Le quotidien qui Mark

What is life like in a madrasa and why are young western women drawn to a life of strict religious discipline?
In the ancient cemetery of the desert town of Tarim, in south Yemen, a crowd of young women shrouded in black nylon are kneeling around a red clay gravestone.
"Bismillahi r-rahmani r-rahim," they mutter, hands cupped in supplication, shuffling under the midday sun. "Al hamdu lillahi rabbi l-alamin." They are reciting Qur'anic prayers for the soul of a saint and scholar who, 600 years ago, used to conduct miraculous conversations with the dead from the minaret of the mud-built town mosque.

The chanting is led by a birdlike old lady lost in her black robes: a "hababa", holy woman, who traces her ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad. Behind the hababa, the girls stumble over the unfamiliar Arabic and begin to fidget. They surreptitiously check mobiles for a rare bar of reception or pull Polo mints from Warehouse bags hidden under their robes. Most have never been to Yemen before, understand little Arabic and have never worn a veil. Some have been Muslim for only a few months. But they have come to learn "pure" Islam, and are eager to do it properly.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, and one of the most conservative. Beyond the centres of the largest cities, life is still governed by tribal loyalties and an austere Saudi-influenced interpretation of Islam. But Islamic schools in Tarim are attracting increasing numbers of young western Muslims in search of an answer to the question: how do I live as a real Muslim in the west? I have followed them to find out what could draw young British women of my own age to a remote valley in the Yemeni desert – and what ideas they will bring back to the UK.

"Men! Watch out, girls – men!" An urgent whisper runs through the group and they hurriedly pull down an extra veil to conceal the only visible part of their bodies, their eyes. Through a grey gauze mist, they watch as, 25 metres away, an old man in a heavy green turban limps past to pray at another grave. At the cemetery gates, a bus waits to take the girls back to the madrasa, the traditional Islamic school for women, where they are studying. As they climb aboard, hurrying past the male driver with averted eyes, I fall behind. The cemetery paths, baked in the midday sun, have burned the soles of my bare feet.

"That's nothing compared with what hellfire's going to be like," a heavy-set girl from Luton says flatly, and hauls herself on to the bus.

I first hear about Tarim on a cold December night in west London, where one of its three highest-ranking scholars is addressing a hall packed on one side with young men in tracksuits, jeans and prayer caps, and, on the other, with young women in colourful headscarves. When the robed and turbaned scholar steps out on to the stage, both sides unite in a jostling sea of camera-phones. It looks less like a religious gathering than a music festival.

"It is my right to say," Habib Ali begins in Arabic, his voice rising then falling to a persuasive whisper, "while I am here in Britain, that the role the government played in the Iraq war was a crime. But does that justify the killing of innocent people here?"

Since 2001, Habib Ali, with his fellow Tarimi scholars Habib Umar and Habib Kadhem, has travelled increasingly widely through Muslim communities in Europe and the US. To western governments, they offer an Islamically credible argument against violence and militancy; to their audiences, they represent an unbroken line of charismatic Yemeni scholars that stretches back over a thousand years. After the talk I hear Muslim friends describing Tarim as a "place of miracles", where the faith and manners of the time of the Prophet are preserved. I am intrigued and, with their help, manage to persuade Dar al-Zahra, the Habibs' madrasa for women, to admit a non-Muslim visitor.

On my flight from Dubai to the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, every other woman is wearing a black face veil. After the glitz and hustle of Dubai, Sanaa's mud-brick old city feels dark, quiet and ancient. It is the summer monsoon and in the late afternoon the sunken street past the old city is suddenly waist-deep with rushing grey water, submerging a taxi. Four men with curved daggers thrust into their wide, gold-embroidered belts hitch up their white robes and wade in to heave it out. A crowd gathers, but the few women hurrying past, draped in black, do not stop. In Yemen the streets overwhelmingly belong to men.

Tarim is remoter still, 300 miles south-east across the desert in a vast canyon, the Wadi Hadhramaut – the tribal home from which the father of Osama bin Laden migrated to Saudi Arabia, where Osama was born. Descending towards the canyon's little airport, the plane plunges into a landscape of tiny emerald-green fields set with date palms and crumbling mud-brick towers. Where the irrigation stops, the valley sides are dotted with the whitewashed tombs of local saints. The Hadhramaut converted to Islam around the time of the Prophet's death and it has been famous for its scholars and holy men ever since. The Habibs are their newest incarnation.

The "place of miracles" turns out to be a nondescript grid of square concrete buildings under the high canyon walls. One of them conceals a tall, galleried white courtyard, where a dark-eyed Briton in black robes, Asma, is waiting for me.

"Assalaam aleikum, welcome to Dar al-Zahra," she says, taking my hands. Little girls in coloured gowns bring metal cups of iced water and wave palm leaf fans while the older students, all in black, press round to wish me peace. They have been sent from Indonesia, East Africa and the Arab world to complete their years of Islamic study. But I have come to meet the "Dowra girls", western Muslims on a 40-day programme introducing them to a beginner's version of life in the madrasa. In the windowless hallway of their separate home, a dozen twentysomething women in bright ankle-length house-gowns and headscarves are sitting on thin mattresses with their textbooks. They look tired and hot.

"This is Rachel, our guest," says Asma.

The warmth of the girls' welcome surprises me. They jump up, smiling, to wish me peace, hurry to bring tea and carry my bags – earnestly striving to live up to the Islamic virtue of hospitality. Aziza, a lively girl from Manchester with heavy kohl rings around her dark eyes, introduces me.

Many of my new housemates are, like Aziza, from Urdu-speaking British-Pakistani families, but there are also a handful of converts, including a South African lawyer called Samira, a Canadian student, Sara, and a blue-eyed English girl who has taken the Muslim name Nur, "Light". When they head off, chattering, to the afternoon prayer, I explore the Dowra house. It is less like an austere Islamic retreat than an English boarding school: it smells of shampoo, perfume and sweaty nylon, and the shared bathroom is a cheerful girly clutter of pink razors and make-up. But on the door someone has stuck a note in felt-tip pen: the duas – or special prayers – to be repeated before and after using the shower or toilet.

It is not unusual for British Muslim men to travel abroad for religious education, particularly to the Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan. But, partly because of the restrictions on female travel prescribed by many scholars, it is far less common for women to do so. Dar al-Zahra, a traditional Islamic school that actively encourages western women students, is a rare thing. The Habibs are Sufis, followers of Islam's mystical tradition, and many of their western students are drawn to Tarim by their charisma and emphasis on personal, rather than political, spiritual goals. Their philosophy and practices – reverence for the graves of holy people, devotional singing, the great respect paid to the Habibs – are anathema to more conservative scholars. Most Yemeni madrasas are influenced by hardline clerics from neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the government is so nervous that they will harbour or indoctrinate al-Qaida sympathisers that – spurred on by the US – it has closed many of them down.

Despite the Habibs' liberal reputation, life in Dar al-Zahra turns out to be one of strict discipline. The day begins at 3am with individual pre-dawn prayers, then continues through the set dawn prayer; classes in Islamic jurisprudence, hadith; the Sufi disciplines of adab, spiritual etiquette, and "sciences of the heart"; and Qur'anic recitation, punctuated by more prayers, lectures and homework. The girls sleep only a few hours a night. On Fridays there might be a trip to a saint's shrine or to the ancient graveyard.

We have been sitting cross-legged and barefoot on the floor for two hours and my knees and back are burning. Even the other girls are wincing.

"Is it too strict?" I ask.

"No, no," says Aziza. "And the more you suffer, the more it proves your himma." Himma is the Islamic virtue of spiritual aspiration, and the girls are keen to encourage each other in its feats.

"When we're really tired, I say, 'Come on, girls'," explains Aziza. "'Remember that the darkness on the way to the mosque in the morning will be repaid with light on Judgment Day, when everyone else is in the dark.'"

As we trail slowly back along the dust road, the girls describe the rules for students. They are based on the strict codes of behaviour that apply to Yemeni women, who are among the least educated and most cloistered in the world. Away from the concrete boxes of its outskirts, Tarim is an exotically beautiful town of merchants' palaces and mud-brick mosques. But, unlike the male students, the girls are not allowed to visit the fruit and vegetable souq, drink Fanta in the couple of grill cafes or visit the tumbledown outdoor teahouse in the shade of the date palms. They leave the house only for short walks along the dust roads to prayer halls or lecture rooms, rarely after dark, and never alone. Outside, they wear the abeyya, a voluminous black robe, and the niqab, a double-layered black face-veil. The unmarried women have no contact with men.

Late that night, as the girls prepare for bed or sit softly reciting the Qur'an, Iman, an American convert, takes me aside.

"You should wear niqab like we do. Then you won't draw so much attention to yourself. None of us wear it at home, but when we're here…"

My loose cotton tunic, trousers and headscarf leave only my hands, feet and face exposed, but they clearly mark me out from the other students in their black robes.

"You should wear it," insists Iman.

Her tone is polite, but firm. The next morning I find a bag containing an abeyya, a black headscarf and a niqab hanging on my door handle. Caught between irritation and amusement, I clumsily put them on. In the 40-degree heat, the swathes of heavy nylon are an unbearable addition to my clothes. The headscarf coils tightly under my chin and across my forehead, and the tight headband of the veil, even folded back, leaves only a narrow space to see through. When I blink, my eyelashes catch against it, and the heavy fabric presses damply against my nose and mouth. But when we step out on to the street, my companions' eyes look me over approvingly.

"Mashallah, you look lovely!" a girl whispers to me in friendly delight.

The dress that allows western girls to blend in with the women of south Yemen has temporarily made me part of the same community, closed to men and to outsiders.

That afternoon, we sit – cross-legged again – in a large square classroom listening to a lecture on the attributes of God. Although the scholar who is teaching us is in the same room, we are watching him on a TV screen because the room is divided by a long green curtain. Behind it, the scholar is sitting with his male students, one of whom is filming him for us, while another translates the lecture into elaborate English.

"Someone who allows his wife or daughter to go out of the house uncovered," repeats the translator carefully, "he has judged other than according to what Allah has revealed."

The next morning, the crowds of similarly dressed girls barely glance at me as I cross the sunlit courtyard of Dar al-Zahra on my way to my first Islamic class. In a small square room, 12 young women sit on the floor, poring over The Beginning Of Guidance, a guide to moral etiquette by an 11th-century theologian. Their teacher, Aisha, reads passages aloud, expanding complex points into diagrams on a whiteboard.

"One who has pride in his heart will never come close enough even to smell paradise," she reads, and explains the traps set for believers by their cunning, devilish egos. Her students listen, occasionally asking the meaning of a difficult term.

"Do you ever question your teacher's interpretation or argue in the class?" I ask a student afterwards. She looks surprised.

"No, that would be terribly arrogant," she says. "She is the one with the knowledge."

In this Sufi madrasa, debate and criticism take second place to the flow of baraka, the spiritual blessing or grace that comes from Allah and is channelled through his chosen intermediaries. Only by paying humble, loving attention to a teacher – in person, through books, or praying beside their grave – can a student receive the baraka that emanates from them. In Tarim, the greatest living source is the three Habibs, whom the female students adore from a distance.

"You can see a different aspect of the Prophet in each of the Habibs," Nafeesa, a senior student, tells me as we sit outside the dormitories drinking sugary black tea. "Habib Ali has his cheerfulness and his skill in communication, Habib Kadhem has his wildness and his freedom of spirit, and Habib Umar..." She breaks off, sighs and smiles ecstatically. "He just has light shining from him."

"Mashallah," whisper the girls, nodding. I am intrigued by the intensity of their devotion – especially for Habib Kadhem who has, they say, a wild prophetic beard, dancing eyes, chiselled features and a battered motorbike.

"One of the windows in Dar al-Zahra overlooks the road Habib Kadhem takes to Friday prayers, and when he drives past on his motorbike, all the girls fight each other to see," Nafeesa says. My housemates laugh wistfully.

I feel a little guilty. In my bag is a dented green Twinings tea tin, half-full of dark Yemeni coffee, which Nur had given me the night before.

"This is from Habib Kadhem's house," she said. "It's full of baraka. I want you to have it." Through their ancestry and spiritual dedication, the Habibs' baraka has become so strong, their students believe, that it radiates from objects they own or have touched.

The Dowra girls have come to Dar al-Zahra looking for an essence of Islam's past. Tarim's obvious differences from the west – the niqab, the authority of the scholars, the harsh desert surroundings – are, to them, precious marks of its authenticity. They speak of escaping the consumerism of home for complete simplicity. "This is the opposite of Oxford Street," Asma says as we walk between the old mud houses. They are so dedicated to the idea of Tarim that they would not dream of criticising it. To me, Tarim seems full of contradictions. The Habibs' male followers drive gleaming SUVs through the dusty streets. In the cemetery, the hababa hides her face in distress when the girls snap the tombs with slimline digital cameras. The local women endure poverty, segregation and a lack of healthcare, even vaccination for their children. But while the women's hardships move them, my housemates see something beautiful in their lives.

"Their deen" – religion – "is so pure and strong," they say.

The girls even welcome the ban on seeing or talking to men. "In Islam we understand that men are men and women are women," Nur says. "If you're praying or studying together, it's natural that you'll distract each other, and we want to avoid distractions." The Dowra girls accept this as a simple truth that the secular west, in its pursuit of equality, has forgotten. In an environment so preoccupied by the quest for purity, the tiniest contact between the sexes, even the glimpse of a hand or a brief meeting of the eyes, becomes charged. After a few days in the madrasa, I catch myself instinctively flinching at the sight of a male taxi driver. I understand why Samira says segregation feels "cosy and safe".

"We've lost this kind of sisterhood in the west," says Nur. "There, we just encourage women to compete with each other."

Before class, we sit in a circle as the converts explain why they gave up the freedoms of secular life – which believers see as the temptations extended by the dunya (material world) to the nafs (ego).

"There's nothing more free than a white Protestant female," says Nur, who was studying Arabic at university in Scotland when a Sufi teacher introduced her to Islam. For the past 18 months, she has struggled to cover her hair, pray and avoid alcohol, parties and men. "My nafs was strong. But no matter how many times I slipped into my old habits," she says, "something kept drawing me back to Islam like a fish on a hook."

Beside her sits Sara, a clever, acerbic engineering student who spent her teenage years smoking, drinking and hanging out with bikers and musicians.

"Do you girls know what the Maliki position on tattoos is?" she demands, asking if one of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence has ruled that laser removal is halal (permitted). "I have them all across my back." Looking at her demure house-dress and brown hair neatly smoothed back under her headscarf, it seems impossible. Like Nur, she says her old freedoms were empty and unsatisfying in comparison with the discipline she discovered when she began to read about Islam, and finally converted a few months before coming to Tarim.

"Before, my attention was scattered," she says. "When you follow Islam's rules, you finally feel clean."

On my last evening in Tarim, Asma hurries into my room, breathless. "Come with me, quickly – you've been asked to meet Habib Kadhem."

I am amazed. Students who have been in Tarim for years long to sit in the Habibs' presence. A private interview with them is considered the rarest of privileges.

In a bare meeting room, Asma and her friend Farida kneel silently, fully veiled, behind me. Asma's two small daughters solemnly carry in trays of iced water and peach juice. The translator, a white-robed westerner with a thin blond beard and the stocky build of a rugby player, sits cross-legged, piously avoiding my eyes. At the head of the room sits Habib Kadhem. A heavy pale blue turban frames his high-cheekboned face, and his robes fall in elegant folds around him. I can see the power of his presence over the other people in the room. The Habib raises his eyes to meet mine, smiles and greets me.

"Habib Kadhem wishes you peace and places himself at your service," repeats the translator, in a faintly but definitely Australian monotone.

"First, I have to thank you for your coffee tin," I say, and tell the Habib how it had come into my possession. He laughs. I had expected a scholar to be sober and grave, but his face, voice and gestures are full of energy.

"But that gift made me think that your women students are at a disadvantage. Do they have to be so strictly segregated?"

"Islam treats everyone equally," says Habib Kadhem firmly. "Education is everyone's right, man or woman. To disagree with this is completely contrary to our beliefs."

He is sincere. But living in a separate, freer world, I wonder how much he knows about the female students' lives. I remember the girls jostling to glimpse him drive by their classroom.

The Habib tells me that the scholars do everything they can to support their female students in the search for Islamic knowledge – which they will then pass on to their husbands, children and friends. "We must encourage women in the most important thing: the real jihad, the search for understanding in order to share it with others."

As soon as the door closes behind the Habib and his translator, Farida and Asma throw their veils back from their faces and rush forwards to where he has left his cups of juice and water.

"It's always the men who get to do this," Farida says happily, picking them up. "Mashallah, now it's our turn!" She sees my confusion. "Have some – it's full of the Habib's baraka." She hands me the cup and I take a small sip.

"Have more, and some juice," Asma urges me, passing the water to her daughters. "Don't waste any – drink right down to the bottom of the cup."

At dawn the next day, as I step out through the heavy front door of the Dowra house, the air is cool and fresh. At the airport, I finally take off my veil and black robe, and stuff them into my bag. Without them, I feel light, but frighteningly unprotected. I wrap a scarf over my hair and sit waiting, my eyes lowered against the stares of my fellow passengers. When I change planes at Dubai, the sight of loud, bare-headed women in shorts and vests eating Burger King meals shocks me. I try to imagine how they will look to my housemates on their journey home.

Four months later, in the short days of early winter, I meet Samira and Nur in London. We laugh when we see each other dressed in city clothes and bundled against the cold. Nur has even abandoned her headscarf.

"The Habibs said we should practise Islam in our home culture," she explains. "And anyway, I was angry about having been locked up for so long." Unlike the other girls, she admits that she struggled with the confinement, the segregation and the suspicion that women students were getting a second-class education.

"But was it hard to leave, even so?" I ask, remembering my shock at the airport in Dubai.

"When I came back, I felt like half of me was still there," says Samira. "It's difficult to find yourself back in a way of life that suddenly looks very alien."

Back in the UK, they find themselves facing the complications of living as an observant Muslim in the west without the certainties offered by life in Dar al-Zahra, with all its hardships and restrictions. The Habibs do not encourage them aggressively to separate themselves from secular society – by wearing Yemeni-style niqab or refusing to work outside the home, for instance – but to maintain their spiritual purity through prayer and study. But this is hard, and most of the girls long to leave the struggles and temptations of life in London and return to Tarim.

"Before, I was living for guys, for my university, for work," one writes to me. "Now all I want is to put my niqab back on and live as simply as a Yemeni woman. That's where real Islam is."

• This article was amended on 26 October 2009 to make clearer that while the bin Laden clan hailed from the Hadhramaut in Yemen, this was not the birthplace of Osama bin Laden.