Turkish women demand safer, cleaner spaces in mosques
Observant Muslim women have won their struggle to access all public buildings in Turkey and will now take on the mosques.
In October 2017, a group of Muslim women launched a campaign on social media called Women in Mosques with the hashtag #kadinlarcamilerde. The group announced an invitation for weekly gatherings at a mosque in Istanbul to discuss women’s access to prayer halls.
These gatherings aim to correctly diagnose the problems women face at mosques and discuss possible solutions. They highlight the most important problem as inadequate spaces reserved for women while the most unorganized and dirty spaces are wrongly seen as appropriate for women.
How women are received at mosques differs, as each mosque has a different design and size. Ideally, mosques — just like Turkish baths — should have separate entrances for men and women. In some cases, women and kids are allotted space in the balcony area where they can still see the imam and the congregation and pray under the same roof. However, as the Women in Mosques campaign has documented, that is not always the case. Sometimes the upstairs is locked or unavailable. In some instances, the stairs are so steep that it becomes a safety concern — particularly for children and the elderly.
The hardship starts from the moment women decide to pray. The bathrooms — essential for ablution prior to prayers — that are reserved for women are frequently locked or out of order in many mosques.
