In this article I examini two problems regarding women's participation in shared saint veneration and festivals in the eastern Mediterranean and Iberia. First, I ascertain what women's practices were, whether women participated in or assigned meanings to rituals that were separate from those of men, and finally, whether these shared practices were enough to break down religious barriers between women so that we may speak of ‘women's piety’ or ‘women's religious culture’ as a category that extends beyond the confines of individual religious affiliations. Secondly, I explore the meanings that certain male writers assigned in these practices and their emphasis on the fact that it was women, according to them, who engaged in the rituals. I show that, in contrast to Christian or Jewish authors, many Muslim legalists focused on women as the primary participants in certain types of piety as a polemical strategy to denigrate religious practices of which they disapproved.