JEDDAH, 15 November 2004 — Police in Bahrain arrested a woman on Friday for disguising herself as a man and trying to deliver the Friday sermon at one of the largest mosques in the island state, Asharq Al-Awsat reported yesterday. “The 40-year-old woman, who had put on an artificial beard and mustache and was wearing full male dress, took her place in the first row of the mosque packed with 7,000 worshippers, and intended to deliver the sermon before the prayer,” the paper said quoting Sheikh Adnan Al-Qattan, the mosque’s imam. The people who had assembled there for prayer did not take long to discover that the new “imam” was a woman and stopped her from climbing the “mimber” or podium used by the imam to deliver the sermon. The woman is now under detention at Houra police station. One of the worshippers prevented the “imam” from getting into the mimber. “In the ensuing jostle, the woman’s beard fell off and this revealed her gender,” Qattan said. The woman was so powerful that four men could not control her. Finally, the worshippers overpowered her and handed her over to police. “The woman had prepared a sermon to deliver at the mosque,” the imam added.