I’ve never actually experienced much of mosques during Ramadan. Where I live, there aren’t any big mosques that cater well for women, except for one. I went to one iftar and it was nice to be around other people. Our eid prep starts very early! Usually we’ll make sure the big thing (clothes/presents) are done well before Ramadan.
if she pays no mind to fancy dressing. Then, she has liberated herself from the shallow needs of regular girls and is now on par with her male counterparts. This sentiment has given us oxymoronic slogans like “substance over beauty” and “beauty and brains” and “not like other girls”.
The position of being held to the highest moral and social standards comes with a singular pitfall: women are afforded little to no grace in the catastrophic event that they make mistakes.
Culturally, cooking was “the thing”. There was no space to just like doing it. It was presented as a woman’s headache, so I had to unlearn everything surrounding it. I think my dislike for cooking also had to do with the weight and pressure my mother put on me to learn how to cook.
We want to (rightfully) debate and critique Islamophobic establishments that bar our sisters from their rights to wear hijab. However, we will ignore the epidemic of the rising “spiritual leaders”, “scholars” and “holy men” in our communities who have been demonstrated to commit various forms of abuse against vulnerable women.
Women need not be held to the unrealistic standards of the Ideal Muslimah, who by the way, is a fictional character with roots not unrelated to passive misogyny. The Ideal Islamic culture is not one of cancel culture, but one of constant repentance and improvement.
On one incident, during Hajj, she asked the Prophet (PBUH) why he was still in Ihram, when he had instructed the sahabah to take off their Ihram.
Hind bint Umayya asked questions that God responded to by way of revelation. She once asked the prophet why men were always mentioned in the Quran and not women, and God answered her question by revealing the famous ayah 35 of surah Ahzab.
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.
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.
