Fatima Barkatulla – Gifts of Islam for Women – Ep.01

			We'll breeze you around the mod to the sunset in the evening.
		

			When I'm drowning in onto horde in the deepest, darkest ocean
		

			the second gift that Islam gave me, is a healthy relationship with men, a healthy relationship with
men. Men are not the enemy. You know. And that's the kind of narrative that we're hearing a lot.
Nowadays, men are the enemy men are there to exploit women, and they've always exploited women
throughout time, which is completely untrue. You know.
		

			So men are not the enemy. I'm not in competition with men, I don't need to prove myself by copying
men or being like them. Or thinking that success equals what a man does. You know, I see my role as
Islam tells me as complimentary to men, and men are complimentary. So the men in my life, compliment
me and I compliment them. When we're not at war.
		

			Islam teaches me that
		

			if a man wants to be close to me, he must marry me, he must have a contract with me, in order for my
rights to be protected, and for his rights to be protected, and the rights of the children that may
come from that union to be protected as well. It doesn't allow for a man to be intimate with a woman
without that protection. So in that way, it helps me to have a healthy relationship in any intimate
relationship I would have.
		

			It protects me from objectification.
		

			And I was just reading this book actually on the way here.
		

			And it's called the equality illusion by Kat Spaniard, I'm just gonna read one quote from this book,
which she really highlights something important for us. I think. She says that today in Britain,
women's and girls bodies are widely denigrated as inanimate objects
		

			to be publicly scrutinized, judged, maintained, and manipulated for the benefit of others, they are
shared public property, a female body is deemed an object that could and should be made beautiful,
at almost any cost, for the benefit of those looking at it.
		

			Islam freed me from that.
		

			And the way it did that is, by removing or making the public space, a space that is not sexually
charged, when it comes to my interactions with the opposite *. So although it may look like you
know, I'm very restricted, actually, you know, the structures around my life are such that actually,
most of the time I'm, I'm with women, and, you know, when I'm working, etc, and so I don't dress in
this way, you know, I can dress in my normal clothes, probably similar to what anyone out there
would dress in. But when it comes to my interactions with people of the opposite *, who are not
closely related to me,
		

			then, you know, it gives not just me but it gives the men and Muslim men guidelines as to how to
interact, How to Have a Healthy interaction such that the kind of sexual element, the sexually
charged element is removed from that interaction or minimized so that we can focus on on the work at
hand. You know, whatever it is that we're doing and, and, and focus on that
		

			I was born to praise