A Mosque Led by a Female Ahong

The nüsi, or women's mosque, is a distinct institutional tradition found chiefly among Hui Muslim communities in north central China, particularly Henan, Shaanxi and Hebei provinces, in which women worship and are taught in a physically separate mosque building led by a female ahong, a title equivalent to imam, rather than in a women's section attached to a mosque whose overall leadership remains male.

Jaschok and Shui Jingjun's history of Chinese women's mosques traces the practice back several centuries, plausibly to the Ming or early Qing period, making it one of the oldest continuously documented traditions of institutionally independent female religious leadership anywhere within Islam. A women's mosque of this kind is a complete institution in miniature, with its own prayer hall, its own teaching functions and its own leadership succession, not a subordinate annex whose activities are set by a neighbouring men's mosque, which is precisely what distinguishes the Chinese nüsi tradition from the women's prayer spaces found within mixed mosques elsewhere in the Muslim world. The institution is closely tied to the wider Hui pattern of mosque centred community organization, in which a mosque functions as an educational and social hub for its neighbourhood well beyond the five daily prayers.