Are women allowed to attend the mosque?

Yes, and the Prophet ﷺ explicitly instructed that women should not be prevented from doing so, saying: do not prevent the female servants of Allah from the mosques of Allah (Sahih al-Bukhari 900). Women prayed in the Prophet's ﷺ mosque in Madinah throughout his lifetime, with rows organized separately from men's rows for reasons of order and modesty, not exclusion. Aisha reported that women attended the dawn prayer wrapped in their garments in the dim early light and were not recognized due to the darkness, indicating regular, normalized female attendance at congregational prayer (Sahih al-Bukhari 578). Some later jurists, particularly within the Hanafi school, expressed a preference for women praying at home, reasoning that a woman's prayer within her own house carries equal or greater reward and can avoid unnecessary difficulty — but this was framed as a matter of what is more virtuous in some circumstances, not a prohibition on mosque attendance. No authentic text bars women from the mosque outright. Where local practice today discourages or physically excludes women from mosques, this reflects custom or poor facilities planning, not the Prophetic model, which was one of visible, welcomed female presence.

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