Na'eem Jeenah

The mufti confided in me, somewhat embarrassedly, that he had felt ashamed and ‘didn’t know what to say’, when he had been confronted by the women. I, in turn, felt embarrassed to be a South African. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything to him because he knows me long enough to know my views on such issues.

He was a mufti from another African country, in Johannesburg for the Second Inter-Faith Summit on Peace in Africa. Probably about 95 percent of the delegates at the conference were Africans, a large number of them were Muslims. Men and women, mostly in their various cultural dresses and, in the case of those for whom this was relevant, wearing their ‘symbols of authority’. The delegations of many countries from Sub-Saharan Africa included the muftis of those countries. Also included were a number of Muslim women active in peacemaking, counselling or other community activities, including involvement in various Muslim organisations.

On the first day of the summit, a Thursday, we were informed that the ‘Muslims of South Africa’ would host the entire Muslim contingent for the jumu’ah prayer and for lunch. Like all visitors to a foreign country would, the non-South Africans looked forward to getting away from the conference for a while, praying their jumu’ah with locals and eating a home-cooked meal rather than hotel food.

The Friday morning session focussed on women as victims of war in Africa. There were illuminating presentations about the suffering African that women endure and many concerns about the need to empower women. It was the most moving session of the summit, and included the voices of dozens of women from across the continent. In light of the events of the rest of the day, its placing on the programme was ironic. The session was shortened to allow the Muslim delegation time to get to the jumu’ah prayer.

We all – men and women – got onto the bus, sat together and chatted to other Africans that we hadn’t met before. It was a wonderful opportunity for the Muslims to make contact with each other and to network.

Soon the bus pulled into the yard of a Muslim school but, as we stood up to alight, we were told that only the women should leave the bus. There was some confusion but, after the women got off, the bus left and drove for another ten minutes to a mosque – even though there was a mosque adjacent to the schoolyard.

Within a couple of minutes, it became clear to those (men) in the bus what was happening. And the debate began. An Algerian scholar railed on in Arabic and French, demanding to know why the women were dropped off on ‘one planet’ and the men taken to ‘another planet’. No reason was forthcoming. He raised the matter again at the end of lunch and still got no response.

During lunch, a Sudanese sheikh demanded loudly, ‘Where are the South Africans?’ and, on learning that I was a South African, began accusing me of violating the sunnah, of depriving women of the rights given to them by Allah and the Prophet (s). He and the Algerian quoted aḥādīth and reports from ‘Umar to me and kept demanding that I justify why women were not allowed to pray in the masjid.

Of course, I couldn’t justify it because it is unjustifiable. But I felt terribly embarrassed and attempted to explain to the two of them that I agreed that women should be praying in the masjid and that there was no reason, according to the Qur’ān and the sunnah, why they should be denied access. This didn’t reduce their unhappiness in the least. They were very willing to apportion collective blame to all South African Muslims.

One delegate was also irritated that the men in the delegation were shunted off to a side space in the masjid when, after their jumu’ah prayer, they wanted to pray their ‘asr salah which, as travellers, they could do. Just before they began their congregation, he said, they were asked to leave the main masjid area and were directed to another area of the masjid. He added that this other area would have been adequate space for the women and felt that even if the masjid didn’t normally accommodate women, an exception could have been made for the guests. This, of course, would not have addressed the bigger issues that the Sudanese and Algerian were harassing me about.

Two days later, the one mufti told me how he was accosted by a group of (non-South African) women – some from his country, soon after we had returned from the jumu’ah prayer. They had told him they were very happy with the hospitality they had received and the meal was lovely but ‘we lost our jumu’ah’. And they demanded to know from him whether he had protested and insisted that the women should join the men or whether he had silently accepted that they would be denied their right to pray their jumu’ah salah. His explanation that many of the men were also unhappy and had questioned the hosts about it seemed not to have quelled the women’s anger.

They were unhappy, of course, because, for all of them, praying jumu’ah salah is a normal part of their weekly activities. As in most of the Muslim world, mosques in their countries are built to accommodate men and women. And women’s attendance at jumu’ah is part of their communal activity. So they all went back to their home countries believing, not incorrectly, that most South African Muslims do not want to accommodate women in their masjids. It is an experience, it seems, many of them will remember painfully for a long time to come.

But the issue is not simply one of accommodating foreign Muslim guests; it is, rather, about the attitude of many South African Muslims in acting as if they are doing some great service to Islam by preventing women from going to the masjids when, in fact, this is in flagrant violation and betrayal of the practice of the Prophet Muhammad (s). what can be clearer than his (s) statement, narrated in Bukhari: ‘Do not forbid the mosques of Allah to the women of Allah’?

May 2005
published in Al-Qalam

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Last updated: 07 September 2007