit to the first women’s mosque in the northern atoll, I was delighted to be invited to visit a number of women’s mosques on surrounding islands, and intrigued to find that the spatial and material conditions of women’s mosques varied greatly from island to island. On one island I visited, for example, there was a strong contrast between the physical condition of men’s and women’s mosques. The men’s mosque was a larger building of newer construction with a tall minaret, located just off the main road (Fig. 5.1). The women’s mosque, pictured below, was an older and smaller building, tucked away on a small side street. The outside of the building had worn plastered coral stone walls and rusted metal roof features; there was no minaret. The inside walls showed water damage and cracks from recent tsunami damage. After women prayed, their prayer mats were wedged haphazardly into the blinds of the window, presumably to store them in a clean and dry area. While slightly dilapidated, this women’s mosque was obviously well cared for; every area was meticulously clean (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). Many of the women who prayed dhuhr here while I visited seemed at home in this mosque; after salat they lingered in the building, older women quietly reading and chatting while girls playfully ran around on the verandah. This damaged women’s mosque contrasted strongly with the physical presence of another women’s mosque that we visited on another island, © The Author(s) 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0_5

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Fig. 5.1  Men’s mosque on a northern atoll island. There is a minaret on one side of the building, where the call to prayer from the island is broadcast. Inside is a large open prayer area; the wall opposite the main entrance features a minbar next to the mihrab (2006)

a sparkling renovated building in a quiet residential neighborhood. The second women’s mosque, again meticulously clean, had a wellappointed courtyard that looked out onto a large road and was surrounded with planted greenery (Fig. 5.4).

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Fig. 5.2  Exterior of a damaged women’s mosque in the northern atolls of the Maldives, on the same island as the men’s mosque in the last figure. There is no minaret on this building; the yard contains a well in the front (2006)

Inside the women’s mosque had a mihrab and small steps that acted as a symbolic minbar. The large mosque windows let in ample light, making the clean marble tiles shine; the walls were decorated with bright colors and varnished decorative wood trims (Fig. 5.5). While quiet and empty between prayers, the arrangement of books and carpets stacked at the end of the main room gave the sense that this was an oft-used religious building. The mudahim who showed me around told me that the mosque building and its grounds had been recently renovated. The renovation was supported, according to informants on the island, not only through government funds but also through donations of money, time, and materials from women throughout the island. Visiting women’s mosques in the Maldives, I was intrigued, and sometimes even startled, by the material variations in these mosque sites—e.g., the size of the buildings, whether the windows were

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Fig. 5.3  Interior of the same mosque in the last picture, displaying considerable unrepaired damage from the tsunami. This women’s mosque had neither minbar nor mihrab, although the room was oriented directly toward qibla (2006)

covered, the building materials used, architectural choices, the presence or absence of features such as a minbar and mihrab, and the site of the building in the island landscape. At the same time, I was fascinated by the similarities between these spaces; each was carefully cleaned, surrounded by a courtyard containing a well with washing area, no partitions were used within the buildings themselves, and none had a minaret.

What Makes a Mosque? A mosque—derived from the Arabic term “masjid,” “a place of prostration”—is a place defined by function. Islamic art scholar Robert Hillenbrand has noted in his seminal work on Islamic architecture that a mosque is not necessarily a building, writing:

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Fig. 5.4  An exterior view of the verandah on a well-maintained women’s mosque on a northern atoll island (2006) What makes a mosque a mosque? The answer is forbiddingly simple: a wall correctly orientated towards the qibla, namely the Ka’ba within Masjid al-Haram, Mecca. No roof, no minimum size, no enclosing walls, no liturgical accessories are required. Indeed, it might very properly be argued that even the single wall is unnecessary. After all, the Prophet himself is record as saying, ‘Wherever you pray, that place is a mosque (masjid)’…. Technically, therefore, it could be argued that the term masjid, normally translated into English as ‘mosque’, does not necessarily connote a building of any kind. (Hillenbrand, 2004)

Hillenbrand uses the term “technically” here to suggest that while the mosque could be thought of as a functional space without a building, it most frequently is not. There is a semantic issue with the contemporary use of the term “mosque.” In Arabic, Muslim places of prayer can be labeled either

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Fig. 5.5  Interior of the women’s mosque in the last photograph. The qibla wall is clearly marked with a recessed mihrab and small stair-like minbar (2006)

as “masjid” (places of prostration) or “jami” (places to assemble). Historically masjid were daily places of prayer, community situated and oriented; larger towns had a masjid for each neighborhood and masjid associated with other institutions such as madrasas (religious schools) and caravanserais (inns/trading posts for travelers) (Hillenbrand, 2004, p. 44). In contrast, jami were larger, often more ornate, places for Friday prayer congregation; jami were religious sites of prayer as well, but more political in nature as their construction was frequently regulated by the government, and they were the setting of the enactment of religious authority in the form of the khutbah (Friday sermon) (Hillenbrand, 2004, pp. 44–45). While the distinction is preserved in many contemporary Muslim communities—signified by the presence of a Jama/Jamia Masjid in larger cities that is recognized as the main Friday mosque for that area—the use of the term “mosque” in English elides differences

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and generally obfuscates the nuances that distinguish these sites, an issue that has implications for defining women’s mosques, as we shall see later. Nevertheless, if a mosque exists as a physical location in the form of a building with purposefully constructed architectural components, then one approach to evaluate it as a symbolic site, to understanding its lived meanings as a place, is to deconstruct it into its component architectural features such as the dome, minaret, qibla wall, mihrab, and minbar. Omar Asfour considers these parts of mosques, noting that the diversity of mosque elements over time reflects the dynamic concept of the mosque in Islamic history (Asfour, 2016). In an attempt to find a structural definition of a mosque, Asfour suggests that a mosque be defined as an area with a floor on which to pray; its architecture therefore has the basic functional requirements of: (1) providing a “pure” prayer space, (2) noting orientation toward Mecca, (3) having minimal obstructions that would break up rows from prayer, (4) minimizing distracting decorations, and (5) having a form that allows for long rows for prayer (Asfour, 2016, p. 80). Thus, at first glance, the only aforementioned architectural features of a mosque that meets the functional requirements of a mosque are the qibla wall, which orients prayer toward Mecca, and by extension an accompanying mihrab, a recess or niche mid-point in the qibla wall. The qibla wall is claimed by some authors to be the only required feature in all mosques (except the Haram Al-Sharif in Mecca, toward which all other mosques are oriented), if any features are even required, as noted by Hillenbrand (Frishman, Khan, & Asad, 2007, p. 35; Hillenbrand, 2004, p. 31). While the mihrab may be popularly thought of as a symbolic addition that has more to do with indicating positions of power in the mosque than the function of qibla, Hillenbrand notes that it is technically simply “a visual aide-memorie of the location of the qibla wall” (Hillenbrand, 2004, p. 17).1 From Asfour’s initial functional perspective, a clean and empty covered stadium would seem to have more functional value as a mosque than a smaller historic building such as the Maldivian Hukuru Miskii; however, Asfour goes on to recognize the symbolic elements that compliment the functional elements of a mosque. The minaret, commonly considered a functional element of mosque architecture, is discussed here as symbolic as historical evidence suggests that the earliest minarets were not added to amplify calls to prayer (as commonly thought) but to denote the presence of an Islamic site (Asfour, 2016, p. 81). Hillenbrand expands upon this notion noting that the earliest documented case

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of minaret construction was clearly motivated by political concerns (Hillenbrand, 2004, pp. 129–130). This understanding of the minaret can be used to reevaluate studies of mosques in many communities— including, for example, contemporary buildings that use loudspeakers not located in a minaret, mosques in minority Muslim societies that may use repurposed buildings, and women’s mosques in the Maldives that lack minarets—moving away from a focus on the absence of minarets as a lack, to reframe inquiry as attention to that which is symbolically conveyed by the presence or absence of such a feature. The late appearance of the mihrab—absent in some of the earliest Muslim sites of prayer and not documented in mosques until the ninth century—suggests a similar need for reevaluation, particularly given the symbolic connotations mentioned by Hillenbrand (Kuban, 1974, p. 4). Domes are also frequently cited as exterior features of a mosque that make it a recognizably “Muslim” space. This characterization of the dome is born out in mosque projects around the world, documented, for example, in the construction of the Seoul Mosque, which emphasized the construction of an Islamic space as a way of symbolizing the community’s belonging in the ummah (Song, 2016, pp. 48–50). My own ethnographic work in American mosque communities suggested similar viewpoints; most of those interviewed claimed that a dome is the single most important feature of an Islamic building in order to symbolically represent their presence. The same concept may be true in reverse as well; if minarets and domes can be used to publically signify a connection to the global ummah and/or the Muslim presence in the public sphere, the lack of such features can signify the opposite. Thus, traditional Swahili stone mosques, which rarely featured minarets historically, are interpreted as locally oriented institutions (Frishman et al., 2007, p. 199). In many countries—both Muslim majority and minority areas—neighborhood mosques that lack dome or minarets may be small community spaces that choose not to overtly advertise themselves to outsiders; intimate places of prayer available to the people who know their location. In Tunis, for example, most small local mosques do not have either minarets or a minbar of their own; these “local mesjeds” function as places of prayer for residents, but not as sites for salat al-jumaa or Eid prayers (Hakim, 2013). This case study in Tunis suggests that the masjid/jami distinction noted earlier has architectural implications. The example of local masjids of Tunis raises another significant architectural feature in the mosque, the minbar. The minbar is a piece of

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equipment, sometimes a stationary feature in the mosque and at other times a moveable piece of furniture, that acts as raised area for imams delivering the khutbah (sermon) at salat al-jumaa (Friday prayers). In Islamic history, the Prophet Muhammad used a basic minbar in Medina to ensure that he was heard when speaking to large congregations; this simple form consisted of three levels—two steps and a small platform above them for standing on (Kuban, 1974, p. 5). Thus, the presence of a minbar invokes a symbolic history of leadership and authority in religious settings. As shown in the example of the Tunisian neighborhood mosques above, not all mosques have minbars. Kuban notes such a pattern historically—with many mosques in smaller villages that did not have minbar—linking the pattern to the Shafi’i fiqh that requires a minimum of 40 Muslims in congregation for Friday prayers, thereby only allowing minbar in large mosques that conducted Friday salat al-jumaa, accompanied by a khutbah (Kuban, 1974, p. 3). This use of the minbar varies regionally, however, and the presence of simple symbolic minbars has been documented in South Asian prayer areas even “when not liturgically necessary, as in the mosque attached to a tomb” (Burton-Page, 2008, p. 45). Common architectural features of mosques are not simply signifiers that denote a mosque; each plays a role in the production of place as a diachronic process that connects physical, mental, and social aspects of space. The diachronic nature of this process is clearly reflected in the ways in which mosque architecture represents the historical contexts of production. For example, the addition of the minaret to the mosque (which was not a common feature on mosques until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) and the increased sophistication of mosque decorative elements (features considered integral to many mosque buildings today) are associated with the historical growth of Islamic influence and power (Bloom, 1989, p. 19; Frishman et al., 2007, p. 40). Each minaret thus has a symbolic history, an origin that contributes to the representational spaces of mosques. These individual elements of mosque architecture continue to be used to represent and reinforce nuanced political and religious histories. For example, in Cheikh Anta Mbacké Babou’s study of the social construction of space in late nineteenth-century Senegal, the Murid community built a mosque with multiple minarets and a large central dome mosque that followed the Ottoman architectural style (Babou, 2005). While most West African mosques at the time had a columned hall without a dome and a single minaret, seen, for example, at Tuba’s central

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mosque, the Murid community was working to build a “house of Islam” as a space in opposition with that of Senegal—viewed as a “house of unbelief” as a result of French colonial influence—and therefore chose Ottoman architecture as an embodiment of that goal (Babou, 2005, p. 417). The conceived space of the mosque incorporated the historical context of colonialism and religious perspectives on authenticity and power, offering a new mosque aesthetic in the community and shaping the practices of those who practiced within it. Attention to mosque architecture can also demonstrate how the diachronic process of place construction is a dialogical one. In a study on Sufi traditions in Persian architecture, Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar note that, “[t]he historic ‘residue’ that certain forms manifest reflects their origins and indicates their appropriate uses; at the same time, it fortifies their inherent symbolism” (Ardalan & Bakhtiar, 1973, p. 67). The example they provide of this process is of the courtyard plan in Iran, which allows for the incorporation of natural elements (water features, gardens, etc.) in the midst of urban environments. While use of the courtyard layout in mosques shapes the uses of the space, it also invokes an entire cultural history, “unifying house with mosque, caravanserai with college, the individual parts with the whole. This unity is achieved through visual interaction of space, shape, and surface, complemented by their qualitative correspondences” (Ardalan & Bakhtiar, 1973, p. 68). The relationship between mosque architecture and other buildings within Muslim communities is a characteristic of the architecture that draws each mosque into dialogue with other cultural institutions such as caravanserais and madrasas, and also evokes historical relationships to the setting of the first mosque, the Prophet Muhammad’s home in Medina (Hillenbrand, 2004, pp. 24, 39). Each architectural element thus brings a history and associations—with accompanying narratives and silences—into a place, which interacts with the meanings written upon the whole.

A Seated View: Mosques as Sacred Spaces I further developed this holistic understanding of women’s mosques later in my Maldives trip, after coming back from the northern atolls, during a visit to another women’s mosque closer to Malé. I arrived at the mosque on a bright Maldivian morning and was invited to come into talk with the mudahim. She gave me permission to take pictures and left me alone

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for a few moments while talking to another woman in the courtyard. Having visited a number of mosques on this trip now, I had a good sense of spatial patterns and what I wanted to document. I immediately began walking around the one room mosque, taking pictures and cataloguing what I saw. There is the mihrab  , the lines on the floor are oriented in alignment with the walls , there is a well  , prayer mats  … When the mudahim came back inside, she watched me for a minute, then turned toward woman who had brought me there, and spoke. “She is suggesting that you sit down,” my friend told me, pointing to a place along the wall. The mudahim spoke again, “You will understand the mosque better if you sit in it.” I immediately sat down, chastened, and observed the mosque from that perspective. We subsequently had a good discussion, but I did not fully comprehend the main lesson until years later, sitting in another mosque in another country. It was then, while touring a large regional mosque in the USA and taking pictures for another project, that I mentioned to a friend that I wanted to get a new head camera mount so that I could convey the sense of walking through the mosque in one of my videos. “How strange,” my friend observed. “I’ve never thought of a mosque as a place to walk through. It’s a place to sit, pause, and reflect. When I’m in a mosque I always think of it in terms of where I’m sitting.” These comments recall two of the definitions of place alluded to in the last chapter—Cresswell’s places as “things to be inside of” and Tuan’s places as “pauses” (Cresswell, 2004, p. 10; Tuan, 2001, p. 6). While Cresswell’s definition of places as a container of activity at first seems to counter to Lefebvre’s agentive conceptualization of space, it does not have to limit our notions of places. To recognize place as a container of pauses, pivotal moments that give rise to the experiences within it, is not to claim that places are only containers. If we can avoid confining ourselves to this notion, conceptualizing place as a container of pauses encourages us to view the whole space as a unit, to experience its totality in an ontological sense rather than trying to break it up into component parts. Almost paradoxically, this seated view allows us to better recognize the mosque as perceived space, affording opportunity to recognize that your gaze is limited, to be confronted with the notion that actions that you take part in and observe may not be all of the functions of that place, to wonder about hidden nooks and crannies, and to recognize that there are conversations and events that you are not a

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part of from where you are sitting. This approach may also help viewers to access the mosque as a conceived space, as Hillenbrand argues that the unifying aesthetic of all mosques globally are the careful measurements and complex correlations that unify components of the building (Hillenbrand, 2004). A seated view also requires a person who is sitting, which means that these understandings of mosques are derived from specific people engaged in activity, rooted in ethnographically informed studies, and situated within their cultural and historical contexts such as in relation to other buildings as discussed earlier. This “sitting” view of the mosque therefore helps to ultimately comprehend mosques in their entirety, from a holistic perspective, and to embrace the silences in the spatial narratives we create about mosques as places. Thus, while it is useful to consider mosques in detail, at times breaking them up into parts as I have done earlier in this chapter—e.g., does a minbar make a mosque, what can we learn from the style of the minaret—considering these sites as whole places is critical as well. I would therefore like to take such an approach to perceive mosques as sacred spaces, and locate women’s mosques within that discussion. A mosque, or masjid, is most fundamentally (and literally) a place of prostration and prayer. The collective nature of these places is central as well. A number of Islamic religious texts—particularly hadith and their commentary—emphasize that mosques are religiously comprised not only through the activities associated with them, but also through a social element in these activities, an aspect of religion that transcends the individuals’ role in the mosque. For example, some of my informants spoke of mosque attendance in relation to a hadith from Sahih Bukhari, which teaches that prayer in congregation is twenty-five times more beneficial than prayer alone and that once you are heading to the mosque every step along the way becomes a blessing. These women suggested that the mosque is an exalted space due to the sharing of religious experiences; physical site plays a role in its symbolic construction as the import of moving toward, and entering, a mosque accentuates notions of a place being anchored by its location. The emphasis on the journey toward the mosque serves to underscore the notion that the mosque is as much a fixed destination with geographic coordinates as it is a gathering. Although women in the Maldives could pray at home, many mudahim noted in their interviews that women chose to come to the mosque as they find communal worship more personally satisfying and spiritually

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beneficial. The view of sacred spaces as shared places with communal significance has been developed in a number of anthropological works (e.g., Hirsch & O’Hanlon, 1995). For example, anthropologist Rachel Corr has demonstrated how the concept of lived religion can help explain sacred geography, focusing on religious culture in the Ecuadorian Andes to demonstrate how the presence and continued use of sacred spaces act as a marker of group identity (Corr, 2010). It is, as she points out, the accumulation of uses of these places that creates subjective understandings of them rather than any one particular feature or ritual; as people have personal religious experiences at a site that location becomes a part of larger narratives of community and belief, a “collective body of knowledge that shapes perceptions of the landscape” (Corr, 2010, p. 147). Places are not fragmented spaces of individual functions, but instead are the sum of their uses and meanings; furthermore, the spatial processes of perceived and lived spaces are both individually apprehended and a collective endeavor.

Defining Women’s Mosques The collective nature of sacred spaces requires attention to the cultural contexts of those spaces. To this end, we can step back and consider mosques from yet another perspective, through case studies of other spaces that have been called women’s mosques throughout the world. At the heart of this discussion is a series of questions about the definition of a women’s mosque. Is the women’s mosque ultimately a building, defined by specific architectural features or the material conditions of its construction? Is it a functional space, defined by patterns of behaviors in that location? Must it involve a historical tradition of Islamic practice? Are women’s mosques necessarily sites that act as containers for forms of women’s religious authority and power? All of these questions and more should occur to any person interested in pursuing the topic, for a simple definition—e.g., defining women’s mosques as Muslim places of worship for women—does not adequately address the range of possibilities associated with these spaces or distinguish them from the many other types of spaces that could be invoked using this definition (e.g., certain prayer rooms in airports or spaces in homes). A simplified definition of the women’s mosque may obscure relationships between the women’s mosque and other types of spaces that lend substance to the mosques. Furthermore, as I will cover later

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in this chapter and in even more detail in the next chapter, women’s mosque spaces are frequently distinguished by the activities they contain, and if activities of women’s prayer and religious leadership are to be included in a more comprehensive definition, then we cannot separate women’s mosque spaces from women’s mosque movements, and therefore must engage with conceptual as well as physical spaces. Thus, the challenge here is to bring together literature about women’s mosques to document their existence, while developing a better understanding of the various types of physical settings, cultural contexts, and historical processes that contribute to comprehending women’s mosques.

Patronage and Place Before addressing instances of specific women’s mosques in various cultural contexts, it is useful to acknowledge one use of the term that, while distinct from the manner in which it is used in this book, contributes an additional dimension to placing mosques. There is a long history of women acting as patrons of mosques in Muslim communities around the world, and these mosques were sometimes referred by women’s names or titles—e.g., “The Queen’s Mosque.” Cases of women’s patronage of mosques through history are too numerous to list comprehensively and many are well documented historically; even a review of few of the more prominent documented examples can demonstrate the chronological and geographic breadth of this phenomenon. The Mosque of Sitt Hadaq in Cairo, built in 740, is a famous example in Muslim histories of patronage; Sitt Hadaq’s patronage, as well as the fact that she had performed haj, is inscribed just above the door of the mosque (Williams, 1994). In Asia, women of high status in tenth to thirteenth centuries were known as patrons of varied religious public works that included shrines, madrasas, and mosques, as were the ruling class Timurid women in fifteenth-century Afghan society who funded mosque constructions (Arbabzadah, 2017; De Nicola, 2017). The Yeni Valide Mosque complex in Istanbul, constructed from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, was the product of patronage from two powerful female members of the imperial family, meant to commemorate their family’s power and legitimate the political regime (Thys-Şenocak, 1998). In the Maldives, several historical mosques of Malé were also built through the support of female patrons, including Endi Kabafanu Miskit, built by a sultan’s concubine named Mariyam, and Bodugalu

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Miskit, whose royal female patron was documented in lomaafaanu (Forbes, 1983, pp. 60, 67). Mosque patronage has long been a preferred method for charitable works for influential individuals in Muslim communities. The religious benefits of such charity are often explained in reference to hadith; for example, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim record the Prophet Mohammed as saying, “Whoever builds a mosque for Allah, then Allah will build for him a house like it in Paradise.” As mosques frequently contain other social services (e.g., schools, soup kitchens, and public baths), they have numerous social benefits to a community as well. The building of a mosque is also a monumental form of charity that serves to attest to the patron’s wealth and power; historical mosques frequently contained inscriptions with the names and details of the patron (as in the case of Sitt Hadaq). While the female patrons of these mosques did not, in most cases, use these mosques, they may be thought of as “women’s mosques” not in a functional or possessive sense, but in recognition of the roles that women’s agency and power played in their construction and administration. Each mosque that was designed, constructed, and/or renovated with the patronage of women represents a place where women have contributed to the site’s conceived spaces—the planned and professional aspects of space that not only represent power, but also shape the lives of those who use them. Including the notion of mosques constructed by female patrons in an inclusive definition therefore allows for a more holistic understanding of the concept of women’s mosques.

Women’s Mosques as Traditional Institutions—In China Returning to the basic—but incomplete—definition of women’s mosques as places where women worship, we can begin with what is perhaps the best-known case of women’s mosques, that of the Hui community of China, which is frequently (erroneously) described in popular and academic sources as being the only place in the world where women’s mosques exist. Hui Muslims have had separate mosques for women, called nusi, and female leadership within those mosques, dating back to the Ming dynasty. There are several academic sources that document women’s mosques in China from a variety of perspectives. One source of particular note is Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun’s

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The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam, which provides a thorough study of the topic, outlining how women’s mosques shape women’s religious practices in Hui communities (2000). In addition to providing a survey of known women’s mosques in the Hui community, Jaschok and Jingjun situate their study of women’s mosques in the context of both Islamic discourses about women’s authority and Chinese discourses about women’s knowledge and leadership. The authors’ explanation for the existence of women’s mosques in China, embraced by most scholarly reviewers, is that these mosques are atypical Muslim institutions made possible by the geographic isolation of Hui Chinese Muslim community and local cultural influences. This argument is similar to that of Élizabeth Allès, who has argued that women’s mosques among the Hui are linked to Chinese Buddhist and Daoist traditions of women’s associations and organizations (Allès, 2000). The historical origins of the Hui community are with traders from both the Silk (overland) and Spice (maritime) routes, although, as Gladney notes, most of the Hui communities in China today no longer live in the border zones associated with that trade (Gladney, 2003, p. 41). While Islam has been a part of China since it first came with these traders in the seventh century, Jaschok and Jingjun date the origins of nusi later, to the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century development of formal religious education centers for women; they suggest that the early nuzi jingxue (Islamic School for Women) evolved over time into women’s mosques run by nu ahong (female religious leaders) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, pp. 68–69). This history is central to defining Hui women’s mosques in global discourses about the topic; as Jacqueline Armijo has noted, Hui women’s mosques are unique in having a well-documented history (Armijo, 2009, p. 41). This history has lent a sense of legitimacy to nusi that separates them from other—newer or less clearly historically rooted—forms of women’s mosques found in other parts of the world. The exact numbers of women’s mosques in China are not known; not all Hui women’s mosques are officially registered with the government, government statistics do not distinguish between nansi (men’s mosques) and nusi (women’s mosques), and while some women’s mosques are registered independently, many others are considered a part of men’s mosques as the buildings are attached or semi-attached (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, pp. 15, 108). Furthermore, the division between men’s and women’s mosque spaces is not absolute in China;

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Gladney records that in some Hui communities the whole community— men, women, and children—all pray in the same mosque, particularly on holidays (Gladney, 2003, p. 62). Jaschok and Jingjun explain that there were approximately 30,000 registered mosques registered with the China Islamic Association in the late 1990s, and estimate that women’s mosques made up approximately one-seventh of the mosques in Hui communities; in Zhengzhou (the provincial capital of Henan) alone, there were eleven women’s mosques at the time, four of which were independent mosques (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, p. 15). Chinese governmental policies shape contemporary women’s mosques as legal institutions. Jaschok and Jingjun note several times in their book in that many women’s mosques in China have political and economic disadvantages when compared to men’s mosques (e.g., Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, p. 14). The government’s call for mosques to register in 1993 and 1995, however, allowed nusi to register independently from men’s mosques, gaining a legal status that translated into economic and social independence for many sites; Jaschok and Jingjun consider these policies to be responsible for the increase in women’s mosque site in the late 1990s (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, pp. 174–175). The Chinese Government has also strictly controlled religious education among Muslim communities in China, limiting the general growth of mosques as educational centers (Allès & Black, 2003). Women’s mosques in China have no minaret, and no call to prayer is issued from the mosque (Jaschok, 2012, p. 45). Gladney distinguishes between Hui women’s mosques and women’s prayer rooms, the latter being separate facilities for women to pray in larger mosque complexes or even within private homes (Gladney, 2003, pp. 71–72). He notes, however, that …[t]he issue of whether a prayer hall (libai tang) exclusively reserved for women is actually a ‘woman’s mosques” (nu si) is really a matter of semantics, since often mosques in China are referred to as ‘prayer halls” (libai tang). The real issue is whether the women are organized independently of the man’s mosque and if their mosque is considered independent. Usually, women’s prayer halls are adjacent to the main mosques, as in Chang Ying, or women are given a curtained section or outlying room of the main prayer hall in which to pray. But I have heard of at least one totally independent women’s mosque in Henan that is nowhere near a mosque that includes men (Arthur Barbeau, personal communication). Maria Jaschok (personal communication) has suggested that the 1994 International

116  J. H. FEWKES Women’s Conference in Beijing did much to galvanize Muslim women organizations nationally in China and this may lead to increased Muslim women activism, either in social welfare programs or even in new mosque building. (Gladney, 2003, p. 87)

Gladney’s description suggests that in defining nusi in China, the physical building itself as not as significant as its status as an institution. Of note too is his mention of the 1994 International Women’s Conference in Beijing, reminiscent of certain aspects of the development of nisha miskii in the Maldives discussed earlier. This acknowledgment of the role of transnational institutions in shaping women’s mosques in China suggests that we can consider the nusi as more than just local spaces. Gladney supports such a view by arguing that in some—but not all—Hui communities in China women’s mosques are part of a group of cultural institutions that help to connect Hui women beyond their villages to the wider world (Gladney, 2003, pp. 83–84). In this passage, we can also see that leadership and authority play an essential role in defining women’s mosques, an idea supported by Jaschok and Jingjun’s comment that, “the concept of the nusi widens to encompass meanings beyond a social spaces allocated to female Muslims to acquire religious learning and ritual mastery, to perform ablutions and pray collectively under the guidance of their own ahong” (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, p. 4). The nusi are thus clearly accepted as holistic sacred spaces.

Historical Hints—The Lakshadweep Islands The Lakshadweep islands, a union territory administered by the Government of India, are located north of the Maldives, close to Kochi on the southwest coast of India. Although oral traditions in the Indian Ocean suggest the presence of women’s mosques in the Lakshadweep islands, there are few textual mentions of such institutions, such as Robert Hawkes Ellis’ 1924 accounts of his visit to the Lakshadweep islands. Ellis noted that public mosques were attended by “all islanders” (whether he actually refers to both men and women is unclear here), and that “[s]ome of the richer families of Ameni have small private mosques for the women to which the women of the neighbouring houses also come. In these mosques the imam is always a woman” (Ellis, 1992, p. 66). Thus, Ellis provides a clear statement of women’s mosques in the

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Lakshadweep as being a place where only women pray, and a place where the religious leadership is female. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find many other sources to corroborate or elaborate upon this. Forbes noted briefly in a 1983 publication on Maldivian women’s mosques that women’s mosques also exist in “the Laccadives,” but did not elaborate further on the topic (Forbes, 1983, p. 73). Conversations with visitors to the islands suggest that women on Minicoy (Maliku) pray outside on beaches today (reminiscent of Hillenbrand’s earlier description of a mosque in its most primary form), although there are also spaces for women in the island’s main mosques. The religious history of the Lakshadweep islands has several similarities with the Maldives. The spread of Islam in the Lakshadweep islands is mythically attributed to a mass conversion of the islands after witnessing miracles performed by an Arab missionary named Ubaidulla sometime between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Dube, 1995, p. 170). However, several historical accounts suggest a much earlier and gradual process of conversion that involved traders and travelers from the Middle East, other parts of the Indian Ocean, and the Malabar coast of India. The Islamic heritage of the Malabar coast, said to play a major role in the religious history of the Lakshadweep islands, was heavily influenced by eighth-century and ninth-century contact with Hadrami traders from Yemen (Kadeeja, 2008). Forbes links the origins of the Shafi’i madhhab to “the Hadramawt and the Yamani [sic] lowlands,” and argues that the Shafi’i identity of both the Lakshadweep and Maldive islands “suggests that Islam, rather than spreading to the islands from the Indian mainland, may have passed directly across the Arabian Sea from Yaman [sic] and the Hadramawt” (Forbes, 1981, p. 62). Forbes has also noted that the trade routes that linked the Maldives and Lakshadweep with these areas were of much older provenance, having been used since the preIslamic era (Forbes, 1981). Anthropologist Dennis McGilvray writes that from the nineteenth-century or earlier movement of Sufi shaykhs between Lakshadweep islands and Sri Lanka bound the two areas together religiously; he also provides an example of a shaykh who traced his religious lineage back to a Yemeni sayyid merchant through female lines (McGilvray, 2014, pp. 254–255). Forbes linked the religious role of the tangals (religious leaders in Lakshadweep) to the sayids of Yemen, suggesting that the latter role became the former upon import to the Lakshadweep islands (Forbes, 1981, pp. 86–87). In addition to documenting women’s mosques, Ellis’ early twentieth-century description is

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noteworthy in that he records that small private mosque complexes in the Lakshadweep islands included a tank and graveyard (Ellis, 1992, p. 66). The presence of water tanks and graveyards adjacent to each of the numerous Lakshadweep mosques is reminiscent of the spatial components of historical Maldivian mosque complexes. Today, a majority of the Lakshadweep Sunni community continue to follow the Shafi’i school, although Muslims in the region have experienced doctrinal diversification through the introduction of varied transnational Muslim perspectives (Didier, 2004). Mosques in the Lakshadweep are also clearly linked to local traditions of women’s land rights and ownership. Much has been made in popular literature about the fact that the Lakshadweep islands are matrilineal. The traditions of gendered space here are shaped by the institution of taravad (matrilineal descent groups), and “visiting marriages,” where men would go to their wives’ families houses for dinner and the night, and then return their mother’s or sisters’ house for the day where they contributed their labor to their matrilineage (Dube, 1995, pp. 169– 170). A majority of mosques in the islands were traditionally “associated with and managed by particular taravads,” with each taravad reportedly maintaining its own mosque (Dube, 1995, p. 176). I have not found any sources other than Ellis’ that suggest that these mosques have female imams leading prayer, and contemporary accounts of mosque leadership in the region are clear that male leadership—albeit traced through the female line—is considered the norm in the Lakshadweep mosques.

Historical Hints—Mainland India Mainland India also provides scant evidence for historical women’s mosques, in spite of the similar influences from Indian Ocean trade, particularly along the Malabar coast. The only historical mention of interest pertaining to women’s mosques that I have found for mainland Indian comes from a volume by Henry Cousens, a British colonial official with the Archaeological Survey of Western India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cousens worked in Bijapur (Vijayapura, Karnataka) and documented regional mosques associated with the Adil Shahi dynasty from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. He writes of the Anda Masjid, which is built on the second floor of a two-story building, noting that,

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There is no minibar, or pulpit, in the mosque, and this may give us a clue to the true reason for its elevated position. Women’s mosques have no pulpit, for the reason that no man can enter them to address the worshippers. This was so in the case of the Makka Masjid in the citadel. The apartment below, closed as it could be by a single door, the staircase through the wall to the upper terrace, and a low parapet around the latter, would be all that was required to afford the necessary privacy. (Cousens, 1916, p. 78)

Cousens refers here to the Makka Masjid, another structure in the same city, which he also identifies as a women’s mosque based mainly on its lack of minbar as well. In these cases, he seems to rely on the absence of this architectural feature, as well as the privacy of the building, to designate the building as a place where only women prayed. Cousens does not provide any other evidence (historical or ethnographic) to support these claims.

Historical Hints—The Comoros Islands and Mayotte The Comoros is a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, located between Mozambique and Madagascar.2 While I have heard a few people casually mention the possible existence of women’s mosques in the Comoros, there is little written about such institutions. Malyn Newitt, a historian who studied Indian Ocean regional history in 1984, documented practices that hint women’s mosques might exist in the Comoros (Newitt, 1984). Newitt wrote that on Grande Comore island women had “a hut of their own for prayers or use the seashore” (the latter site reminiscent of beach prayers in the Lakshadweep), but that this was not universally found on all of the islands, as on the island of Anjouan “women are allowed into the mosques but must sit behind screens or curtains” (Newitt, 1984, p. 80). I would not have pursued these limited mentions further if not for the engaging history of the Comoros, which echoes that of both the Maldives and Lakshadweep. As in the other islands, Islam came to the Comoros Islands with traders from throughout the Indian Ocean region; Arab and African traditions, as well as those of other Indian Ocean areas, informed Islamic practice in the region. The presence of preIslamic and early Islamic period Hadrami communities in the Comoros links its Indian Ocean history to the Maldives and the Lakshadweep, as well as a broadly dispersed and historically significant Muslim diasporic

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community (Ho, 2010; Walker, 2002). Many regional histories of the Comoros emphasize the religious influence of the Shirazi community, a Persian community who settled on the islands in the tenth century and again in larger numbers in the mid-fifteenth century (Newitt, 1983). These communities are linked to the earliest archaeological evidence for mosques in the Comoros in the form of stone mosque foundations and mihrabs, which do not appear until the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Insoll, 1999, p. 193). Given the prevalence of other forms of structures in the region—e.g., thatch huts that do not show up as clearly in the archaeological record—this evidence suggests a possible architectural innovation more than the advent of mosque building in the region. By the early seventeenth century, strong ties with India—signified by the number of Comoros Islanders who spoke Guajarati and Hindi—offered other Islamic influences (Newitt, 1983, p. 149). Anthropologist Michael Lambek has written about this mixture of influence on the religious practice of Islam in Mayotte, noting that the regions’ culture brings together “Malagasy and Southeast Asian, Islamic and Swahili, Bantu, FrancoEuropean” influences (Lambek, 1990, p. 25). This been further complicated within the past century, as the twentieth century was a time of intense religious change in the Comoros, with sometimes conflicting influences from traveling African and Arab scholars (Ahmed, 2000, p. 16; Loimeier, 2018). The islands today are reportedly a majority Sunni, most of whom follow the Shafi’i fiqh. A number of cultural studies of the Comoros have suggested that a strict public/private dichotomy organizes gendered social life there, with homes and courtyards being thought of as women’s spaces and public areas—including public squares and mosques—conceived of as men’s spaces. Some authors have claimed that women were barred from the mosque and public square in the Comoros (Mroudjae and Blanchy, 1992, p. 178). Yet Lambek has written that in Mayotte while it was usually adult males that attended the Friday prayers at mosques, there was a separate side area for women mostly filled by older women (Lambek, 1990, p. 30; 1993, pp. 82, 179). Lambek also noted that women study Islam formally in Mayotte, but were prohibited from leading rituals (Lambek, 1990, pp. 25–26). More recent works have documented separate screened off areas for women in Comoros mosques (Ojo, 2015). There are a few books that suggest the existence of other women’s religious institutions, such as women’s prayer gatherings, in the region. For example, anthropologist Jon Breslar recorded that in Mayotte

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women gather in household courtyards to pray for funerals (Breslar, 1985, p. 261). Breslar’s archived interviews indicate that women in Mayotte participated actively in public life and had a sense of ownership of the village to the point where they married outside their village and brought their husbands into positions in the community using their own genealogical status (Breslar, 1971–1982). Women in the Comoros islands have traditionally owned land, passing it down matrilineally within matrilocal households, and participated in civic associations (Ottenheimer, 1994). The possibility of the existence of women’s mosque institutions in the Comoros islands is just that a possibility. Even if there were specific sites where women prayed in the region, we must ask how we can define them specifically as women’s mosques; as Lambek observes, some contemporary Muslims in the area consider it appropriate to pray in nonIslamic sites such as a church (Lambek, 2000, p. 67). The prospect of past women’s mosques in the Comoros region is an intriguing one, however, when considered as part of a narrative about the historical influence of Indian Ocean regional trade on Islamic practices in the region. The hints of women’s mosques in the Comoros are also suggestive of another link between a historical Hadrami presence and regional traditions of women’s mosques, making this an intriguing possibility as well.

Historical Hints—Coastal Kenya Given the pattern of historical hints of women’s mosques, we have seen thus far it should be of no surprise that there are mentions of a women’s mosque in the island and coastal areas of Kenya. Forbes noted that there was a women’s mosque on Lamu, an island just off the coat of Kenya, as well as one among the Bajun on the north Kenya coast (Forbes, 1983, p. 73). The Lamu community is predominantly of the Shafi’i sect. A collection of manuscripts housed in the Riyadha mosque in Lamu documents the Hadrami influence on this island as well, with late nineteenth-century settlements from the Hadramawt region linking Lamu’s religious history to other Indian Ocean areas (Bang, 2014). Of the two possibilities Forbes mentioned, the Lamu women’s mosque is better documented. Patricia Romero Curtin wrote about the Lamu women’s mosque, called the Mwenye Alawi mosque, in 1982. She reported that women told her they “do not normally enter any mosque in Lamu, except after their death, though a so-called women’s mosque

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operated for a few decades before being abandoned after World War II. Men could also attend there, but they were separated by a curtain” (Curtin, 1982, p. 339). Curtain’s description suggests that it was called the women’s mosque as it was the only mosque on the island that offered any space for women, not due to use exclusively by women. In contrast, Usam Isa Ghaidan’s (1974) thesis on Lamu architecture documents that the mosque was used exclusively by women, who used the space as a retreat to “spend some time in solitude when needed”; Ghaidan notes that that women’s mosque had been closed only recently (Ghaidan, 1974, p. 85). While I have not found mention of the mosque in any other historical records, several popular sources on the island claim that Mwenye Alawi mosque was built around 1850 and used only by women originally. As Curtin noted above, and Forbes and Ghaidan confirm, by the early 1980s, Mwenye Alawi mosque was used only by men on the island. The islanders of Lamu traditionally had a number of mosques associated with the various ethnic groups settled there, while spatial communities defined other mosques as each neighborhood had its own mosque (Ghaidan, 1974, p. 44). An article on the archaeology of stone towns on the Swahili coast mentions the possible presence of women’s mosques in the region far earlier, based on evidence from the eighth-century town of Shanga on Pate Island (located just north of Lamu), based on the work of archaeologist Mark Horton (Patel, 2014). Horton’s excavations uncovered a small mosque located in the beach area, which was originally thought to be a traveler’s mosque due to its location. Once Horton’s team excavated the site, however, they found the mosque layout puzzling. The building has a mihrab with a small prayer hall in front of it that is just big enough for one person, such as the imam; behind its wall is a long, larger room (Patel, 2014, pp. 48–49). Horton has suggested based on these architecture features that it could be a women’s mosque, which—the author of the article ironically notes—would be “unique in the Islamic world” (Patel, 2014, pp. 48–49). The summary of cultural patterns in Shanga sites reads almost as checklist of recognizable cultural patterns associated with the other Indian Ocean sites that have been discussed here, including the presence of matrilocal residence patterns suggesting strong cultural relationships between women and land ownership, and the regional significance of Indian ocean trade. This archaeological study of the Swahili coast does, however, add a new emphasis on the influence of African religious patterns on early Islamic patterns in the region.

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What Counts as a Mosque—Surau in Malaysia and Indonesia If we conceive of women’s mosques broadly as gendered prayer spaces—a potentially problematic approach given Lambek’s earlier point about prayer sites in Mayotte—another set of Muslim spaces to consider here is the surau of Malaysia. Surau are generally prayer spaces in Malaysia and some areas of Sumatra; they can be for men, women, or for both. There is some variation in the types of spaces invoked by this term. Surau may refer to prayer rooms in contemporary Malaysian commercial structures, such as in office buildings, malls; in this sense, the term is used similar to those of “men’s mosque” or “women’s mosque” in airports in the Middle East for men’s and women’s prayer rooms. However, surau are frequently prayer halls in stand-alone buildings as well. Many Malaysians tend to think of a surau as a small village mosque, and some authors refer them to as a “prayer room for women” (Merriam & Mohamad, 2000, p. 55). Reportedly, there are some women’s surau in Malaysian villages that are separate buildings that provide prayer spaces specifically for women. Surau may be used for daily prayers by either individuals and groups; curiously although a number of academic sources note that surau are not used for Friday prayer (suggesting that they are masjid rather than jami), Malay media contains mention of several accounts of Friday prayers at surau. Surau are, in general, community-based prayer structures, and indeed are neighborhood sponsored and funded, although they are formal religious institutions in Malaysia as government permission is required for their establishment (Zaleha, 1999, p. 9). Malaysian surau can be a meeting place for women’s groups and the location for Islamic study groups for women led by other women (Merriam & Mohamad, 2000, p. 55; Zaleha, 1999, p. 9; Zaleha & Hassan, 1997). Surau are so closely related to Islamic studies and learning that some authors consider the term to be synonymous with “pesantren,” a term for Islamic schools found in Indonesia and Malaysia. The presence of matrilineality in some communities that have surau, as well as the region’s documented historical connection to Hadrami traders and the Shafi’i jurisprudence, contributes to the historical patterns noted previously in other communities (Bonate, 2017; Ho, 2010, pp. 162–163). As the sites of teaching activities, surau are spaces linked to the roles of Malaysian female Islamic scholars/teachers, the ustazah

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(Frisk, 2009, p. 41). Ustazah are knowledgeable religious authorities that teach Arabic and religious studies. They worked within village education systems in precolonial Malay society, but now contribute to contemporary urban movements for women’s religious study groups in Malaysia, similar to some of the Egyptian groups mentioned in the next chapter (Frisk, 2009). The presence of the ustazah in surau indicates that surau can be female-led religious spaces. Surau are further contextualized as religious spaces when contrasted with another women’s religious space in Malaysia, that of the majlis doa. Anthropologist Sylva Frisk has identified majlis doa as rituals that create urban Malaysian religious spaces that are constituted by women, as women act as both organizers and performers of these Islamic rituals (Frisk, 2009, p. 153). Frisk argues that majlis doa create public women’s religious spaces, writing that women who organize these events do so in conjunction with the community; while the majlis doa may take place in a household, it is a collective ritual that, “requires the participation of the larger community, and is by no means a private matter” (Frisk, 2009, p. 158). Frisk therefore reasonably considers the majlis doa should not be relegated to the private space of the home. Yet, the creation of public spaces inside the home does not turn a home into a mosque; these are fundamentally different types of spaces with their own patterns of functions. In Frisk’s account above, the public nature of other spaces is underscored in contrast, by the ways in which spaces such as the mosque and religious classes contribute outside participants to the majlis doa. The surau then, as the presumed spaces of the mentioned religious classes and potentially as spaces synonymous with mosque, is further constructed as a public gendered Islamic space in relation to the public/private space of the majlis doa ritual. The surau are formal religious spaces dependent upon community practices to define the spaces functionally and are constituted as social spaces in part by women’s activities. Spatial practices associated with surau may also serve to delegitimize, control, and limit women’s access to Islamic practices as well. Surau may derive some of their cultural meaning as Islamic spaces from non-Islamic cultural traditions; one author notes that use of term “surau” links these buildings with pre-Islamic practices and structures in Malaysia as key structural features, such as being raised above the ground on posts, that invoke pre-Islamic indigenous Malay architecture (Bougas, 1992, pp. 90–92). Thus, through architectural signifiers, the gendered role of surau may associate women’s religious activities with pre-Islamic

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traditions. Furthermore, in the particular surau featured in Bougas’ article, while men and women pray together in the surau gendered access to the prayer space is quite literally spatially stratified; Bougas notes a case in which only men are allowed to use the door to enter the surau, and women are supposed to enter the building through windows located on the side of the mosque (Bougas, 1992, p. 96). While this is unheard of in other Muslim communities, and certainly not true of all Malaysian surau, the unique arrangement serves to remind us that architecture alone does not fully inform viewers about spatial practices; the behaviors at these sites may reorganize spatial arrangements in ways that redefine place.

What Counts as a Mosque—Jakka Jigeen in Senegal The jakka jigeen of Kenya provide another example of gendered prayer spaces that can help us better understand what a women’s mosque might be. Historian Muriel Gomez-Perez mentions jakka jigeen as a term for the women’s section of Senegalese mosques, which can be a separate area or building within a complex (Gomez-Perez, 2005, p. 123). Scholar Cleo Cantone defines jakka as daily prayer mosques, in contrast to jaama (Friday) mosques, noting that they were historically simple buildings made of straw or bamboo in Senegal and generally do not have the minarets that are used to identify jaama mosques (Cantone, 2006). Cantone has studied the process of creating spaces for women in Senegalese mosques and addresses the ideological role of these jakka jigeen, which she refers to as being “women’s mosques” (e.g., Cantone, 2009, p. 60). She argues that in the traditional Senegalese Sufi community the mosque is not a spatial dimension of women’s religious lives— instead women’s religious spaces included “native structures” such as saint’s tombs—but that “the recent infiltration of ‘Wahhabi’ ideas has given women greater access to public places of worship” (Cantone, 2002, p. 29). Mosques in Cantone’s Senegal are spatial embodiments of social trends, particularly women’s increasing demands for their rights to participate in the public religious community, and places dependent on historical contexts. In the Senegalese example, we see a tension between local Muslim spatial practices—restriction of women to mosque spaces and creation of culturally specific women’s religious spaces—and the spatial practices of a transnational religious movement that calls for increased inclusion

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of women in mosques. The global influences are felt in Senegal through both male and female participation in a popular Islamic reformist movement, whose members are referred to as “Ibadou” or “Ibadu.” Social markers of Ibadou are embodied by those who, “veil, wear a beard, and [or] pray with their arms crossed” (Cantone, 2002, p. 29). Cantone argues the changes displayed in Ibadou women’s hijabs are part of a trend that increases women’s social rights in the local Muslim community. Women have access to a religious education that allows them to quote hadiths to support their rights to attend mosque. Whereas younger women were previously excluded from the mosque as sexually dangerous beings, and older women were relegated to small buildings physically separated from the mosque, increased Islamic education for women has meant that new integrated mosque spaces are now being created for, and by, Senegalese Muslim women (Cantone, 2009, pp. 57–58). Cantone offers several examples of such changes associated with jakka jigeen. At one mosque in Dakar, a former women’s prayer room situated next to the mosque has been destroyed, and a new adjoining structure, designed by a female Ibadou architect, has been built. This “women’s space” as the author calls it includes a large window onto the main mosque which allows women to “participate visually in the Friday prayer” rather than being as marginalized as Cantone feels they were in the past (Cantone, 2002, p. 29; 2009, p. 66). The creation of new women’s spaces is not always through physical transformation, it is sometimes enacted by conceptual transformation as well. Cantone provides such example in her discussion of another mosque in Dakar, where a small prayer room for women in the courtyard of the men’s mosque has been renamed Mosquée Aisha. She writes, “[t]he connotations of the name are twofold: one refers to the historical figure of Aisha, reputed to have been a lady of learning, and the other makes a clear reference to the Sunni/Ibadou orientation of the establishment” (Cantone, 2002, p. 29). Thus, both the concept of jakka jigeen and their physical structures have been transformed by recent doctrinal movements and corresponding shifts in notions of gendered religious practice. Cantone indicates that some of the changes in Senegalese mosque spatial practice may be due to cultural diffusion rather than changes in the practices religious community. She notes that more mosques in Senegal are being built with two floors, even though traditionally Senegalese mosques only had one floor, to create an upper gallery for women, and considers these architectural changes to be a part of Middle Eastern cultural diffusion (Cantone, 2002, p. 29). She does, however,

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argue that such spatial arrangements can shape the meanings of practices, as the positioning of women above men in the mosque is thought by some Senegalese imams to confer a new sense of pride in women, which encourages them to attend mosque prayers more frequently (Cantone, 2009, p. 59). Senegalese jakka jigeen as described by Cantone are not women’s mosques in the sense of many of the other examples here; they are spaces carved out of—and formed as places in relation to—men’s spaces. Leadership within these spaces seems to be located wholly within the male areas of the mosque sites. Yet, several spatial themes remain relevant. We see clearly here how space can be used to include or exclude participants in prayer. Cantone demonstrates that the material conditions and/or physical production of spaces can play a role in the production of place; she describes traditional Senegalese mud-brick building practices as a community effort which involved women and therefore gave them a sense of ownership of the mosque space, in contrast to contemporary concrete construction methods (Cantone, 2009, p. 60). The notion that construction of religious spaces may impact the types of places these become for individuals is a significant one, and this insight highlights the unique contributions to understanding religious sites that may be gained by approaching their study from a spatially oriented perspective.

Women’s Mosques Initiatives—Gabiley, Somalia Gabiley, located in the northwestern area of Somalia, is the site of another claimed women’s mosque according to geographer Abdi Ismail Samatar (Samatar, 2005). This women’s mosque site is a building specifically constructed for women’s prayers. The Gabiley mosque is a fairly recent construction, built in the early 1970s by a group of women associated with a local women’s community center. Women in the area had previously prayed at home or in the back of mosques during Eid celebrations (Samatar, 2005, p. 238). Although Samatar does not mention historical precedent for such a building, he links the development of the Gabiley women’s mosque to regional precolonial gender relations and postcolonial education initiatives that allowed girls access to education. Samatar explains that the Gabiley women’s mosque was established as an “autonomous space that would allow women to join men in prayers” and a site for studying and learning about Islam (Samatar, 2005, p. 227). Prayers in the Gabiley women’s mosque were initially led by one of the

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women who helped to start it, a learned woman named Sheikh Marian who was religiously educated by her husband and father. During this time, Sheikh Marian was careful to situate herself slightly behind the male imam when leading women’s prayers in the women’s mosque (Samatar, 2005, p. 239). Later the men agreed to build a door between the women’s and men’s mosques to allow the women to follow the male imam; concerns over female prayer autonomy prompted increased female inclusion in mosque activities (Samatar, 2005, p. 240). Samatar stresses the spatial consequence of the Gabiley women’s mosque as a way for women to pray “in lines parallel to the men’s lines” rather than behind them (Samatar, 2005, p. 227). While considering the presence of the women’s mosque to be “implicit criticism of Islamic practice,” Samatar also feels that the social spaces that represent a “progressive Islamic alternative to a Euro-American centric view of women’s liberation” (Samatar, 2005, pp. 227–228). Samatar’s informants, however, were clear to identify the women’s mosque as a religious space, writing “[t]hese women noted that the mosque is not a women’s place, but a ‘Bayt Allah’ (House of Allah)” (Samatar, 2005, p. 239). This example helps draw our attention to the significance of spatial arrangements for prayer within mosque spaces, particularly in the form of prayer line arrangements, and raises a crucial distinction between the mosque as a site of social practice and the mosque as a sacred site belonging to the divine.

Contemporary Women’s Mosques—Communities and Spaces In the past few decades, a number of contemporary women’s mosques have been convened, constructed, and/or proposed in various countries around the world, including Afghanistan, India, England, Denmark, the USA, and other locations. Most of these contemporary women’s mosques claim the title of “women’s mosque” in offering both a place of worship for women and being led by a female imam, a combination of place and praxis reminiscent of several other historical cases considered in this chapter. Some of these places, such as the Women’s Mosque of America, are not physical sites but communities of worship; others, such as the Mariam Mosque in Copenhagen, identify themselves as communities with associated locations. The diverse individual circumstances and recent histories of these mosques suggest the need for further study.

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There are a few noteworthy spatial themes linked with these mosques. First, many of them do not have their own mosque buildings, but use rented or repurposed sites for prayer. The varying spatial circumstances in which most of these mosques are reportedly situated in—converted shops, community halls, basements of private homes, etc.—are reminiscent of early twentieth-century mosque communities in the USA. The repurposing of non-mosque sites as mosques suggests possible conflicts between conceived and perceived spaces, and highlights questions about how heterogeneous lived understandings are incorporated into coherent narratives of place. The non-building character of these “mosques” invokes Hillenbrand’s technical definition of the mosque as a functional, rather than physical, space. Even when not located in a mosque building, these mosques have spatial practices and circumstances that are strongly linked to physical mosque sites. For example, the Women’s Mosque of America is not a physical location, as the group meets for prayer and other activities in rented spaces. Yet, the organization has a strong spatial presence, grounded since inception in place building processes that are rooted in Islamic practice and the context of Muslim communities. M. Hasna Maznavi, the founder of the Women’s Mosques of America, explained in one interview, … I had a great mosque experience growing up, in Garden Grove mosque. Women were on the board, women and men prayed in the same space, my older sister was president of the Muslim youth group, and there were no barriers, as is the prophetic model. What ended up happening though was that once the mosque grew to such a large size, they renovated and they ended up building the new mosque in the style of another country’s culture. That meant having the dome on top of the mosque, and it meant putting the women upstairs. So now, instead of being with the entire congregation and the imam, now we were separated and cut off. We could look through a glass window, but we couldn’t be heard or seen. What was interesting was that even though this mosque was a beautiful, inclusive, warm, welcoming environment, slowly that architecture started to trickle down into the culture. (Elkhaoudi, 2014)

This narrative about the founding of this women’s mosque brings forward several recognizable themes of the construction of women’s mosques as places, including mosque patronage, cultural contexts of

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mosque architecture, and the ways that the physical layout of mosques shapes spatial practices to contribute to the meaning of these places. Contemporary women’s mosques play a significant role in global discourses on Muslim spaces, as they are regularly featured in global media, where they are discussed as “reformist,” “liberal,” or “progressive” mosques that signal change within the “Muslim world.”

Themes of Place In this chapter, I have brought together accounts of women’s mosques to define and interpret these spaces as Muslim places. While defining a space as a mosque may seem like a semantic task—and admittedly the semantic issues here have made this approach both necessary and unwieldy—it is also one with real-world implications, involving issues of power and access. Variations between women’s mosques spaces in the Maldives and these other case studies suggest that a simple typology of mosques is insufficient, as does an attempt to categorically define women’s mosques. A mosque is not simply a collection of architectural features, although parts such as the dome, minaret, qibla wall, mihrab, and minbar are all meaningful components that offer perspectives on the site. The presence or absence of particular details can convey symbolic information about the construction and uses of this Islamic space, that information is complicated by cultural variations; there is no placeless version of a mosque. This insight is most clearly born out in the case of the minbar as discussed earlier in this chapter. While the absence of a minbar in Tunis and historical Shafi’i village communities signified that a mosque was a local prayer area instead of a mosque for Friday prayers, suggesting a lack of site-specific religious leadership, symbolic minbar was found in South Asian prayer room areas that did not have religious leadership and/or Friday prayers. Additionally, the jami/masjid distinction and information about historical mosques that commonly lacked minbar complicate any reading of the lack of this mosque feature. Cousen’s claim about the status of the Anda and Mekka mosques of Bijapur as women’s mosques— resting in large part on the absence of a minbar—is therefore difficult to evaluate with the amount of information provided. Mosque features do, however, help to promote a recognition of the production of place as a diachronic process, reflecting the historical contexts of production as well as use, as demonstrated in the shared

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features—e.g., tanks and graveyards—of mosque complexes in the Indian Ocean, the national religious histories of jakka jigeen in Senegal, and the role of postcolonial education in the Gabiley women’s mosque. These features highlight the dialogical aspects of place construction, as each architectural element inserts a history—with its accompanying narratives and silences—into a place, interacting with the meanings written upon the whole. Women’s mosques are developed as places through dialogues between the conceived and perceived aspects of mosques in most of these cases. Attention to architectural and physical details can be a fruitful research approach as well; the case of the Shanga mosque in Kenya demonstrates how unexpected spatial arrangements can unsettle and provoke questions about what is “known,” while Bougas’ study of a Malaysian surau reminds readers that even mundane architectural features such as windows and doors cannot be interpreted without careful attention to actual use. The seated view of the mosque as a whole, engagement with the mosque as a holistic sacred site, also provides a useful perspective on women’s mosques. As Samatar’s informants remind readers, the mosque is frequently perceived of as primarily a sacred space, belonging to Allah, rather than as a social space belonging to people. The sacredness of the mosque resides in its divine nature, but is constructed in large part through the communal narratives of place building, the sum of lived experiences associated with the site and other linked spaces, past and present. A seated view of the mosque is meant to switch focus onto conceptual spaces and shared landscapes in lieu of the material conditions of physical spaces, better contextualizing contemporary women’s mosque movements that emphasize that mosques are not physical sites but communities of worship. Details of the Hui case study suggest that the discursive legitimacy of women’s mosques lies, in part, in having a well-documented history in clearly defined cultural contexts. In the case of the Hui nusi, those histories are articulated in the form of a minority community’s explanation of their identity, what Gladney calls the ethnogenesis of their ethnoreligious identity (Gladney, 2003). In many of the other cultural contexts, however, historical narratives about women’s mosques are missing, not clearly reliable, and/or fragmented. The silences in these narratives about women’s mosques may be considered in relation to regional religious history narratives, hence the significance of recognizing patterns in Indian Ocean religious histories such as the repeated historical presence

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of Hadrami traders and contemporary adherence to Shafi’i jurisdiction found in Lakshadweep, Comoros, coastal Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Maldives. For example, Michael Lambek’s argument that these historical influences were part of the spread of religious knowledge in the Indian Ocean that occurred through an “acceptance” of rather than “conversion” to Islam—integration of ideas in contrast to change—provides a possible explanatory model to contextualize women’s mosques regionally (Lambek, 2000). These histories demonstrate that women’s mosques need not be thought of as primarily local phenomenon. The historical narratives of Indian Ocean trade suggest that women’s mosques must be understood in relation to transnational histories—even when not explicitly mentioned in a majority of those histories—as do the cases of the nusi in China, jakka jigeen in Senegal, and women’s mosque in Somalia in other ways. The Hui nusi example also suggests that contemporary politics, national and international, may configure women’s mosques, an idea supported by evidence from the Maldives. This influence need not be in the form of governmental legitimation; whether existing as independent organizations (which Gladney suggests as key among the Hui nusi), community-based establishments (e.g., the Women’s Mosque of America), or formal legal entities recognized by the government (e.g., in the Maldives and Malaysia), women’s mosques are all institutions with bureaucratic structures. Many of these case studies call attention to the ways in which the perceived spaces of women’s mosques, which people experience based on everyday life and perception, are physical and agentative. As such, these places are clearly constructed in large part by human use—including associated functions, behaviors, roles, relationships, etc.—in conjunction with their physical and material settings. Women’s patronage of mosque constructions represents a form of women’s power and authority in mosque place construction, and as in Cantone’s Senegalese study women’s involvement in constructing mosques can contribute to the development of women’s spaces. Yet, women’s patronage is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a space a “women’s mosque.” The role of women in a social collective, religious leadership of prayer, and authority of religious knowledge all play a powerful role here. This is why, the social role of women and their taravad in the Lakshadweep, women’s land and descent roles in Comoros, and the interplay between men’s and women’s religious authority in the women’s mosque in Gabiley are relevant

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in characterizing women’s mosques. Prayer leadership and religious authority—rooted in knowledge or elsewhere—are also crucial concepts. In discourses about historical and contemporary women’s mosques, the presence of a female prayer leader is cited as if it were sufficient for defining a women’s mosque and at times queried as if it were a necessary condition, requiring a more detailed examination of such collective engagements and individual roles.

Notes 1. Hillenbranduses the term “technically” here in much the same manner that he does in other parts of the book—such as in the earlier quote— to indicate a contrast between practice (actual) and theory (technical) (Hillenbrand, 2004). Thus, we can read this statement as one that recognizes that the mihrab plays, in the typical mosque, a symbolic role that extends beyond that of memory aid and qibla marker. 2. The nation of the Comoros includes several islands; in addition to those commonly recognized, the government also claims the adjacent island of Mayotte, a claim that is contested internationally. Mayotte is currently administered by France and is included here as a part of the cultural area.

References Ahmed, A. C. (2000). Dacwa in the Comoros Islands. International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World Newsletter, 6(1), 1. Allès, É. (2000). Musulmans de Chine: Une Anthropologie des Hui du Henan. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Edues en Sciences Sociales. Allès, É., & Black, M. (2003). Muslim Religious Education in China. China Perspectives, 45, 21–29. Arbabzadah, N. (2017). Women and Religious Patronage in the Timurid Empire. In N. Green (Ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam (pp. 56–70). University of California Press. Ardalan, N., & Bakhtiar, L. (1973). The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armijo, J. (2009). A Unique Heritage of Leadership: Muslim Women in China. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 10(1), 37–45. Asfour, O. S. (2016). Bridging the Gap Between the Past and Present: A Reconsideration of Mosque Architectural Elements. Journal of Islamic Architecture, 4(2), 77–85.

134  J. H. FEWKES Babou, C. A. (2005). Contesting Space, Shaping Places: Making Room for the Muridiyya in Colonial Senegal, 1912–1945. The Journal of African History, 46(3), 405–426. Bang, A. K. (2014). The Riyadha Mosque Mansucript Collection in Lamu: A Hadrami Tradition in Kenya. Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 5(2), 1–29. Bloom, J. (1989). Minaret: Symbol of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonate, L. J. K. (2017). Islam and Matriliny Along the Indian Ocean Rim: Revisiting the Old “Paradox” by Comparing the Minangkabau, Kerala and Coastal Norther Mozambique. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 48(3), 436–451. Bougas, W. (1992). Surau Aur: Patani Oldest Mosque. Archipel, 43, 89–112. Breslar, J. (1971–1982). Papers of Jon Haskell Breslar. Collection NAA.2007-04. Smithsonian Institution. National Anthropological Archives. Breslar, J. (1985). An Ethnography of the Mahorais (Mayotte, Comoro Islands) (PhD thesis) University of Pittsburgh. Burton-Page, J. (2008). Indian Islamic Architecture: Forms and Typologies, Sites and Monuments. Leiden: Brill. Cantone, C. (2002). Women Claiming Space in Mosques. ISIM Newsletter, 11, 29. Cantone, C. (2006). A Mosque in a Mosque: Some Observations on the Rue Blanchot Mosque in Dakar and Its Relation to other Mosques in the Colonial Period. Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 182, 363–387. Cantone, C. (2009). The Shifting Space of Senegalese Mosques. In M. Diouf & M. Leichtman (Eds.), New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power (pp. 51–70). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Corr, R. (2010). Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Cousens, H. (1916). Bijapur and Its Architectural Remains, with an Historical Outline of the ‘Adil Shahi Dynasty’ (Vol. XXXVII). Mumbai: Government Central Press. Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Curtin, P. R. (1982). The Sacred Meadows: A Case Study of “Anthropologyland” vs. “Historyland”. History in Africa, 9, 337–346. De Nicola, B. (2017). Mongol Women’s Encounters with Eurasian Religions. In B. De Nicola (Ed.), Women in Mongol Iran (pp. 182–241). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Didier, B. J. (2004). Conflict Self-Inflicted: Dispute, Incivility, and the Threat of Violence in an Indian Muslim Community. The Journal of Asian Studies, 63(1), 61–80. Dube, L. (1995). Matriliny and Islam in Lakshadweep. India International Centre Quarterly, 22(2/3), 168–180.

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Elkhaoudi, S. (2014). Women’s Mosque of America: In the Founder’s Own Words. Retrieved from http://muslimgirl.com/10157/womens-mosque-americainterview-m-hasna-maznavi/3/. Ellis, R. H. (1992). A Short Account of the Laccadive Islands and Minicoy. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Forbes, A. (1981). Southern Arabia and the Islamization of the Central Indian Ocean Archipelago. Archipel, 21, 55–92. Forbes, A. (1983). The Mosque in the Maldive Islands: A Preliminary Historical Survey. Archipel, 26, 43–74. Frishman, M., Khan, H.-U., & Asad, M. A. (2007). The Mosque: History, Architectural Development & Regional Diversity. London: Thames and Hudson. Frisk, S. (2009). Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ghaidan, U. I. (1974). Lamu: Case Study of the Swahili Town (MA, thesis). University of Nairobi. Gladney, D. C. (2003). Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Gomez-Perez, M. (2005). L’islam Politique au Sud du Sahara: Identités, Discours et Enjeux. Paris: Karthala. Hakim, B. S. (2013). Arabic Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles. London and New York: Routledge. Hillenbrand, R. (2004). Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, E., & O’Hanlon, M. (Eds.). (1995). The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Ho, E. (2010). The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Insoll, T. (1999). The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. Oxford and Malden, AM: Blackwell. Jaschok, M. (2012). Sources of Authority: Female Ahong and Qingzhen Nusi (Women’s Mosques) in China. In M. Bano & H. Kalmbach (Eds.), Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (pp. 37–58). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Jaschok, M., & Jingjun, S. (2000). The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own. Richmond and Surrey: Curzon. Kadeeja, P. (2008). The Arabs in East West Trade: A Study in Political, Economic, and Social Interactions 9th to 15th Century (PhD thesis). University of Calicut, Calicut. Kuban, D. (1974). The Mosque and Its Early Development. Leiden: Brill. Lambek, M. (1990). Certain Knowledge, Contestable Authority: Power and Practice on the Islamic Periphery. American Ethnologist, 17, 23–40. Lambek, M. (1993). Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

136  J. H. FEWKES Lambek, M. (2000). Localizing Islamic Performances in Mayotte. In D. Parkin & S. Headley (Eds.), Islamic Prayer Across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque (pp. 63–98). London: Curzon. Loimeier, R. (2018). Islamic Reform in Twentieth-Century Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McGilvray, D. B. (2014). A Matrilineal Sufi Shaykh in Sri Lanka. South Asian History and Culture, 5(2), 246–261. Merriam, S. B., & Mohamad, M. (2000). How Cultural Values Shape Learning in Older Adulthood: The Case of Malaysia. Adult Education Quarterly, 51(1), 45–63. Mroudjae, S., & Blanchy, S. (1992). The Status and Situation of Women in the Comoros. New York: United Nations Development Fund for Women. Newitt, M. (1983). The Comoro Islands in Indian Ocean Trade Before the 19th Century. Cahiers d’Ãtudes Africaines, 23(89/90), 139–165. Newitt, M. (1984). The Comoro Islands: Struggle Against Dependency in the Indian Ocean. Aldershot: Gower. Ojo, A. (2015). Comoros, Federal Islamic Republic of the (The Union of the Comoros/Union des Comores). In T. Falola & D. Jean-Jacques (Eds.), Africa: An Encyclopedia of Culture and Society (pp. 256–283). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Ottenheimer, M. (1994). Marriage in Domoni: Husbands and Wives in an Indian Ocean Community. Salem, WI: Sheffield. Patel, S. S. (2014). Stone Towns of the Swahili Coast. Archaeology, 67(1), 42–49. Samatar, A. I. (2005). The Women’s Mosque in Gabiley. In G. W. Falah & C. Nagel (Eds.), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender Religion and Space (pp. 226–248). Philadelphia, PA: Guilford Press. Song, D. (2016). Ummah in Seoul: The Creation of Symoblic Spaces in the Islamic Central Masjid of Seoul. Journal of Korean Religions, 7(2), 37–68. Thys-Şenocak, L. (1998). The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex at Eminönü. Muqarnas, 15, 58–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/1523277. Tuan, Y.-F. (2001). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Walker, I. (2002). From Moroni to Mukalla: Hadhramis on the Island of Ngazidja (Comoros) and in the Hadhramhout. Journal des Africanistes, 72(2), 111–121. Williams, C. (1994). The Mosque of Sitt Hadaq. Muqarnas, 11, 55–64. https:// doi.org/10.2307/1523209. Zaleha, S. (1999). Surau and Mosques in Malaysia. ISIM Newsletter, 3(2), 1. Zaleha, S., & Hassan, S. (1997). Constructions of Islamic Identities in a Suburban Community in Malaysia. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 25(2), 14.

CHAPTER 6

Locating Women’s Roles

As we have seen in Tuan’s and Lefebvre’s human-centered discussions of place, understanding a place requires attention to the people who produce, make use, reproduce, etc., those spaces. Lefebvre reminds us that any inquiry into place is the product of a dialogue between space and agents and therefore requires asking the question “by whom?” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 142). Thus, we turn our attention in this chapter to women’s roles in the mosque, particularly women’s leadership roles in prayer and other mosque-based activities, a frequently debated topic. In non-Muslim media, particularly in the USA and Europe, the topic is often a part of oversimplified media dialogues about the social status of women in Muslim communities and the role of a so-called moderate Islam in world Muslim communities. Regardless of global geopolitical interest in the status of Muslim women, the question of women’s space in mosques is not simply one of social equality, but also an issue with serious spiritual implications. Prayer is central to women’s spiritual roles in Islam as salat (prayer) is a core Islamic belief used to define an individual as Muslim, as a “believer”; through discussions of prayer roles Muslims explore the notion of core spiritual differences between a Muslim man and woman. Thus, as Beth Buggenhagen points out while discussing her work in West Africa, there is a need for increased scholarly attention to the ways in which debates about women’s participation are not only about gender roles, but “central to their articulation of what it is to be a good Muslim” (Buggenhagen, 2009, p. 191). © The Author(s) 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0_6

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Within Islamic studies and Muslim communities, discourses of the gendered dimensions of prayer frequently draw upon the Qur’an and hadith as authoritative sources through which to interrogate whether women’s leadership of prayer—in mixed gender and female only congregations, evaluated individually as distinct scenarios—is religiously permissible and desirable (see, eg., Elewa & Silvers, 2010; Mattson, 2008; Reda, 2005; Shakir, 2008; Silvers, 2008). While recognizing the significance of such a debate, it is not my aim to focus here on positions in Islamic orthodoxy on the permissibility of women leading prayers and/ or holding other positions of authority as a doctrinal issue, although I encourage readers to familiarize themselves with the religious literature and concepts frequently used in these discussions (e.g., Aslan, Hermansen, & Medeni, 2013).1 As an anthropologist I am focusing on what has been documented as occurring in Muslim communities and the lived experiences associated with that social data.2 Thus, my goal in this chapter is to develop a sense of what religious scholarly and leadership roles exist for Muslim women and investigate the spatial dimensions of such roles in order to better understand the mudahim of the Maldives. To this end, I draw upon varied sources on Muslim women’s religious leadership from many other parts of the world—focusing particularly on Asian examples—to consider the broad range of women’s religious roles in Muslim communities. As Jacqueline Armijo has noted, numerous women in early Islam actively engaged with their communities as scholars and teachers, a phenomenon that lasted until the sixteenth century (Armijo, 2009, p. 41). Thus, there is a long history of female scholars of Islam, one that has been most notably documented in Mohammad Akram Nadwi’s biographical dictionary Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam, a 40 volume work that contains biographies of more than 9000 female religious scholars (Nadwi, 2013). Contemporary studies have also detailed a number of cases of women leaders and their contributions to religious practice, many of which have a long historical precedence (e.g., Bano, Kalmbach, & Louis, 2012). One example of such a case that immediately comes to mind is that of the murshidah of Morocco, who are state recognized religious preachers and counselors, trained and certified by the Moroccan Government. Margaret Rausch has noted that while their presence in Morocco is fairly recent, their work is positioned within a long history of female scholarship, women’s scholarly roles in scholarly families, and female patronage of Islamic sites in the country

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(Rausch, 2012). Another strong example of contemporary Muslim women’s scholarly religious roles is found in Mona Hassan’s studies of the bayan vaizler of Turkey, female preachers employed by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, that can, among other tasks, answer religious questions for callers to the “fatwa hotline” on behalf of the office of the Central Muftiate in Istanbul (Hassan, 2011, 2012). The bayan vaizler have formal degrees in Islamic studies; they do not lead prayers as imams, but do preach in mosques to men and women (Hassan, 2011, pp. 463–464, 456). These are just two examples; given the wide range and long history of scholarly roles for women in Muslim communities around the world, it would be impossible to cover all of them here. Instead, I will now explore here a few examples particularly from Asian Muslim communities that offer insights into Muslim spatial practices, foreground the relationship between mosque spaces and women’s religious work, and highlight patterns of women’s religious leadership that can shed further light on the Maldivian case.

The Otinchalar of Uzbekistan Anthropologist Svetlana Peshkova has studied the role of the otinchalar, female religious authorities in the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan, while conducting two years of ethnographic research in the region (Peshkova, 2009). In an article, she describes these women as informal religious leaders, whose work includes teaching religion classes, leading ritual practices, and offering “socio-religious” advice (Peshkova, 2009, pp. 6–12). Deniz Kandiyoti and Nadira Azimova, scholars in gender and development studies, contrast the role of the otinchalar with that of the dastarkhanji; both are explained as female Uzbek ritual specialists; however, only the otinchalar have Islamic knowledge and authority in women’s rituals. Dastarkhanji—a term derived from the word “dastarkhan,” or tablecloth—are ritual specialists with a focus on the ceremonies themselves; the dastarkhanji do not have religious knowledge but instead possess social knowledge and expertise in ceremonial behavior (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 334). Thus, in women’s religious rituals the otinchalar and dastarkhanji work together, each performing their own tasks. In one ritual, the dastarkhanji might organize the event details such as seating, while the otinchalar recites prayers and reads passages from the Qur’an (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 334). In such a way, Kandiyoti and Azimova note, the two female ritual specialists

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“play key roles both in the transmission of ritual observance and practices and in the day-to-day reproduction of communal life” (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 329). Other research has suggested that all of these women’s roles can be traced back to pre-Islamic shamanistic practices (Basilov, 1994, p. 274). Education is a key component of the otinchalar’s identity and role in the community as a specialist in Islamic knowledge. The otinchalar’s own educational background has traditionally been informal. Peshkova notes at one point in her article that otinchalar are frequently homeschooled or self-educated in religious affairs rather than formally trained (Peshkova, 2009, pp. 6–8). Yet in her earlier dissertation work on the same subject Peshkova recounted ethnographic vignettes that demonstrated that some otinchalar receive training conducted by another otinchalar (Peshkova, 2006, p. 119). Kandiyoti and Azimova confirm that otinchalar have traditionally not had the same formal education as male religious scholars in the community, noting that they did not have access to formal madrasas for learning; they point out that kinship relations shape these women’s learning, as many otinchalar were descended from mullahs and clerical families that transmitted Qur’anic knowledge orally (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 334; Sultanova, 2000). The otinchalar derive authority from their knowledge of Islamic texts and classical Central Asian literature. More recently, the contemporary revival of madrasas in Uzbekistan has made formal religious education available to women, potentially changing the role (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 344). The most common role for otinchalar in religious settings is that of a teacher, and according to one informant Peshkova interviewed, the term originates from the colloquial word for teacher, “otincha” (Peshkova, 2006, p. 15). The otinchalar only teach religious studies such as recitations of the Qur’an to women and girls, and were reportedly the only providers of women’s education in Uzbekistan under imperial Russia (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 334). Peshkova writes that women in the Ferghana valley do not attend mosque for prayers and demonstrates that the religious authority of the otinchalar is not associated with mosque spaces (Peshkova, 2006, pp. 71–72). Their relevant spaces are, instead, the home and the neighborhood; homes are sacralized and remade into public spaces, with the neighborhood (mahallah) as a social setting for the skills of an otinchalar (Peshkova, 2006, pp. 119, 126). Yet the otinchalar do not reside fully in the private sphere; while they are not formal leaders, they are legitimate,

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officiating large women’s gatherings for events such as birth, marriages, and deaths. Their roles have political dimensions and are shaped by political contexts, as shown even by the domestic nature of the otinchalar’s work, which Kandiyoti and Azimova consider to be a result of Soviet anti-religion campaigns before Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991 that allowed only for folk practices and religious traditions associated with private domestic practices (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004, p. 331).

The Pandei of the Philippines In another anthropological study, this time among the Sama of Simunul Island in the Philippines (Horvatich, 1994), Patricia Horvatich has written about the role of women called pandei. Pandei are ritual specialists who, as Horvatich writes, …perform a wide range of activities, all of which are defined as Islamic. For example, pandei know how to heal and know the art of midwifery; they are skilled in making charms and removing curses; they perform all life-cycle rituals for women and children (with the exception of the male circumcision); and pandei play important roles in rituals of death by preparing the bodies of girls and women for burial, “holding” the spirits of the dead, and praying for their souls. (Horvatich, 1994, p. 814)

Horvatich’s pointed comment that all of these activities are considered Islamic by the Sama community is noteworthy, as some—such as ­interacting with charms and curses—would not be thought of as such from other cultural perspectives. At first glance one might assume that healing and midwifery were skills pandei held in addition to their religious roles—as a sort of “wise woman” figure in village mythologies— however, Horvatich is explicit here that these are also considered a part of Islamic practice among the Sama. While pandei are therefore female religious practitioners with crucial socioreligious roles in their communities, whether they are also considered leaders is unclear. Horvatich is clear about the limitations on the role of the pandei, explaining that the women do not perform mosque rituals such as issuing the call to prayer and khutbah, public prayer recitations, and using the tasbi (prayer beads) to recite the names of Allah (Horvatich, 1994, p. 814). From the Sama perspective, there are physical, social, and spatial distinctions between gendered religious

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practitioners. The pandei seem to be excluded from religious events in the public sphere in general. The role of religious knowledge and Islamic scholarship in the work of the pandei is unclear in Horvatich’s work, and I have not found any other currently published studies about pandei available. Other sources on Islam in the Philippines mention female Islamic scholars that are not called pandei, suggesting that formal Islamic scholarship is a distinct category of experience (e.g., Antonio, 2003, p. 35). Horvatich does mention that pandei become practitioners “after an apprenticeship with a local teacher” but does not specify whether that teacher is a pandei also, or is a male practitioner (Horvatich, 1994, p. 814). Given the specialized knowledge of the pandei, as well as their women-centered work such as midwifery, it is highly probable that the apprenticeship is with another pandei. The close relationship between the history and practice of Islam in Indonesia and the Philippines suggests that in spite of their seemingly localized roles, we might think of the pandei in relation to the nyai of Indonesia, discussed next, as well as contextualize their role in larger transnational flows of the diffusion of Islam through maritime trade.

The Nyai and Muballigha of Indonesia In Java, Indonesia, the terms nyai and muballigha are used to refer to women in Islamic scholarly and/or leadership roles. Some sources suggest that muballigha (female preacher) is, like ustada (female teacher), simply a term for one of the roles that nyai can take on in their work (Anwar, 2013, p. 212). Accounts from Javanese women contend that each of these words is a title for a type of practitioner, that there muballigha who are not nyai, and vice versa. Based on the variety of ways of discussing these two terms, it is likely that they have meanings that vary widely, both geographically and chronologically. Nyai are often associated with pesantrens, traditional religious boarding schools that offer a combination of religious and secular subjects to students. They are frequently the teachers or heads of girls’ pesantrens, although some work in coed pesentren (Srimulyani, 2012). The term nyai can be used, however, in various ways. In one interview I conducted in Indonesia in 2006, an NGO staff member working with pesantren in Jakarta differentiated between ustad and ustada, male and female teachers, and kyai and nyai, male and female preachers. She pointed out that

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nyai may be ustada, but not all nyai are ustada, and argued that what makes a woman a nyai is that she has a community of followers. In contrast, Ann Kull has written that while kyai and nyai are parallel terms the former requires knowledge of Islam while the latter does not; many nyai have extensive Islamic education, but it can also be an honorary term for the wives or daughters of kyai (Kull, 2009). The tension between these varied uses of “nyai” is perhaps reconciled by its recent history, as a number of accounts suggest that nyai have only within the last 50 years become commonly conceptualized as Islamic scholars and teachers. In a 2006 conversation during a meeting in Jakarta, Dr. Lily Zakiyah Munir, one of the leading scholars on gender and Islam in Indonesia, recounted to me a family story that illustrated these changes in recent Indonesia history. When her mother grew up in Sepak, East Java, educational opportunities for girls were limited. Her mother was married young, in her early teens, and was illiterate at the time of her marriage. Munir’s father was a kyai (male religious scholar and leader of a pesantren) and decided to address his wife’s lack of education by teaching her. He wanted to teach other women in the village as well, but it was considered inappropriate by other members of their community. Munir’s parents decided that each day after her father taught her mother, they would push the blackboard to women’s section and her mother would then teach what she had just learned to the girls and women of the town. Munir’s mother was not only able to complete her Islamic studies this way, but became a successful scholar in her own right who later became an Islamic judge and a national board member of Nahdat ul-‘Ulama’s women’s wing, the Muslimat Nahdat ul-‘Ulama. In such a way, Munir’s parents transformed the meaning of the title “nyai” in their own lives. This story illustrates changes that took place more generally in the early twentieth century for Muslim women in Java. Today nyai are generally recognized as religious teachers; they also as Anwar confirms are “knowledge producers” and sometimes lead groups of women in prayer, especially within the pesantren complex (Anwar, 2013, p. 211). Pesantren, as governmentrecognized schools, are formal institutions within the public sphere. The religious focus of pesantren education is often reinforced spatially in the school complexes; upon visits to pesantren in Jakarta, I have noted spatial practices such as the presence of signs posted outside explicitly marking pesantren as Islamic areas in which Islamic dress is required, a mosque prominently placed at the center of the complex layout, and areas reserved for the grave sites of the religious founders of the school.

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In addition to their work within the schools, nyai sometimes act as preachers outside of the pesantren complex, particularly within the households of the associated communities. While attending a neighborhood religious event in Jakarta, I had the chance to observe two nyai and their roles in the gathering. The prayers were conducting in a family household, in two rooms—one for male guests and the other for female guests. Inside the women’s room, there were approximately 28–30, two of whom were pointed out to me and identified as the nyai. The hosts had set up a loudspeaker system in the house, with speakers and two microphones in the women’s room. At the beginning of gather, a man from the other room led prayers in both rooms, over the speakers; male and female guests followed these prayers. Then, the system between the rooms was shut off and the nyai began leading prayers in Arabic, followed by salawat (songs in praise of the Prophet Muhammad). Each woman ended individual sermons in the Indonesian language. Muballigha lead study groups that meet either in mosques or homes and preach mainly to groups of women (Kull, 2009, p. 33). One biographical sketch of a twentieth-century Indonesian muballigha associated with ’Aisyiyah—the women’s branch of the Muhammadiyah organization—documents that the Muhammadiyah opened religious schools for women in the 1920s that trained muballigha, that muballigha were active in the mid-twentieth century, and that senior muballigha may also educate and train junior ones (van Doorn, 1997).

The Ahong of China The female ahong of the Hui community in China are frequently discussed in conjunction with the Hui nusi, or women’s mosques, as female imams of these spaces. Their roles and spaces are intimately linked through historical narratives as well; Jaschok argues that the seventeenth-century formal religious education centers for women, which produced the female ahong, evolved over time into women’s mosques (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, pp. 68–69). In the Hui community, the term “ahong”—which can refer to males or females, but will refer to females for the rest of this section unless otherwise noted—is more commonly used for religious leaders than “imam” and has been used to refer to any ulema—Islamic scholars—in China since the eighteenth century (Jingjun & Jaschok, 2014, p. 642).

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The religious roles of female and male ahong are similar. Erie writes that the male ahong is an imam (prayer leader) and khatib (person who gives the Friday sermon) (Erie, 2014, p. 548). Jaschok points out that the same is true for many female ahong, but then notes that some rites “go beyond” the female ahong’s religious authority; for these, she invites male ahong for assistance (Jaschok, 2012, pp. 42–43). The boundaries of the ahong’s ritual role may involve ceremonies such as weddings and funerals, a limitation that may be changing among younger ahong (Jaschok, 2012, p. 42). Within the women’s mosque, ahong are responsible for religious duties; mosque administration is managed by an elected mosque management committee, the shetou or sheshou, which are “the most pious, learned and capable women in local congregations” esteemed by the ahong and mosque members (Jaschok, 2012, p. 43; Jingjun & Jaschok, 2014, pp. 643, 649). Overall, Jaschok argues, the use of the term “imam” for an ahong accurately reflects her “formal rank and contractual status with respect to a mosque or other Islamic institution” (Jaschok, 2012, p. 40). At the same time, this status can vary considerably between institutions. As some nusi are branches of men’s mosques, the ahong at those institutions have more limited institutional powers; in such cases, their salaries are paid by the men’s mosque association and they can be fired for not following instructions from the men who run those institutions (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, pp. 12–13). As noted above, the identity of the ahong is closely tied to Islamic knowledge and education. Prior to the seventeenth-century development of madrasas for women in China, the ahong gained access to religious knowledge and training through kinship networks, as the daughters or wives of male scholars (Jaschok, 2012, p. 41). Today the domestic unit and kin can still contribute to an ahong’s education; for example, Jingjun and Jaschok write that one ahong they interviewed had learned Islamic teachings from her father and grandfather at home before being taught by an ahong at a women’s mosque, while another studied with her mother and then later from a women’s mosque (Jingjun & Jaschok, 2014, pp. 645–647). In addition to having a long history, the formal schools associated with women’s mosques have traditionally had a unique curriculum, including Arabic and Persian language texts. Jingjun and Jaschok explain that in the late 1980s when the Chinese Muslim community “were reconnecting with the global ummah,” the women’s use of Persian texts was seen as inappropriate, and female

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students training at women’s mosques to become ahong were encouraged to take classes with male students to have access to the study of Arabic under male ahong (Jingjun & Jaschok, 2014, p. 647). The ahong’s role as a teacher of Islamic studies for girls and women is frequently cited by those interviewed as one of the most significant aspects of their work (Allès & Black, 2003, p. 25). Ahong are also usually responsible for the tutoring of women—as individuals or in small informal groups— in Islamic perspectives on sensitive subjects such as sex and sexuality (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, pp. 128–129). The sociopolitical contexts of the ahong help to define their roles as well. Ahong—both male and female—are responsible for interacting with Chinese government officials as representatives of their mosques, and negotiating the interests of their mosques as formal legal institutions within the bureaucratic system (Erie, 2014, p. 548). The separate state registration of women’s mosques in many cases has strengthened the legitimacy and power of ahong associated with those mosques (Jaschok & Jingjun, 2000, p. 15). The ahong do not, however, derive their authority within their community from the state; a large part of it comes from their social context. Chinese ahong may have generational authority, as noted in the article “Leading Their Sisters in Faith,” about an older ahong revered for her long-standing contributions, and experienced leadership within the community of Zhengzhou’s Beidajie Women’s Mosque (Lini, 2005). According to Jingjun and Jaschok’s informants, a good ahong is open, informal, and friendly, but also a capable scholar and manager of mosque affairs. As such Jingjun and Jaschok suggest that ahong display an associational leadership style based on gender awareness, self-confidence, and agency (Jingjun & Jaschok, 2014, p. 643). In another work, Jaschok has written that the source of ahong religious authority is, “a nexus of social relationships, which have in the course of time become associated in the minds of women with the most cherished traditions that mark the uniqueness of women’s own religious and social institutions” (Jaschok, 2012, p. 37). This description of ahong authority is intriguing, as it suggests that their authority lies in the manner in which historical narratives of the community—or more specifically the historical narratives of collective sites such as mosques and madrasahs— have been created by the accumulation of social interactions over time. Ahong authority from this perspective rests in the ways in which people relate to each other, shaping the stories they share about the places that matter to them and why they matter, their place-making narratives.

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The Alima3 of India In India, the Deobandi revivalist movement, a Sunni school of thought, runs a number of madrasas that offer advanced theological degrees for women. The alima (qualified scholar) degree prepares women act as Islamic teachers, preachers, and in other religious positions. In 2012, I had the opportunity to work with four alima who worked as religious scholars and teachers in the northern Indian region of Ladakh (see Fewkes, 2018). While the alima title and theological degrees are not unique to the Ladakh region, their impact in Ladakh’s religious community demonstrates the local significance of these scholars’ work. The women that I interviewed were the first four alima in the Leh district of the Ladakh region. In the late 1980s, they had all attended a religious boarding school called Jamea-Tus-Salehat, in Malegaon (Maharashtra, India), which was established in the 1950s and is reportedly the oldest religious schools for girls in India. The madrasa teaches students a variety of subjects including languages (Urdu, Persian, English, and Arabic), as well as Qur’anic studies, and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). While most of the materials studied at the women’s school are similar to that in men’s madrasas, the women are also taught fiqh related directly to women and what are considered to be women’s issues (Winklemann, 2005). Many such schools envision themselves as preparing women for educating family members within the household rather than employment (Jeffery, Jeffery, & Jeffery, 2012). The four Ladakhi women who attended this school completed their theological degrees and graduated in 1991, returning to Leh. Since that time the Ladakhi alima have engaged varied religious work in Ladakh, including teaching Arabic and religion in schools, conducting public religious teachings for women in Leh and Nubra valleys, and offering religious instruction to children in their homes. The alima advise local women on religious fiqh, addressing sensitive issues with other women—such as those pertaining to menstruation, marriage, etc.—that women would not want to discuss with male scholars. They have also inspired younger women of their community to attend madrasas outside of Ladakh. As preachers the alima’s teachings have shaped the practice of religion in their region, transforming prayer practices and informing other women’s understanding of themselves as religious believers. The alima of Ladakh emphasize prayer as a crucial site of their authority as religious scholars, and a point of significance for the practice

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of Islam in Ladakh. In interview one, alima explained that when she and her colleagues returned to Ladakh after their studies, they found that many Ladakhi Muslim women were praying “incorrectly”—holding their bodies and performing motions as if they were men—and needed to be taught how to pray as women specifically. She theorized that this gender-neutral method of presenting prayer may have arisen because there were previously only men with religious training in Ladakh, and that it was “hard for men to show how to do a women’s prayer.” Ladakhi’s women’s prayer practices were also linked to regional histories; many of the Ladakhi Muslim families are descended from Muslim traders who had come to Ladakh and married Buddhist or Christian women locally, and many Ladakhi Muslim women had historically learned religious practices in an androcentric fashion. When asked what specific type of religious knowledge Ladakhi Muslim women had traditionally lacked, the alima claimed that in the past Ladakhi women just put a scarf on their heads to pray, but that they—the alima—had taught them how to dress properly, covering to the wrists and ankles. Women’s coverings beyond a headscarf were a new concept in the Ladakhi Muslim community and the alima—who were the first women in Leh to wear a burqa— commented that when they returned from school in 1991 their clothing incited a great deal of attention. “Ladakhis had never before seen burqas,” she recalled, “so people were teasing us [in the streets], and calling us ghosts.” The need for, and significance of, women showing other women how to pray ranked for the alima among the top benefits of having female Islamic scholars. They could, the alima explained, give women specific information that was informed by interpretations of Qur’an and Hadith, rather than folk practices or local tradition. The alima’s teachings on embodied prayer practices—how to cover, hold one’s body, and recite during prayer—have been a significant force for socioreligious change in Ladakh. These prayer performances are conceptualized as a form of women’s religious empowerment, contrasted to past prayers where women’s bodies, dress, and spaces were defined wholly by male authority. The alima’s religious scholarship has created new ways of being Muslim for Ladakhi Muslim women and new religious spaces for those communities. Before their work in the 1990s, Muslim women in the Leh district usually prayed at home and did not regularly attend mosque. The Leh Jama Masjid reportedly only offered space for women’s prayer—in the form of interior partitions to create a women’s section—on special

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occasions such as the observance of Laylat al-Qadr. Muslim women in the area gathered as part of community celebrations such as weddings and had significant roles in religious holiday celebrations within the household, but they did not generally gather for religious purposes. Muslim women of the Leh district were rarely, if ever, identified as a religious collective. The presence of the alima in Leh district prompted the formation of new groups, as they gathered women from Leh and surrounding small villages for religious teachings, organized study groups, and offered shared prayer spaces. During Ramadan, they began to offer prayer space for women in the Leh Tsa Soma mosque, a renovated historical mosque in the middle of Leh town, creating a dedicated space for women’s prayers outside of the home. When asked about the prayer meetings in Tsa Soma, one alima said, [d]uring Ramazan we teach women at the Tsa Soma Mosque in Leh, and then everyone reads namaz… everyone prays her afternoon prayers individually. The reason we pray separately is that there is no formal group prayer for a congregation of women. However, there is one condition that would allow for group prayer; if you are supposed to teach a group of women how to pray then you can do the jamat (praying in congregation, with a person leading) together. This is only for teaching them how to pray. Otherwise no, you don’t have, groups of women praying namaz. (Fewkes, 2018, p. 96)

As expressed here, the alima do not consider themselves to be leading a congregation in prayer, as an imam would, but guiding a group as religious teachers. Although Tsa Soma is not a women’s mosque in the same sense of the term as in the Maldives—it is only used for women’s prayers during Ramadan and the alima were clear to inform me that it is not a “women’s mosque”—its use as sacred space by women represents a shift in Ladakhi Muslim spatial practices. Since 2012, the alima have continued organizing and teaching Muslim women in the Leh district; they have developed religious conferences for Ladakhi women from throughout the region, bringing scholars from other parts of India as guest speakers, and coordinated women’s religious groups in remote villages to create grassroots networks. The alima’s work in and around the Leh district of Ladakh has resulted in the formation of a new public, a Muslim women’s collective religious identity that did not previously exist in the region.

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Women’s Mosque Communities In the last chapter, I wrote about how we can think of the community movements for contemporary women’s mosques as a form of place; emphasis on shared sites of prayer and the role of female prayer leadership in these examples created a combination of place and praxis reminiscent of other women’s mosques discussed. I would like to return here briefly to the idea of mosque associated movements and discuss some women’s mosques communities that have spatial dimensions, but may also be considered as unique forms of female Islamic scholarship and leadership. Like many of the movements for contemporary women’s mosques mentioned in the last chapter, these highlight how mosques are communities of worship as well as physical sites; the attention paid to discourses of leadership within these movements similarly suggests a need for a more detailed examination of individual roles within the collective movements. Unlike those discussed in the last chapter—which are regularly discussed in global media as “reformist,” “liberal,” or “progressive” movements that signal change within the “Muslim world”—these women’s mosque movements are frequently labeled “revivalist” and “conservative.” The example that immediately springs to mind is that of the community featured in Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, an anthropological study of a women’s piety movement in Cairo, Egypt, during the late 1990s (Mahmood, 2005). Mahmood writes about the groups of women in Cairo who have joined together to conduct study groups; their lessons focus on Islamic texts, social issues related to practices of being Muslim, and the development of embodied piety. She conducted fieldwork at six mosques in Cairo, demonstrating that the movement crossed boundaries of class and age, while utilizing a variety of rhetorical styles, modes of argument, and forms of leadership; what united these groups as a movement was a concern about secularization in Egypt and a notion of preserving “the spirit of Islam” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 43). The Egyptian women’s mosque movement is led by women and has given rise to increased numbers of Muslim women with religious educations, making possible the development of female preachers who work in mosques and homes (Minesaki, 2012). In the course of her book, Mahmood raises several points about Muslim women and religious authority. The women that Mahmood works with are associated

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with three mosques and led by female da‘iya (preachers). According to Mahmood, the roles and practices of the female da’iya vary individually. In one example, Mahmood discuss the work of Hajja Faiza, a popular female dai’ya who leads prayer for hundreds of women each night during Ramadan; Hajja Faiza does not follow the convention of only leading women in collective prayer when no male imam is present, but instead will ignore the call to prayer from the men’s mosque when giving a lesson and then lead women in prayer separately only when she is finished with the lesson (Mahmood, 2005, pp. 86–87). When challenged about the propriety of such acts given that other (male) dai’ya had said it was bid’a (an innovation) Hajja Faiza responded, I respect his opinion, but it is based on the Maliki school. The other three schools [Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Hanbali] say that it is permissible for a woman to lead other women in prayers, and is in fact better [afdal]. There are three opinions on this matter [from among the four schools] that are in agreement, and the fourth is different. I follow the majority opinion in this case, and Shaikh Karam follows the minority one. He is within his rights to do so, just as I am, because remember that it is our right [min haqqina] to select from any of the opinions avoidable in the four schools, even if the opinion happens to be noncanonical or anomalous [shādhdh]. (Mahmood, 2005, p. 88)

Mahmood goes on to note that Hajja Faiza does not argue her case by invoking gender equality or women’s abilities—indeed, Mahmood notes that Hajja Faiza generally supports common expressions of gender inequality such as a woman’s subordination to her husband—but instead locates it within discourses among Muslim jurists (Mahmood, 2005, p. 88). Her reply emphasizes her own authority based on knowledge of these jurists, and by positioning herself as in the majority of religious thought, Hajja Faiza establishes her seemingly unorthodox actions as part of Islamic orthopraxy rather than in opposition to it. Through such examples, Mahmood challenges readers to ponder what feminism looks like outside of the common conceptualizations of feminism as resistance, an idea based on secular-liberal views of individual autonomy, and argues that we must recognize agency as historically and culturally specific. The book is a call for researchers to better understand the contexts of use of religious authority and to represent the complexity of those stories rather than assume that resistance is the only form of agentative power.

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In “Appropriating the Mosque: Women’s Religious Groups in Khartoum,” Salma Nageeb provides a perspective on another set of mosque groups. Nageeb starts with a quote from an informant who notes “…mosques were always for men. Now you see young and old women coming at different times of the day…” (Nageeb, 2007, p. 5). This beginning clearly establishes her study of women’s mosque movements in Khartoum as concerned with spatial processes; she goes on to outline how the group and its activities redefine gendered religious spaces in Sudan. Throughout the piece, Nageeb’s fieldwork with religious groups of women in Khartoum in 1999, 2002, and 2004–2005 provides a detailed perspective on how mosque groups use religious knowledge and enactments of piety to assert power in public and religious spaces. She argues that this case helps demonstrate linkages and fluidity between Muslim public and private sphere, rather than upholding such a dichotomy. These spatial practices are founded, and crucially depend, upon the development of women’s religious authority. Although male teachers sometimes visit, women teachers referred to as hajja or shaikha most often run Qur’anic studies lessons for these groups (Nageeb, 2007, pp. 13–14). As in the case of the mosque groups in Egypt, the women’s mosque groups in Sudan emphasize that Islamic scholarship provides a source of legitimacy for women’s authority; as one of Nageeb’s informants bluntly states, “because we were not learning Quran ourselves we were like cattle in the hands of the herd man. Now we know that we don’t need an intermediary to reach the way of God. We can do it alone” (Nageeb, 2007, p. 12). In contrast to some of the forms of female leadership and scholarship discussed earlier in this chapter, but similar to those in Mahmood’s study, the women’s mosques groups in Khartoum see themselves as empowered in opposition to folk traditions of Islam, developing personal authority through emphasis on learning “right” or “correct” practices and access to institutional teachings about Islam through an internationally supported Dawa organization (Nageeb, 2007). The common themes of submission to orthopraxy that emerge from Mahmood’s and Nageeb’s work thus lead some observers of such movements to ask if the women associated with mosque movements can be thought of as leaders, and if women’s mosque movements actually represent forms of female authority. Jeanette Jouili and Schirin Amir-Moazami point out in their study of pious women in France and Germany that the conflation “authority” and “leadership” obscures the complexity

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of women’s mosque movements, where authority can refer to either embodiment in the form of leadership or authoritative discourses (Jouili & Amir-Moazami, 2006, p. 619). This distinction suggests that thinking about women’s scholarly and leadership roles simply as individual roles in specific sociocultural contexts may limit the understandings of women’s mosque places. Authoritative discourses have their own contexts of development and transmission and are, as Trouillot demonstrated, comprised of silences that are not “deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production” (Trouillot, 1995, pp. 152–153). Authoritative discourses are particularly fascinating forms of power as they can be both vertically hierarchical—who has access and who does not, as in Alidiou’s work on Arabic literacy and power (Alidou, 2005)—and horizontally shared, emphasized in women’s mosques movements through the focus on teaching and studying religious materials. A focus on authoritative discourses also helps contextualize women’s mosque movements within broader historical contexts of religious leadership, as there is a welldocumented history of the ulama developing transnational systems of authority based on notions of piety (see, e.g., Feener, 2014). As Mahmood writes, the women’s religious authority in these mosque movements is generally called into question by outside observers because it is based on the concepts of piety and submission, ideological positions at odds with neoliberal Western feminist concepts of gendered agency and power. Yet women’s empowerment, Mahmood argues, does not always occur in the form of opposition. This observation can be applied to a number of other contemporary Muslim women’s religious movements as well, giving rise to further insights on gender and Muslim spaces. For example, Annabelle Böttcher has written about the Kurdish women of the Naqshbandi sisterhood, who teach about Kaftarian Islam in homes and mosques in Damascus; these female preachers wield religious authority in the public sphere, and a major portion of their teachings focuses on the positive value of the traditional domestic role for women as wives and mothers (Böttcher, 1998). While these women’s mosque movements uphold religious roles for women that seem to support public/private distinctions, Jouili and Amir-Moazami argue that the reverse is actually true. They write, [t]hrough the construction of a “private” domain that simultaneously represents and reproduces public concerns, domesticity gains a public relevance. […] the domestic sphere constitutes both a separate entity and a

154  J. H. FEWKES sphere, which gains public or political importance. Hence, the domestic sphere, as the women conceptualized it […] turns out to be a space that is largely societal and political. (Jouili & Amir-Moazami, 2006, pp. 622–623)

Demonstrating the influences of public social and political forces in domestic spaces, women’s mosque movements betray how the private sphere may act as the public sphere in Habermas’ sense of the term, mediating relationships between state and society. Thus, women’s mosque movements call into question the divide between public and private spaces even while invoking and reproducing such a dichotomy in authoritative discourses.

Maldivian Mudahim Revisited—Roles and Duties In A Maldivian Dictionary, Reynolds succinctly notates that a mudimu is “an official in charge of a mosque” (Reynolds, 2003, p. 3650). The term mudimu (or mudim) and its female equivalent, mudahim, both are clearly related to the Arabic term mu’adhdhin (muezzin), which refers to the person who makes the call to prayer. In the case of the mudimu, this role-based description is accurate; in the case of the mudahim, it is not, leading to several questions about what mudahim actually means in a sociocultural sense. On the most basic level, the Maldivian mudahim and mudimu are mosque caretakers in charge of the daily administration and physical upkeep of mosque sites. The Bodu Galu lomaafaanu, dating to the mid-fourteenth century, outline the duties of the mudimu as cleaning the mosque (including spreading out prayer mats and sweeping), performing prayers (an idea I will return to shortly), and sounding the call to prayer five times a day (Al Suood, 2014, p. 12). Maloney notes the Arabic source of mudimu, claiming the term is the Dhivehi equivalent of the muezzin in Arabic, an individual who makes the call to prayer and takes care of the mosque; in an earlier work, he had referred to the mudimu simply as a “mosque functionary” (Maloney, 1976, p.  658; 1980, p. 211). These and other sources suggest that the role of a mosque caretaker is one that is most clearly associated with the mudahim and mudimu. There is only one task that varies between the male and female functionaries; according to everyone that I asked on the islands, Maldivian mudahim do not issue the call to prayer at prayer times, which is usually broadcast by loudspeaker from the main men’s mosque on

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the island. The work of caring for the physical structure of the mosque, however, is the same for mudahim and mudimu. Both are responsible for keeping clean and tidy the entire mosque complex (including the building and courtyard), mopping (and drying if necessary) the well area where people wash for prayer, cleaning the floors of the mosque, stacking books and prayer rugs neatly, and ensuring that mosque congregants are tidy when in the premises. In the dark hours, mudahim and mudimu are responsible for turning on the lights, which these days simply means switching on the electricity for prayer times and/or visitors. These tasks were mentioned by all mudahim that I interviewed, with small variations in what was stressed or remembered initially. Baksi-Lahiri notes that in the 1980s mudahim and mudimu were also responsible for managing mosque accounts, which includes income from the mosque lands (e.g., through the sale of coconuts from trees within the mosque complex) and expenditure of these funds for the mosque upkeep (BaksiLahiri, 2004, p. 127). In contrast, my informants in 2006 suggested that the Maldivian Government now provides funds for the upkeep of both men’s and women’s mosques. The mudahim are also clearly government employees with bureaucratic roles. While this official recognition of mudahim’s work may be a recent occurrence for women, there is a well-documented history of male mudimu working as government representatives. In stories from Maldivian folklore, the mudimu are responsible for legally marrying couples, their legitimacy recognized by the sultan (Romero-Frías, 2012, p. 106). In English literature, Bell mentions in records of his 1922 expedition that his group obtained laborers who were assigned to them by their khatibs or mudimu, and supervised by the same, thus the mudimu had a power over people to assign work (Bell, 2002, p. 148). Forbes notes in 1981 that mosques in the Malé traditionally had a separate space reserved in the front of the room for officials, including the sultan and his relatives, the qadi (an Islamic judge), the khatib (village head), and the mudimu (Forbes, 1981). Mohamed Faizal notes the particularly bureaucratic nature of mudimu’s work in relation to a long chain of command associated with the mosque administration, as observed by Maloney in the 1970s (Faizal, 2013, p. 149; Maloney, 1980, p. 185). Their accounts suggest that the mudimu were centrally organized and part of a national political structure rather than simply island officials. This idea is further supported by Maloney when he notes that mudimu were required to pass national examinations to secure their government appointments in the

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1970s (Maloney, 1976, pp. 658–661). Maloney does note, however, that mudimu may also be employed by small mosques that have their own island benefactors or are supported directly by mosque land endowments; this arrangement was present in the 1970s and historically recorded in early lomafaanu (Maloney, 1980, p. 213). In the 1980s, Phadnes and Luithui refer to mudimu as “religious functionaries” under the supervision of the island chief appointed by the Ministry of Provincial Affairs, who exists as part of a hierarchical system with the atoll chief, appointed by president; they note the continuity of these political structures with those of the sultanate era (Phadnis & Luithui, 1985, p. 9). More recent sources suggest that the political position of the mudimu has continued to exist; Al Suuod, for example, notes that mudimu, like khatibu and naib, “gave instructions to people about the law” (Al Suood, 2014, p. 32). When asked about the position, my informants in Malé confirmed this history, explaining to me that the mudimu were very “old” positions, most confirming its association with the sultanate and use by the current government. There is no documentation suggesting that mudahim have a similarly long history in the Maldives bureaucracy; however, we do know that Maldivian women have a long history of leadership roles; and in the fourteenth century CE, Ibn Battuta noted that the ruler of the Maldives was a woman named Sultana Khadija, who appointed mosque officials and judges of Islamic law for the country (Dunn, 2005, p. 131). While the etiology of women’s mosques provided by the official at the Ministry of Gender and Family in Malé seemed to suggest that mudahim would not have been government employees until the government program establishes women’s mosques as public spaces in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the older mudahim who spoke of the role of women’s mosques in counting populations for rations during World War II strongly suggested that women’s mosques had a bureaucratic role at that time as well, with, therefore, some individuals occupying associated bureaucratic positions. In interview, a number of younger women indicated that they held the position of the mudahim solely as a government job; it was not, from their perspective a sacred role but instead a form of civil service comparable to being a nurse or a teacher in a government institution. In spite of the ways in which these women recognized their roles as mudahim as part of the formal governmental structure, national networks did not inform their experiences of their roles. None of these women had received training from the government or were connected to mudahim on other islands through the post itself. The women, while

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pointing to the national government as the source of their employment and legitimacy within mosque spaces, were all strongly oriented toward island spaces in terms of their knowledge and practices. Furthermore, all of the women who expressed they were mudahim solely due to their government appointment, rather than through any personal authority or claims to religious knowledge, emphasized their work as a caretaker of the physical mosque site as their main duty. This was in contrast to other mudahim, who considered themselves to be socioreligious leaders distinct from their government appointments. In interview, at least four older mudahim emphasized to me that their authority and legitimacy as a mudahim were rooted in their social statuses and roles. These older women articulated their roles as that of the social leader of women on their island, locating the significance of their practices in women’s mosque sites within the social order of the island locale. For example, two older mudahim in separate interviews indicated that they had inherited the role of “the leader of women on the island” from their mothers before gaining any government positions, citing both their roles as mudahim and leaders of the Island Women’s Committee as outcomes of those initial roles. One woman specifically explained that she had inherited these two positions—being the leader of island women and mudahim—from her mother, kinship playing a larger role than government structures. The legacy of leadership these women inherited from their mothers suggests that participation in these institutions may be related to Maldivian cultural practices of passing down of particular types of work from mother to daughter, a practice that is featured in government narratives and described in one brochure that reads, “[t]raditional women’s activities, such as midwifery and tailoring, are often handed down from the older to the younger female members of a family” (Office for Women’s Affairs, 1989). The social inheritance of rank may also be more generally linked to other kinship-based social patterns, such as historical Maldivian matrilocal residence patterns recently confirmed through genetic studies (Pijpe et al., 2013). These women’s descriptions of their status and relationship to island women as a collective suggest that mudahim’s roles are shaped within island spaces; while the government positions may be defined in the national arena, they are not wholly constituted within national spatial practices. Unlike many of the other cases of women’s religious leadership roles discussed in this chapter, religious education did not seem to play a central role in defining the mudahim of the Maldives. In interview, only a

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few mudahim cited “teacher” as one of their roles in the community. A number of mudahim’s stories indicated, however, that it is common for knowledgeable older women on the island to teach girls how to pray and read the Qur’an. Fathimath, for example, learned to lead prayers by following the movements of one woman, sitting behind her in prayers to watch how she prayed. None of the women indicated that there was a special title for these women, and on several islands, men were conducting religious classes for children of both genders. Some of these religious teachers were not from the islands on which they were located, or even from the Maldives. On one island I visited, for example, I was told the story of a man who was teaching Qur’anic classes who had come to live in the Maldives from Mainland South Asia as an act of charity, to establish island religious classes to spread knowledge of Islam. At the same time, religious education can play a deciding role in the lives of Maldivian girls and women. The Office for Women’s Affairs in 1989 worked with the traditional island educational institutes, the kiyavaage or edhurge, where children are taught to read the Qur’an and some Thaana; while these schools educated girls and boys traditionally boys would drop out at 9 or 10 to begin working, but girls would stay longer and thus were often more literate than their male peers in religious texts (Office for Women’s Affairs, 1989, p. 16). Women on many islands have traditionally provided women’s education as well; Fathimath recalled learning how to read the Qur’an through classes the older woman held in her home and in turn taught the Qur’an to girls in the mosque, a task she mentioned as central to being the mudahim before her retirement. As we saw in Fathimath’s earlier account of an argument over burial techniques, there is the possibility of tension between the experiential knowledge of some mudahim and the formal religious learning of other women in the community. A final point in support of considering the significance of education for the role of the mudahim comes from a study by the Government of the Maldives and the USA Agency for International Development (Seidler, 1980). In interviews with over 600 people on 40 islands, 63.13% of Maldivians said that they thought of women as leaders on their island; when asked their reasons for considering women as leaders, 41% cited education as a source of authority, 27% chose personality, 9% indicated religiosity, 4% suggested leadership was gained through relationships of marriage, and 1% simply indicated “other” (Seidler, 1980, p. 83).

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Perhaps the only generalization that we can make about the role of the mudahim as religious leaders is that it is a changing one. In the 1980s, Baksi-Lahiri observed that piety was a source of religious authority for the women associated with women’s mosques, writing about one woman, that her “…authority in the community was founded on her strict adherence to the rules of religious conduct. Women, and to some degree, men were afraid to cross her path on matters of religious importance” (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, p. 120). In my interviews, younger mudahim tended to allude to the government as the source of their authority, while the older mudahim tended to cite their service to the community—which were varied but could include mosque caretaking, teaching religious teaching, midwifery, preparing bodies for burial, and leading prayer (more on this later)—or their social status as a leader.

Mudahim and Prayer One of the few more specific questions that I had when I began this study was whether or not the mudahim led prayer within the mosque. The role of the mudahim in prayer connects women’s mosques to larger debates; as seen in the cases of the Ladakhi alima and Egyptian hajja earlier, the question of whether or not women should lead prayers for other women is one of significance in global discourses about women’s leadership and authority in Muslim communities. Laury Silvers has provided a useful summary of the positions of different schools on women leading prayer, which follows the characterization provided by Hajja Faiza, but provides some more details. Silvers writes: [t]he Shafi’i and Hanbali schools allow for a woman to lead other women in prayer without any restrictions. She can lead such prayers in the mosque or other places. The Hanafis permit a woman to lead other women in prayer. However, they hold it to be disliked. All three of these schools stipulate that the woman leading the prayer should stand in the middle of the front row, without being in front of the women praying along with her. This is based on the description of the prayer led by ‘Aisha and Umm Salama. The Malikis hold that a woman cannot lead other women in the prayer. (Silvers, 2008, p. 5)

Here, Silvers notes that the Hanafi position is less positive about women leading prayer than the characterization of the position in Hajja Faiza’s account suggests and provides crucial details about the accepted spatial

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arrangements of women’s prayer leadership. The difference between the Shafi’i and Maliki positions on women leading prayer underscores the implications of differing religious historical narratives associated with Maldivian religious place-building processes; an Indian Ocean centered Shafi’ist perspective on Maldivian religious practices offers a very different set of possibilities for women’s spaces than that offered by the Rannamaari narratives that emphasize the Maliki origins of Islam in the country. A review of existing sources on the Maldivian mudahim is ambiguous about whether the mudahim lead prayer for women in their mosques, although it is clear that prayer is part of the duties of the mudahim. She is required to say prayers in the mosque regularly, five times a day, whether or not others attend the prayer; this aspect of her job was mentioned by several of my informants and documented in both the 1970s and early 2000s for mudimu (Al Suood, 2014, p. 12; Maloney, 1980, p. 214). A few sources on mudimu refer to them as “prayer leaders” (e.g., Al Suood, 2014, p. 32), and Baksi-Lahiri refers to mudahim leading prayers several times in her study of women’s mosques (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, pp. 147, 152). Several women that I interviewed in the Maldives mentioned mudahim leading prayer as well, although they did not elaborate what this meant. There were clear discussions in my interviews of the women leading prayer for other women in the Ladakh scholar’s sense of the term, as teachers showing others how to pray. This was true in the past as well; the older mudahim I interviewed, Fathimath, spoke several times about learning to pray from women who were leading prayer in the women’s mosque, and explained that when she was unclear about certain aspects of prayer she asked an older woman who was an Islamic scholar and teacher to instruct her on the finer points of how to do the prayers properly, so that she in turn could lead others. Fathimath learned by sitting behind the woman in prayers and watching how she prayed. Similarly, in one account about joining in prayers at the women’s mosque Baksi-Lahiri notes that the mudahim was comfortable about leading her in prayer as a teacher, telling her “[j]ust do what I do, and you will learn” (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, p. 152). When asked directly about what it meant to lead prayer women, I spoke with most often discussed encouraging and teaching others to pray, or making sure that each of the daily prayers was observed in the women’s mosque. Curiously, when mentioned at all the idea of women, leading prayer did not seem to be specific to the mudahim; when one mudahim, Zeena,

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discussed her memories of growing up in a pre-1970s women’s mosque, she said, “there were a few women who would lead prayers there, and they would take turns doing so.” Later she took over leading prayers as an individual, before becoming a government-employed mudahim. She continued leading prayers, which she defined as starting the prayers at the correct time and ensuring that women knew how to pray properly, upon becoming a mudahim. Most published sources agree that mudahim may lead prayers, but do not preach or give the Friday sermon. This distinction is maintained between genders; when Maloney claims that mudimu is the Dhivehi equivalent of the muezzin, he notes that the khatib is a village headman who was originally the “preacher” of the mosque (Maloney, 1980, p. 211). Baksi-Lahiri noted that in the 1980s Friday sermons were delivered only in the Friday mosque by the khatheebu (island chief); there were no women’s katheeba in the early 1980s, so women’s mosques were for praying but not for sermons; she suggests that political changes may also lead to religious changes (Baksi-Lahiri, 2004, p. 123). Although I was unable to attend any women’s mosques on a Friday, none of my informants suggested that they gave sermons or preached. On one island, several women noted that they listened to sermons at the main mosque of the island, from a women’s section of the mosque that was partitioned with a curtain.

Is a Mudahim an Imam? The Maldivian mudahim are commonly referred to as the imams of women’s mosques in popular literature and in discussion of the Maldives. Given what we know about their roles in the nisha miskii, is use of the title “imam” accurate and relevant here? The question is a crucial one because the role of imam is widely recognized as a legitimate form of Muslim authority and power within the ummah; many of the other roles discussed in this chapter do not have the same widespread legitimacy. For example, Peshkova argues that the otinchalar’s informal leadership in Uzbekistan is in opposition to global Islam, as “an example of an Islamization from below” (2009, p. 6), and that these women’s leadership in Islamic religious subjects particularly influence local social interactions and culturally specific notions of Islam. Peshkova writes that, “otinchalar’s religious knowledge helped them and their students [to] evaluate and when necessary challenge Islamic orthodoxy produced by

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other religious leaders, identified by otinchalar as male.” These women generated their own [emphasis in context] discourses about being “right and good” Muslims’ (Peshkova, 2009, p. 14). Peshkova seems to suggest here that the otinchalar identify Islamic orthodoxy as a non-local and male endeavor; the second sentence supports such an interpretation, emphasizing a division between the genders in notions of being Muslim. Otinchalar exist, at least at times, in opposition to roles such as imam, rather than in relation to them. Like the status of women’s prayer places as mosques, the recognition of women as imams has contemporary implications in discussions of women’s power and autonomy in Muslim communities. While some authors see these discussions as recognition of existing women’s roles in Muslim communities, others see it as part of a process of religious reformation. Wadud, for example, suggests reformation in the form of a “gender jihad,” a struggle for gender justice in the thought and practice within Muslim communities, involves men and women working together to ensure that there are no barriers to women’s participation in all aspects of Muslim society, which she describes as “the inclusion of women in all aspects of Muslim practice, performance, policy construction, and in both political and religious leadership” (Wadud, 2006, p. 10). Thus, the designation of women’s roles in Muslim communities as imams has both theoretical and practical implications. Literature on the mudahim indicates that the relationship between the roles of mudahim/mudimu and imams in the Maldives has a dynamic history. Writing in the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta distinguished between “imamus (prayer leaders)” and “mudimus (caretakers of mosques)” in the Maldives, suggesting through this contrast that the latter were not prayer leaders (Romero-Frias, 2016). Yet historical sources also suggest that mudimu had a status in relation to mosque spaces similar to that of imams. Forbes’ diagram of the past spatial arrangements of the Hukuru Miskii in Malé documents how mudimu were positioned in front of the praying congregation, next to the pulpit (Forbes, 1983, p. 59), and Phadnis and Luithui refer to the sultanate era mudimu as “priests in charge of mosques” (Phadnis & Luithui, 1985, p. 11). More recent studies suggest that any historical distinctions between the two have been erased; for example, Mohammed Faizel, in a contemporary study of civil service and democracy in the Maldives, notes that the terms “mudahim and imaam are used interchangeably” (Faizal, 2013, p. 141). Yet while reportedly the Maldivian legal code requires that the national

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Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs certifies imams after proving their credentials and taking an exam, my interviews with mudahim at the women’s mosques suggested that all of these women did not take any exams for their positions.4 Looking at common definitions of an imam, we find that most sources take a classic approach—categorize and distinguish from other members of the category—to the term; an imam from this perspective is a Muslim leader (category) who leads prayers in a mosque (distinguishing features). A few circulating definitions of an imam add additional categorical details such as a Sunni Muslim leader, but most variations focus on additional distinguishing features, such as that an imam is a Muslim leader of a community associated with a mosque, who gives a sermon, shares Islamic knowledge, acts as a ritual leader, or has a formal institutional role in a mosque. Given that all of the women’s scholarly and religious positions in this chapter meet the categorical part of the definition—all of these women discussed earlier are leaders of Muslim communities in some way—further attention to the distinguishing features of the definition, which are all functional roles, is needed. Obviously, the mosque space is central to these definitions, and in the above accounts, we can see that only some of the women’s roles reviewed are associated with mosques. As we have seen, the pandei and otinchalar do not occupy mosque spaces and are even, at times, perceived as in opposition to those sites. Muballigha, nyai, alima, dai’ya, hajja, and shaikha all may be associated with the mosque space; however, in these cases the spatial orientation of their authority and legitimacy within Muslim communities is varied; and nyai are most often spatially formed in relation their schools, while the other five roles frequently divide their activities between the mosque and homes. The authority of the ahong and mudahim is most clearly situated within the mosque as a place, which is why Jaschok argues that using the title “imam” for an ahong accurately reflects her “formal rank and contractual status with respect to a mosque or other Islamic institution” (Jaschok, 2012, p. 40). A formal institutional role in a mosque can vary greatly; the alima’s efforts in organizing prayers in Tsa Soma, the mudahim’s status as salaried mosque employees in charge of the site’s functions and affairs, and the nyai’s work as appointed teacher-leaders in a school mosque may all qualify as formal institutional roles. All of these women possess religious knowledge, both social and textual, but only some of them—muballigha, nyai, alima, dai’ya, hajja, and shaikha—are knowledge producers who

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give sermons. Most are ritual specialists; however, the types of ritual roles they fulfill vary a great deal. As discussed above, leading prayer is just as ambiguous a function as mosque association. Given these varied configurations of the role, with confluences and divergences, the definition of an imam is difficult to apply objectively cross-culturally. Peshkova argues—in a manner similar to Saba Mahmood and indeed citing her work on Eygpt (Mahmood, 2005)—that women’s religious roles cannot (and by extension should not) be reduced to absolute, decontextualized categories such as “mullah” or “imam,” but must be conceptualized as relationships located within specific social, historical, and cultural landscapes (Peshkova, 2009). This argument is obviously worth making, as a priori categories run the risk of become reified, and in the process of trying to unify all information, the conceptual complexity is lost. We could therefore conclude that it is not desirable to try to classify women’s mosque leaders in a larger category, as the term “imam” itself is not useful. This is why Peshkova argues, … that to define or think of otinchalar as clerics, mullahs, or imams is to assume that these leadership positions are standard, thus obscuring rather than clarifying gendered dynamics of Islamic religious leadership. In order to understand these dynamics we should critically interrogate socio-historical contexts that engender different forms of leadership such as otinchalar’s and question the assumption that all Muslim women everywhere aspire to have the same leadership positions as do the men. (Peshkova, 2009, pp. 8–9)

This perspective allows us to think of Muslim women’s leadership roles as valuable and meaningful in their own right. Yet, accepting this conclusion creates a situation where women’s leadership is accepted as sociohistorically bounded, while in popular discourses men’s leadership continues to define the Muslim religious leadership roles of mullah, imam, etc. In actuality, the multifaceted nature of female clerics’ work, which defies categorization into one simple definition of a term such as “imam,” is true of male clerics’ work as well. As part of another project on American mosques, I have conducted dozens of interviews with male imams associated with mosques in the USA. Each of these imams has stressed various parts of their work as integral to their identity as an imam, and many of them perform duties in the mosque that others do not (e.g., marriage counseling, preparing

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bodies for burial, youth education, interfaith outreach). In the past eight years of interviewing imams in the USA, I have noted historical variations in defining imams, as their discussions of their tasks have noticeably shifted over time based on the political climate in country. An imam’s role may vary culturally as well; in 2010, I conducted an interview with one imam in Iowa who had originally been trained, and worked, as an imam in the Middle East before coming to work in the USA. The man observed that being an imam in the USA varied considerably from his previous posting. Where he originally worked, he was expected to present confrontational sermons, to “yell” at people and to chastise them. When he came to the USA, he found that his new congregation did not respond well to this approach; they needed, he realized, an imam who would be a counselor and advise them. The changing needs of his congregation prompted this imam to go back to school and receive a degree in counseling to better fulfill his duties. As we can see in these examples, the leadership work of any imam—female or male—is always situated within particular sociohistorical relationships. Exploring the category of imam in relation to women leaders and claiming that the label is not applicable therefore highlights the heterogeneity of experiences for both male and female clerics, drawing into question the very notion of one model for being an imam. Returning to the concept of place, we can clearly see that women’s mosques are formed through a myriad of uses that invoke histories, symbols, and roles that do not conform to common global categories of Muslim leadership. In the next chapter, I hope to explore more carefully where these “common” ideas arise, through a search for the community spaces in which these discourses reside and an exploration of what exactly we mean by the “global” in this discussion.

Notes 1. Many textually focused studies of Muslim women’s roles as religious leaders, scholars, and knowledge producers discuss the issue in relation to women in the life of the Prophet Mohammed; for example, Walker and Sells analyze the language of the hadith in relation to that of the Qur’an to demonstrate how Aisha possessed religious authority that was based, at least partially, on textual knowledge (Walker & Sells, 1999). Hadith frequently play a significant role in these discourses, and the female transmission of hadith is addressed critically as well (e.g., Kunkler & Fazaeli, 2012;

166  J. H. FEWKES Sayeed, 2009; Shaikh, 2004). Also of use in this discussion are scholarly studies of historical female scholars and jurists (e.g., Hassan, 2015; Nadwi, 2013). 2. The religious studies approach to Islamic doctrine rooted in texts and anthropological approach to understanding Muslim communities built upon the analysis of sociocultural data need not be considered separate. Dr. Sa’diyya Shaikh argues that contemporary feminist Qur’anic exegesis should be informed by the real-life experiences of Muslim women (2007). Shaikh uses contemporary feminist and classical male perspectives on Qur’ānic interpretation to demonstrate that tafsir are inherently located in particular sociohistorical contexts and then argues that abused women’s interpretations of Islam form another such context, making Muslim women’s experiences a “mode of exegesis” rooted in praxis (Shaikh, 2007). 3. While the term “alima” is technically the feminine singular form of ulama (scholars or learned ones), none of the alima that I worked with referred to themselves in plural in this way. In general conversations in Ladakh about these women, “alima” was used for both singular and plural forms, or made plural with English influenced conjugation as “alimas”. I have chosen to preserve the colloquial use here, selecting the first version for consistency. 4.  More recently, there are, however, Maldivian female scholars of Islam who have passed national exams and been certified by the Maldivian Government. I will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 8.

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168  J. H. FEWKES Hassan, M. (2015). Relations, Narrations, and Judgements: The Scholarly Networks and Contributions of an Early Female Muslim Jurist. Islamic Law and Society, 22, 323–351. Horvatich, P. (1994). Ways of Knowing Islam. American Ethnologist, 21(4), 811–826. Jaschok, M. (2012). Sources of Authority: Female Ahong and Qingzhen Nusi (Women’s Mosques) in China. In M. Bano & H. Kalmbach (Eds.), Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (pp. 37–58). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Jaschok, M., & Jingjun, S. (2000). The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Jeffery, P., Jeffery, R., & Jeffery, C. (2012). Leading by Example? Women Madrasah Teachers in Rural North India. In M. Bano & H. Kalmbach (Eds.), Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (pp. 197–216). Leiden, Boston: Brill. Jingjun, S., & Jaschok, M. (2014). The Culture of ‘Associational Leadership’ in the Hui Muslim Women’s Mosques of Central China. Asian Journal of Social Science, 42, 641–656. Jouili, J., & Amir-Moazami, S. (2006). Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority Among Pious Muslim Women in France and Germany. The Muslim World, 96(4), 617–642. Kandiyoti, D., & Azimova, N. (2004). The Communal and the Sacred: Women’s Worlds of Ritual in Uzbekistan. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10(2), 327–349. Kull, A. (2009). At the Forefront of a Post-Patriarchal Islamic Education: Female Teachers in Indonesia. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11(1), 25–39. Kunkler, M., & Fazaeli, R. (2012). The Life of Two Mujtahidahs: Female Religious Authority in Twentieth-Century Iran. In M. Bano & H. Kalmbach (Eds.), Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (pp. 127–160). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Lefebvre, H. (2009). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Lini, L. (2005). Leading Their Sisters in Faith: Chinese Women Imam’s and Women’s Mosques. Women of China, 12, 4. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety, The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maloney, C. (1976). The Maldives: New Stresses in an Old Nation. Asian Survey, 16(7), 654–671. Maloney, C. (1980). People of the Maldive Islands. New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd. Mattson, I. (2008). Can a Woman Be an Imam? Debating Form and Function in Muslim Women’s Leadership. In E. Curtis (Ed.), The Columbia Sourcebook of

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Muslims in the United States (pp. 255–260). New York: Columbia University Press. Minesaki, H. (2012). Gender Strategy and Authority in Islamic Discourses: Female Preachers in Contemporary Egypt. In M. Bano & H. Kalmbach (Eds.), Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (pp. 393–412). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Nadwi, M. A. (2013). Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam. Oxford: Interface Publications. Nageeb, S. A. (2007). Appropriating the Mosque: Women’s Religious Groups in Khartoum. Afrika Spectrum, 42(1), 5–27. Office for Women’s Affairs, Maldives. (1989). Status of Women: Maldives. Bangkok: UNESCO. Peshkova, S. (2006). Otinchalar in the Ferghana Valley: Islam, Gender and Power (PhD dissertation). University of Syracuse, Ann Arbor, MI. Peshkova, S. (2009). Muslim Women Leaders in the Ferghana Valley: Whose Leadership Is It Anyway? Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11(1), 5–24. Phadnis, U., & Luithui, E. D. (1985). Maldives: Winds of Change in an Atoll State. New Delhi: South Asian Publications. Pijpe, J., Voogt, A., Oven, M., Henneman, P., Gaag, K. J., Kayser, M., Knijff, P. (2013). Indian Ocean Crossroads: Human Genetic Origin and Population Structure in the Maldives. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 151(1), 58–67. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22256. Rausch, M. (2012). Women Mosque Preachers and Spiritual Guides: Publicizing and Negotiating Women’s Religious Authority in Morocco. In M. Bano & H. Kalmbach (Eds.), Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (pp. 59–84). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Reda, N. (2005). What Would the Prophet Do? Muslim Wake Up. Reynolds, C. (2003). A Maldivian Dictionary. London: Routledge. Romero-Frías, X. (2012). Folk Tales of the Maldives. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Romero-Frias, X. (2016). Rules for Maldivian Trading Ships Travelling Abroad (1925) and a Sojourn in Southern Ceylon. Politeja, 40, 67–84. Sayeed, A. (2009). Gender and Legal Authority: An Examination of Early Juristic Opposition to Women’s Hadith Transmission. Islamic Law and Society, 16, 115–150. Seidler, H., (1980). Report on the Survey of Island Women, Republic of Maldives, 1979. Malé [Washington, DC]: Republic of Maldives in Collaboration with the Overseas Education Fund; National Planning Agency, and League of Women Voters. Shaikh, S. (2004). Knowledge, Women and Gender in the Hadith: A Feminist Interpretation. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 15(1), 99–108. Shaikh, S. (2007). A Tafsir of Praxis: Gender, Marital Violence, and Resistance in South African Muslim Community. In D. C. Maguire & S. Shaikh (Eds.),

170  J. H. FEWKES Violence Against Women in Contemporary World Religion: Roots and Cures. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press. Shakir, I. Z. (2008). An Examination of the Issue of Female Prayer Leadership. In E. Curtis (Ed.), The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States (pp. 239–246). New York: Columbia University Press. Silvers, L. (2008). Islamic Jurisprudence, ‘Civil’ Disobedience, and Woman-Led Prayer. In E. Curtis (Ed.), The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. Srimulyani, E. (2012). Women from Traditional Islamic Educational Institutions in Indonesia: Negotiating Public Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sultanova, R. (2000). Qadiriyya Dhikr in Ferghana Valley. Journal of the History of Sufism, 1–2, 531–538. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. van Doorn, N. (1997). Portrait of a Female Preacher. Inside Indonesia, 52. Wadud, A. (2006). Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. London: Oneworld Publications. Walker, A. M., & Sells, M. A. (1999). The Wiles of Women and Performative Intertextuality: ‘a’Isha, the Hadith of the Slander, and the Sura of Yusuf. Journal of Arabic Literature, 30(1), 22. Winklemann, M. J. (2005). Everyday Life in a Girl’s Madrasah in Delhi. In R. Chopra & P. Jeffery (Eds.), Educational Regimes in Contemporary India. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

CHAPTER 7

Contexts and Discourses

One of the reasons my interest was initially piqued by the mention of women’s mosques in the Maldives was that the only place I had previously heard of them existing was China; the presence of women’s mosques was, I thought, a culturally specific phenomenon. My ideas at that time about the rarity of women’s mosques were further supported by common discourses, reflected in a number of media sources detailing new women’s mosques and claiming that each was the “first ever.” Articles such as those mentioned in the preface of this book focused on novelty as a way to “sell” the story, and/or forwarded narratives about these spaces that framed each instance of a women’s mosque as a form of protest for gender equality, a contemporary liberal progressive movement in opposition to global Muslim histories. Consider, for example, an online news story in 2018, titled “Do You Know About the First Mosque Led Entirely By Women?” which reads, “[b]eing recognized as the first ever female-run and established mosque, the Mariam Mosque opened recently in the start of February 2016, being led entirely by women” (Mvslim, 2018). In another article, found in a 2018 edition of the Christian Science Monitor, titled “The Rise of the Imama: WomenLed Mosques are Growing,” the author writes, [n]egative stereotypes abound of how women are treated under Islam. But there’s a new movement of women-led mosques who are challenging this, and making both Muslims and non-Muslims think differently about the faith… Khankan said she hopes to see a new generation of female Islamic © The Author(s) 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0_7

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172  J. H. FEWKES scholars and worship leaders, or ‘imam’ - a title normally given to men…. (Taylor, 2018)

As these examples illustrate, limited representations and narrow readings of women’s mosques spaces continue to be propagated in popular sources. Perusal of media on social topics aimed specifically at Muslim audiences—such as booklets, blogs, and video lectures—as well as conversations with Muslims around the world have yielded similar silences in regard to women’s mosques. Yet, as we have seen in the previous two chapters, women’s mosque spaces and women’s religious scholarly/ leadership roles have varied multiplex histories in Muslim communities. In spite of the increasing evidence about these roles, how do so many sources still manage to ignore/misrepresent Muslim women as religious leaders and scholars, and their associated spaces? Significantly, this silence in the literature has continued even as we have seen increased scholarly interest and attention to “Muslim women” as a category. In Geographies of Muslim Women, Caroline Nagel commented upon the latter point, writing: [t]here are few social categories today that generate as much interest, attention, and scrutiny as that of “Muslim women.” To illustrate, in 2001, an informal book search I conducted on Amazon.com generated a list of 292 publications on Muslim women. In contrasts, a search on Hindu women generated only 47 books (Nagel, 2001). In 2004, in the wake of the “War on Terrorism,” I repeated this exercise and found that the number of publications on Muslim women had increased to 383, while the publications on Hindu women had increased more modestly to 58. (Falah & Nagel, 2005, p. 5)

Out of curiosity, I repeated Nagel’s Amazon.com search on “Muslim women” recently and found that in 2018 “Women in Islam” is its own sub-category of books on Amazon—a subcategory that contains 483 books—and that a simple keyword search of “Muslim women” now yields over one thousand results. The abundance of research on one side of this equation and the lack of insight on the other side are startling, yet telling. Certainly, we can recognize, as I mentioned in the preface of this book, the biases here; the role of Orientalism pertaining to the Muslim Other that produces knowledge that “no longer requires application to reality” and “gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another” is unambiguous (Said, 1979, p. 1). Thus, even

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though there are over a thousand works on Muslim women readily available for sale on Amazon, the textual narratives presented in those works adhere to many of the same stereotypes. A quick application of Voyant’s text analysis tools1 demonstrates, for example, that out of the top 200 titles in the keyword search for “Muslim women” on Amazon one of the unique terms most frequently associated with Muslim women is “veil” (and the associated “hijab”), calling upon one of the common spatial tropes mentioned earlier in this book; another set of frequently used terms in these titles are those that invoke distance, e.g., “beyond,” “behind,” “from,” and “journey.” Versions of history are shaped by forms of power—economic, political, social, cultural, etc.—and we can account for the patterns with a quick explanation of the recognized ways in which Muslim women are represented as passive and victims, in lieu of active agents (well documented in sources such as Abu-Lughod, 2002; Mahmood, 2005). However, the variety of types of sources that variously omit, include, or partially mention of women’s mosques in accounts of “Muslim women”—non-Muslim, Muslim, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, historical texts, contemporary magazines, news media, and social media— suggests that a more careful scrutiny of the issue is needed. The myriad forms of silences and varied themes of inclusions focused on women’s mosques suggest that simplifying the root problem into simple one-word answers such as “prejudice,” “misogyny,” and “ignorance” provides an insufficient explanation. As Trouillot asks, “…what makes some narratives rather than others powerful enough to pass as accepted history if not historicity itself? If history is merely the story told by those who won, how did they win in the first place? And why don’t all winners tell the same story?” (Trouillot, 1995, p. 6). Trouillot acknowledges that there is an uneven production of historical narratives based on power imbalances, and unequal access to the “means of such production” (1995, p. xix), which includes not only material tools but also conceptual tools such as the rules that govern the production of scholarly works, vocabularies, and other less tangible forms of hegemony. He concludes in the case of Haitian histories that multiple competing groups and individuals as well as the multivocality of sites of history learning and making make the formation of history far more complex than a simple monothematic utterance by “those who won.” Similarly, I would argue, the global discourses about Muslim women do not simply omit or ignore histories of women’s mosques and women’s scholarly/leadership roles

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in Muslim communities, but instead reflect more convoluted narratives informed by a gap between the place-making processes of the actual sites as they exist in local arenas, and the place-making processes of the conceptual spaces the sites as a category—“women’s mosques” in general— occupy in global discourses. Recall Geertz’s quote that, “no one lives in the world in general. Everybody… lives in some confined and limited stretch of it – ‘the world around here’” (Geertz, 1996, p. 262). Global discourses are not lived in; we cannot meet “Muslim women” as a whole or sit in some version of an abstract and unsituated women’s mosque. As demonstrated in Chapter 5, even so-called universal mosque components—architectural features such as the dome, minaret, qibla wall, mihrab, and minbar—have unique sociocultural histories and varied contexts of production. Looking at the ways in which Maldivian nisha miskii are constructed as local places, the world around here, and considering how those constructions of place interact with discourses concerned with world in general allows us to better understand the silences related to women’s mosques in global conversations about the histories of Muslim communities. Thus, in this chapter I will begin by further examining the role of the local—both island and national—in Maldivian nisha miskii and then go on to examine the role of the global in two ways: first, in terms of how transnational processes have contributed to the signification of nisha miskii in the Maldives, and second, how the concept of the global ummah, a shared notion of a worldwide Muslim community, relates to these places.

The Maldives, Island and Nation As we have seen throughout this book, the spatial practices of nisha miskii in the Maldives are clearly linked to Maldivian national politics.2 In the Maldives, the central government, through the Supreme Islamic Council, impacts every aspect of religious life. The text of the 1997 constitution of the Maldives stipulates that Islam is the official state religion, and that the Maldivian President must be Sunni, as he (all presidents to date have been male) holds the “supreme authority to propagate the tenets of Islam” (Larkin, 2001, p. 511). Associated laws make it the duty of both the Government of the Maldives and the people to ensure religious unity. One particular outcome of these laws that many of my informants stressed in conversation is that it is illegal in the Maldives for religious gatherings to take place outside of government-sponsored

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mosques—government mosques are used to ensure religious unity within national borders. As such, the Supreme Islamic Council is responsible for overseeing the affairs for hundreds of mosques—approximately 700 according to most accounts—throughout the Maldives. Women’s mosques, as with other mosques in the Maldives, are conceived spaces of the national government that function as formal government institutions; the mudahim of nisha miskii are appointed and paid by the central government. In addition to employing all of the mudahim and/or imams of these mosques, Supreme Islamic Council also issues a national khutbah, which is distributed to all of the islands for reading at Friday prayers. Recognizing the import of the khutbah in defining a mosque as a site of Muslim leadership, as outlined in Chapter 6, the fact that leaders of local men’s mosques do not “give” Friday sermons in the full sense of the term—as knowledge producers—suggests the need for a reconsideration of the contrast between women’s and men’s mosque leadership roles and prompts recognition of the ways in which national practices interact with gendered practices to shape the functions of mosque spaces. The physical locations and material conditions of mosques are also closely tied to national interests. As demonstrated in the case of the Masjid al Shaikh Qasim bin Muhammad al-Thani in Hulhumalé—which was built to encourage people to move to the new island in order to alleviate over-crowing on Malé island—the Government of the Maldives uses mosque spaces as a tool in government programs geared toward shaping ideal island communities. Recall too that Maldivian mosque attendance has been used to calculate whether the population of an island is sufficient (both historically and in the contemporary period), and for access to government benefits, as in the story the mudahim Fathimath told me about how the women’s mosque site was used to count the ­population of her island for government rations during World War II. The spatial organization of Islamic practice is even further nationally oriented as it is enforced, and informed, by Maldivian governmental regulations that distinguish between types of islands to regulate religious practice. For example, while it is illegal in all other areas of the Maldives to engage in practices that are circumscribed as not “being Muslim,” these laws are suspended for resort islands, as they are considered spaces for foreigners (including both guest tourists and guest workers), rather than Maldivians. Thus, resort islands may serve alcohol and pork, practices that are illegal in other physical locations. The national community of the Maldives is thus carved up bureaucratically into separate zones

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of social practice as distinctly as the resort islands have been physically shaped for those practices. This division of spaces within the country informs all other spatial variations; nisha miskii in the Maldives are able to exist only within island spaces—not conforming to a national or international norm—in part due to the ways in which this segmentation of place has been established as a spatial practice in the country. This observation brings us back to “the islands.” In Chapter 2, I described flying to the northern atolls and the lessons I learned there from some of the mudahim that I met. Before we even landed, however, the island landscapes of the Maldives taught their own lessons. At first as we flew, I simply enjoyed the scenery, watching the islands below and trying to note each island’s name—Gaafaru, Kaashidhoo, Maakurathu, and so on—as we flew over it. Then, I began to see patterns. Contrary to what I might have expected, each island was unique; the variations in size, vegetation, human presence, shapes, and other small details all worked together to tell a story. We flew over a small sandbar island no more than 2000 feet across, a slice of sand in the ocean with no plants; a spotless white catamaran and brightly painted dhoni (a traditional Maldivian wooden boat) were moored just off its shore, and two tourists seemed to be having a picnic on the beach. An uninhabited island full of tight, tangled greenery looked like a possible setting for the evils spirits that I had been told some Maldivians— although never the person telling me—said existed on those islands. Each inhabited island announced its presence with right angles, the sharp lines formed by the rectangular edges of a sheltered concrete-wall enclosed port, jutting piers, and a main road down the middle. The precise aerial views of grids of walls and streets on each inhabited island reminded me of a story that one of the librarians in Malé had told me of a past president who insisted that, for the sake of progress, each island should have one long straight finished road down the middle of the island, even if the island was too small for vehicles. We passed strangely shaped resort islands, bristling with spiny strings of bungalows built over water on stilts, some sculpted into convoluted shapes to provide direct beach access to each guesthouse. It was then that I realized that no matter how much influence and power was exerted from the national government in Malé, these island spaces had their own identities and narratives as well. Maldivian islands, while conceived spaces of the national government that literally defines each island, are not wholly constituted within

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national ideologies. Local communities also play a role in defining island social practices, particularly the women’s mosque of the island. Maldivian islands are spaces where usage of areas can be defined by cultural beliefs about the movements of dangerous magical spirits, which Islamic practices and sites are believed to help to control (see, e.g., Razee, 2006, pp. 115–117); the practices of magic may be nationally forbidden, but are reported to continue on the islands. Islands are also social units where women are part of household compounds and neighborhood associations that map out social hierarchies and order daily life. This evidenced during my interviews while traveling in the northern atolls of the Maldives, when a number of mudahim on different islands articulated their roles as leaders in relation to island society, and located the significance of their practices in nisha miskii sites within the social order of the island locale. While the women’s mosques function as government institutions, patterns of mosque design and upkeep in the islands suggest that these spaces derive a great deal of their social significance from local community participation. They frequently are developed as conceived spaces by islanders instead of the government; in my interviews, islanders frequently indicated that the nisha miskii buildings were of their own design and construction. For example, on one island a mudahim told me that the mosque had been built twelve years earlier (in 1994). She explained, …twelve years ago the mosque was too hot and very small, so we asked everyone here to help to make it bigger, and then to help in. mosque construction. Who did you request the funds for the building from? We raised it ourselves, the men and the women of this island. I worked very hard, doing a lot of work, carrying the stones, it was a lot of work… but we collected 230,000 rufiyaa [Maldivian currency]. And we did it on our own. In the construction women here worked very hard, for nine days we were carrying sand and other materials, back and forth, the women themselves. I led them, and the other women helped.

The physical presence of newer island mosques, including the women’s mosques, often invokes a national aesthetic rather than a local one, as they are frequently built similar to all buildings in Malé, using imported concrete blocks. Concrete blocks can be costly and require raising funds in support of mosque constructions. These are not simply

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national constructions since, as described above, they are arranged and undertaken locally. Each nisha miskii building reflects historical changes in building materials and economic situations that also symbolize an intertwining of local and national aspirations. Older mosques, or reused sections within newer constructions, may be built out of local materials—cut blocks of coral stone for the walls, with woven palm leaf roofs. The sense of local community was articulated through these local materials, expressed in the ways in which women and men of the island themselves produced them. This is still true of facets of modern constructions to a degree, as exterior arrangements (shrubs, sitting areas, etc.) and mosque ornamentation frequently reflect local involvement. Local spaces shape the functions of women’s mosques on a daily basis, playing an active role in the human engagement with spaces that becomes part of the dialectical process of place production. After traveling to visit nisha miskii on a number of islands, I noted that within one atoll group it is possible to find a wide variety of mosque conditions between islands, with some nisha miskii in evident need of basic repairs and other mosques in excellent condition, finished with expensive new materials. Although mudahim consistently reported that the Maldivian Government was responsible for the cost of repairs and upkeep of nisha miskii, in conversation island women linked the condition of their mosques to the economic opportunities available to members of their community, citing private incomes rather than government funding as a source of regular mosque funds. On many islands, individual community members sponsor mosques, and women report that being a mosque patron is a sign of high social status for local community members. According to my informants, household spatial arrangements—particularly whether there is ample space where women can be relaxed and focused at home—can determine the actual usage of women’s mosques. Thus, the actual possibilities for religious and social interactions within the women’s mosques, the deciding mechanism for whether a nisha miskii is a place for comfortable reading, reflection, study, and prayer, depend as much on local island social life as government intervention. Reviewing the contrasting explanations of the etiology of nisha miskii in the Maldives through the lens of a national government vs. islands dichotomy, it is noticeable that all of the accounts that suggest that nisha miskii existed before the 1970s are from local sources; the silence in national narratives of Muslim practices depends upon the

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spatial distinctions between Malé and other islands of the Maldives. In the Maldives, the island is a common spatial metaphor for social life and referred to as a traditional cultural setting by Maldivians everywhere; “the island” is an ideal, and as such a fundamental local unit of the country. It is not, however, the only model of social life; conversations about social practices are often conceptually mapped to contrast life on Malé (including the capital island and its immediate neighbors) versus that on the “islands,” i.e., outlying islands. This spatial dichotomy has a social history, as it is closely related to the Malé-centric perspective of the Maldives associated with the political elites of the country as mapped by Colton in the 1970s (Colton, 1995). Thus, although “the island” is integral to cultural models of place-making, it is not at the center of Maldivian spatial models. The island is a cultural ideal of a spatial norm, but it is also perceived of as marginal within the nation; as in the case of all margins, island spaces are essential for defining the center even while positioned outside of it. Women’s mosques as a part of island life therefore occupy a curious position within Maldivian social discourses as being associated with traditional norms and cultural ideals, yet peripheral to national identity. A woman’s mosque is located conceptually as a specific site of religious practices and histories that are part of a larger cultural geography that contrasts social life of Malé, the 200 inhabited islands, and the eighty resort islands developed for international tourism. While the spatial practices associated with “being Muslim” in the Maldives are then literally formed by the central government, including the mapping of gendered spaces for prayer, they are also informed by Maldivian ideas about islands as social units. Maldivian nisha miskii are nationally conceived, oriented in reference to notions of an island or local community, and situated within interlocking spatial orientations comprised of multiple dichotomies—such as island vs. Malé, inhabited island vs. resort, inhabited island vs. uninhabited island, mosque vs. Friday mosque, men’s vs. women’s mosque, etc. Thus, the dialectical engagement of place-making processes for nisha miskii in the Maldives occurs not only between people and sites, but also in dialogue with multiple cultural landscapes, another form of the holistic system of place-making I have considered previously. As I will address in the next sections, this dialogue extends outwards in time and space, to engage with diverse systems of spatial meaning linked to transnational processes.

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Transnational Flows—Historical Indian Ocean Travel One of these transnational processes is the historical Indian Ocean trade, which linked the Maldives to global economic networks and brought many Islamic beliefs and practices to the region. As demonstrated in Chapter 4, the Indian Ocean trading arena provides multiple possible symbolic histories for women’s mosques that contribute to their construction as lived or representational spaces in Lefebvre’s sense of the terms. The presence of contemporary women’s mosques and prayer spaces in many of the areas historically linked by this trade—China, Indonesian, the Maldives, the Lakshadweep Islands, the Kenyan coast, Yemen, etc.—suggests the possibility that women’s mosques were associated with the gradual spread of Islam and continual movement of Muslim travelers along these trade routes. Common historical narratives suggest that we regard the practice of having women’s mosques in the context of communities that developed historically with culturally hybrid households whose identities and interests transcended local identities. In these narratives, Muslim men were thought to have been mobile, while women—Muslim and non-Muslim—were linked to those mobile men through kinship and trade; from this perspective, it is generally agreed that women were involved in the historical trading networks of the Indian Ocean only within their own cultural settings, as the producers of goods from local economies, local wives of seafarers, working as traders for family businesses in multiple ports, and at times as investors financing their own expeditions (see, e.g., Andaya, 2001; Sheriff, 2010). This version of Indian Ocean history supports, and gives rise to, understandings of Muslim community in the Indian Ocean that categorize men’s practices as universal Islamic ones and relegate women’s practices to the local. For example, Lambek notes in Mayotte that in the past while men and women both participated in Islamic rituals, the major distinction between the genders’ religious roles was that men could participate “simply on the basis of their public Muslim person,” comprised by their familiarity Islamic prayers, while women had to specifically be invited to the event based on kinship and friendship links with the sponsors (Lambek, 2000, p. 79). Thus, Lambek concludes, “women were more closely linked to the local and the particular, and men to the global, the abstract, and the universal. It was thus men who, in their roles as seafarers or traders, could join

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in any congregation across the Indian Ocean” (Lambek, 2000, p. 79). In a reflection on the consequences of conversion in the Indian Ocean, Stephen C. Headley speaks of the mosque as a spatial counterpart of the same type of religious universalism that Lambek ascribes to knowledge of prayers; the uniformity of mosques provided an alternative to the specific cultural landscapes required for prayer in pre-Islamic communities, “[o] ne could pray at one’s local villages shrine… or one could follow Islam which enlarged using new oral rites which made prayer possible anywhere and at any time” (Headley, 2000, p. 206). Headley points out that with the introduction of Islam the mosque in Indonesia represented a fundamental shift in cultural spatial geographies, as “[t]he Muslim prayer came with a new religious landscape, a mosque, oriented towards Mecca… A self-conscious uniformity was introduced” (Headley, 2000, p. 206). Understood within historical narratives that emphasize the Indian Ocean arena as populated by male travelers, this claimed universalism of mosque spaces lends credence to notions of Islamic spaces as male spaces. From this perspective, women’s mosques are contrasting spaces of local significance. Voices on women’s historical roles in transnational Indian Ocean travel and trade are notably silent in these historical narratives. Viewing the historical Indian Ocean as an arena of traveling men and stationary women must surely over-simplify the actual circumstances of individual men and women in the past. Contemplate, for example, the daily lived implications of gendered labor divisions in a historical Maldivian island household where the man’s labor produced locally consumed products such as fish and regional navigational assistance, while the woman’s labor produced globally valued commodities such as coir rope and cowry shells. Such a scenario creates economic patterns that could potentially have as much salience in comprehending gendered agency and orienting spatial roles within the transnational Indian Ocean trade system as the movement of bodies. While the development of such alternative models of agency is necessary for better exploring the gendered roles in the historical Indian Ocean, we can also find a great deal of historical evidence that suggests the necessity of revising existing models as well. Women’s roles as travelers within the Indian Ocean have been overlooked, in spite of the better-documented history of Muslim women travelers in general (Tolmacheva, 1993). The exclusion of women travelers from many Indian Ocean accounts may be due to the common adherence to Eurocentric histories; a majority of European ships

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did not carry women on board, with only a few noticeable exceptions (Pearson, 2009, p. 695). Other authors have arrived at the conclusion that women were rarely part of the historical Indian Ocean travel networks by abstracting backwards based on twentieth-century data (Sheriff, 2010, p. 102). Yet several authors of varied time periods—e.g., Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century, and the Dutch trader Jan Huyghen van Linschotenate in the sixteenth century—note that, in contrast to European ships, Asian Muslim ships in the Indian Ocean frequently carried women; women on Asian Muslim ships included the wives of elite passengers who traveled in purdah, the families of crew (both wives and children) engaged in daily household tasks on board, servants and slaves of both genders busy with work, and individual passengers who had paid for their passage (Pearson, 2009, pp. 696–697). Ship forms shaped the types of society aboard (Chaudhuri, 2005, pp. 138–159); larger Asian Muslim ships were reportedly more stable social units than European ships of a similar size (Pearson, 2009). The Asian Muslim ships fostered a generally egalitarian community where it was believed to be safe for women to be actively involved in ship life, unlike in European ships where rigid class hierarchies were used to both restrain and reproduce violence (Pearson, 2009). Muslim women from both Arabia and Asia traveled through the Indian Ocean for trade, family reasons, and as pilgrims whose movements were tied to their universal religious geographies (Tolmacheva, 2013). We therefore know that women were also travelers in the Indian Ocean arena. Women traveling in the Indian Ocean during this time period were also potentially part of gendered religious collectives. There are well-documented accounts of these women’s Haj experiences in Mecca that suggest that medieval Muslim women sometimes preferred to pray together as a group and had a sense of themselves as a sharing religious concerns and interests (Tolmacheva, 1998, 2013). I have found no mention of the prayer facilities en route for medieval Muslim women traveling in the Indian Ocean and consider this narrative silence meaningful. In contrast, overland travel documented by Ibn Battuta demonstrates that each person in a well-to-do caravan would have his or her own mahala, a large tent, which could serve as, among other functions, a mosque for the travelers; thus, we can establish that women travelers of the time period in other systems were able to negotiate their own spaces for prayer and worship while traveling (Tolmacheva, 2013). That we have

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no mention of any similar or alternative prayer facilities for women traveling in the Indian Ocean suggests the need for further research. While the presence of women travelers in the historical Indian Ocean is hardly conclusive evidence of prayer spaces for those women, the potential of historical sites that met the needs of women engaged in transnational travel and trade and informed global flows of religious practice does suggest the possibility of considering women’s mosques spaces in the historical Indian Ocean as Islamic spaces, rather than as locally conceived places. In this case, the silences regarding women’s mosques in the historical narratives of the Indian Ocean may have misinformed our understandings of the gendered spaces of the past.

Transnational Flows—Tourism The Maldives is most famous globally for its tourist destinations; resort islands are commoditized sites that sell the Maldives’ regional climate, ocean access, isolation of islands, and pristine beaches bundled together as luxury locations. The tourism business is a critical source of income for the country; in 2017, the Maldives earned over 2 billion dollars hosting 1.3 million foreign tourists, 46.5% of whom were from European countries, and 44.4% of whom were from Asian countries, a majority of the latter from China (Maldives Monetary Authority, 2018; Ministry of Tourism, 2018). While we might imagine that tourism on this scale prompts tourists to interact extensively with Maldivian society and culture—making local practice into subjects of international interest as, for example, in Bali—this is not the case. In spite of these numbers, the transnational interactions with tourists in the Maldives have limited sociocultural scopes and are largely economic in nature. Unlike many other popular tourism sites in Asia, where tourist–resident interactions are common sites of intercultural communication and negotiation, few international tourists actually interact for any length of time with Maldivians when visiting the Maldives. A majority of international visitors travel directly from the international arrivals airport near Malé to their resorts via boat or seaplane transfers and do not leave their resorts while visiting. This pattern of isolation had characterized Maldives tourism for several decades; although more tourists reportedly began visiting Malé and other Maldivian areas in the early 2000s, these numbers declined after the 2007 bomb blast in Malé’s Sultan Park that injured several tourists and have continued to remain low with several international travel

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advisories that keep tourists away from populated areas. As mentioned earlier, the cultural geography of the Maldives, which classifies tourist islands as separate zones of social practice from other islands, and national laws, which are applied differently to tourist spaces, reinforce this separation. Even the material culture of resorts speaks to this pattern of segregation; when I had the occasion to visit a few tourist areas in 2006, a quick perusal of resort gift shops revealed that nearly all of the objects sold as tourist souvenirs in Maldivian shops were made in Sri Lanka or Indonesia. International tourists visiting the Maldives are insulated and kept separate from most Maldivian’s daily lives; few tourists visit inhabited islands and cultural practices such as nisha miskii rarely have the chance to enter tourist narratives about life in the Maldives. Maldivians do work in resorts, although fewer are employed there than might be expected. In 2010, 53% of Maldivian resort employees were expatriate labor; overall only 7% of resort employees were female, and only 2% of those were Maldivian women (Shakeela, Ruhanen, & Breakey, 2010, p. 65). While many tourists in the Maldives assume that cultural attitudes about women and work are responsible for these numbers, it is notable that at the same time women made up 47% of the workforce in the Maldives (Shakeela et al., 2010, p. 67). Scholarly perceptions of the factors that inhibit women from working in the tourism industry often focus on the association of tourism with “nonIslamic” tourist activities such as gambling, nudism, and the consumption of pork and alcohol (Shakeela et al., 2010, p. 66). Other sources argue that structural issues such as poor employee housing choices and the lack of childcare facilities in tourist areas can be the real barrier for women’s participation (Dayal & Didi, 2001). Conversations with women in the Maldives suggested a combination of these factors; there is some concern in island families about the non-Islamic influences within the tourism market, as well as functional concerns about language barriers, gendered salary discrepancies, and lack of structural facilities for female employees within the resorts. As a result, a majority of Maldivian women will rarely interact with foreign tourists directly on resort islands. Although most Maldivian women do not work for the resorts, resort employment for both men and women affects local island economies and therefore influences the construction and maintenance of island mosques. In spite of the general discursive emphasis on government funding for nisha miskii, particularly in conversations with government officials, I found that some of the most spacious and well-kept nisha

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miskii were located on islands nearest to tourist resorts. In conversation, a few mudahim mentioned men’s tourism employment as a major source of financial support for the women’s mosques of the island. In one atoll, the impact of these two sources of financial support was strongly contrasted in the material conditions of nisha miskii; the women’s mosque building on the island that housed the administrative headquarters of the atoll chief was damaged and lacked funding for repairs, while the island closest to the atoll’s largest tourist resort was new and in excellent repair with, reportedly, the support of tourism earnings. Thus, while the tourism industry shapes the material conditions of mosque sites, which can in turn influence women’s uses of the spaces, the transnational tourist industry of the Maldives has little impact on the sociocultural status of nisha miskii. Beyond participating in, and perhaps reinforcing, a cultural geography that maintains women’s mosques as island institutions, international tourism creates a distinct silence in global discourses about Maldivian social life.

Transnational Flows—Development Agencies Another global arena that has shaped ideas about and practices in nisha miskii in the Maldives is the international humanitarian world, the global sphere of contemporary non-governmental development organizations (NGOs). As noted in Chapter 4, the Maldivian national government explicitly attributed the creation of nisha miskii in the Maldives to the United Nations’ (UN) 1985 World Conference on Women held in Nairobi, Kenya. The representative of the Ministry of Gender and Family that I spoke with discouraged me from thinking of nisha miskii as long-standing cultural traditions, claiming that Maldivian women’s mosques were linked to the creation of women’s committees, island sociopolitical units managed by the National Women’s Committee (founded in 1979), which was formed in preparation for the 1985 meetings in Nairobi (Office for Women’s Affairs, 1989, p. 21). Government publications of the time period supported this narrative, reporting that the women’s committees were responsible for women’s mosques, and involvement in these spaces was intended to train women in civic roles (Department of Information and Broadcasting, 1985, p. 7; Office for Women’s Affairs, 1989, p. 21).3 This way of speaking of nisha miskii reminded me of Marc Auge’s definition of “non-places” as sites that are purely functional and have no history or relation to identities

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(Auge, 2009). In spite of discussing women as collectives, which should require scrutinization of group identities, most development sources on Maldivian nisha miskii considered them as ahistorical settings for women’s public presence, with little meaning ascribed to the site itself. Any coverage of the significance of these sites as places was located in international rather than local processes; women’s mosques were perceived as non-places from a local perspective, an idea that directly opposed what I was later told by the women who used them. The Ministry of Gender and Family representative had claimed in conversation that the government, under direction from international NGOs, specifically designed women’s mosques to “get women outside of their homes.” This phrase struck me as strange, as in Malé women’s movements outside the home did not seem visibly limited; I was accustomed to seeing women in public spaces of the city, engaged in a variety of activities, at all hours of the day and night. I assumed, in part, that this represented a difference between urban and rural women’s roles, however after visiting some of the islands I realized that this was not the case; island women were also mobile, socially visible within their communities, and employed in a variety of activities outside of their household compounds. Both historical accounts and individual women’s life histories did not suggest that these were recent developments. These contradictions were present in documents from the UN as well. In a 2001 United National Development (UNDP) report, the writer claimed that, “[f]emale public role models are not concepts familiar to the Maldives. Women are socialized for roles in the private sphere and not public life” (Quinn, 2011, p. 30). Yet the same author goes on to note that while this was a national-level stereotype, on islands “current and former Women’s Development Committee leaders and female Imams play a respected and important role in the life of the community” (Quinn, 2011, p. 30). Elsewhere in the same report are a few mentions of women’s mosques, claiming that these sites play a “significant role in the collective action of women on the outer islands” (Quinn, 2011, p. 27).4 After exploring the topic with a number of women in both Malé and the islands, I came to the conclusion that governmental and NGO discourses about women’s mosques were both predicated upon stereotypical notions of Muslim women’s spaces, notions that classically invoked the spatial trope of the public/private dichotomy in Muslim women’s lives. These development projects mirror the works of other international agencies in Asia that have used as a starting point flawed

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assumptions about Muslim women and their spaces (Davis, 2005). The UNDP report from 2011 mentions women’s leadership and women’s mosques to illustrate the success of development projects, the women’s development committees who support the women’s mosques. It is striking that the language of the problem perceived by the development world uses the common spatial trope of the public/private dichotomy, while the language of the solution mirrors the long-standing national cultural geography of the Maldives, contrasting Malé vs. the islands. It is also notable here that female imams and women’s mosques are discussed from the development perspective as largely social roles and sites. The development-oriented government sector of the Maldives and international development NGOs both frame women’s mosques—and leadership within the mosques—as part of a progressive secular movement aimed toward women’s civic engagement, which only happens to take a religious form in the Maldives for cultural reasons. That is, in conversations with and documents from these two groups nisha miskii were rarely considered as sites of piety and prayer—in contrast to the accounts of the women who used them—but instead as sociopolitical sites. Women’s mosques within the development perspective are not constituted as Islamic sites belonging to Muslim women and used for spiritual purposes, i.e., non-places as religious spaces; instead, they are placed in these discourses as foreign innovations of public space that have taken a culturally recognizable form to make them acceptable to Muslim women, particularly to those living in what are conceived of as insular island communities. Naheed Gina Aaftaab notes, in her study of public spaces and development in Afghanistan, that “[l]iberal feminist development theories privilege mobility and visibility as a necessary precursor to access public education and employment, making the veil and the burqa a symbol of power and submission in the public realm” (Aaftaab, 2005, p. 50). This development approach employs and relates two of the spatial tropes covered in Chapter 3 to make sense of Muslim women’s experiences; “the veil” and private spaces are conceptually bound to traditional restrictions on women, while women’s visibility in public spaces is equated with empowerment. As Aaftaab points out this use of spatial tropes—so recognizable at the global level—breaks down in many local levels; in Afghanistan, for example, the burqa allowed women “to be mobile in the public realm while protecting their privacy from the public gaze” (Aaftaab, 2005, p. 50). In doing so, the burqa in this cultural setting

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provides women access to education, while maintaining cultural traditions that defined an individual’s autonomy as a right to privacy in a manner reminiscent of Kadivar’s aforementioned work (Kadivar, 2003). Local experiences of the burqa are silenced in international development agencies’ narratives that utilize progress discourses predicated on notions of universal agency and development. While not posed in direct opposition to women’s religious engagement, key players in national and international development initiatives in the Maldives similarly equate mobility and visibility in public spaces with women’s empowerment. This perspective—informed by secular progressive development theory and overlooking the sitting view of women’s mosques as sacred spaces—precludes recognition of the role women’s mosques as site of religious experiences, either individual or collective. By excluding women’s piety, religious experiences, scholarly expertise, and other dimensions of the lived experiences of being Muslim in discussions of nisha miskii in the Maldives, development narratives dislocate Maldivian nisha miskii from sacred geographies. National and international interests in Maldivian women’s mosques focused primarily on the sociopolitical roles of women thus promulgate these perspectives of the spaces—as local non-places and international civic sites—in global development discourses. As in the previous cases of transnational flows, development agencies’ perspectives offer only a fragmentary understanding of the sociocultural contexts within which nisha miskii exist as sites of spatial practice in the Maldives; there are differing silences in the heterogeneous narratives of historical and contemporary transnational flows.

Imaging and Belonging in the Global Ummah Spatial tropes may be fictions, as Parkin pointed out, but they are useful fictions (Parkin, 2000, p. 1). Earlier, I located that utility in terms of scholarly study, observing that attention to spatial tropes allows us to focus on spatial patterns and make sense of them. Here, I would like to return to the idea of the global ummah and examine the spatial trope further, as a concept with utility to many Muslims around the world. The notion of a global ummah provides a powerful ideoscape that allows people around the world to imagine themselves as members of a shared community, and as such functions as an additional layer of meaning in the place-making processes of Muslim communities around the world.

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As covered in Chapter 4, the term “ummah” literally means “community” in Arabic, and although it has contemporary political implications in its most basic form, it refers to a community of religious believers. The ummah as a religious identity community is contrasted with communities associated with geographic locations such as nations; while nations require physical boundaries for their definition, the ummah is bounded theoretically, the border of the ummah located between believers and non-believers. The ummah is one of several possible transnational identities for Muslims—we can see this clearly with the other transnational flows associated with Maldivian culture reviewed earlier in this chapter— and it is the only one that is assumed to be shared between all Muslims of diverse cultural backgrounds. As such, the idealized global ummah has significant implications for lived religion; being Muslim is theoretically sufficient for being a member of the ummah, separate from individual practices, educational status, gender, etc. In daily practice, however, concepts of the global ummah vary culturally, and access to education, media, and other ideological tools may shape an individual’s access to a religious ummah that extends beyond local understandings of religious practice. The ummah is not simply an abstract unembodied community; it is organized in communities with geophysical constraints and linked to several shared sacred landscapes for Muslims as the foundational concepts of the global community of Muslims are built upon particular spaces—e.g., Mecca, mosques, and religious schools—through narratives about Muslim beliefs and practices. The global ummah also has socio-spatial implications, such as fostering transnational links, developing new forms of social consciousness, and reshaping religious practices. Thus, the ummah, while theoretical, is comprised at least in part through spatial practices with gendered dimensions. Its shared notion of a worldwide Muslim religious community does not transcend regional differences and cultural backgrounds, but instead incorporates them into a large narrative about who Muslims are as a whole. As much as we can deliberate on how local Muslim communities encounter and are impacted by the ummah, we should therefore also consider how they give form to the ummah. The roles of shared geographic landscapes in shaping the Muslim ummah are demonstrated even in seemingly universal Islamic movements, where we see the utilization of fundamentally locally situated perspectives on Islam. For example, John Bowen describes a movement for a “French Islam” that is opposed by what is considered to be

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“universalist” ideas of Islam (Bowen, 2004). He notes, however, that visiting scholars resistant to French Islam scholars are those who, ….[c]ome to France for these sessions, and then return to their posts in Syria, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia…. precisely because these guest speakers do work in the Arab-Muslim environments of the Middle East, they have little patience with the call for “new interpretations” of Islam to fit French conditions. (Bowen, 2004, p. 51)

What may initially seem like tension between a locally specific practice of Islam and a more universal one is actually part of multiple local perspectives engaged in a dialogue about historically formed tensions within international networks of knowledge and power. As Bowen points out, it is “precisely because” of the social and cultural backgrounds of these scholars that they reject calls for a specifically French Islam. The idea that being Muslim is constructed locally through spatial practices in diverse cultural communities in a variety of ways is supported by a variety of anthropological works on Islamic practices. In Hegland’s work, while the central spatial paradigm for Muharram rituals in Pakistan remains the historical battle on the Karbala plains, Pakistani women’s participation in these rituals is oriented to and reconfigured by local spatial practices (Hegland, 1998, p. 251). Mahmood’s aforementioned work on women’s mosque movements in Egypt similarly links the women’s movement to the political landscape of Egypt and social terrain of the women’s lives (2005). At first glance these examples may seem to suggest that the spatial practices of “being Muslim”—and, by extension as a community formed by being Muslim, the global ummah—are fundamentally comprised of the local, in dialogue with other local practices and perspectives. Such a scenario would support the “world around here” idea discussed earlier. Yet, even though we all live in the local, the concept of the world in general is not simply composed of multiple instances of local perspectives linked together; there is a notion of the world in general, in this case the ummah, that we all live in as well. As demonstrated in the case of the nisha miskii of the Maldives, the world in general may be informed by the world around here, but is not informed equally by all local experiences. Women’s mosques are largely excluded from conversations of universal Muslim spaces in the global ummah, as they are relegated to the cultural as historical institutions or social as contemporary movements.

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Not all local spaces find their way into narratives of the ummah, as not all local ways of being Muslim are in the dialogues that contribute to perceptions of the ummah as a place. The local, national, transnational, and global are intersecting systems of meaning, but each is not comprised of a single perspective or experiences, and they do not all simply intersect at equal levels. As we have seen in the previous section on transnational flows in the historical Indian Ocean, silences in formal historical documents about historical gender roles have shaped assumptions of which Muslim practices are particular to local communities and which existed in abstract forms associated with the universal and global ummah. These selective conceptualizations of the global ummah have, in turn, new sociospatial implications, fostering certain transnational links over others, not only developing but also privileging new forms of social consciousness and redefining religious practices. The textual landscapes of the ummah, communities that are located in relation to bodies of literature and (increasingly) new media, play a role in contemporary forms of this process. Just as silences in histories of Muslim communities have shaped which spaces are included in global historical narratives of being Muslim, so too do omissions, inclusions, and silences in contemporary media and literature fashion new notions of being Muslim in the global ummah. In some of the case studies of women’s leadership mentioned in Chapter 6, we can see that Muslim women’s leadership roles are relegated to the local and excluded from the global ummah through reference to textually informed geographies. In the case of the pandei of the southern Philippines Sama community, Horvatich argues that Sama entanglement with textually based higher education systems has led to increasing challenges to the local system in the form of a globally informed, textually oriented understanding of Islam referred to as the ummah. Among the Sama, college-educated individuals have access to international Islamic literature made available with the spreading influence of the Ahmadiyya movement, which has been growing in the Sama community since the late 1950s.5 While the Sama community encounters globally influenced ideas about Islam through a variety of media, published pamphlets and books form the backbone of global religious influence (Horvatich, 1994, p. 821). College-educated Sama have greater access to these sources in both a linguistic and epistemic sense; they have studied English language and are therefore able to read internationally authored literature. These texts also appeal to them as

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arguments in this literature present “rational, abstract arguments” that appeal to “Western-educated Sama” (Horvatich, 1994, p. 821). The textual basis of these arguments and formal educational credentials of the authors of the pamphlets legitimizes this religious material for college-educated members of the community. Adherence to textual authority learned in college allows these Sama individuals to construct their notions of being Muslim in relation to the textual worlds of the Qur’an and Hadith and creates a version of being Muslim in the global ummah that excludes local practices thought of as traditional rather than rational, such as the work of the pandei. Thus, Sama women’s Islamic leadership roles are restricted and excluded from discourses of the global ummah through introduction to a textually oriented global ummah. Spaces of Muslim practices reorganize gender roles in this community as well; Sama mosque spaces are similarly redefined in relation to texts as the community debates new ideas related to mosque orientation and construction (Horvatich, 1994, p. 819). Not all Muslim women religious leaders function wholly in opposition to local constructions of the global ummah as constructed by networks of transnational knowledge. As noted in the last chapter, the Hui Chinese ahong have traditionally studied both Arabic and Persian language texts; in the late 1980s when the Chinese Muslim community was reinforcing its ties with the global ummah, women’s mosques engaged in training female students to become ahong changed their curriculum to focus further on the study of Arabic (Jingjun & Jaschok, 2014, p. 647). In the case of the Uzbek otinchalar Peshkova mentions that the women are regarded as “an alternative to Islamist religious networks such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Ar., The Party of Liberation) and a purist conservative trend of Islam referred locally as a ‘Wahhabism’” (Peshkova, 2006, p. 131). Yet the otinchalar also have “access to global religious knowledge and information about recent developments in Islamic Religious Thought and socio-religious movements” (Peshkova, 2006, p. 132). Their teaching is informed by globally circulated pamphlets that have been translated into Uzbek or Russian, which is in turn incorporated into the lessons they teach to students (Peshkova, 2006, pp. 186–188, 361). Otinchalar themselves cross national borders, as some travel to Tajikistan to deliver teachings (Peshkova, 2006, pp. 188–189). In spite of this, the contrast between otinchalar roles and the global significance of transnational religious networks is essential to the otinchalar themselves who, Peshkova argues, preserve the distinction by claiming their

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roles are more influenced by, and rooted in, local spaces and spatial practices than global ones, even while participating in global spatial practices that could be associated with the ummah (Peshkova, 2009). Still, other case studies in Chapter 6 suggest that the conceptualization of a textually oriented global ummah can foster Muslim women’s scholarly and leadership roles, and as well as reinforce their rights to mosque spaces. The alima of Ladakh have established their local religious authority based on textual expertise gained through their education in formal transnational institutions. The women leaders of the women’s mosques movements in both Mahmood’s and Nageeb’s work similarly derive their discursive authority from textual sources and modes of argument associated with global flows of Islamic knowledge and orthodoxy. In Mahmood’s account of the dai’ya Hajja Faiza, for example, the authority of globally recognized schools of thought was invoked to support women’s religious authority over cultural traditions that challenged her right to lead her own prayers. In all three of these cases, we can see that the textually based global ummah does not inherently undermine women’s spaces in Islam, but can work to reinforce notions of women’s authority and religious spatial practices. Yet, access to literacy and the tools of history that Trouillot wrote about earlier—vocabularies, ways of fashioning arguments, physical tools of reproducing information, etc.—means that not all women have equal access to this form of the global ummah, as demonstrated in Alidiou’s work on Arabic literacy and power (Alidou, 2005). The omission of the Maldivian nisha miskii in global discourses about Muslim women may in part be linked to their exclusion from this form of the global ummah, the textual landscapes formed through Arabic literacy and formal scholarship. Once, while visiting a women’s religious school in Mecca (Saudi Arabia), I spoke about the Maldivian mudahim and women’s mosques with a group of Saudi women who had earned advanced degrees in Islamic theology. The Saudi religious scholars were interested in the descriptions of nisha miskii in the Maldives that I presented, and agreed that there was a religious benefit to have such spaces to pray. They objected, however, to the mudahim being called “religious leaders” as, the scholars pointed out, the mudahim I spoke about were not all “qualified” and “properly educated”.6 This conversation with the Saudi scholars suggested to me that while Maldivian nisha miskii were potentially globally recognizable as part of spatial practices in the ummah as spaces of prayer, they lacked legitimacy because they were not

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associated with globally recognizable forms of religious authority. As indicated by many of the women I interviewed, mudahim do not receive formal religious training beyond their local studies. This is not true of all Muslims in the Maldives; many members of the national government were educated at internationally recognized Islamic institutions outside of the Maldives (in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and other areas), including President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who earned a degree from the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Egypt. This is also not the case for some women in the Maldives, as I will explain in the next chapter. Formal religious education beyond the local level is possible, and indeed valued, for Maldivians but not required, or perhaps even desired, for the mudahim of nisha miskii. The global ummah, however, is not just about textual landscapes, adherence to a form of globalized orthodoxy in Islam, and formal education. The ummah is also a community of sentiment, a shared identity that is experienced by many Muslims as a personal connection to narratives about Muslims in other places regardless of whether they share (or not) a language and customs. This perspective on the global ummah is more clearly expressed in women’s mosque spaces than the leadership roles associated with those spaces. What transforms a mosque as a physical site into a mosque as a place is, as contended in Chapter 5, not any particular arrangement of architectural features—which suggests access to formal architecture traditions, funding, and other material forms of the transnational flows of Islamic knowledge that comprise the earlier version of the global ummah—but instead its holistic role as a sacred space. As a place of collective prostration and prayer, the mosque is constructed as a sacred space by both religious activity and social elements. Although Muslim women can pray at home, prayer in a mosque is believed to be particularly beneficial due to the community role of the mosque site—the value of praying together—and because it is considered a house of Allah, more than a simple physical location. Maldivian women’s reasons for using mosques share these global understandings of mosques with Muslims in other parts of the world; many of their statements about the perceived and symbolic significance of their women’s mosques show that these globally shared systems of meaning contribute to forming women’s mosques as places. As I noted earlier, however, it is the accumulation of uses of these places that creates subjective understandings of women’s mosques as sacred places rather than any one particular feature or ritual; the sacredness of the

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mosque resides in its divine nature, but is continually reconstructed through the communal narratives of place building that highlight lived experiences associated with the site. It is this aspect of process of place building—recognized by Muslims around the world—that is rarely expressed in global narratives about women’s mosques, particularly in the Maldives where extra-local—national and transnational—narratives about the nisha miskii do not connect with their role as sacred spaces. As illustrated by the Hui case study, the legitimacy of women’s mosques in global discourses about these spaces often depends upon them having a well-documented history of usage that highlights the sacred— not only social or political—nature of the space. If historical narratives about women’s mosques are missing, not clearly reliable, and/or fragmented in cultural contexts of local islands, national communities, and regional histories, then they lack the context necessary to locate them as sacred spaces that construct the shared identities of being Muslim in the global ummah.

Locating Women’s Mosques in the Silences Being Muslim is comprised in global discourses of local practices and spaces, but is also informed by transnational networks of movement, capital, and knowledge, as well as a sense of a shared religious identity linked to collective practices and sacred spaces. When we scrutinize women’s mosques as not simply functional spaces, but as places that have been constituted through multiple fluid processes, we can see that they could derive their meaning in global discourses from all of these sources. Yet silences in many of these narratives often obscure and omit women’s mosques from these global dialogues about the lived experiences of being Muslim. Beverly Mack, when writing about a West African woman scholar and poet, critiques historical works that represent gendered religious roles in simple dichotomies such as ‘men as Muslim’ and ‘women as pagan’, that conceptualize women as being “on the periphery of the periphery of the Muslim world”, and/or those that assume an adversarial relationship wherein women are “silently subverting ‘the Islamic rules which keep them in an inferior position’,” noting that “[s]uch perspectives have contributed to negative stereotypes about Muslim women,” and that these “views derive from a paucity of women’s voice in recorded history” (Mack, 2000, p. 91). The lack of women’s voices in these histories, as Mack points out, shapes narratives of gendered roles, in turn

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constructing an entire conceptual framework of religious practice and who is meant when we invoke “the Muslim world.” The silences in narratives about the Muslim world are not merely blank spaces; each omission or missing piece of information is fashioned in its own context. There are historical silences in the Indian Ocean trade formed by selective attention to masculine histories, silences in the tourism industry shaped by contemporary political and economic patterns that influence tourist and worker choices, and silences in development narratives about the sacred nature of these sites as a result of the perception of women’s mosques as sociopolitical development outcomes. Regional religious historical narratives with gendered silences have contributed to place-making processes in Muslim communities by shaping notions of possible shared spaces in the global ummah. These silences in narratives regarding Maldivian nisha miskii—particularly the lack of documented female voices and perspectives that express collective rituals and sacred practices—therefore exclude the spaces from common discourses about global ummah.

Notes 1. Voyant Tools is an open-sourced online project that offers a platform for text analysis. Developed from HyperPo and Taporware, its project leads are Stefan Sinclair (McGill University) and Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta). The platform is, in their words, “a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public” (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016). 2. Readers should remember, particularly during this discussion of politics, that this use of present tense is an ethnographic construct (refer back to Note 1 of Chapter 1 for more on this choice). The present tense here refers to events in 2006, so the information on political life in the Maldives refers to the time period before the elections in Fall 2008. The 2008 constitution of the Maldives is substantially different from the 1997 version, and there have been numerous political changes; the contents of this chapter do not reflect those or later developments in Maldivian political life, as will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. 3. The Maldivian government’s desire to participate in international humanitarian initiatives is fueled, as in other parts of the world, by national interests, as participation in such programs is invariably linked to the bestowal of international funding and can be used to lend internationally sanctioned

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political legitimacy to national governments. The Maldives may be particularly susceptible to international influences of this kind; as political scientist Maqsud Ul Hasan Nuri has pointed out, the Maldives are a micro-state, dependent on “other states, institutions, processes and developments” to ensure its solidarity, a precarious position which the nation occupies in both political and ecological terms (Nuri, 2000, p. 83). 4.  I am reminded here of Diana K. Davis’s work in Afghanistan, which focuses on the problems associated with programs developed by international agencies. Davis points out that the “women in development” (WID) approach to gender issues, which is linked to modernization theory and neoliberalism, focuses on mobilizing women as a collective but generally occurs without remuneration and with the overall effect of increasing women’s workloads (Davis, 2005, p. 71). 5. Not only the Ahmadiyya movement is a part of this engagement; while the Ahmadiyya has a strong presence in the Sama community, its authority is so widely known that the term is commonly used for any reformist teachings of non-Sama provenance, whether then are related, unrelated, or even opposed to the teachings of the Ahmadiyya movement (Horvatich, 1994, p. 817). 6. It is notable that while the Saudi women scholars contested the Maldivian mudahim’s religious authority based on their local educations (in spite of their formal roles in Maldivian government institutions), in subsequent descriptions of this exchange with others I have never encountered questions about Saudi scholars’ own religious authority. The fact that the Saudi women had formal theological degrees from a government recognized university and were located in Mecca—even if some of them had been born in Mecca and were therefore the recipients of a form of local education as well—legitimizes their religious authority in most discussions with Muslims in other countries. This observation underscores the significance of formal religious education and specific Muslim spaces such as Mecca in the global ummah.

References Aaftaab, N. G. (2005). (Re)Defining Public Spaces Through Developmental Education for Afghan Women. In G. W. Falah & C. Nagel (Eds.), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion and Space (pp. 44–67). New York and London: Guilford Press. Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist, 104(3), 783–790.

198  J. H. FEWKES Alidou, O. (2005). Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Andaya, B. (Ed.). (2001). Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Auge, M. (2009). Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. New York, NY: Verso. Bowen, J. R. (2004). Does French Islam have Borders?: Dilemmas of Domestication in a Global Religious Field. American Anthropologist, 43–55. Chaudhuri, K. N. (2009). Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean. An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colton, E. O. (1995). The Elite of the Maldives: Sociopolitical Organization and Change (PhD thesis). London School of Economics and Political Science. Davis, D. (2005). A Space of Her Own: Women, Work, and Desire in an Afghan Nomad Community. In G. W. Falah & C. Nagel (Eds.), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion and Space (pp. 68–90). New York and London: Guilford Press. Dayal, R., & Didi, S. (2001). Women in the Republic of the Maldives: Country Briefing Paper. Manila, Philippines: Asian Development Bank. Department of Information and Broadcasting, R. o. M. (1985). Maldives Social Development. Malé, Maldives: Department of Information and Broadcasting. Falah, G.-W., & Nagel, C. (Eds.). (2005). Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion, and Space. New York, NY and London: Guilford Press. Geertz, C. (1996). Afterword. In S. Feld & K. Basso (Eds.), Sense of Place (pp. 259–262). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Headley, S. C. (2000). Sembah/Salat: The Javanisation of Islamic Prayer; The Islamisation of Javanese Prayer. In D. Parkin & S. C. Headley (Eds.), Islamic Prayer Across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque (pp. 169–211). London: Curzon. Hegland, M. E. (1998). Flagellation and Fundamentalism: (Trans) Forming Meaning, Identity, and Gender through Pakistani Women’s Rituals of Mourning. American Ethnologist, 25(2), 240–266. Horvatich, P. (1994). Ways of Knowing Islam. American Ethnologist, 21(4), 811–826. Jingjun, S., & Jaschok, M. (2014). The Culture of ‘Associational Leadership’ in the Hui Muslim Women’s Mosques of Central China. Asian Journal of Social Science, 42, 641–656. Kadivar, M. (2003). An Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islam. Social Research, 70(5), 659–680. Lambek, M. (2000). Localizing Islamic Performances in Mayotte. In D. Parkin & S. Headley (Eds.), Islamic Prayer Across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque (pp. 63–98). London: Curzon.

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Larkin, B. (2001). International Religious Freedom 2000. Washington, DC: United States Department of State. Mack, B. (2000). One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety, The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maldives Monetary Authority, R. o. M. (2018). 2017 Annual Report. Malé, Maldives: Maldives Monetary Authority. Ministry of Tourism, R. o. M. (2018). 2017 Tourist Arrivals by Nationality. Malé, Maldives: Ministry of Tourism. Retrieved from http://www.tourism. gov.mv. Mvslim. (2018). Do You Know about the First Mosque Led Entirely by Women? Retrieved from http://mvslim.com/do-you-know-about-the-first-mosqueled-entirely-by-women/. Nuri, M. U. H. (2000). Maldives in the 1990s. In V. Grover (Ed.), Maldives Government and Politics (pp. 65–104). New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd. Office for Women’s Affairs, Maldives. (1989). Status of Women: Maldives. Bangkok: UNESCO. Parkin, D. (2000). Inside and Outside the Mosque: A Master Trope. In D. Parkin & S. Headley (Eds.), Islamic Prayer Across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque (pp. 1–22). London: Curzon. Pearson, M. N. (2009). Class, Authority and Gender on Early-Modern Indian Ocean Ships: European and Asian Comparisons. South African Historical Journal, 61(4), 680–701. Peshkova, S. (2006). Otinchalar in the Ferghana Valley: Islam, Gender and Power (PhD diss.). University of Syracuse, Ann Arbor, MI. Peshkova, S. (2009). Bringing the Mosque Home and Talking Politics: Women, Domestic Space, and the State in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan). Contemporary Islam, 3(3), 251–273. Quinn, I. (2011). Women in Public Life in the Maldives: Situational Analysis. Malé, Maldives: UNDP. Razee, H. (2006). ‘Being a Good Woman’: Suffering and Distress Through the Voices of Women in the Maldives (PhD, thesis). University of New SouthWales, Sydney. Available from http://worldcat.org/z-wcorg/database. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism (1st ed.). New York: Vintage Books. Shakeela, A., Ruhanen, L., & Breakey, N. (2010). Women’s Participation in Tourism: A Case from the Maldives. In N. Scott & J. Jafari (Eds.), Tourism in the Muslim World (Vol. 2, pp. 61–71). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Sheriff, A. (2010). Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean. London: Hurst & Co. Sinclair, S., & Rockwell, G. (2016). Voyant Tools. Retrieved from http://voyant-tools.org/.

200  J. H. FEWKES Taylor, L. (2018). The Rise of the Imama: Women-Led Mosques Are Growing. Retrieved from https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0905/ The-rise-of-the-imama-women-led-mosques-are-growing. Tolmacheva, M. (1993). Ibn Battuta on Women’s Travel in the Dar al-Islam. In B. Frederick & S. McLeod (Eds.), Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience (pp. 119–140). Pullman: Washington State University Press. Tolmacheva, M. (1998). Female Piety and Patronage in the Medieval Hajj. Women in the Medieval Dar al-Islam: Power, Patronage, and Piety (pp. 161–178). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Tolmacheva, M. (2013). Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel: Defying Distance and Danger. World History Connected, 10(2). Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

CHAPTER 8

Closures and Conclusions

The End of the Nisha Miskii After leaving the Maldives in 2006, I remained in touch with a few friends in Malé, who sent me updates and news stories. I developed the habit of reading several English-language Maldivian blogs, which ­ provided new perspectives on news stories in the country. My online fascination with the Maldives was supported by its growing virtual presence; new blogs and Facebook groups related to the Maldives were appearing every day. I was particularly delighted to find that in 2007 the Maldives became the first country to open an online embassy in Second Life, a virtual reality platform. These links to events in the Maldives became crucial sources as much changed in the country over the next few years.1 While I have focused on women’s mosques in 2006 to ground my discussion of women’s mosques in this book and will not attempt to discursively locate women’s mosques beyond that date, it is worth noting some of these changes, as they have led to the apparent closure of all nisha miskii in the Maldives. In 2006, President Mamoon Abdul Gayoom had been the president of the Maldives since 1976; the development of multiple political parties was only allowed in 2005. During my time in the country, political parties were discussed seriously with concern and debated as political tools with potential that was, as yet, untested. The formation of political parties and other reforms were said by many in Malé to be a reaction

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to the destabilizing influences of the 2004 tsunami and 2005 political unrest in the capital. Political change came a few years later; in 2008, the Maldivian constitution was ratified and the Maldives held democratic multi-party elections for the first time. President Mohamed Nasheed, one of the founders of the Maldivian Democratic Party, was elected as the fourth president of the Maldives and served in that role from 2008 until his resignation under disputed circumstances in 2012. In 2009, news stories and blog posts started to appear that suggested that the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, the new title of the former Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, would close all nisha miskii in the country. Several Maldivians commented that this decision was intended to gain support in the coalition government. Other Maldivians suggested that this was a religious reform enacted by a new council of religious scholars appointed by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, intended to ensure that Maldivian religious matters were informed by general Islamic knowledge. A few bloggers wrote of the government’s plans, commenting on the fact that the move would leave the mudahim without jobs and the women of some islands without a place to pray outside of their homes.2 One blogger wrote a thoughtful editorial on the subject, claiming that women’s mosques had been in the Maldives for at least a century, and quoting older mudahim’s concerns about the impending lack of women’s religious spaces if the nisha miskii were closed. Later published sources suggest that discussions of nisha miskii closures in 2009 frequently were organized around ideas of gendered spaces for prayer in Islam. The UNDP publication Women in Public Life in the Maldives— Situational Analysis notes: …Those consulted spoke of a huge disparity between the public space available to men and women. For example, there used to exist separate mosques for men and women. In 2009, the Islamic Affairs Ministry decided to close the women’s mosques due to a limited government budget. In a news article [of that time period], Deputy Minister at the Islamic Affairs Ministry, Sheikh Mohamed Faroog, said that the ministry had decided to shut down all mosques used exclusively by women in order to cut down expenses and that the government’s new policy would be to build larger mosques with separate areas for men and women. However, in the same article, the Deputy Minister was also quoted as saying that “in Islam, the best place for women to pray was at home”. (Ritchie, Rogers, & Sauer, 2014, p. 28)

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The authors of the UNDP report went on to note that the removal and reallocation of space for women’s prayers “reinforces the perception that men have a right to public space,” conveying “a very public message that women have no right (or need) for public space…[and] suggests institutional decision-making processes that discriminate against women” (Ritchie et al., 2014, p. 27). All of the nisha miskii in the Maldives seem to have been closed later in 2009 and in 2010, as documented in blogs and international publications. A US Department of State report in 2010 on religious freedom in the Maldives notes that the Ministry of Islamic Affairs of the Maldives closed 210 women’s mosques in 2009, claiming that they were costly and rarely used (Department of State, 2011). International publications from 2011 (presumably based on work in 2010) suggest that the closure process was gradual, as the Ministry of Islamic Affairs cited only 200 women’s mosques scheduled for closure, claiming that, “…[t]he structures of women’s mosques are a waste of time and money because they are old and would need to be restored” (Quinn, 2011, p. 31). By all available accounts as of 2018, the nisha miskii no longer exist in the Maldives.3 In recent years, development publications discussing resources for Maldivian women have contained few, if any, mention of women’s mosques in the Maldives, emphasizing instead work in sites such as “Women’s Development Centers,” sponsored by Women’s Island Development Committees that continue to function with limited funding (Elhorr & Pande, 2016, p. 28; Ritchie et al., 2014). A recent communication from Michael Feener, an archaeologist working in the Maldives, states that in 2018 his team documented two former women’s mosque buildings in their survey of Laamu Atoll, both of which were derelict. The team was told that one of them (on the island of Maavah) was not only no longer in service, but that the building was scheduled to soon be demolished in order to make space for a sewage treatment facility (Michael Feener, personal communication, September 8, 2018). Contemporary bloggers suggest that while the nisha miskii have closed, more Maldivian women are going to larger mosques to pray in women’s sections, particularly in Malé where women previously did not commonly pray at mosques. A number of Maldivian women who have received religious degrees from formal institutions abroad have returned to Malé and contribute to public dialogues about women, space, and religion there. Aisha Hussain Rasheed, one such scholar who

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has completed a degree in religious studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia, writes online about the challenges faced by women Islamic scholars in the Maldives who struggle to be recognized as religious knowledge producers. She observes, As a Maldivian woman, and as a pursuer of Islamic scholarship, the issue of how Islamic scholarship relates to the women of this country is one that I have been faced with at various points of my academic and personal life. One thing, I found, is undeniable; there are huge challenges for women in the field of Islamic scholarship in our country. In the Maldives, Islamic scholarship - at least on the level of public discourse - is a field almost completely monopolised by men […] many women, including myself, have been issued licenses to preach Islam by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and previously by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. One must ask, however, how often these women do, or are given the opportunity to, address an audience at all, not to mention one comprising both genders. One cannot help but wonder whom among these women is given the opportunity to be at the forefront of the Maldivian stage of the eternal strife to promote Islam. (Rasheed, 2012)

Rasheed’s writing suggests that the Maldivian government currently confers recognition, although not opportunity, to female Islamic scholars. They are confirmed as holding legitimate forms of religious knowledge, but are not granted formalized roles by the government; this is a curious contrast to the role of the mudhahim who were often represented as having formal governmental authority, but not possessing legitimate religious knowledge. Studies by international organizations suggest that women’s political participation in the Maldives has decreased in recent years (Ritchie et al., 2014). For example, women’s political representation in the Maldivian People’s Majlis had increased from 1989 to 2005, with the most marked increase on the latter decade, but has declined since 2005 (Elhorr & Pande, 2016, pp. 44–45). A UNDP report claims there is a shift in Maldivian attitudes toward women leaders, quoting in illustration one older woman as saying, “[t]he communities no longer have women leaders which makes it difficult for women’s voices to be heard” (Quinn, 2011, p. 19). While these development organizations have their own perspectives on gender and empowerment in the Maldives that must be closely examined in order to better recognize how this knowledge has been produced—consider, for example, the claims about the

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founding of women’s mosques from international development agencies discussed earlier in this book—several scholars have also expressed concern about contemporary changes in Maldivian women’s social worlds. Husna Razee—a Maldivian public health scholar who has acted as head of the Maldives Department of Public Health and the Dean of Faculty of Health Sciences at the Maldives College of Higher Education— documents that during her 2005 research she found a few cases of girls not being sent to school, a shift in common Maldivian education patterns (Razee, 2006, p. 48).

Locating the Nisha Miskii The closure of the nisha miskii in the Maldives makes the task of documenting the existence of these institutions all the more crucial. I have gathered here as much information as possible on these sites to create a repository of information about the nisha miskii, to record what we know about the women’s mosques of the Maldives. As I have described, there were 266 documented women’s mosques in the Maldives during the mid-1990s, a number that seemed to be growing until 2009. By 2010, there were only 210 women’s mosques still being used in the Maldives, and later that year the number had fallen to 200. These were, first and foremost, religious sites for prayer that the mosque employees called mudahim would ensure were open and ready five times every day for those who wanted to say prayers. They were also educational locations, where women instructed other women in prayers and the Arabic language. The nisha miskii served as places of prayer for all women of the community that offered the possibility for quiet reflection not always available in crowded homes; they could also be social meeting places for the elderly and young alike. The voices of the three mudahim in Chapter 2 demonstrated the variety of perspectives and experiences of those who worked in these mosques. Saeeda, who defined her role as a mudahim as that of civil servant, offered a view of the development of women’s spaces within mixed gender mosques on the islands. Anisha’s story of resettlement after tsunami losses and cooperation with the other mudahim within the women’s mosque suggests the precarious position of these nisha miskii in times of insecurity as well as the ways in which historical events may have shaped practices within these religious sites. Fathimath’s account of growing up around women’s mosques offered narratives about their historical roles and how women’s

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island leadership interacted with the spaces over time. Interviews with Fathimath and other older women demonstrated the existence of Maldivian women’s mosques in the early twentieth century, an idea corroborated by other Maldivians that claimed that the oldest documented women’s mosque was Masjid ul Salat on Thakandhoo island (Haa Alif Atoll), which was reportedly inaugurated in 1926. All of my informants agreed that women’s mosques did not exist in Malé, but were specific to the islands, and that they were more common in northern atolls than the southern parts of the country. We can fit the nisha miskii into more general Maldivian mosque histories, part of a broader religious landscape that includes other mosques built during the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The women’s mosques were also part of the program of government control of mosques undertaken during the period of President Gayoom’s regime in the country, guided by the government’s Religious Unity Act, through which the Maldivian bureaucracy regulated leadership in mosques. Women’s mosque employees, like other mosque employees in the Maldives, were hired by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, which certified imams, although the mudahim at the women’s mosques did not take exams or have specific religious credentials required for their positions. As in the case of all other Maldivian mosques, the women’s mosques did not produce their own khutbah; unlike other mosques, women’s mosques did not issue a call to prayer or hold Friday prayers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the nisha miskii were supported by internationally oriented development initiatives— influenced by global movements linked to the 1985 United Nation’s World Conference on Women in Nairobi—that linked women’s mosques sites and women’s development committees to encourage increased women’s participation in the public sphere. Thus, if I was asked “what were the nisha miskii,” I would have to answer that they were—at least in part—defined by all of these functions. The nisha miskii were religious sites where women connect with Allah and educational sites where women learned to pray and read. They were alternative prayer sites, distinguished from “men’s mosques” which may or may not have spaces for women to prayer, and also contrasted with private places to pray such as the home and namaad-ge (prayer rooms). Nisha miskii were public places where any woman could pray, but also private places only for women, although sometimes shared with men when extra space was needed for the community. Maldivian women’s mosques were civic sites that signaled habitation on an island,

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perhaps even allowing for that habitation, and marked islands as places of unique social practices and laws. They were government institutions, development spaces, locations for community gatherings, and collective action, as well as focal points for patronship that allowed expressions of individual power. They were historical locations, with archaeological evidence potentially signaling the replacement of pre-Islamic religious sites with Islamic places of worship, and a part of the Indian Ocean histories about the spread of Islam in the region. With this long list of functions associated with the nisha miskii, it may seem as if the mosques are simply defined as sites with multiple connotations written upon them from multiple perspectives. Keeping in mind Lefebvre’s understanding of space, however, we can see that the women’s mosques were not inscribed with static multiplex messages. Place is created through a dialogue between functions, agents, and spaces and should not be oversimplified as set of spatial practices; the use of a space for any particular purpose is not only just one possible aspect of its role as a place, but actually only an incomplete fragment of the interplay between this and other aspects of that space. This is why the “sitting view”—a holistic approach that requires attention to a whole system of meanings understood in relation to each other and the whole—helps us to better recognize places. While individual components of the mosque building (minaret, dome, mihrab, etc.) each have histories and convey symbolism, none of these pieces of a mosque make the mosque itself. Attention to the components only in relation to each other, without a sense of the sacred space, would produce a study of a limited form of architecture rather than one of mosques. Answering the earlier question, “what were the nisha miskii,” from a seated view—a holistic perspective on place that has been conceived, perceived, and lived into being— therefore requires some further development of the list of women’s mosques roles, functions, and histories noted above to arrange them in dialogue with each other. The nisha miskii existed as sacred spaces through their shared religious significance, collective imaginings based on shared experiences and understandings, and their relationship to the divine, as a house of Allah; their roles as places were dynamic, linking the mosques to many other systems. A holistic view of mosques as places is not a totalizing theory; indeed, as I argue in Chapter 6 we would not want it to be, as making the mosque a central explanation for Muslim experience does not serve to make sense of the places covered in this book. For example,

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Tétreault suggests that the mosque transcends physical space and exists as, “a metaphorical construct embracing individuals, institutions, and organizations,” which she sees as, “analogous to the use of ‘the church’ in the context of Catholicism” (Tétreault, 1993, p. 278). Her point is appealing, but has limited application to this discussion. The mosque may indeed serve as such a metaphor in many communities, extending its meanings beyond physical location. Such an approach is useful as it allows us to see why debates about mosque authority and leadership are so significant within the global ummah, as well as to comprehend why mosque histories are frequently at the heart of discourses defining the ummah. Conceptualizing the broader experiences of Muslims as part of the metaphorical mosque helps problematize “being Muslim” as a set of fixed traits; if we can clearly recognize the multi-vocality of sites such as Maldivian women’s mosques as places—with heterogeneous placemaking dialogues between multiple functions, agents, and contexts— then the metaphor extends this realization to highlight how being Muslim is part of dynamic dialogical processes as well. Yet, the nature of the global ummah itself makes it difficult to conflate the terms ummah and mosque, as such a metaphorical approach would suggest. Embracing this definition of the mosque obscures the fact that there is no central hierarchical body in Islam that defines and legitimizes the boundaries of the community to which it refers. When the phrase “the church” is used in Catholicism, a formal institutional body is referenced; this is not true in the Islamic case. Individuals and groups variously and situationally define the global ummah as a community of sentiment, and do so at times in contrasting ways; imaginings of the ummah are shared, but not always coherent or consistent in their sharing. This is why the ummah may take on many forms, as noted in Chapters 3 and 7, becoming variously defined as a sense of belonging, an intellectual tradition, a transnational subjectivity, an engagement with types of landscapes, a political consciousness, or even simply in opposition to local understandings of religious practice. Furthermore, the institutional import of the mosque is commonly associated with formal Islamic practices and contrasted with informal practices; meaningful distinctions such as that between mosque studies and home studies of Islamic knowledge would be obscured if Muslim homes are elided with mosques through the metaphorical use of the term “mosque.” Use of the metaphorical mosque does similar disservice to crucial distinctions between sacred and non-sacred spaces of Muslim practice as well as the public/private dichotomy. Therefore,

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mosques, while central to Muslim identity and practice, do not serve as a construct for the global ummah; for the purposes of this analysis, mosques must be recognized as linked to their physical forms, as places. Addressing mosques as places has allowed me to explore their uses in specific contexts and emphasize the significance of culturally situated lived religion. Mosques as places are physical locations of lived religion, in which, as Orsi points out, “[r]eligious practices and understandings have meaning only in relation to other cultural forms and in relation to the life experiences and actual circumstances of the people using them” (Orsi, 1985, pp. xix–xx). Thus, while drawing together information about the women’s mosques in Maldivian contexts, in Chapter 5 I also provided accounts of women’s mosques from different parts of the world as connected to building the place of the nisha miskii. Differences and similarities between the place-making processes of women’s mosques in the Maldives and other parts of the world suggest several avenues for further study of their roles as places in the global ummah. While a mosque is not a collection of architectural features, those features can be symbolic components that reflect historical contexts of production and use. Attention to architectural details of mosques therefore helps to promote comprehension of the production of place as a diachronic process, with historical contexts, and dialogical processes, through the interplay between conceived and perceived aspects of mosque design. The case studies in Chapter 5 also all emphasize the ways in which the perceived spaces of women’s mosques are constructed by human use in conjunction with their physical settings and material conditions. Combined with the account of women’s leadership in Chapter 6, these examples provide a perspective on women’s mosques that focuses on human experiences in the nisha miskii, leading us to see these mosques as sites of both geographic and cultural crossroads, where intertwining local, national, transnational, and global interests shape, and are shaped by, the experiences of real people.

Reconciling Through Place Earlier in this book I claim that by considering the nisha miskii places I hope to illustrate how experiences of being Muslim are simultaneously shaped through multiple notions of community, complicated by historical and contemporary social trends, but reconciled through place. In the last section, I have addressed the first part of this goal, locating

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the nisha miskii in its myriad roles in both a historical and contemporary sense through local, national, transnational, and global perspectives. What remains is a need to delve into how place helps us to reconcile these multiple versions of the nisha miskii. Place, while linked to a physical location, is not in conflict with movement; places are complex symbolic sites that in the process of placemaking—an ongoing process—tie together multiple aspects of space (as well as multiple spaces) and create a grounding point for fluid human actions, beliefs, ideas, and sentiments. Places are sites through which we gather differing meaningful pauses, recognize overlapping boundaries of experience, and negotiate the relationships between these. Hence, the Maldivian nisha miskii could be newly constituted as development projects focused on women’s civic roles, even while already having existed as sacred spaces for decades, or perhaps for even centuries within transnational histories of the spread of Islam. They were quintessentially island sites that signified national religious bureaucracy and still stood as testaments to individual leadership and status. We cannot focus on spaces as simply containers of experience, however, as such individual pauses in place building processes are often contradictory; to conceive of a site as holding these pauses is to ignore that they must be negotiated. Place reconciles conflicting aspects of spatial processes through the dynamic dialogues between these moments, providing a cogent shifting lived experience rather than a coherent grand explanatory model. In such a way, the nisha miskii and other examples of women’s mosques provided in this book exist as places that make being Muslim—a lived experience simultaneously shaped through diverse notions of community and practice, complicated by historical and contemporary social trends—possible.

Global Discourses and Ummah In this ethnography of place, I focus on the ways in which women’s mosques are constructed in the Maldives and beyond to allow us to challenge generalized popular narratives about mosque spatial practices, as well as their discursive significance. While grounding deliberations of Muslim community in the local is essential, to limit one’s understanding of women’s mosques and women’s leadership roles in Muslim communities only to this level is to accept the idea that considering these on a broader level has no utility. The degree to which the public, Muslim

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and non-Muslim alike, allude to “women in Islam” as a generalized category suggests that this is not the case; there is indeed a need for us to make sense of these cases in more general terms. Since gender issues in Islam are commonly and increasingly referenced in popular media in terms of transnational settings, it is also appropriate to ask why women’s mosques are not constituted as spatial practices in this sphere. The frequent exclusion of women’s mosque sites such as the Maldivian nisha miskii from global discourses—crafted by popular media and the imaginings of the ummah—about space and Muslim women shapes public perceptions; women’s mosque sites provide alternatives to popular and intellectual narratives where the spatial practices associated with mosques have become a synecdoche for oppressive gender relations in Muslim communities. The silences in global discourses about women’s mosques and roles stem from a gap between the place-making processes of the actual sites as they exist in local arenas and the place-making processes of the conceptual spaces the sites as a category—“women’s mosques” in general— occupy in global discourses. In part, this gap is due to the emphasis on place-making as a local process for Maldivian nisha miskii, which in practice frequently acted as spaces that emphasized the centrality of local community, as women’s leadership roles and each mosque’s use within the community were defined, in spite of national interests, in island spaces. While these mosques were indeed part of a body of national Muslim practice and shaped by the transnational movement of people and ideas, local spatial practices played a central role in defining these sites, particularly as sacred spaces and associated notions of gendered religious spaces. As I consider in the previous chapter, silences in historical narratives are formed both consciously and unconsciously, and produced unevenly by competing groups and individuals. There is no single version of “those who won” that narrates histories; uneven access to the material and conceptual tools of the production of historical narratives results in historical narratives that are stitched together from varied sources. Just as history is far more complex than a simple monothematic utterance by static victors, global discourses about identity and belonging in the global ummah—which frequently feature historical narratives as well—are also complex multi-vocal narratives that reflect shifting power relations. Global discourses about Muslim women do not simply omit histories of women’s mosques and women’s scholarly/leadership roles in Muslim

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communities; these gaps between local experiences and global discourses are meaningful silences in complex narratives about being Muslim. We can better recognize the import of these silences when we realize that the local and global are not mutually exclusive concepts in many forms of the global ummah. As I explain in Chapter 7, one view of the global ummah is that of a community of orthodoxy formed through textual landscapes based on Arabic literacy and formal Islamic scholarship based on the Qur’an and hadith. While there is considerable discussion about women and prayer situated within this landscape, I note in Chapter 6 that many conversations about the local within this arena— particularly those conversations in regard to women’s spaces and leadership roles—tend to position the local in opposition to the universal, a framework that in turn situates women’s local practices in opposition, or at least outside of the global ummah, as seen in the case of the pandei of the Philippines. The local/global dichotomy is not a necessary opposition; several models of incorporating local variation and differences into universalist Islamic perspectives exist within this textually oriented framework. For example, when asked about cultural variations in gender roles, several scholars that I spoke with in Indonesia quoted Surah 49, Verse 13 from the Qur’an to me—“Oh mankind, indeed we have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another”—to demonstrate that cultural differences are not only recognized in Islamic texts as universally existing, but, according to my informants, that social difference is part of the universal Muslim experience to encourage learning about different perspectives. Another example of perspectives in the global ummah based on ideas of textually based universal Islamic practice occurred during my research in northern India, while investigating the circumstances behind a local disagreement over the annual sighting of the moon for an Eid-al-Fitr celebration. My conversations with local scholars focused on the action of the sighting the moon, which, they explained, needed to be seen by a member of the community to celebrate Eid. As happens for Eid moon sightings in many Muslim communities around the world, the question of whom, exactly, was a member of the community became the main issue in this particular instance. Sighting the moon at the end of the month of Ramadan and the subsequent celebration of Eid-al-Fitr are Islamic practices defined by textual and traditional guidelines that are followed widely by Muslims around the world and promote a sense belonging to a global ummah for many participants; the moon, however, is sighted locally. So, while

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the sighting of the new moon is not a global event, and local Muslim communities are bound together by the actual sighting of the moon, the global ummah is bound together by the concept of all sighting the moon, each in their own time and place, using the same, or similar, procedural frameworks. Embedded in this framework of universal Islamic knowledge is the idea of cultural variation, of locally specific ways of encountering the world. Concepts of shared practices and core tenants across cultural lines are not themselves practices; without being instantiated, they are only sets of expectations. This differentiation is embedded in the core tenants the global ummah formed by textual Islamic knowledge. Thus, the relationship between local experiences of being Muslim and global flows of knowledge about Islamic texts is not necessarily an oppositional one, and we cannot assume that women’s mosques and leadership roles are left out of conversations about space in the global ummah merely because they are locally informed places. The global ummah as a sentiment—which, as clearly demonstrated in the examples above, is mutually constitutive with the global ummah as a textual landscape— similarly enables recognition of difference and diversity; I have heard many people use the metaphor of the body to speak of their feelings for the global ummah. Based on a hadith from Sahih Bukhari, this perspective on the global ummah suggests that the shared interests of the ummah are in spite of, or perhaps even based on, the stratification of its interdependent—organic in a Durkheimian sense—parts. These forms of the global ummah are thus part of an ongoing dialogue between ideas of a framework that provide shape to being Muslim and the enactment of practices in a multitude of specific sites that also provide shape to being Muslim. In spite of these possibilities for local variation within the versions of the global ummah, ideals do not always translate into reality. Global debates about Muslim women’s spaces and religious leadership roles, in both Muslim and non-Muslim global discourses, focus exclusively on particular forms—e.g., women leading prayer and acting as imams—that depend on generalized notions of practices and categories for scholars, leaving little room for the grounded deliberation of the actual practices of women such as the mudahim, otinchalar, nyai, alima, and others. Furthermore, as we have seen, while local sites of being Muslim are a crucial part of the place-making processes of the global ummah, Maldivian nisha miskii and leadership roles were frequently left out of

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these global dialogues as they were discursively erased. These silences were fashioned in the context of non-local dialogues about Maldivian nisha miskii and mudahim that did not reflect the religious nature of these spaces and roles, the sitting view of the women’s mosques as a sacred space. This occurred, as we have seen, on the national level as discussions about women’s mosques in the Maldives frequently framed the nisha miskii as government institutions, civic centers run by salaried public servants. The cultural geographies that separated Malé from the other islands of the Maldives further entrenched these views, as religious practices were perceived as having socio-geographic distinctions, and elided island women’s religious experiences. On the transnational level histories of Indian Ocean travel and trade that have omitted women’s roles in travel and reflexively consigned women’s experiences of being Muslim to the local (in opposition to men’s universalist Islamic practices), constricted the lens through which Maldivian nisha miskii—as well as other possibly related women’s mosques sites in the Comoros Islands, Lakshadweep Islands, and linked areas—were viewed, obscuring the potential patterns that connected these spaces to each other as well as the global ummah. Without these histories, women’s mosques in the Maldives were delegitimized as religious institutions since, as my comparisons of the different women’s mosques in Chapter 5 clarified, the global legitimacy of women’s mosques as Muslim sites has frequently been discursively supported by well-documented histories in clearly defined cultural contexts. Silences in Indian Ocean historical narratives about women’s religious travel and networks have consequently minimized the possibilities for conceiving of Maldivian women’s mosques as part of the global ummah. The Maldivian nisha miskii were also represented by transnational development agencies that considered them social sites for the empowerment of women in the public sphere, rather than sacred sites with religious significance. The disjuncture between representations of these sites of women’s experiences as atypical institutions in global discourses about Muslim spaces and gender on the one hand and the information found in scholarly studies about the role of women in diverse Islamic institutions and public spaces on the other is therefore not merely a case of misinformation, or a disjuncture between discourses about cultural spheres—e.g.,

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“local” vs. “global.” It is instead the result of a series of related silences constructed in the stories that people have told about the nisha miskii and mudahim, and in related spaces that contribute to forming these sites as places. Documentation of the details of the nisha miskii and mudahim is absolutely essential for reclaiming their histories, both the historical chain—associations between pieces of narratives that may yield something more than what we currently know about the past—and the narratives of these places require that we preserve what is known about these institutions and their roles. Yet, as I have argued, studying Maldivian women’s mosques is also crucial on a broader level. “Mosque” is not a metaphorical term for the global ummah, it is a particular place with a physical location that we can sit in and experience the sacred; in the absence of these small—or big, humble or grand—spaces, without discussion of how these mosques are created and maintained as places, we lose sight of the lived experience of religion and the sites of being Muslim.

Notes 1.  It has been many years since I visited the Maldives to study women’ mosques and much has changed since 2006. As explained in the Chapter 1 I used the present tense throughout most of this book to refer to the nisha miskii—except when narrating particular interactions with individuals in the Maldives—to focus on the ethnographic present as an encounter rather than a time period and reflect how the ethnographic present is produced in an ongoing dialogue between ethnographic observation and writing. But I would like to expand that dialogue now, to engage with the years after 2006 until the present, and so will move my tenses forward (alluding to 2006 in the past tense) to reflect the end of this writing project. 2. Many of these blog posts have since been removed, and some of the blogs closed as well. Although publically archived versions are available for most of these sources since the posts were deliberately removed from public view by their authors I will not cite or quote directly from the text of any political blogs here, even ones that are currently still available. 3. I have not asked any of the women in outlying islands if any nisha miskii continue to be used or maintained due to the potentially politically sensitive nature of such questions.

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References Department of State, U. S. O. A. (2011). July–December 2010 International Religious Freedom Report. Washington, DC. Elhorr, J., & Pande, R. (2016). Understanding Gender in the Maldives: Toward Inclusive Development. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. Orsi, R. (1985). The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (2nd ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Quinn, I. (2011). Women in Public Life in the Maldives: Situational Analysis. Malé, Maldives: UNDP. Rasheed, A. H. (2012, January 26). Islamic Scholarship and Maldivian Women: My Swim Against the Tide. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://living4islam. blogspot.com/2012/01/islamic-scholarship-and-maldivian-women.html. Razee, H. (2006). ‘Being a Good Woman’: Suffering and Distress Through the Voices of Women in the Maldives (Ph.D.). Sydney: University of New South Wales. Ritchie, M., Rogers, T. A., & Sauer, L. (2014). Women’s Empowerment in Political Processes in Maldives. Washington, DC. Tétreault, M. A. (1993). Civil Society in Kuwait: Protected Spaces and Women’s Rights. Middle East Journal, 47(2), 275–291.

Index

A agency, 50, 113, 146, 151, 153, 181, 188 ahong, 116, 144–146, 163, 192 Alidou, Ousseina, 46, 48, 54, 75, 153, 193 alima, 147–149, 159, 163, 193, 213 Anderson, Benedict, vii Appadurai, Arjun, 4, 71 archaeology/archaeological, 45, 57, 59, 78, 81, 82, 87, 120, 122, 207 Ari Atoll, 88 atoll, 1, 8, 18–21, 24, 31, 32, 39, 57, 80, 88–90, 92, 99–101, 103, 108, 156, 176–178, 185, 203, 206 B Baksi-Lahiri, Sudeshna, 35, 88, 89, 155, 159–161 Barlas, Asma, 47, 48 Battuta, Ibn, 65, 66, 68, 69, 87, 156, 162, 182

bayan vaizler, 139 bid’a, 151 Bijapur, 118, 130 boudkhânah, 65, 67 Bowen, John, 7, 189, 190 Buddhism/Buddhist, 67, 82–86, 148 burqa, 49, 50, 148, 187, 188 C Cantone, Cleo, 125–127, 132 caravanserais, 104, 108 cemeteries, 56, 58, 60. See also graveyards China, 11, 53, 79, 81, 93, 113–116, 132, 144, 145, 180, 183 colonial, 49, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 108, 118 Comoros Islands, 11, 79, 119, 121, 214 coral, 1, 22, 25, 36, 38, 58, 83–86, 99, 178 cosmopolitan, 80 cowry(ies), 81, 181

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 J. H. Fewkes, Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13585-0

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218  Index Cresswell, Timothy, 3, 4, 70–72, 109 D da‘iya, 151 dastarkhanji, 139 dawa, 152 Deobandi, 147 Dhivehi, 27, 68, 80, 154, 161 dhuhr/zuhr, 21, 22, 99 dome, 36, 105–107, 129, 130, 174 E ethnography, 5, 8, 55, 210 Eygpt, 164 F fiqh, 107, 120, 147 Forbes, Andrew D.W., 38, 88, 91, 92, 113, 117, 121, 122, 155, 162 Foucault, Michel, 74, 76, 78, 93 G Geertz, Clifford, 5, 6, 8, 15, 71, 174 Giraavaru, 32, 38 Gladney, Dru, 114–116, 131 graveyards, 44, 87, 118, 131. See also cemeteries; tombstones H Habermas, Jurgen, 43, 154 hadith, 110, 113, 126, 138, 148, 165, 192, 212, 213 Hadramawt, 117, 121 Hadrami, 117, 119, 121, 123, 132 hajj, 54 Hanafi, 151, 159 Hanbali, 151, 159

Heidegger, Martin, 4, 71 hijab, 22, 46–51, 126 Hillenbrand, Robert, 102–106, 108, 110, 129, 133 Horvatich, Patricia, 141, 142, 191, 192 Hui, 113–116, 131, 132, 144, 192, 195 Hukuru Miskii, 18, 34, 58, 84–86, 105, 162 Hulhumalé, 31, 32, 35–37, 59, 175 I ihram, 54, 55 imam, 7, 11, 13, 29, 39, 107, 118, 122, 127–129, 139, 144, 145, 149, 151, 161–165, 175, 186, 187, 206, 213 India, 11, 19, 94, 116–118, 120, 128, 147, 149, 212 Indonesia, 7, 15, 43, 55, 79, 93, 123, 132, 142, 143, 181, 184, 212 Iran, 108 J jakka jigeen, 125–127, 131, 132 jamat, 149 jami, 104 Jaschok, Maria, 113–116, 144–146, 163, 192 Jingjun, Shui, 113–116, 144–146, 192 jinn/jinni, 61, 65, 66 K Kadivar, Mohsen, 43, 44, 188 Kenya, 11, 121, 125, 131, 132, 185 khatib/khatibu/khatheebu, 145, 155, 156, 161

Index

khutbah, 38–40, 104, 107, 141, 175, 206 Korea, 55, 106 Kuwait, 33, 45, 91 kyai, 142, 143 L Ladakh, 94, 147–149, 160, 166, 193 Lakshadweep, 11, 93, 116–119, 132, 180 Lambek, Michael, 120, 121, 123, 132, 180, 181 Lamu, 121, 122 loamaafaanu, 82–85, 87 M madrasas/madrasahs, 104, 108, 140, 145–147 mahala, 182 Mahmood, Saba, 50, 150–153, 164, 190, 193 majlis doa, 124 Malaysia, 11, 33, 123, 124, 132 Malé, 2, 8, 16–19, 29, 31–33, 35–38, 50, 52, 58–60, 66, 69, 82–86, 89, 92, 108, 112, 155, 156, 162, 175–177, 179, 183, 186, 201, 203, 206, 214 Maliki, 69, 151, 159, 160 Maloney, Clarence, 32, 35, 38, 51, 52, 85, 88, 91, 154–156, 160, 161 mastaba, 45 matrilocal, 121, 122, 157 Maulaama, 67, 69 Mecca, 53–55, 59, 84, 103, 105, 181, 182, 193, 197 Mernissi, Fatima, 47 mihrab, 34, 39, 40, 44, 100–102, 104–106, 109, 120, 122, 130, 133, 174

  219

minaret, 33–36, 44, 84–86, 99–102, 105–107, 110, 115, 125, 130, 174, 207 minbar, 34, 39, 100–102, 104–107, 110, 119, 130, 174 monsoon, 80 Morocco, 68, 69, 138 muballigha, 142, 144, 163 mudahim, 1, 9, 15, 16, 18, 21, 23–30, 38, 39, 57, 92, 101, 108–110, 138, 154–163, 175–178, 185, 193, 194, 197, 202, 205, 206, 213–215 mudimu, 2, 154–156, 160–162 muezzin, 154, 161 mullah, 140, 164 murshidah, 138 N naib, 156 namaadhugé/namad-ge, 88, 89 nansi, 114 Naqshbandi, 153 nu ahong, 114 nusi, 113–116, 131, 132, 144, 145 nuzi jingxue, 114 nyai, 142–144, 163, 213 O orientalism/orientalist, 15, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 68, 172 orthopraxy, 6, 7, 151, 152 otinchalar, 139–141, 161–164, 192, 213 P Pakistan, 33, 46, 50, 190 pandei, 141, 142, 163, 191, 192, 212 patriarchal, 43

220  Index patron/patronage, 36, 112, 113, 129, 132, 138, 178 Persian, 81, 83, 108, 120, 145, 147, 192 pesantren, 123, 142–144 Peshkova, Svetlana, 139, 140, 161, 162, 164, 192, 193 Philippines, 141, 142, 212 praxis, 44, 70, 128, 150, 166 purdah, 48, 51, 52, 88, 182 Q qadi, 68, 155 qibla, 102–105, 130, 133, 174 Qur’an, 23, 52, 53, 60, 82, 139, 140, 165, 212 R Raadavali, 67 Ramadan/Ramazan, 149, 151, 212 Rannamaari, 65–67, 69, 70, 76, 160 S Sahih Bukhari, 110, 213 Said, Edward, 15, 47, 51, 172 salat, 7, 83, 99, 137, 206 salat al-jumaa, 106, 107 Samatar, Abdi Ismail, 127, 128, 131 Saudi Arabia, 33, 55, 75, 190, 193 Shafi’i, 60, 107, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 130, 132, 151, 159, 160 shaikha, 152, 163 ship, 65, 76, 181, 182 Sinhalese, 83 Somalia, 11, 127, 132 Sri Lanka, 82, 87, 117, 184 surau, 123–125, 131

T tangals, 117 taravad, 118, 132 tarikh/thaareekhu, 67–69, 76, 82, 87, 93 Toddu, 88 Tolmacheva, Marina, 181, 182 tombstones, 58, 59, 82, 84 tourism, 16, 65, 179, 183–185, 196 trade, 1, 10, 11, 70, 78–83, 93, 117, 118, 121, 122, 132, 142, 180–183, 196, 214 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 76–78, 82, 153, 173, 193 Tuan, Yi Fu, 3, 4, 70–72, 109, 137 Turkey, 139 U ulama/ulema [A]- Islamic scholars, 144, 153 ummah, 10, 11, 42, 46, 52–55, 59, 61, 69, 71, 106, 161, 174, 188–197, 208–215 Urdu, 81, 147 ustad/ustada, 142, 143 ustazah, 123, 124 Uzbekistan, 139–141, 161 V Vanoli, Alessandro, 67–69, 83 W Well [the structure], 57, 87, 102 wudu, 22, 40, 56, 57, 84 Y Yemen/Yemeni, 80, 93, 117, 180