Reimagining Empowerment: Women’s Mosque Movements and the Critique of Western Feminist Agency (Dr Joseph Yu)

In evaluating Muslim women’s practices in religion, such as wearing veils and gender segregation, western feminists often see them as oppressive and passive in nature. As a result, rather than being understood as meaningful agents, Muslim women are often seen as victims of patriarchal domination. Nevertheless, this understanding omits women’s lived experiences and their own interpretation of devotion, piety and selfhood. Through the cases of women’s mosque movements in Cairo (Egypt) and Los Angeles (USA), this essay explores adopts an anthropological point of view to investigate how women’s mosque movements challenges these western feminist interpretations of agency. Informed by Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety and postcolonial feminist theory, particularly the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Kimberlé Crenshaw, this essay argues that liberal feminist framework is not adequate in explaining women’s religious participation, as they understand agency as resistance to tradition. In religious practices, agency is better understood as expressions in piety and self-discipline. In both cases, women actively participate in shaping the power structures within mosques, such as by reinterpreting religious texts and creating alternative community spaces. By comparing them, the essay shows that sociopolitical contexts play a significant role in shaping women’s agency. For example, in Cairo, women navigate religious organisations and patriarchal norms by assuming moral authority; while their American counterparts respond to Islamophobia and marginalisation by participating in feminist activism. Overall, this essay agrees to a large extent that women’s mosque movements challenge Western feminist assumptions as they demonstrate how agency is contextual and embedded within religious traditions.

Literature Review

A crucial aspect of mosque life is the role and positioning of women within it. Their participation raises questions about agency, religious identity and self-determination. Women’s participation has been increased in recent years due to the introduction of distinct gendered spaces within the mosque. The provision of a separate room and entrance for women has actually encouraged participation, as many express appreciation for having a dedicated and autonomous space.^[1] In such way, women actively claim their own religious cultivation, challenging public perceptions that Islam suppresses women’s interests. Even though men continue to “cling to power”, women’s responses tend to be more passive than overtly resistant, suggesting that their Islamic identities are negotiated rather than oppositional. This negotiated agency is apparent in expressions of frustrations and concern, such as: “If we [women] need to do anything, we have to ask the chairperson…Why can’t we decide?” ^[2] This shows how women would rather avoid conflict and focus on their cultivation of a pious self, leading to the commonly perceived perception of them ‘submitting to patriarchy’. This cultivation is facilitated by the mosque’s multifunctional role as both a religious and social institution, which enables women to assert their own position both religiously and socially. Women’s agency is further demonstrated in how they face and respond to unequal decision-making structures. While Men are able to address questions regarding the Qur’an directly to the Imam, women are required to submit inquiries indirectly in written form.^[3] This restrictive practice has motivated women to articulate alternative discourses of “authentic Islam”.^[4] Through double checking information provided by the Imam and engaging in personal reading of religious texts women foster their ethical self. This self-reflexive acquisition of knowledge proves that women’s agency is enacted through gender-specific practices, while simultaneously fostering supportive networks beyond the mosque.^[5]

Post-colonial feminist theory critiques Western feminist framworks that universalise women’s oppression. Liberal feminist approaches often rely on binaries of “tradition” and “modernity”, resulting in their failure to understand that not all communities need to follow the same, linear trajectories when it comes to religion. Alternatively, post-colonial feminism showcases how the mosque movement embodies both tradition as well as modern interpretations of Islam. It focuses on a holistic approach that takes into account geographical, historical, and cultural aspects when examining womens experiences. Applying Mohanty’s framework to the women mosque movement reveals that participants are not passive subjects of patriarchy but active agents shaping their religious lives. Theferore,women’s engagement with religion under hegemonic gender norms should not be read as internalised subordination but  asa form of agency. This challenges Western analyses as highlighted in Mohanty’s research,^[6] where she does notmerely present ‘Third World women’ as an oppresed group lacking agency but takes into account how power is negotiated under a heteronormative discourse. The above indicates how taking into account multiple factors, following the theory of intersectionality by Kimberle Crenshaw, allows for a more a nuance and holistic approach to analyse Muslim women’s experiences. Moreover, intersectionality takes into account class, race, reigion and political positioning in the production of power relations. Wade critiques the tendency to separate gendered practices from their surrounding cultural contexts, particularly in relation to modesty.^[7] This is often misinerpreted as a lack of resistance by women. Women’s religious cultivation, as seen in Mahmood and Zeweris work, is shaped by cultural norms surrouding modesty and racialised stereytotypes about Islam and gender. Similarly, Pollock and Subramanian argue that power stuctures are not fixed but can be negotiated through everyday forms of agency.^[8] This is evident in the ways women in the mosque movement reinterpret religious texts within sisterhood study groups,^[9] and navigate navigate spatial exclusion by using parallel spaces for community support.^[10]

Contextual Background

Drawing on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, the Women Mosque Movement in Cairo can be understood as grassroots political movement, even though it did not involve overt revolution, protest, or direct demands on the state.  From a social movement theoretical perspective, the movement holds great importance for the Egyptian political landscape, especially in light of the Arab Spring uprisings that unfolded across the region in 2011. The Arab Spring was a period of protests, rebellions and various uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East. These uprisings were sparked by authoritarian rule, corruptions and economic hardships. Processes of globalization, alongside neoliberal economic reforms and the diffusion of Western political values often came into tension with Islamic moral and religious values. Western states frequently supported secular or authoritarian regimes in the region while exerting pressure through international financial and political mechanisms. Economic instability in Egypt led to increased westernization and secularization of the Egyptian society by making Islam “an abstract system of values that is to be cherished but that, nonetheless, remains inessential to the practical organization of day-to-day life” (Mahmood 2005). As a result, these socio-political conditions intensified calls for an Islamic revival, motivating many women to shift from private piety to forms of social activism. However, despite increased participation, Islamist political actors such as the Muslim Brotherhood often saw women’s activism as a threat to patriarchal orders, which leads to the continued marginalization of women from formal religious and political decision-making roles. Similarly, the Women’s Mosque Movement of America (WMA) in Los Angeles emerged in response to the social and political consequences of September 11 (9-11) attacks on Muslim communities in the United States. Post 9-11 America was characterized by the racialization of Muslim bodies and the intensification of gendered Islamphobia. These conditions prompted many Muslim women, specifically visibly Muslim women who wore a hijab, to protest against public harrasment and hate crimes. Ultimately, this mobilization fostered increased public and political engagement through the foundation of women-led religious organizations, including the WMA. These development can be better understood through Pollock’s post-colonial feminist insights. Pollock and Submaniam (2016) emphasize the importance of examining historical conditions when assesing power structures. They emphasise that inequalities, and paricularly gendered ones, cannot be understood without attention to cultural and historical context. This framework is especially relevant when analyzing religious contexts such as women’s mosque movements. Women’s identities and roles within the mosque should therefore not assessed solely through a Western feminist lens, but through an analysis of how socio-political transformations such as the Arab Spring and 9-11 have shaped gender norms over time.  

Womens Mosque Movement in Cairo

The women’s mosque movement, studied ethnographically by Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist of modern Egypt, constitutes a grassroots religious movement that challenges dominant secular-liberal interpretations of women’s perspectives. The movement emerged in the late 1970s during a broader Islamic revival in Egypt. This period significantly reordered Egyptian society through extensive economic, political and social transformations. For instance, the growing influence of Islamist such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi groups reshaped public morality and the religious discourse. Egypt was therefore simultaneously experiencing rapid modernization which deeply affected its system of morals and its code of public conduct. Against this backdrop, Egyptians turned to Islam as a moral compass, when women sought self-cultivation through religious teaching and through achieving personal piety. Personal piety became the focus of the women’s mosque movement that emerged. The movement also gave women a way to reconcile the demands of modern life with Islamic ideals. This renewal of Islamic practices redefined femininity in relation to faith. More specifically, traditional practices from the past, defined by modesty, were now rearticulated within modernized social landscape. Thus, femininity was reshaped as women were far more visible and active in public life since they were agents of Islamic pedagogy through their public participation in Mosque lessons and sermons.

Women’s participation challenges feminist ideas that view agency as resistance. Seeking self-cultivation through following Islamic traditions such as veiling and studying the Quaran is therefore not a sign of oppression or false consciousness but instead an active moral practice, demonstrating that inhabiting tradition is also a form of agency (Mahmood, 2005). This movement emerged in middle-class neighborhoods but quickly spread across broader social classes. The female preachers (da’yat) were not formally trained in state religious institutions but rather achieved derived their authority through moral credibility. Da’iyat often argued that young women were particularly in need of ethical guidance as they could easily get carried away following fads and trends which did not adhere to Islamic norms.  Additionally, the pedagogical spaces created by the movement also offered alternative forms of moral education not provided by formal schooling. This is because the lessons extended beyond the transmission of religious knowledge for multiple reasons. First and foremost, rather than passive memorization of the Quran or one-directional instruction, lessons emphasized debate, dialogue and practice. Despite women’s growing participation, women continued to be excluded in the physical space. They were allocated smaller, less resourced prayer rooms and denied access to deliver sermons in the main prayer hall. In response to this marginalization, women nonetheless embodied and internalized virtues such as modesty, devotion and patience that defined femininity. Therefore, tradition was viewed as a living discourse which shaped women’s subjectivities of by integrating piety into everyday conduct: how to speak, how to dress, how to behave.

This contrasts sharply with Western feminist beliefs that women’s authority stems from resistance to patriarchy or rejecting traditions. In Cairo, femininity was embraced and embodied through everyday practices that follow tradition, such as veiling, prayer, and moral discipline. These practices were not a sign of submission as women did not perceive their own religious commitments as constraining. Rather, they felt empowered and fulfilled. Women’s overall engagement with Islamic pedagogy has produced wider social changes. Most notably, women increasingly participated in public religious ceremonies and assumed teaching roles (da’wa) in institutional spaces traditionally dominated by men. Moreover, mosques functioned as community centers where women organized food and medical support for those in need. This helped to strengthen social relations and allowed women to engage in public life. Social events such as weddings or birthdays increasingly shifted from private gatherings to public religious occasions accompanied by short sermons delivered by da’wa. This reconfiguration from private to public sphere for women altered all aspects of their life as they performed their piety publicly. Helene Zeweri also highlights this transformation in her ethnographic findings. She argues that the mosque functions as a space that centers women’s lived experiences while engaging with issues of social injustice. Finally, she emphasizes the importance of the movement in enabling women to navigate marginalization and Islamophobia.

Women Mosque Movement in America

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), as examined by Tazeen M. Ali and echoed in Zeweri’s findings, illustrates how American Muslim women engage with their faith within a postcolonial and minority context, emphasizing community building and the cultivation of female religious leadership. Zeweri’s research highlights that WMA participants negotiate religious identity and authority within the intersecting realities of race, gender and religious marginalization experienced by Muslim women in the United States. The movement toward women-led prayer and khutbahs at the WMA reflects a socially negotiated form of legitimacy, rather than one grounded solely in traditional Islamic jurisprudence or institutional sanction. By embracing ritual authority (leading prayer), interpretive authority (engaging Qur’anic exegesis in English), embodied authority (drawing on women’s lived experiences), and activist authority (linking faith to social justice), the WMA reconfigures authority in a way that resonates with the lived realities of American Muslim women. Central to the WMA’s approach is the dynamic interplay between cultural identity and faith, which shapes the social and political lives of Muslim women in the U.S. The WMA congregation is ethnically and racially diverse, including African American, South Asian, Arab, Latina, and white Muslim women, as well as interfaith allies. This diversity directly challenges the ethnoreligious hegemony often found in U.S. mosques, promoting a more inclusive and intersectional model of community formation. The mosque provides a complementary space where women from different backgrounds can share experiences, build solidarity, and reimagine Muslim community beyond ethnic and sectarian divisions. By contrast, in Cairo and other Muslim-majority contexts, women’s religious authority is more often confined within state-sanctioned or traditional institutions, leaving less room for inclusive and experiential forms of legitimacy. Women’s mosques in Cairo might be limited geographically or socially, and authority is more tightly linked to religious knowledge. The WMA’s emphasis on English Qur’anic interpretations and women’s embodied experiences represents a distinctive postcolonial reimagining of Islamic authority, tailored to the American social and cultural context.

The implications of transnational feminism are also evident in the strategies employed by the women of the WMA. Scholars such as Pal and Nieto-Fernandez (2023) and Mert (2024) demonstrate how Muslim women globally adopt counter-hegemonic strategies to contest patriarchal religious structures, racial hierarchies, and imperialist narratives that seek to delegitimize female religious authority. The WMA’s model aligns with these approaches by decentralizing male, Arabic-language, and credential-based authority and instead valuing women’s interpretive voices rooted in their social justice activism, racialized experiences, and community solidarity. In practice, the WMA’s khutbahs often address contemporary issues such as Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, gender violence, and environmental justice, linking sacred Islamic ethics to ongoing social justice movements like Black Lives Matter. This form of activist authority, grounded in Islamic ethics, empowers women to navigate their dual marginalization as Muslims and as women of color in the U.S. They foster intrafaith inclusivity by welcoming Muslim women across sectarian divides, including Sunni, Shi‘i, Sufi, and Ahmadi voices, while also cultivating interfaith solidarity by involving Jewish and Christian women allies. This helps them extend their communal reach and challenging Islamophobic and sectarian marginalization. This intersectional, transnational feminist model of authority identified by Zeweri underscores the WMA’s significance as a distinctive postcolonial American Muslim institution. It embodies a counter-hegemonic project that combines religious knowledge production, community empowerment, and political activism. By doing so, it offers a template for how Muslim women in diasporic and minority contexts can reclaim religious authority and reshape community life in response to contemporary struggles for gender, racial, and religious justice.

Comparative Analysis

A postcolonial feminist lens clarifies how local histories, cultural norms, and power relations shape women’s religious agency in each setting. In the United States, the WMA reimagines religious authority through interpretive and embodied forms of leadership that are explicitly multilingual and intersectional. Women lead prayers, deliver khutbahs in English, and articulate Qur’anic exegesis informed by lived experience and social justice commitments. The WMA’s multilingualism and emphasis on race, ethnicity, and allyship reflect a postcolonial condition in which religious authority is renegotiated in response to Islamophobia, racialized hierarchies, and gendered marginalization.

By contrast, In Cairo and other Muslim-majority contexts, women’s religious authority often remains tethered to state-sanctioned structures or long-standing traditional institutions. While women participate meaningfully in religious life, opportunities for autonomous, woman-led ritual leadership is comparatively constrained by organizational hierarchies and political oversight. Authority is frequently anchored in formal religious knowledge and jurisprudential credentials, with less emphasis on English-language interpretation or overt alignment with social justice movements. In contrast to the WMA, this illustrates a divergence between a postcolonial, diasporic negotiation of authority and a more constrained, institution-bound model prevalent in many majority-Muslim societies. Yet both contexts reveal the enduring tension between religious legitimacy and social legitimacy: women’s voices push against patriarchal norms, though the pathways and scales of change differ according to political structures, language hegemony, and the reach of civil society. Hegemonic structures in both societies shape women’s participation, albeit through different mechanisms. In the United States, hegemonic Islamophobic discourses, racial hierarchies, and gender norms converge to marginalize Muslim women of color. The WMA counters these forces by creating a space where non-Arabic and non-traditionally credentialed voices gain authority, thereby contesting both racial and patriarchal hierarchies. Zeeshan and Aliefendioğlu’s work on women’s experiences in conflict highlights how gendered marginalization intensifies under instability and militarized governance; applied here, similar dynamics operate under the pressures of Islamophobia and nationalist politics in the U.S., where women’s activism becomes a site of resistance and identity formation. The WMA’s activist authority, linking faith to social justice, channels this resistance into tangible community-building and policy-conscious action, such as addressing anti-Black racism and gender-based violence within and beyond the Muslim community.In Cairo and similar contexts, hegemonic structures are often reinforced by state control, religious establishment, and traditional jurisprudence, which can constrain women’s ability to claim interpretive or ritual leadership beyond certain approved channels. Emphasizing English Qur’anic interpretation, embodied experience, and cross-sectarian and interfaith solidarity, the WMA’s model, thus poses a challenge to this centralized legitimacy by demonstrating the viability of alternative epistemologies. Nevertheless, transnational feminist solidarities and global discourses on women’s rights must navigate local cultural norms, state responses, and sectarian politics, which can both mobilize and restrain reform efforts.

Comparatively, both case studies reveal that women’s religious agency flourishes most where communities actively reframe authority to incorporate lived experiences, social justice commitments, and inclusive solidarity. The WMA’s postcolonial reimagining of authority aligns with broader transnational feminist strategies that contest patriarchal, racialized, and imperial narratives. In both contexts, the social lives of women are reshaped through collective practice, but the American case foregrounds pluralism and public advocacy within a diverse civil society, while the Cairo-focused dynamics emphasize negotiation within state-religion complexes and local jurisprudential traditions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is clear that agency should not be reduced to acts of resistance against patriarchal authority. Instead, from the ethnographic analysis informed by Mahmood’s critique of liberal feminist frameworks, this essay argues that agency may also manifest through self-formation, religious practice and engagement with existing power relationships. In Cairo, by participating in mosque movements, women actively cultivate piety through teaching, study, and moral discipline. Their participation is not passive: they reshape femininity and public presence in their own ways within an Islamic framework. Despite being excluded from leadership roles and central mosque spaces, women negotiate marginalization by gaining moral authority. This contradicts Western feminist assumptions that understand agency solely as autonomy or the ability to oppose patriarchal tradition. Women could likewise assert their centrality in a diasporic, post-9-11 context by reimagining religious authority. Informed by postcolonial feminism, we can see how power was negotiated by the Women’s Mosque of America. Apart from leading prayers and delivering sermons, they also succeeded in linking faith to social justice activism. These illustrates how Muslim women could assert interpretive and activist authority when responding to Islamophobia, and racialization. Together, although to differing extents depending on socio-political contexts, both cases demonstrate that women’s mosque movements do challenge Western feminist models of agency. As it is apparent that women actively reshape religious spaces and meanings, to fully understand women’s religious lives, we need to adopt an anthropological approach that recognizes agency as culturally situated.

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^[1] Nyhagen, L. (2019). Mosques as gendered spaces: the complexity of women’s compliance with, and resistance to, dominant gender norms, and the importance of male allies. Religions, 10(5), 321. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050321

^[2] Nyhagen, L. (2019). Mosques as gendered spaces: the complexity of women’s compliance with, and resistance to, dominant gender norms, and the importance of male allies. Religions, 10(5), 321. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050321

^[3] Nyhagen, L. (2019). Mosques as gendered spaces: the complexity of women’s compliance with, and resistance to, dominant gender norms, and the importance of male allies. Religions, 10(5), 321. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050321

^[4] Nyhagen, L. (2019). Mosques as gendered spaces: the complexity of women’s compliance with, and resistance to, dominant gender norms, and the importance of male allies. Religions, 10(5), 321. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050321

^[5] Nyhagen, L. (2019). Mosques as gendered spaces: the complexity of women’s compliance with, and resistance to, dominant gender norms, and the importance of male allies. Religions, 10(5), 321. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050321

^[6] Liang, T. (2023). Is there a need for a world feminist movement?. Journal of Research in Social Science and Humanities, 2(2), 33-37. https://doi.org/10.56397/jrssh.2023.02.04

^[7] Wang, Y. (2017). Muslim women’s evolving leadership roles: a case study of women leaders in an immigrant muslim community in post-9/11 america. Social Compass, 64(3), 424-441. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768617713660

^[8] Pollock, A. and Subramaniam, B. (2016). Resisting power, retooling justice. Science Technology & Human Values, 41(6), 951-966. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243916657879

^[9] mahmood

^[10] Zeweri