4 Islamic articles on: feminism

A woman’s worth does not depend on her accomplishments

AOA, Akhi! few days ago I met an aunt of me.She and her daughters are very social and they all are well known in their fields.My father couldn't afford our studies so we sisters are just graduate.Also my father never allowed us to go out much so we are kind of staying at home type girls.But Alhamdulillah all are married and happy in their lives.My aunt said to me that the kind of life u are living,is just making u a burden on society.So does a person must be recognized by society before dying?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

In my opinion a saintly “soccer mom” who has no accomplishment beyond taking care of her family is infinitely more admirable than a selfish and greedy female CEO. A woman’s worth has nothing to do with her accomplishments and everything to do with her character. A saintly woman who carries out her duties (whatever they may be) is better than other women regardless of accomplishments.

The idea that a woman’s worth should depend on her accomplishments is a self-defeating modern superstition. It tells women they are not good enough unless they ignore their own desires and instincts and enter races with men in the corporate, political or scientific world. 

I fully support women’s participation in these things. What I do not support is acting as if a woman’s worth depends on these things. It does not. Her worth depends on her character. I would consider a woman with no accomplishments but with a good character superior to a female Nobel Prize winner with a bad character any day.

Our accomplishments are gifts from God. He created us, gave us talents and made things easy for us. Acting as if accomplishments increase our worth is the height of arrogance, it is the same as a rich person thinking their money that God has given them makes them worthier than poor people.

I see nothing wrong with a woman having no interest in accomplishments and simply wanting to take care of her family. And I see nothing wrong with another woman who likes accomplishments. Neither is worthier than the other. Both are simply carrying out their duties.

It is only ignorance and arrogance that makes a scholar or scientist think their job is more glorious than a mother who takes care of her children. To me their worth depends on their character, including how well they try to carry out their duties. If God has enabled me or some woman to be a scholar and has put scholarship in our path, it would be shameful if we do not try to be the best scholars we can be. But if God has not enabled another person to become a scholar, then it is not shameful that they are not scholars.

I firmly believe that an uneducated and illiterate shepherd who fears God more than I do is a better and worthier person than I am regardless of my accomplishments.

Your aunt’s statement that you are a burden on society is rather ignorant and arrogant. Just because God made things easy for her and not for you makes her think she is better than you. If you fear God more than her and carry out your duties just as well as her, then you are superior to her even if she gains global fame in her field.

There is no worth, honor or glory except through God. Anyone who chases these things outside of God is chasing a mirage. 

I do not want to discourage women from working in traditionally masculine fields. What I want to discourage them from is the arrogance to think that this makes them superior to other women. It does not. Whether you work with test tubes or diapers, you are a lowly servant of God and your only worth comes through Him. Anyone more pious and saintly than you is superior to you regardless of who you think you are.

And I find pious women who seek worth and honor through God to be infinitely more admirable than women who seek these things by trying to race with men in traditionally masculine fields. Of course there is nothing wrong with a woman wanting to work in these fields, what is wrong is her thinking this is something to be proud of. Like I said, being proud of your accomplishments is like being proud of being rich. Both are blessings from God that you would never have had if He had not made things easy for you. Accomplishments should only increase your humility and gratitude toward God.

If anyone, man or women, thinks their accomplishments makes them superior to someone more pious than them, then they have become arrogant and misguided. If you think your fame and accomplishments make you superior to a completely unknown mother who fears God more than you and whose only accomplishment is raising healthy and happy children, then that is the height of arrogance.

So never let someone make you think you are inferior just because they are more accomplished and famous than you. It is the same as letting a rich person make you think you are inferior because you are not as rich. Seek worth an honor only through God, He should be your standard and your guide, not other people. If you are more pious than your aunt, then she has absolutely nothing to be proud of, and her self-satisfaction has only set her up for failure in attaining God’s love and pleasure.

There is, however, the danger of letting our sense of our piety make us feel arrogant and superior to others. This too is wrong. Feeling superior to others is always wrong, whether because of piety, accomplishments or wealth. You should only compare yourself to what God wants you to be, and seeing your numerous failures in being the best person you can be in God’s sight should only increase your humility and fear of God’s dissatisfaction with you.

IslamQA: Differences in male and female responsibility for adultery in Islam

Why does Allah frown upon woman with consensual sex more than men?

It seems like you are asking why God blames men more than women in cases of adultery and fornication. Islamic law punishes men and women equally for such sins and does not hold one of them more accountable than the other. Even if a woman has greater responsibility (as some women believe, see below), this greater responsibility is not so much greater to justify a harsher treatment. Their responsibility is similar enough to justify the same legal treatment.

Most cultures around the world consider women to have more maturity and self-control than men in sexual matters. Even Western women blame “the other woman” more than their husbands in cases of cheating, as a Cardiff Metropolitan University study showed.1 These women believe that other women “should know better” because women are more mature and have better self-control in sexual matters than men. One could argue that it is because of deeply ingrained misogyny that women hold other women to higher standards than they hold men, but this argument is in itself highly misogynistic, by what right do we deny these women the right to have their opinions on this matter taken seriously? I personally support treating men and women exactly the same when it comes to the issues of adultery and fornication (as the Quran commands us), but ignoring the opinions of these women who have been cheated on just because we do not like what they say is just as discriminatory as ignoring women’s opinions on any other topic. Either we take women’s opinions seriously or we do not, we cannot hold them to double standards, as some feminists do, so that we only accept those female opinions that we like or that fit our ideology and dismiss those that we do not like. Feminists have attacked and demonized female scholars like Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers for speaking their minds too freely and daring to go against their ideology. A true feminist should be a humanist who does not demonize and belittle other women but respects their opinions regardless of where those opinions might lead.

At any rate, Christian societies until recently put almost the entirety of the blame on women in cases of out-of-wedlock births. It seems to have been common for Christians to cast out women who became pregnant outside of marriage, although perhaps Victorian works of fiction exaggerate how common this was. Casting out such women is expressly forbidden by Islam; her male relatives are forced by Islamic law to continue to shelter and feed her even if they do not want to.

Of course, after pregnancy, it appears that, at least in Islam’s early days, the rule was to follow the Jewish law of stoning adulterous men and women to death. One of the foremost scholars of Islamic law in the 20th century, Sheikh Muhammad Abu Zahra, argued that this punishment was abrogated by the Quran’s 24th chapter (see this article about him). If his view becomes the norm, then stoning would be relegated to history as many Muslims wish. Not even one out of a million Muslims has witnessed a stoning in his or her lifetime, since the extremely high requirements for evidence (four witnesses to the act of copulation) makes it close to impossible to prove, and since Islamic judges have always done everything in their power to avoid carrying out the punishment. But if Sheikh Abu Zahra’s views become the norm, then this issue will finally be settled and we can forget about it. It should also be mentioned that Islamic law is not meant to be forced on people; it is how the Muslim community organizes its own business. In a modern, cosmopolitan society, there would be a constitution that applies to Muslims and non-Muslims, while Islamic law would only apply to Muslims. And since people have the right to abandon Islam (as is the opinion of modern scholars such as Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s Grand Mufti from 2003 to 2013), people who have a problem with Islamic law can do that so that Islamic law would not apply to them any longer. We have no interest in forcing Islamic law on others. Islam is beautiful and meaningful enough to continue to attract great numbers of people who would voluntarily follow its laws.

The Quran provides only a small hint toward women being more responsible than men in cases of adultery, when it says:

The adulteress and the adulterer... (Verse 24:2)

It mentions “adulteress” first, while in the case of robbery it mentions the male robber first. Mentioning the adulteress before the adulterer is the only thing in the Quran that can be construed as putting more blame on women than men. But this apparent extra female responsibility is not used to justify unbalanced laws. The laws treat the man and the woman equally, which shows us that the extra female responsibility is not so great as to justify letting the man get a milder treatment than the woman.

Muslim cultures, however, like all cultures, are harder on women than men in these cases. It is very unfair to let men do whatever they like while putting all the blame and responsibility on women, as past Christian societies used to do and some Muslim societies today as well. The right thing to do is to treat them equally as the Quran commands. But we cannot wipe out human nature, so it will likely forever remain the case that people, including women, will hold women more responsible than men for their sexuality. This means that all Muslim societies, due to being human societies, will invariably edge toward putting more blame on women than men no matter how hard they try to resist this. The more pious these societies are, the fairer they will be toward women, because if they try to follow the Quran as much as possible, then they will try to have its attitude toward adultery and fornication, which is that the man and the woman are to be treated equally.

IslamQA: Islam versus Feminism

My professor told me that men and women have different purposes, so we can't protest how men are more "free". We can't protest on how wives have to do what the husbands say as long as it's right. My Mom also told me that if your husband says no, then you don't do it. However, there are feminists that are rebelling against this, they say that it's sexist, women rights, equality, etc. What do you think about this? And what do you think about feminism? Sorry if it's hard to understand.

There are many types of feminists. Some of them believe in equal rights for women and there is nothing wrong with this. Others believe in women’s moral superiority and think that all men are inherently worthless

"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." —Andrea Dworkin

"All men are rapists and that's all they are" —Marilyn French, advisor to Al Gore's presidential campaign.

"In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" —Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College, and associate director of the school's Center for Research on Woman.

"The most merciful thing a large family can to do one of its infant members is to kill it." —Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in "Women and the New Race," p. 67.

"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

These are feminism’s leaders and intellectuals. They have high-paying jobs as university professors and administrators, pundits and non-profit executives. These are not some crazy outsiders, they are at the center of feminism, and it is people like this who run most women’s studies departments at universities.

As for women who believe in the equal worth of men and women and simply want to promote equal rights and opportunities for women, then there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. So it is quite true that a Muslim woman can be a feminist and make a contribution to society.

There is a big difference between the old humanist feminism of Wollstonecraft and Stanton and the new radical leftist feminism in vogue today. The old one worked to end social injustice against women by demanding equal rights and freedoms for them. This old feminism is in keeping with Islamic principles and can serve a useful function in Islamic societies, ensuring that women’s rights are not neglected and women’s freedoms not limited due to un-Islamic cultural biases that exist in many places.

The new feminism, which is the doctrine of today’s women’s studies departments at universities, has little to do with the old feminism. It teaches that men are inherently evil and worthless, that men’s thinking is invalid, that the world would be a better place if all men ceased to exist. It promotes hatred and anger against men and civilization, teaching women to feel no moral responsibility toward their societies and to see everything from the highly skewed lens of a mythical war between the sexes. This view is highly un-Islamic, because it does not believe in the transcendent value of human life. It teaches that men are sub-human, lesser creatures, almost worthless. It teaches that a woman’s rights and feelings must be of the utmost importance while considering men’s (and boys’) rights and feelings laughable and worthless.

Any feminist Islam, therefore, must be highly sensitive to the differences between these two types of feminism and reject the new one in favor of the old, humanist feminism that truly believed in equality, in giving back to society, in cooperation with men rather than hatred toward them.

IslamQA: Patriarchy in the Quran

Stick to posting Islamic art and quotes. Otherwise, go learn about the patriarchy and power imbalances before flaunting your misogyny everywhere. May Allah guide you.

Islam is a patriarchal religion, where men get a degree of authority over their women in their households, and with that authority comes the burden of having to provide financially for all of their female relatives, so that in a devout Muslim society no woman will ever have to work, though they can if they want to.

That authority is balanced by the fact that a woman can get a divorce any time she wants, and she is protected by all of her male relatives against any abuses by her husband, so that if her husband abuses his authority in any way, she can always leave him to find a better man. The Quran calls on men to fear God, to be kind, to be just, and to defend the weak (which includes the women and children among them) but it also gives them authority in their households.

So while in Islam we believe in the equal worth of men and women, and in equal opportunities for both, the fact that God has given men a rank over women in their households is in the Quran, and ignoring this and pretending it doesn’t exist is throwing part of the Quran away because it disagrees with your preconceived notions, because you think your inane feminist-inspired moralizing is better than God’s guidance.

The Quran, 2:85: “Is it that you believe in part of the Scripture, and disbelieve in part? What is the reward for those among you who do that but humiliation in this life? And on the Day of Resurrection, they will be assigned to the most severe torment. God is not unaware of what you do.”

The Quran, 2:228: “And women have rights similar to their obligations, according to what is fair. But men have a degree [of authority] over them. “

The Quran, 4:34: “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women [qawwamoon, literally “people of authority who watch over and maintain standards…”], as God has given some of them an advantage [in rank] over others, and because they spend out of their wealth.”

If you have a problem with a patriarchal society, you are in the wrong religion.

I encourage you to learn Arabic and read the Quran to discover the wonders of a society where men are not considered worthless and disposable like in the West, but where they are respected as figures of authority, and where a woman enjoys the peace of mind that comes with having multiple God-fearing men dedicated to her welfare, knowing that she could never, ever be homeless or wanting of food and income while a devout Muslim male relative remains to her, knowing that she can marry and divorce whoever she wants, start a business, or do whatever she wants with her life as long as it doesn’t go against God’s commandments, enjoying a peaceful life among men who like her and respect her and will not let anyone abuse her.

You are free to leave patriarchy, which means all sustainable civilized societies (all societies that have an above-replacement fertility rate, i.e. that are not on the path to extinction like Japan and Western Europe), to enjoy life among some Stone Age tribe where matriarchy is the order of the day, or in the ghettos and trailer parks of America where men belong to their mothers and do not know their fathers, where non-existent fathers make a patriarchy a practical impossibility, since patriarchy means rule of the fathers.