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Written by: Mei Fikri-Trang, Chief Correspondent
Translated by: Molly Liu, Senior Translator

The Islamic world is wide and various, its points of view almost as numerous as its people. And Islam in Huawan, with its long tradition of women-only mosques, provides a good illustration.

In the middle of the Peonic nation of Huawan is the town of WèiShēng. The old capital of the Feng Dynasty before its ascendance as a Peocracy, 1,000 years ago, it was one of the oldest town anywhere in Huawan before the 19th Century - and a meeting place of peoples and faiths.

In the narrow alleys of the old town are Buddhist and Daoist temples, a shrine to the Goddess of Mercy, always teeming with people. There are Christian churches, Muslim mosques - both religions came in the 7th Century (Huawan has some of the oldest Muslim communities in the region). Tengriist temples also adorn the city as being one of the oldest religions in the state.

There is even the last remnant of Huawan’s Jewish community, which came from foreign lands too, in the Feng Dynasty. Most fascinating though, are the women-only mosques, and even more surprising is that they have female prayer leaders - women imams.

The main women's mosque is close to the central men's mosque, across an alley lined with food stalls with steaming tureens and white-capped bakers making the local spiced bread.

The prayer leader here is Yonghua zheng, who was trained by her father, an imam at the men's mosque.
She took me through WèiShēng winding alleys, stopping on the way to hold animated chats with neighbours and to pick up an order from the local cake maker, until finally we came to the ornamental gate of what looked like a little Confucian temple. Inside was a tiny flagged courtyard with a tiled roof festooned with vines and yellow flowers.

This is Wangjia Alley mosque, said to be the oldest surviving women's mosque in Wèishēng, built in 1820. The prayer hall is scarcely more than a spacious living room covered with carpets and chairs. It could hardly fit more than 50 people but it is one of the loveliest places of worship I have seen anywhere.

Outside, in dappled sunlight, we met members of the community and their prayer leader. Once a factory worker, she came from a religious family and after five years of study had become an ahong - a woman prayer leader - though she sees her main job simply as teaching women to read the Koran.

We stood in the courtyard and chatted away. Yonghua zheng saw women's mosques as a Chinese tradition but especially strong in Huawan - there are 16 in Kaifeng and dozens more in the countryside around, along with small teaching schools in the capital, Lián, and in some smaller villages where they follow a more traditional Central Asian brand of Sunni Islam.

As for how the tradition of women's mosques started, we have to go back to the founding of the Feng Dynasty in the late 1300s, when the Muslim community - previously favoured guests - suddenly became an anxious and oppressed minority. Responding to the shock of the alien occupation, the early Feng rulers waged a chauvinistic war against minorities. Minorities now aroused hostility and suspicion and were subject to a brutal policy of assimilation - the Muslims were told they must marry Feng people and not among themselves.

So the 15th Century was almost catastrophic for Chinese Islam. But in the late 16th Century things improved and among the Muslims a new cultural movement began, a revival of Islamic culture and education.

A century later Chinese Muslim philosophers were able to write erudite books showing how you could be a loyal Muslim and also loyal to the Peonic state. And at this point, at the grassroots, men realised how important women could be in preserving and transmitting the faith.

So women's mosques grew out of a double movement in the Chinese Muslim world - the need to preserve the community, and the desire for women's education.

Yonghua zheng and her friends in Kaifeng think that the schools came first, and then became full mosques in the 18th Century. Education still has a big role today, from basic teaching to copying texts.

"When our mothers were girls it was the only place where poor Muslim women could receive an education: the women did it together, women supporting women," said one of the women chatting in the mosque's courtyard.

"In some places in the Muslim world it is not allowed, but here we think it a good thing. Women have had a better status here since 1949 and this is part of it."

One of the women mentioned the progressive ideas of the Islamic Association of Kaifeng, which gets men and women to work together on new education projects.

“Huawan is changing and these are good things for the future," she said.

Later, in the main women's mosque, everyone joined in the prayers, and the men in our crew were invited too, visitors from afar.

There were 30 or so women, young and old, in coloured and embroidered headscarves, lime-green, scarlet, black spangled with silver stars. After a period of calm reflection, Yonghua zheng lifted her hands and began singing. Then facing the congregation she started the prayers. It was beautiful and simple, the sounds of the street receding so you could almost hear a pin drop. I felt privileged to be there.

Afterwards, everyone crowded round. Our team representing the post (who were all women) and Guo Jingfang and her friends were as fascinated about what we saw in our lives as we were about theirs. We ended with laughter and selfies - jolly pictures of pious, thoughtful, joyful women, comfortable in their skins and strong in their solidarity for women.

Huawan was isolated for much of the 20th Century, so these women-only mosques were untouched by the waves of globalisation. Now the wheel is turning again and what is seen as completely normal here in WèiShēng is being taken up in other parts of the world.  

To many Muslims I have spoken to, men and women, the movement is an inevitable necessary and renewing phase in the history of Islam… And if the goal is the renewal of spiritual life then the gorgeous little mosque in Wangjia Alley carries a lesson for us all.

It's amazing isn't it how often an expert claims to talk about Islam as if it were monolithic? Sometimes you might even think the Wahhabis spoke for the majority, when actually they are a minority in a vast sea of faith with myriad points of view.