Women Teaching Women

The women's mosque movement names the circles of religious teaching and learning that developed within and around the mosques of Cairo from the 1970s onward, part of the wider Islamic revival, sahwa, sweeping Egypt and much of the Muslim majority world across that period, in which women who hold no formal clerical office or credential nonetheless teach other women in regular lessons on Quran, hadith and the proper conduct of daily religious life, meeting in mosque annexes, private homes and community spaces across Cairo's neighbourhoods rather than through any centralised institutional structure. The movement was documented in unusually close ethnographic detail by the anthropologist Saba Mahmood, whose fieldwork among these circles of piety minded women became a widely read and influential study specifically because it complicated straightforward assumptions, common in some Western feminist scholarship of the period, that women's religious piety and their agency as women must necessarily stand in tension with one another, arguing instead that the participants themselves experienced their disciplined religious practice as a genuine and positively chosen form of self cultivation and agency rather than as externally imposed constraint.