In her famous essay “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” Rachel Adler writes of how orthodox Judaism’s exemptions for women, children, and slaves made all three groups “peripheral Jews.” Allowing them to skip such rites as hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah or praying at the three daily services meant that they were “‘excused’ from most of the positive symbols which, for the male Jew, hallow time, hallow his physical being, and inform both his myth and his philosophy.” In Islam, the dispensation that allowed women to pray at home worked, in practice, to deny many of the pleasures and support of
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