Friday Nasiha

Dawa is the first and most important duty for Muslims today. In our daily affairs, it is the Sunna that must be uppermost in our mind and heart. It must make the greatest claim on our time and wealth.

Secondly, while living in an 'alien' culture, we have to preserve your Islamic identity - not only through rational arguments, but through emotional, cultural, and civilisational symbols. It is only the Sunna that can provide these emotional and civilisational symbols through which we will not only preserve our identity but strengthen and advance it.

Thirdly, it is the youth who must claim our major attention for that is also the Sunna of the Prophet. They were the people who had the energies and capabilities to carry the burden of his mission.

Fourthly, in a society where so many misgivings about Islam prevail, where Islam has been misrepresented and distorted so widely, our conduct must be a living example of that mercy to mankind, just as the Prophet was rahmatun lil-alamin a mercy to the worlds.

The Prophet Muhammad was such a model of mercy that he declared that removing an obstacle from another's path leads one into Paradise; to quench the thirst of a dog entitles one to enter Paradise; and to tie a cat until he dies makes one deserve Hell-fire. Such was the mercy of his uswa, his living example. We will only be able to invite people to Islam if we follow his example.

Treating Women Honourably

The Prophet's traditions encourage the Muslim to care for the good upbringing and education of women, and for their well-being in general: "The best of you is one who is best towards his family and I am best towards the family". (Al-Tirmidhi). "None but a noble man treats women in an honourable manner. And none but an ignoble treats women disgracefully". (Al-Tirmidhi).

Weak commitment to religion tends to cultivate unjust and hostile treatment of women. Unlike man, a woman's performance of her natural functions keeps her away from the toughening experience of everyday public life. Man, uncultured by religion, tends to oppress her as is common in many a human society. Men normally purposefully keep women weak, and the jealousy which they entertain in respect to women tempts them to multiply the means for restraining and monopolising them.

Male jealousy is but one aspect of masculine reckless tendencies which only godly men are immune from and which inculcated the myth that women, by nature, suffer from excessive incapacity. Men use that fantasy as an excuse to ban women from active participation in the broad spectrum of human life and to deprive them of experience and training - thereby devitalizing and weakening them - and finding reason for further ill-treatment and prejudice. These male tendencies, customs and ways are manifest in many societies where male arbitrariness runs amok with no religious or human limitation.

The traditional Muslim Society has become unduly conservative for fear that freedom of thought would lead astray and divide the community; and that freedom of women would degenerate into uncontrollable promiscuity - so much that the basic religious rights and duties of women have been forsaken and the fundamentals of equality and fairness in the structure of Muslim Society, as enshrined in the Sharia, have been completely overlooked.

The thought and practice of Muslims have come lately to misrepresent most of the doctrinal and normative teachings of Islam on female affairs. In the fallen society of Muslims, women have little freedom to marry the person she likes, or to separate from a husband she loathes. Nor is she, as wife, entitled to full consultation and gracious companionship by her husband. In many cases she hardly enjoys an equal opportunity to earn and own property, or the full capacity to manage her property or to dispose thereof. All sorts of schemes are employed to deny her inheritance. Her role in private life has been reduced to that of a housewife chosen not for her personal merit, for she was denied the education or the opportunity to acquire merit, but for the merit of her menfolk.

The greatest injustice visited upon women, is their segregation and isolation from the general society. Sometimes the slightest aspect of her public appearance would be considered a form of obscene exhibitionism. Even her voice was bracketed in the same category. Her mere presence at a place where men are also present was considered shameful promiscuity. She was confined to her home in a manner prescribed in Islam only as a penal sanction for an act of adultery. She was so isolated on the pretext that she might devote herself exclusively to the care of her children and the service of her husband. But how could she qualify for attending to domestic family affairs or to the rearing of children in a satisfactory manner without being herself versed through education or experience, in the moral and functional culture of the wider society?

Source:
"Women in Islam and Muslim Society" - Hasan Abdalla al Turabi