Muslim women are especially expected to do more with less; to handle multiple demands, to run lean. We see this all the time in the way we have to multitask at work and at home. We know who we are. We are brilliant and we can do anything we put our minds to. But how do we start to make a movement culture in which the workload is truly shared?
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The struggles of Muslim women across the globe cannot be exhausted. What makes the load lighter to carry is community and reassurance that she’s not alone. It doesn’t end there, the wins of Muslim women seem to be magnified when shared with a community. It’s always beautiful and gratifying to sit in the audience and watch the Community bond and connect and let themselves be vulnerable and pick their sisters up — Alhamdulillah.
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Having fulfilled all the requirements for the Ribaat Teacher Certification, sixteen women from diverse parts of the world graduated from the Ribaat Academic Institute, a women-only madrasah that offers a comprehensive curriculum of courses in traditional Islamic Sciences, the Arabic language, and the Tajwid of the Holy Quran to women around the world.
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For a while, the heroes of the decade were people whose mind and matter were not white, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Malcolm X in America, Ben Bella in Algeria, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, amongst many others. Suspend your politics of left and right or your views on violence and non-violence as a means for liberation for a second and consider that for a period, people tried to put the oppressed people first.
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The Qur’an’s description of Queen Bilqis is undeniable proof that a woman can be a head of state and that her femininity would rather serve her well by bringing her closer to her people and their daily realities. In Queen Bilqis’ example, her logical reasoning prevailed in managing the affairs of the state.
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I was a different person in college. I was me. I found my voice. I found the education I needed to open my mind; the strength I needed to voice out ‘inequality’. It was some sort of training my parents didn’t anticipate. We were taught to be independent, to never depend on men, or their opinions. It’s also where I learnt that “We”, as women are so much capable, individually and collectively. Thanks to this education, I gathered the courage to be financially independent. I called off a wedding, decided to stay single and adopted a kitten when my hormones started acting up.
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What we’ve done with the Qur’an is unforgivable. It has taken the backseat in our daily lives while controversial issues have taken over. We don’t study the Qur’an enough. We don’t study the message conveyed in beautiful poetic synergy, the history of past nations, the scientific miracles, all of it. We take it all for granted. We don’t reflect upon the sunnah of the prophet, which is the lived practice of the spirit of the Qur’an.
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Today, Jackie has more than 190 primary patents, 41 of which have been licensed to multinational companies and start-ups in the field of nanomedicine, drug delivery, medical implants, cell and tissue engineering, and medical devices. She remains a powerful inspiration for Muslim women everywhere in the field of science and technology, encouraging many more women to study and work in the ever-growing and important field of STEM.
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As a Muslim, Arab-American I have encountered different types of prejudice and racism throughout the ten years that I have lived here. The scarf that I wear on my head had caused people to give me many belittling looks, sarcastic laughs, and hurtful words, and my identity, which I have always been proud of, became a barrier standing between myself and many people in this country.
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It was really appalling to discover that these sisters would mock other sisters who were trying to wrap their hijabs after salah. They referred to themselves as the “no-hijab-pin” ummah. After all, if you needed to pin down a scarf, then it was not a hijab!
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It is essential to spread more success stories of Muslim women to not only end misconceptions and damaging stereotypes but to reinforce the truth that Muslim women have the unfettered freedom to be whoever they want to be. This month, Time Magazine announced the Next 100 leaders to watch in the world, amongst which are these three powerful Muslim women.
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In the early years of her activism, many women in northern Nigeria observed purdah, a form of social seclusion, Gambo went from house-to-house to speak to them. This displeased the Native Authority in Kano and, in 1952, she was hauled before the conservative Alkali (Magistrates) Court, on charges of “drawing out women who were in purdah”. The court sentenced her to three months in prison; the first of 16 prison sentences she would serve during her lifetime.
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In South Asian culture, people seem to expect that every of a girl’s life will eventually tie into her future marriage. (We’re good at structuring our lives around male privilege like that.) When I was in college, people would tell me that I needed to learn to cook – not because it’s a life skill and I would die if I didn’t learn it, but because “you’ll need to feed your husband someday!”
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Seeing the challenge that lay ahead of her, Najah wiped her tears and got to work. She was not about to allow an exclusionary rule stand in the way of her ambition, With the support of her school and the American Muslim Advisory Council, she was determined to change the rule with the hope that no Muslim athlete wearing the hijab in Tennessee or elsewhere, would encounter the same obstacle.
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It had been my dream for years, to create a space where Muslim women could be seen and heard; where our pains could be felt and our shoes left empty enough for others to step in and see just how or how not it fits. I wanted to create a platform where Muslim women could be the diners at the table and not the menu on the plate; a space where we could be in charge of our narratives and take back our agency.
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Through their activities, they brought a lot of revenue to Tichit and enriched many families. This was perhaps the reason for the popular Mauritanian proverb, “The woman is the man’s trousers” (Limra’ sirwal al-rajul), for it was a testament to the fact that the women of Tichit were providers and protectors for their husbands and, by extension, their family.
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The rule of Usman Dan Fodio was revolutionary, improving the status of women and ensuring that they had equal rights as their male counterparts. Little wonder Nana Asma’u, his daughter became the epitome of women’s liberation at the time. West African Muslims glorify her, celebrate her efforts in expanding the rights of women to intellectualism and to active participation in the affairs of society, reasserting rights that had been selfishly snatched away in preceding generations.
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Since time immemorial, women have been shamed for absolutely everything about their bodies. If they’re not being objectified and hyper-sexualised, then they’re body-shamed and mocked, and even blamed for men’s fetishes and obsessions. From the distasteful jokes to the innuendos and the lust-driven songs sung about them, everything about women has been public domain.
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Daisy is a representation of the marginalisation of women and their existence as possession in the 1920s; her trophy wife status, beauty and lack of intelligence highlight a lineage of societal gender expectations on a woman. All of this as we are well aware of is an abstract image that still lives on today, built by males to manipulate and design the idea of the perfect woman. A mute, submissive and pretty woman.
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Unfortunately, there’s still an uproar from many Muslims today when women choose to exercise this right from Allah and suggest conditions that are completely halal and acceptable. Men are able to divorce women on a whim, when angered, out of boredom, or because their wife is infertile, but women are dragged through hell and back just so they don’t die at the hands of their abuser. If a man can leave his wife because he so desperately wants children, why is a woman seen as heartless for the same thing?
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As my work slowly evolved from being just a hobby to something more commercial, I’ve had more need to be discovered. No one can know what you’re capable of if they don’t see it. For someone that’s a social recluse like me, it has been tough. I used to be shy and anxious about sharing my work, I still am but I have coping methods now.
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Women have been made to feel and believe that they are not allowed to do anything with their lives apart from cooking. They have been made to believe that it is a religious obligation and by so doing, they have been condemned to the kitchen. This goes against the lifestyle of the Prophet (PBUH) himself who was fully active in doing household chores.
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Hymen does not equal virginity. Contrary to the narrative that has been stressed through our lives, being a virgin means that a woman has not had sex with a man, yet. The bleed-test is not accurate for many reasons. First of all, many women don’t bleed the first time they have sex because their hymens could have torn earlier in their lives during exercise or bike accidents without them even knowing.
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Nafisi fails to separate Islam from Muslims, the actions of the men seem to represent Islam in her writing. She under-handedly supports the Islamophobic views of Islam’s outdatedness, barbarity, and anti-feminism. Her Western education and nationalist Iranian loyalties, highlight her lack of knowledge on the rights of women in Islam, as well as her general ignorance of the globality of Islam.
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What motivated me is knowing that there are many myths about sex and these myths need to be dismantled. I also know there are many toxic negative beliefs about sex within the Muslim community and these beliefs actually go against the nature of Islam so this motivated me to put things right.
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We were taught that being vulnerable, wild, and feminine was inferior and not desirable when in actual fact, our wild feminine was deeply feared by society. In order to understand how to reclaim our power as women, we need to understand why, in the first place, femininity was suppressed and vilified.
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Umm Ad-Darda’ was held by Iyas ibn Mu`awiyah, as an important scholar of hadith of the time and a judge of undisputed ability and merit, to be superior to all the other hadith scholars of the period, including the celebrated masters of hadith like Al-Hasan Al-Basri and Ibn Sirin.
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At the very root of this vague and incorrect notion that either Respect or Love should be served based on gender is sexism. Men are conditioned to suppress their human emotions, the need to be cared for, listened to -but to aspire to Hardness, violence, and toxicity.
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I learnt early in life through watching my mother, observing the men in our family and around us, that sometimes girls and women just have to roll their sleeves up, tackle the hard stuff and get things done. I come from a community of broken homes, so all I ever saw growing up was women playing both roles.
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This is what they told mothers who were abandoned to the street with vulnerable children, literally having to beg for help from local communities. Many mothers simultaneously put up with the shame of being poor and asking for aid. Did these mothers see value in their motherhood at this point? Did they feel the sweetness of giving as freely as sunshine and rain?
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You cannot receive healing from the very person who has oppressed you. You cannot sit there and pray without “tying your camel”. You know you’ve waited long enough, you know he’s never going to change. You know if you keep staying, you will lose every single bit of yourself.
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Seeing the need to create an alternative solution, Muti’ah Badruddeen, a Saudi-based physician and Author of three books founded The Muslimah Virtual Parlour, an open, honest, relaxed and non-judgemental arena to share our ideas, views and experiences on matters that affect us as Muslim women in today’s world.
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In retaliation, the patriarchy did what the patriarchy does best. It fought and rallied for the disappearance of women. Many fans of female reciters and other female Sheikhas protested against the fatwa but to no avail. Radio stations soon stopped playing Sheikha Munira and other Shiekhas’ recitations. The Sheikhs refused to rescind their fatwa even though some scholars saw it as a form of intellectual regression.
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Muslim women telling our own stories is empowering and necessary, since we’re all aware of the perverse misrepresentations that can occur when our stories are told by others. If you look at the great cultures and societies throughout the history of the Islamic tradition, you will find a strong history of artists, craftspeople, and distinct artistic styles.
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Patriarchal studies along the years had relegated her work as emotional, typical of a woman, and even hysteric and obsessive. However, in a world, where Arabs believed themselves the fathers of poetry, her poetry would not have risen to popularity let alone survived had it just been emotional or beautiful.
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Coming to terms with the truth that it will never be enough, no matter how much I do, renders me powerless. But now, it just makes me want to do my part even more while resting in the knowledge that other humans are holding up their ends of the sky.
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In a particular tradition, the Prophet (PBUH) stressed that a man should make sure his partner achieves orgasm before himself. He also gave glad tidings of reward for partners who had sex and satisfied each other, stating that pleasurable sex was an act of Sadaqah. According to him, sex is an integral part of spirituality.
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It particularly surprised non-Muslims to learn that women, living under an Islamic legal system, could be scholars, holding the authority that comes with being knowledgeable about what Islam commands, and therefore making them sought after and deferred to for their fiqh, for their fatwas, and for their tafsir.
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It is important to state that what this essay does is to highlight the theoretical framework of polygyny. It is not a reflection of the realities of Polygyny in Muslim societies. It is only a reflection of the “intent” of the shari’ah and not polygyny as practised.
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Freecycling is an act of sustainable conscious living, and it challenges the concept that the act of giving is not only a Top-to-bottom activity done between the haves and the have nots, but can be done by people within the same class as well.
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In the age of unparalleled freedoms to live our lives as we wish, it’s unfortunate that women still allow beauty and the illusion of its inevitable fading to lurk around and threaten the fringes of women’s progress.
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For much of history after the advent of Islam, multitudes of figures arose who wrote several invectives against the Prophet, yet none of them had any problem acknowledging his marriage to Aisha (RA). It just was not a concern until the early 20th century.
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Documentation from Ibn Hajar indicates that Zainab bint al-Kamāl never married. It also tells us that she suffered from ophthalmia – an inflammation of the eye, though it did not seem to impair her career.
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Is this the truth of Islam? That a man can only leave behind a legacy when he has sons? That a woman, in herself, wholly and independently, is nothing but a trophy?
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While most mothers admit that having children is a lot of hard work and sacrifice, they are quick to point out that the rewards outweigh the challenges. For a number of women across the world, this is not the case.
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At the heart of rape-apologism is the narrative that hijab protects women from predatory men. I wish it were that simple. I wish that the countless reports about rape victims in full hijab and niqab weren’t true. I wish there were no reports of sexual abuse against old women who have lost their youth; that the narrative about infants and school-age children being raped simply didn’t exist. I wish covering up was the magic wand to stopping men from these crimes.
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There has been a troubling rise in Islamophobia and racism in the city. “They’re being targeted by their identity, what they show,” Suri said. “These are hijab-wearing women whose identity is very visible, and what is happening is happening out of hate.”
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The legislation did not specify that the ban referred to headscarves. Instead, it forbade the wearing of “religious clothing that is associated with a covering of the head”. The Austrian court thus found that this legislation was clearly aimed at Muslim headscarves, contravening the principle of equality in relation to freedom of religion, belief and conscience.”
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He had a spreadsheet with all the family’s bank details and passwords and would enter our online accounts to check our banking activities. When eventually I could no longer tolerate living with my father. I left. He thereafter used my bank activity to trace me and followed me in the streets.
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Modern analysis on Rabi’a often plagues her spiritual legacy by placing her in contemporary debates of feminism. Without falling within the paradigms set out by Western feminism and the notions that string along with it, Rabi’a focused on the inward unseen immaterial rewards in her life.
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Wasn’t it both amusing and ridiculous that something as simple as a bicycle could hold that much significance when it came to the virtue of women. I finally said to myself, I’m going to buy a good bicycle someday and I’m going to start cycling.
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Her students came from faraway places, and among them was Al-Shafi’i, the man behind the Shafi’i school of Sunni fiqh. She financially sponsored his education.
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Each time a non-Muslim says Islam is oppressive to women, I choose to channel my energy inwards, to observe the referenced situation, to see the unbiased truth/untruth of the matter. I refuse to counter with the clichés that are usually employed to patronize Muslim women. I choose to call for the much-needed change within the community.
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The more addicted I got, the lonelier I became and the more I hated my body in ways I didn’t think was possible. I directed so much hurt and vitriol to my body for not looking like what I watched.
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I am tired of having to explain to grown men that random, unrelated women do not want your opinions and judgements on the choices that they make in their lives. Not unless they ask for it. That accosting and deriding a woman for her choices cannot be explained away as “enjoining good and forbidding evil”.
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“Sitt” at the time was a title attributed to women rulers or women of that calibre. The queen of the Fatimid dynasty of Egypt in 980 bore the title Sitt al-Mulk. There were also female chief qadis who were addressed as Sitt al-Qudat, for their expertise in the fields of hadith and fiqh in Damascus during the 14th century. Transmissions of the hadiths from Sahih Al-Bukhari.
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The issue is that those who are afraid of losing hold of power often resort to using spiritual abuse tactics in order to maintain their grip. That is rather damning and must be confronted by academics and activists in alliance with influential and sympathetic scholars.
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Women are afraid that they will be shut out of the community if they talk bout Gender-Based Violence. They will rather speak in hushed tones or not speak at all.
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The fact that these points are all taken and understood out of context, and that they cannot be found in the Qur’an and Sunnah as the only markers of the status of women in Islam must make one wary of lists like this.
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women don’t have to do something major like save a nation or participate in politics to have their battles acknowledged. We are all Kim Ji Youngs; faceless young women, battling daily misogyny in our lives from our houses to schools to workplaces.
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Contemporary historians failed to do justice to Lubna’s legacy. The why can be easily answered by the fact that she was a woman. A woman no less who earned her right to fame through skills and hard work. A woman who wasn’t the wife of someone influential, nor the daughter of a famous man.
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“Are there women who are forced to veil? As much as there are women forced to do a number of things in different parts of the world. Islam isn’t a bunch of rules and restrictions, but a way of life. A guide through every hardship and joy.”
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And although men understand that broad statements about gender roles are no longer acceptable, there exists an unspoken expectation that women will do all the domestic chores.
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I do not, cannot and will not understand why I must reduce my capabilities as a wife to elevate yours as a husband. When bullying occurs in religious settings, you find out that men and women, although different, are very much similar.
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There is a sense of defensiveness, of not wanting to acknowledge the diseases that we have within our community, because to do so feels equivalent to admitting to the non-Muslims that we are not as perfect and pure as we claim, or that we are as bad as they make us out to be.
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Each time you shame another woman because you believe she rates lower than you on the scale of male desirability, you expose your deep lack of self-love and self-esteem. And to achieve a gender-equal world, where women are respected and valued as humans and not objects, rhetorics that define our humanity based on patriarchal standards must end.
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“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own When you met Mansoor, he told you “you’re not like other girls”. You asked him what made you different and he couldn’t point at it. Despite this, you […]
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I fought to stay alive. I fought back so hard, struggled to get my hand on something (I can’t remember what it was for the life of me) and whacked it over his head. He looked shocked and bewildered for a moment, then he got up and left. He has not touched me since that day. It was the first time I fought back.
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The TMWT team did a blog tour to handpick 16 books in commemoration of 16 days of activism. Enjoy!
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On one hand you have these religious authorities — who do the service of not sugar coating or engaging in apologetics — and their women-bashing, women-oppressing statements and rulings, and on the other hand you have feminism with all its welcoming love and appreciation towards women. Where do you expect Muslim women to go to seek the care, appreciation and validation they need away from the oppressive norms of traditional patriarchy?
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Conversations around the struggles faced by Muslims every day are stilted in Muslim communities. It is no news that our Iman oscillates like a pendulum and that all we need to recoup is empathy and support as opposed to the vilification that we face. Against the backdrop of a secular world, where does the young […]
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Recent developments concerning the unearthing of women figures in Muslim history have shown the importance of documenting the histories of Muslim women of the past and the present. The future generations of women will be damned if we fail to record the works and achievements of the women before them. For centuries, women have slept […]
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