Conclusion

zeal and fervor of Islam, they burned with the desire to serve its cause, and set about converting their capturers with a large measure of success. Those Tartars who were not immediately converted by their womenfolk at least softened to such a degree in their attitude towards Islam that when they came into contact with Muslims elsewhere in the world, they were very easily converted. This was thanks to the preliminary seeds having been sown within their very own homes. The first Tartar ruler who converted to Islam was Barka Khan, who ruled from 1256 to 1267. It appears that his mother was a Muslim, and had trained him in the ways of Islam from early childhood. His formal conversion came just after his coronation, when he had a conclusive discussion on Islam with a Muslim merchant. Ghazan Khan’s brother, Aljai, whose wife was a Muslim, succeeded him in 1304. It is said that it was his wife’s persuasion which brought about his conversion. Indeed, most of the Tartar chiefs and military men converted in the same way. Indeed, their Muslim wives and mothers so impressed upon their minds the greatness of Islam, that the whole course of Islamic history was thereby changed. The influence of Muslim women is in no way diminished for its being in the more mundane settings of the modern world, for although, physically, they remain within the domestic sphere, mentally they go with their husbands wherever life’s exigencies may take them. In so doing, they share both their hearts and their minds. The relationship of every wife to her husband is of great depth: it is she who is his chief adviser and sharer in his joys and sorrows. Thus she is associated at every moment with all his thinking, all his activities. Where the household tasks are concerned, her involvement is direct: so far as external tasks are concerned, she exercises over them a kind of benevolent remote control. A woman’s work relates, albeit indirectly, to all of life’s activates. While the importance of a woman’s role in life is at all events comparable to that of a man, it should be borne in mind that this role will always be the more effectively performed by those women who are keener in their awareness. It is a little understood fact that the role a woman plays does not depend upon her physical environment, but rather on the degree to which her intellect has been cultivated. The importance accorded to the male sphere of action as opposed to the female sphere, rather than to the type and quality of the actions performed therein, has been given undue emphasis, thus attaching to a woman’s domain an unwarranted stigma of inferiority. It is to combat this acquired sense of inferiority that so many women feel the necessity to emerge from their homes and to take up the cudgels in the world of commerce and industry, science and technology, law and medicine. It is regrettable that they do not stop to consider that, though they are the weaker sex, as a matter of biology they are the strength of the stronger sex. Therein lies the secret of woman’s power. Notes 1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), Vol. 9, p. 383.