Womens Classes At Shiite Mosques Shiite

Women’s classes at Shiite Mosques

Shiite women in Iraq are attending lessons in mosques, according to Ashraf Khalil, writing in Women’s eNews.

Khalil does not know it, but there is a long tradition of women’s literacy based on religious classes in Iraq. Elizabeth Fernea discovered literate women actually leading other women in ritual commemorations in Iraq in the 1950s (see her classic, Guests of the Sheikh). So this phenomenon is not new, but it may be being started back up on a large scale after a hiatus in the late Saddam period.