Woman between Islam and Western Society

By the beginning of the 20th century, this trend of thought had established its hold all over the world, and laws came to be made or modified accordingly. All doors were to be thrown open to men and women alike. In practice, however, this experiment has met with utter failure. Even after a struggle of almost 200 years, women have failed to achieve a status equal to that of men. They are almost as backward today as they were before the launching of the “women’s lib” movement. The only practical result has been that women have come out of the home, and are to be seen everywhere in the company of men. By degrees they have lost their femininity without having achieved the goal of equal status with men in every domain for which they paid this very high price. The failure of women’s liberation has led to wide-ranging research being carried out on this topic, employing strictly scientific methods. Finally, the patent biological differences between men and women have been scientifically proved. These differences have all along been a reason for women’s failure to find an equal place in every department of life. Where philosophers had cast doubts upon the religious concept of women — quite erroneously as it turned out — scientific findings have now re-established this concept’s veracity. Now the question arises as to why it is that once science has supported the religious concept of man and woman as being the right one, the allegation continues to be made that Islam has “degraded” woman. For instance, the Indian freedom fighter, S.M. Joshi, who was interviewed in connection with a government-sponsored scheme to record the voices of freedom fighters for posterity, stated that “the Shariat of the Muslims and the Manusmruti of the Hindus — followed by both communities for centuries — were equally socially reactionary.”3 Such remarks are made so indiscriminately and so frequently that it is high time we concerned ourselves less with our own sense of injury and more with the possible root causes. The main reason is that the results of research on the differences between man and woman have remained only an academic finding and have not yet formed the basis of a popular intellectual revolution. The social penetration of these ideas will have to take place in the same way as monotheism replaced polytheism, that is, through the kind of intellectual revolution set in motion by the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions with the special succor of God. Such an intellectual revolution in our own times is certainly not far-fetched, since modern science has provided all the arguments in its favor. It is only a question now of sufficient number of believers engaging themselves wholeheartedly in the dissemination of those findings for a popular, intellectual revolution to take place. It is my earnest desire that the following chapters should provide the inspiration for this history-making task. Wahiduddin Khan May 19, 1994 The Islamic Centre