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 womenâs mosques, called nisha miskii. 1 Maldivian nisha miskii are separate buildings, run by mudahim âthe female equivalent of a mudimu , or male mosque caretakerâwomen who lead the prayers and act as caretakers for the buildings.
Womenâs mosques are not found in all parts of the Maldives, and those visiting the capital island, MalĂ© may not have the opportunity to see such buildings. This is because the mosques in MalĂ© , 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 womenâs 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 womenâs mosques on the nationâs 200 inhabited islands. 2 These mosques are sites of complex cultural significance as multiple dynamic sociocultural worlds play a part in constituting Maldivian womenâs mosques as gendered religious sites and practices located in nisha miskii challenge common notions of Muslim womenâs 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 womenâs mosques. One line of questioning to pursue is the ontological implications of these sites. How does the existence of womenâs 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 womenâs leadership roles linked to womenâs mosque sites. Are the mudahim of nisha miskii âimams 3 â? What does the presence (or absence) of a female âimamâ in a Muslim community signify? I hope, in the course of this book, to explore possible answers to these questions.
âThe World in Generalâ or âThe World Around Hereâ?
One way of beginning to recognize Maldivian womenâs mosques, and womenâs 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 Islamâusing 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 interpret spaces in Muslim communities better through the use of such dichotomies. I eschew an understanding of Maldivian womenâs mosques as purely dichotomous spaces as this method crucially depends on there being only one distinct way of âbeingâ Muslimâfor example, in the global/local dichotomy one that is decidedly global or decidedly localâthat 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 womenâs 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 womenâs 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 âthings to be inside ofâ (Cresswell, 2004). The term âplaceâ 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 localeâlived experiences of spacesâand locationâthe 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 âspaceâ and âplaceâ 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 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. Tuanâs âplace as pausesâ emphasizes, as Charles Withers has suggested, place as âa way of âbeing in the worldââ in Heideggerâs notion of the phrase (Heidegger, 1962; Withers, 2009, p. 640). Tuanâs 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 tensionâthe tension between geographically fixed places and the mobility of events and practices (Cresswell, 2004). In Harveyâs Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference that which is âmobileâ 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 Appaduraiâs âscapesâ (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 âyou canât go home againâ (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 womenâs mosques, tie together spaces and create a âgrounding pointâ 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 âcontainerâ of meanings, a notion commonly attributed to Plato, then is transformed into something more promisingâless static and more nuancedâthat can reflect complex and shifting meanings through time, as we shall see through a discussion of Henri Lefebvreâs work on space (Lefebvre, 2009).
What I will discuss in this book are these âpauses,â 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 womenâs 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 womenâs mosques constitute and reconfigure sites typically supposed as central to a notion of being âMuslim,â is that rather than conceiving of âbeing Muslimâ 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 womenâs 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 âAfterwordâ of Steven Feld and Keith Bassoâs 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 â âthe world around here.â The sense of interconnectedness imposed on us by the mass media, by rapid travel, and by long distance communication obscures this more than a littleâŠ. 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. 261â262)
Engaging in this ethnography of placeâlooking at the ways in which womenâs mosques are constructed as places in the Maldives and taking seriously the notion that the world is indeed comprised of âthe world around hereââallows us to challenge ubiquitous generalized narratives about mosque spatial practices.
As discussed briefly in the preface of this book and developed in more detail in Chapter 5, womenâs mosques are not unique to the Maldives. Scholarly and popular sources suggest that womenâs mosques are seen in countries around the world. Given the widespread nature of movements for womenâs mosquesâas 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 lifeâit is reasonable to consider Muslim womenâs public institutio...