SLOW Movement

FT: Does science need religion?

Does science need religion?

By Harry Eyres

Published: November 13 2009 23:52 | Last updated: November 13 2009 23:52

Galileo Galilei appeared before the Roman Inquisition in 1632

Humility, genuine humility, is always a good place to start from. But it is not the disposition that most of us probably associate with the world’s major organised religions. Individual religious persons may be humble but the churches, orders, mosques and so on tend to project pomp and certainty (otherwise they are accused of faithlessness). I was brought up within a peculiar strain of English Roman Catholicism which, in those days, combined stupendous social snobbery with scientific ignorance and dismissiveness of all who questioned its authoritarian precepts.

You could forgive some of this on the grounds of the centuries of persecution, but I have always struggled to forgive all of it. I was so alarmed at the likely fate of my ungodly, notionally Protestant but generally hard-drinking, rugby-playing grandfather that when he died I spent hours on All Souls’ Day in the school chapel saying prayers (so-called “indulgences”) to get him off years of punishment in purgatory.

We little Catholic boys were encouraged to believe that Catholics were better – that is holier – than Protestants, not to mention agnostics, atheists, Muslims or Methodists (socially beyond the pale). Did this mean that my Catholic mother was better than my Protestant/atheist father? Reproductively, it seemed that Catholics were trumps; if we had children, they would automatically become Catholics, whatever religion or lack of religion their mother professed.

You can imagine then that I came to the New Orleans Symposium on religion, science and the environment armed with a good deal of scepticism. Would the splendidly dressed religious eminences acknowledge the role that the dogmatism and intellectual blinkeredness of their religious traditions had played in creating the ecological crisis, or in generally messing up the world?

Hearteningly, there were signs that they might. Metropolitan John of Pergamon (of the Orthodox church) and one of the world’s most distinguished theologians, set the tone in his background paper. He fingered parts of the Christian tradition, notably neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, for their disdain of the body and nature, and the Calvinist ethos of capitalism, which views the world simply as raw material for exploitation. Heavy and apparently abstruse stuff, but not so abstruse when you looked out of the window and saw the polluted Mississippi flow by, carrying its load of pesticide and fertiliser effluent into the Gulf of Mexico to create the world’s largest marine “dead zone”.

Environmentalists have long berated Christians for following the Biblical injunction to dominate and populate the world with scant regard for the intrinsic value, balance and order of nature. But here on the banks of Old Man River we heard a message from the Pope stressing that “nature is prior to us” and contains its own “grammar which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation”. Even more amazingly, we were addressed by the wise and sensible Rev Jim Ball of the Environmental Evangelical Network, proving that not all north American Evangelicals believe in hastening the end of the world.

In the past, and in my own past, religions got a bad name among the open-minded by fearing and opposing science and scholarship. This fear and opposition ranged from the heavy-duty persecutions of the Inquisition, burning Giordano Bruno and forbidding Galileo to disseminate his world-changing observations of planetary movements, to the silliness of those who taught me that the first five books of the Old Testament were dictated directly by God to Moses.

In New Orleans I saw religious scholars and leaders reaching out in genuine humility to other intellectual traditions; not being afraid of science, but actively embracing and using it. Of course you can see that religion needs science; it is no longer possible to deny certain kinds of geophysical and biological evidence without cutting yourself off from the community of the intellectually curious. But the more interesting question is whether science needs religion.

“Science”, according to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “manipulates things and gives up living in them.” Or you could say that science illuminates many things but cannot tell us what they mean to us, in human terms.

What religion can bring to science, and the pressing task of planet-healing, is not the arrogant certitude that brooks no argument but passion and community.

Abused and dangerous words these may be. Passions can be whipped up by obscurantists and community too easily becomes a meaningless token. But the Latin origins of the word “passion” take us to suffering and to the cognate word “compassion”.

Science gives us repeated and intensifying warnings that the earth, our home, is in bad shape, and that we are causing potentially disastrous disruption to the great planetary systems of weather and cleansing and renewal. But it leaves us in the lurch, with the bad news. Religion and religious art, at their best, can offer communal means both of mourning our inescapable losses (think of the Bach Passions) and of celebration. Intellectual proofs on their own have never been enough to change human behaviour; we need emotional reconnection.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

Excerpt:

Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

===

July 19, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.

While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.

This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Iran's Second Sex

June 27, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Iran’s Second Sex

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN

From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.

Images assail me: a slender woman clutching her stomach outside Tehran University after the blow; a tall woman gesticulating to the men behind her to advance on the shiny-shirted Basij militia; women shedding tears of distilled indignation; and that young woman who screamed, “We are all so angry. Will they kill us all?”

How can a revolution kill its children? The post-1979 generation has risen, not alone, but in the lead. Perhaps Iran cannot be an exception to the rule that revolutions devour themselves.

A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.

Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. “It’s simple,” she said. “We wanted freedom then, and we don’t have it now.”

In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.

Yes, it’s simple. From the outset, the regime targeted women, calculating that the patriarchal culture of the country would embrace the idea of an Islamic diktat that “put women in their place.”

But then again nothing in Iran is simple. One benefit of the massive show of resistance to a stolen vote, and future, has been to awaken Americans to the civic vitality of Iranian society — a real country with real people rather than a bunch of zealous clerics posing a nuclear problem.

This is a sea change. Iran has been denuclearized, not in the sense that the problem has gone away (on the contrary), but in the sense that a rounded picture, beyond to bomb or not to bomb, has formed.

Say Iran and murdered Neda Agha-Sultan surges where a bearded mullah once stood. Young, modern, connected, Neda just wanted to live her life. She personifies a certain Iran I’ve tried to evoke since the beginning of this year.

In some senses, women of her 20-something generation have benefited from the revolution; I told you to forget simplicity. It took an ayatollah to tell traditional families to educate their daughters. Today 60 percent of university students are women, about double the figure in 1982.

Here we stand close to the tragedy of this election. The vote offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a fast-changing society of highly educated women and the regime. Past elections have served that purpose, nudging the clerical establishment in reformist directions.

Instead, hard-liners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opted for schism, a historic error. The Iran of yesterday is gone, the Iran of tomorrow not yet born.

I don’t want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran’s reformist brain trust, “Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism.” Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.

When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because “all the whores are with Moussavi.” Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.

Women are angry with the state, of course. But they are also angry with the passive way men have accepted discrimination. Be strong! Fight harder! These are immediate messages summoned from old frustrations.

Their courage and pain haunt me. We need Delacroix to paint them. We need President Obama to put engagement — still the right medium-term objective — on hold in their name.

Islam has a lot to say about the rights of women; the mullahs of Qom have lots of training in how to say the opposite of what they said before. The revolution might have bent toward the women it fashioned. But it has stiffened against what it birthed, never wise.

I asked one woman about her fears. She said sometimes she imagines an earthquake in Tehran. She dashes out but forgets her hijab. She stands in the ruins, hair loose and paralyzed, awaiting her punishment. And she looked at me wide-eyed as if to say: do you understand, does the world understand our desperation?

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Outside Edge: Wit and wisdom in 140 characters

Outside Edge: Wit and wisdom in 140 characters

By Ben Fenton

Published: April 10 2009 19:03 | Last updated: April 10 2009 19:03

Can one express ideas that would change the world, simply inspire it, or just allow oneself to be heard, in a box containing 140 characters?

That is the test of Twitter, the latest plague of distraction to spread around the world, challenging the verbose and the tongue-tied alike.

Would the seminal thoughts of Man endure the squeeze of Twitter? Could we, in 140 spaces, prove a rose by any other name can spell as Tweet?

The Ten Commandments are tricky: acknowledging God (101 chars), not taking His name in vain (128) or honouring mum and dad (108) fit a Tweet.

Commandments to forsake other gods (515), keep the Sabbath (493) or shun various kinds of coveting (192), though, are too prolix to Twitter.

However, He could safely ban murder, adultery, theft and bearing false witness in one Tweet, leaving 10 spaces for an @Moses repeat twitter.

The New Testament offers us no stronger chance of finding a concise version of enlightenment. After all, parables and beatitudes need space.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure of heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are those other chaps.

But if divine words may not be clipped, perhaps the profound communications of Man himself lend themselves more to 140-space online editing?

To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or, er, not.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable um.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the (cont’d).

So, sonnets are out. Very brief limericks maybe. But no big multiclause sentences. No complexity of ideas. Just the soul of the soul of wit.

On the other hand, one of the greatest ideas of all – e=mc2 – is said and done in 5 keystrokes. Albeit that explaining it takes rather more.

And we can say a very great deal – I♥U – in almost no space at all. So is language to be celebrated for ineffable variety, depth and colour?

Or its use as data? For a 1 or a 0 are all we need to make and keep the A and Ω of life. We got to the moon on the back of a few good nmbrs.

Nxt, the vxt ? of txt. Shd we spk shrt to max msg? Or are there times when, in the frigidity of abbreviation, extenuation is its own reward?

Perhaps we should consider the thoughts of one of those who gave us this strangely addictive form of curt communication, namely Jack Dorsey.

Twitter’s founder said: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” Twice even, given this tweet was a mere 65 long.

Twitter cuts news to telex language: banks unhave hope moneywise. But is that such a bad thing? After all, every reporter needs a good editor.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

IHT: Flying under cover

Flying under cover

By Melati Abdul Hamid

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia:

I travel abroad quite a bit, both for work and for pleasure. Most of the time, I travel alone. Needless to say, whether one would want to admit it or not, traveling on airplanes nowadays is testing to many, especially if you ’re recognizable as Muslim.

One can take it in different ways, either a) with resentment, which does not help the situation much and is bad for your blood pressure if you are a frequent flyer; or b) with a little bit of humor and  amusement.

Most of the time, I choose to be amused, accepting the idiosyncrasies as part of the adventure, acting as if I am a character in a P.G. Wodehouse story, only without Jeeves.

Below are some points that I hope can be of help to you in your  travels.

-Look normal in your passport picture. This is harder than it sounds, I know. It is also an uphill battle, since cameras that take passport photos seem to have a special feature that works like a distorting mirror to make anyone look like a brewing psychopath.

One way to overcome this is by smiling in your passport photo. This may be hard, as the photo is sometimes taken at the passport office, where you have waited for three hours in a badly ventilated and crowded room.

The problem is that sometimes they do not allow you to smile in your photo. The United States, for example, expressly states that one should not be smiling in the visa photo.

I was told that this is for face verification purposes. Apparently smiling distorts the face and may render it unrecognizable by the machine. I guess this makes sense. In the event that you are not allowed to smile, try to make a humble, honorable and decent expression, like you are meeting your mother-in-law for the first time.

-Use headphones to listen to your MP3 player at the airport. If you are like me and live your life with constant background music, you would definitely prefer to spend the time waiting at an airport with your iPod on. However, I have realized that a woman in a headscarf traveling alone and listening to her iPod through earphones is a cause for concern to many.

Why? Because the onlooker can only see a) the headscarf and b) a white wire that suspiciously stretches from her scarf to an unknown device in her pocket.

On one occasion (I swear this is true!) the man who sat across me at the boarding gate at Newark Airport was eyeing my wire so nervously while trying to avoid eye contact that I looked straight at him, slowly took out my iPod and held it out to him. He had to smile.

- If you are taken aside at the airport immigration section, be calm and answer questions with the simple truth. I have had my share of being escorted to a special office at the airport immigration section. Maybe they were on a lookout for a 20-something, 5-foot-tall Oriental-looking Muslim girl in a headscarf traveling alone. They were especially suspicious when I was returning alone to the United States after a five-day trip to the Caribbean.

Flipping through my passport, the officer asked, “Why did you go to St. Maarten?” My answer: “Because travelocity.com was having a great promotion and I wanted to celebrate having sat for the New York Bar exam.”

I also know of a friend who was asked by the airport immigration officer to explain each stamp in his passport.

Officer: ‘‘Why did you go to Egypt?’’

Friend: ‘‘To see the pyramids.’’

I also learned that it helps to slip in that you are a law student/lawyer who specializes in constitutional law. But only use this if it’s true. And no, watching Law & Order is not exactly the same thing.

-Talking points. When one is stuck for hours on a plane sitting elbow-to-elbow with a stranger, there is bound to be interaction. After the polite smile and the ‘‘hellos,’’ a few things may occur.

One, the conversation may die. In this case, one only has to put on the headphones and enjoy the in-flight movies or sleep.

Two, the conversation continues. This can be tricky if the other person does not speak your language. I once had a 45-minute conversation with an Italian lady. She spoke Italian, I spoke English, and we understood each other through hand gestures. Actually, it was fun.

At other times, one is faced with thinly veiled prejudice, with or without malice. There are those who are just a little too surprised when they hear that I am a lawyer and a Harvard graduate, apparently shocked to find out that I was not forced into marriage at 16 and do not have seven kids yet.

There are also those who feel the need to talk to me about “Muslim issues,” perhaps feeling that they should talk to me about something I can relate to. Oppression of women tends to crop up (perhaps because the topic terrorism is a no-no on a plane). I do not mind talking about it, unless I find myself being made personally liable for something that happened in a village in Africa.

Sometimes, I get compliments that are meant well but do not necessarily translate that way. For example, an American next to me once said, “You speak English well.” I smiled and replied, “Thanks. You do too.”

Then there are the people who, for some reason, are overly enthusiastic about being seated next to you. In such situations, I can’t help but feel like an exotic animal under observation. These people are nice, but they sometimes go too far in trying to identify with your Muslim identity. I often feel bad for having to disappoint them, as in this encounter:

Enthusiastic stranger: ‘‘I see that you are wearing a purple scarf. What is the reason you wear purple instead of other colors?’’

Me: ‘‘Um, it matches my top.’’

Once in a while, one does get to meet the perfect stranger, one who does not have any problem wrapping his/her mind around the fact that you are really just another person.

That’s when you find that the journey is too short, even if it is between the farthest points on earth (I believe the Kuala Lumpur-New York route may qualify).

Melati Abdul Hamid is a government lawyer in Malaysia practicing public international law.

IHT: Muslim women in Egypt enter man's realm of the mosque

 

Muslim women in Egypt enter man's realm of the mosque

 

By Hadeel Al-Shalchi

The Associated Press

Monday, January 5, 2009

CAIRO: Amira Khairy is mobbed by housewives kissing her cheeks in greeting as she arrives to give a lesson on reciting the Koran to women at Al Sedeeq Mosque in a Cairo suburb. Students set up chairs for the class, and soon the hum of chanting female voices fills one of the building's larger chambers.

Up to 1,000 women may show up for the Koran lessons or twice-weekly religious lectures by women. On any given day, several hundred women buzz around the mosque, organizing clothing drives, cooking meals for the poor or teaching women to read. Al Sedeeq also has medical clinics and a day care center for children of women who do volunteer work at the mosque.

All the activities are organized by women - not the mosque's administrators, who are men. On one recent day, the only men seen in the building were workers doing renovations and worshipers who popped in to perform one of the five daily prayers required by Islam.

It is a startling sight in Egypt, where mosques have long been a man's realm. The few Egyptian women who appeared at mosques in the past had come to pray - usually in small corners that were partitioned off - or to make appeals at the shrines of holy figures, hoping for marriage, pregnancy or good grades for their children.

While men often socialize in mosques, women have traditionally been encouraged to practice their religion at home, where they can care for their children and husbands.

"When I was young, we wouldn't even go to pray in the mosque," said Khairy, the teacher. "It was a place for us to tour on holidays, like visitors."

Now, with religiosity increasing in Egypt, more women want to engage in public prayer, increase their knowledge of Islam and do volunteer work in the community. Many Egyptian women have already had to balance their traditional place in the home with public roles at universities and jobs, so they tend to ask, "Why not a place in the mosque as well?"

These women are not Western-style feminists seeking to change the faith's teachings on women. But their presence is challenging assumptions on women's place and turning some mosques into women-friendly social hubs.

While no statistics exist on the increasing number of Egyptian women praying outside the home, several religious scholars in Cairo say there is a clear trend of more women attending mosques and playing a greater religious role.

Khairy is typical of much of the new breed of religious women. She is in her 50s; she studied engineering at a university, but rather than pursue a career, she married and stayed home to care for children. About 10 years ago, she wanted to deepen her faith, so she and a group of women started meeting in each other's homes to memorize the Koran.

More women joined the study circle, and several years ago they began meeting at Al Sedeeq Mosque, which had just been built near Cairo's international airport. They found a woman with an Islamic studies degree who volunteered to give lectures on how to pray and perform other rituals and on why women should wear the hijab, or head scarf.

As hundreds of women from across Cairo joined in, the charity projects multiplied. The women are now so organized that the volunteers wear a uniform: white scarf and blue dress.

Al Sedeeq Mosque's administrators expanded its women's section to accommodate the volunteers. But not all are so welcoming.

Egypt is one of the most progressive Middle East nations on the issue of women attending mosques. In the Gulf, many mosques have no space dedicated to women, and more women can be seen at prayers or Friday sermons in Egypt than in many other Arab countries.

Still, Egyptian women are often told, even by some female Islamic thinkers, that they should stay at home.

"The best place for a woman to pray remains her house," said one of them, Souad Saleh, who teaches at Al Azhar University, the pre-eminent Sunni Muslim institution for Islamic studies.

Mosque administrators are universally men, and many are reluctant to allocate greater space to women, saying that more men attend prayers. At most mosques, women must enter through side doors, and women's sections are not always air-conditioned or carpeted.

But Abdel-Moeti Bayoumi, a theology professor at Al Azhar University, said men must realize that times are changing.

"I always tell men that the days of locking up women away from society and useful work or study is backward and dangerous," he said. "It is not permitted in Islam to prevent a woman from praying in the mosque."

Najah Naji, a 22-year-old woman who tries to visit different mosques around Cairo to pray and study, says she is often told that the women's prayer section is closed or otherwise unavailable.

"Men feel like the leadership will be taken from underneath them," said Naji, who has memorized the Koran. "Even an educated man is raised with a mother who stayed at home and served his father, so he'd be worried I wouldn't be able to do the same for him. It's going to take a lot of time for that attitude to change."

Al Sedeeq Mosque is one of the most dramatic examples of women's taking a bigger role. More often, small groups of women make forays into modest neighborhood mosques.

At a tiny mosque tucked between apartment buildings near the Giza Pyramids on the outskirts of Greater Cairo, Hana Muhammad sits with a group of 12 older women. They cram into a small room every week to share stories, exchange news of grandchildren, vent about their lives at home and recite the Koran.

"The mosque is a softer place now that women have entered it," Muhammad said. "If a woman in need comes for help, she'd never knock on the door if only men were inside."

Members of Muhammad's circle said a woman with several university degrees and a career should not be told she cannot enter a mosque.

"Women started to force themselves on the mosque because they realized their faith allowed them to do so," Muhammad said. "It was a religious awakening. We understood we could do it, so we did."