After a mosque located in the Fort area shut down its prayer hall for women, members of the Muslim community have criticised the decision, saying that it sends the wrong message about gender equality.
The Majali Masjid, located on Homi Modi Street, is used by solicitors, judges, and businessmen from the area. A decade ago, a separate prayer space was created at the mosque on the first floor of a four-storey building owned by a religious trust. Recently, the mosque put up a notice informing devotees that women are no longer allowed to pray in the mosque.
A mosque trustee said the section for women was created during repairs around 12 years ago. “We thought, why not create a prayer space for women. Many mosques have created praying spaces for women. We put up a partition and created a separate entrance for women from the side street. Later, we realised we had allocated a lot of space because not more than seven or eight women came to pray,” said the trustee.
The trustee said they decided to close the facility after realising that unauthorised visitors were using the washrooms in the section. “Anyway, under Islamic rules, women have no place in a mosque. They should pray at home,” the trustee added.
However, the decision of the mosque management to bar women has caused a debate among Muslims. There are allegations that the decision was taken due to ideological differences between the trustees. A businessman from the neighbourhood said, “There have been ideological differences between the trustees and some of them did not want women in the same premises,” said the businessman. “There should be a prayer space for women in the area. There are women lawyers and bankers in the area who need a prayer space and a washroom. The nearest prayer space for women is several kilometres away. This decision gives a bad message to the community. If prayers are compulsory five times a day, a mosque is supposed to provide the space to everyone who wants to pray.”
Scholars disagreed that women are forbidden from praying in mosques. Dr Zeenat Shaukat Ali, former head of the Department of Islamic Studies at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, said there is no such injunction. “These are pre-Islamic patriarchal ideas; women prayed with men in early Islam. They remained at the back of the congregation because they sometimes brought their children along and had to take them away when they cried. If there were restrictions, women would not have been circumambulating the kaaba in Mecca along with men,” said Ali. “If the Fort mosque is worried about unauthorised visitors, they should add some kind of security.”
In Mumbai, many mosques, including the Jama Masjid near Crawford Market, have dedicated praying spaces for women. Shuaib Khatib, president of the Jama Masjid trust, said they enlarged a small prayer room into a mosque-like praying space for women in 2022. In 2013, the Iranian mosque in Imamwada, also called the Moghul Masjid, which was built in CE 1860, allowed women into the main prayer hall, access to which had been restricted only to men.
