Crowdedness and lack of enough space force men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with women in some open-air areas in Egypt during the prayers.

CAIRO — The shoulder-to-shoulder prayers of men and women during `Eid are invalid, Egyptian Muslim scholars have said.

"Men-women mixture during the `Eid prayers (as shown on TV screens during the prayer of `Eid Al-Fitr in Egypt Tuesday, October 24) is unlawful and apprehensible," Abdel-Fatah el-Sheikh, former dean of Al-Azhar University, told the independent daily Al-Masri Al-Yom Friday, October 27.

He said women should be performing prayers behind men's lines.

"But the prayers would be invalid if women stood shoulder-to-shoulder with men," he underlined.

Abdel-Moatti Bayoumi, member of the Islamic Research Academy, agreed.

"Men should be lining up behind the imams, followed by children and then women," he told the daily.

The Muslim scholar said men-women mixture is only allowed during the Tawaf (circumambulation of the Ka`bah).

"But it is not allowed during the prayers," he added vehemently.

Muslim men and women flock to mosques early at the first day of Shawwal (the 10th month in the Islamic calendar) to perform the `Eid Al-Fitr prayers.

Crowdedness and lack of enough space force men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with women in some open-air areas in Egypt during the prayers.

Conditional

Soad Saleh, a professor of Islamic law and former dean of the women's faculty of Islamic studies at Al-Azhar University, said women are only allowed to perform prayers behind the men's lines.

"But in cases of necessities such as lack of enough space, it is permissible for women to perform prayers in lines parallel to men's lines but without standing shoulder-to-shoulder," she said.

"But the prayers would be invalid if there was no necessity," she added.

An American woman led on March 18 a mixed congregation of men and women in New York in the Friday prayer against a backdrop of protests and calls of blasphemy from American Muslims.

More than a hundred men and women knelt in adjacent rows, with no curtain to divide them as Amina Wadud, an associate professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led the prayer.