Los Angeles, USA - On a recent Friday, a veiled woman entered a mosque and surveyed the scene. In the front, a few hundred men waited for the call to prayer. In the back, women and children sat in a separate area behind tinted glass.
With barely a pause, Asra Nomani made her choice. Defying age-old Islamic traditions, she stepped over a low partition, sat with the men -- and kicked off a furor.
A man brusquely approached her: "You are not allowed to pray here with men. The women are on the other side." A female elder tried to coax her out, then lost patience and tried to lift her up by the elbow. A man stared at Nomani and muttered, "She must be mentally sick."
Through it all, the woman in pink veil and long coat stood her ground. No, she was not going to move. Yes, she had an Islamic right to sit there. As a burly security guard towered over her, she began softly chanting "Allahu akbar" -- "God is great" -- to keep herself focused. But she noticed her fingers trembling.
Eventually, leaders at the Islamic Center of Southern California cordoned off her space with a red rope, called other women to join her and started the prayer.
"For that Friday prayer, a woman was able to sit in the main hall and create a new reality for our Muslim world," said Nomani, a 40-year-old India native, author and journalist who lives in Morgantown, W.Va. "We have to take back our mosques with an expression of Islam that fully values women."
Nomani's tactics outrage many Muslims. Among them are critics at the Islamic Center, who viewed her recent visit there as a self-serving stunt to publicize her new memoir, "Standing Alone in Mecca," and an unfair ambush of the Los Angeles mosque, which is known for its women-friendly policies.
Mosques have traditionally kept the genders apart because the prophet Muhammad ordered them to pray in separate rows, leaders say. This has been interpreted over the years, they add, as a way to keep men from becoming distracted during prayers.
Still, friends and foes alike agree that Nomani has helped bring global attention to a long-festering issue: the limits on female access to Muslim prayer space, religious leadership and decision-making power. Today, a growing group of Muslims, most of them North Americans and some galvanized by the intense scrutiny of Islam since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, are pushing for wider roles for women.
Such battles over women's religious rights and authority have raged in many faith traditions -- struggles for Roman Catholic women priests and greater female access to Talmudic studies in Orthodox Judaism, for instance.
Many Muslim women complain that they live double lives, one in the workplace and one in the mosque.
"I don't know how many women I've talked to who are professors, doctors, lawyers, professionals in their secular lives, treated with respect, sitting in the front of the room ... and then you walk into the mosque, and you are catapulted back into some medieval world," said Sarah Eltantawi, 28, a Boston-based Egyptian-American who says she was "spiritually damaged" by lifelong experiences of being shunted to the back of the mosque and chastised for not covering herself properly.
Many Muslims are tackling gender segregation in the mosque. They are urging that women be allowed to pray as a group behind men in the main prayer hall, rather than be physically isolated by curtains, walls or separate rooms as they are in most U.S. mosques.