Muslims in Australia, as in other English-speaking and European nations, live as a religious minority where community infrastructure is still being built, thus intensifying the role of the local mosque as the centre of Muslim religious and community life. Despite evidence that the spatial sunna of the Prophet gave women full access to the masjid, many Australian mosques practise segregation and varying levels of exclusion, which disenfranchises the female half of the community. Segregation and exclusion are defended through use of the fear of sexual fitna trope that arose from patriarchal interpretations of, and interpolations into, Islamic source texts. Nevertheless, fundamentalist and contextualist voices have defended the right of women to fully access mosques. Contextualists in particular base this on the need to provide fresh fiqh interpretations appropriate to the exigencies of modern life, pointing out that many other traditional rulings from the fiqh of mosques have been abandoned or modified in the Australian context.