Fatima Barkatulla – Harsh Realities Of Toxic Femininity
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
When Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
mentions a particular person in the Quran and
their negative characteristics,
we would do well to actually think about
okay,
these are characteristics I don't want to have,
right? So here, slander and Namima. She slandered
the prophet,
she used to spread lies about him.
But Namima,
this is something that I think
a lot of us can actually fall into
and we should be careful of. And that
is
when somebody backbites somebody, of course backbiting is
haram in and of itself.
But if somebody, for example, has back bitten
someone in front of you
and then you go to the person
who they back bit about and you tell
them, you know that person who said this
about you or that person doesn't like you
or that person has this negative view of
you.
This is a very
evil
sin and it's a major sin that we
should stay away from because
it causes problems and, you know, it breaks
relationships. It causes fitnah.
It stirs
hatred in society and unfortunately,
you see people do it very,
you know, casually.
So I think we would do well to
pay attention to this.
A toxic characteristic that a woman had.
Also oppressing the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam
and oppressing the believers. She used to leave
thorns out in the way for prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam to step on
in the pathways that she knew he would
walk in. She was his neighbor, actually. There's
a brother who's done a whole map of,
Makkah and mapped out where everybody used to
live through historical sources.
And she was basically his neighbor within his
neighborhood or on his block.
Also she was envious.
Envy was 1 of her evil characteristics. And
envy is something that eats up
a person's heart.
She was envious that
Justice Abulaheb was that
the prophet, salallahu alaihi wa sallam, this orphan
as they used to
call him,
was chosen to be the messenger.
You know, he they felt that they were
more worthy.
Their family and their themselves were were more
worthy.
So these are just some of the evil
things that
were toxic things you could say she was
responsible for. And then as the sisters mentioned,
Lut and Nuh alaihis salam, their wives.
Allah sets forth an example for the disbelievers.
So after Allah gave the example of Asiya,
the wife of pharaoh and Mariam as examples,
as role models for the believers, Allah gives
the example of,
the wife of Lut and the wife of
as an example of disbelievers.
Each of them was married to 1 of
our righteous servants yet they betrayed them.
So their husbands were of no benefit to
them against Allah whatsoever.
And both were told,
enter the fire along with the others. So
what were some of their characteristics, their toxic
characteristics
of these 2 women? I would say, of
course,
Kufr is 1 of them, disbelief. So even
though they were married to a righteous
man who was actually a messenger of Allah,
each of them actually
secretly
disbelieved.
They didn't actually accept the message.
And they disobeyed
Allah, they disobeyed the messenger.
So with Nuh alayhis salam's wife, when she
when he was building this
ship or this
vessel,
she would go and she would join in
with the people who were mocking him.
And she would be like an informant.
The same with Lut, alaihis salam's wife. She
used to go and be an like an
informant, like a spy who would go and
tell
the evildoers
of,
the of Qaumulut,
about
what the, you know, when when Lut alayhis
salam had guests,
she would go and tell them. She would
she would be like an informant.
And the main
sin that they're mentioned with in this ayah
is treachery.
Being treacherous against their husbands.
Their husband is trying to do 1 thing.
He's a pious man. He's of course he
was they were prophets as well. But I'm
trying to make it relevant to us in
our times, right?
He was a pious man
and yet
under the same roof,
he had an enemy, an enemy from within.
And so 1 of their sins is also
ingratitude.
Because when you are the wife of a
prophet, you are the wife of a righteous
man,
surely you should have gratitude for that. But
instead they
disobeyed them and Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala destroyed
them.
Now those were disbelieving women. The wife of
Al Aziz, we're not 100% sure
if she became a believer
at the end or not. There's
some dispute about that.
However, we can surely say that
she's mentioned in that surah as an example
of a woman who did something
evil, right? Who had an evil characteristic. And
I think it's something worth mentioning.
So I think the main evil characteristic of
the wife of Al Aziz that is mentioned
is first of all
uncontrolled
desire,
lustfulness.
Also harassment,
she literally
was harassing somebody who was under her roof.
And she was enticing him to commit adultery.
So a woman who entices men to commit
adultery.
And then
1 that sometimes gets overlooked is her false
accusation
against a man,
right? Falsely accusing a man. So when they're
caught
when she's caught
chasing after him and she grabs his
shirt,
and then you know her husband opens the
door. What does she do? She accuses him
of
improper behavior. And so he gets put into
jail. So reputation
damage,
this is also a toxic characteristic.
And I think the fact that Allah subhanahu
ta'ala mentioned these women
and some of their toxic
characteristics in the Quran
means that as women and as men as
well, we should really
take on board
these particular characteristics and making sure we stay
far away from them.
So that was just for us to reflect
a little bit from the Quran, you know?
What is toxic?
What are examples of
women
who exhibited toxic behaviors.
Now I want to move on to
some of the toxic results
of feminist ideology.
Now, when we talk about feminism, you know,
sometimes it seems like a very innocuous term,
doesn't it feminism? Because
who doesn't believe in
rights for women, right? Who doesn't believe that
things should be good for women and women
should not be oppressed?
However, in our times feminism means more than
just this. Feminism has become an ideology.
It has its
godmothers, right? It has its, you know, its
leaders. It has its ideologues.
And if you go to university you'll find
this. If you study gender studies for example,
it has certain
premises
that you've got to kind of accept and
adopt in order to
be a feminist.
And some of the evil effects of this,
there's a book actually recently written called
Men on Strike.
Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood and the
American Dream
by Helen Smith.
Now she says, and she researched, and she
says that men in the West, and especially
she's talking about America,
though in wider society are on strike from
getting married. They're they're very averse to getting
married. Why?
Because they fear the legal system.
They fear the fact that they, you know,
don't have many rights in terms of like
if if they have children.
They don't get a say. You know, this
idea of my body, my choice
is afforded to women,
but for a man, if a woman decides
to
keep a baby
then you know he still has to support
her regardless of whether he wanted the baby
or not. So they see these double standards,
They see, you know, there's no incentive in
getting married. Why should I get married when
I can,
without commitment
have my desires fulfilled.
So 1 of the things men are on
strike
with regards to is getting married. The other
is having children.
More than ever
men
in the west do not want to have
children or they're not really they're kind of
averse to it. People are, you know as
in Britain anyway,
dog parents now. You know,
they want to raise dogs
and they they actually see that as an
alternative.
Okay? I think you know
it goes against everything that human beings have
ever thought and done for centuries for
since we existed.
People used to have pride in having children.
To having children was like having wealth,
right? Why would you not want wealth?
Men are on strike from being breadwinners.
They don't see any incentive. So
for example,
you know a lot of young men are
dropping out of university.
Or they don't really see any purpose, any
any,
they're not motivated anymore
because they see that
women earn as well, you know,
they can have an easy life, easier life
by allowing their wife to work or even
depending on their wife's income now.
Okay?
And then the last thing is being from
being prepared to lay down their lives.
So
she talks about how, you know, in the
past men were chivalrous, they had this desire
to defend
their country, their their people, their wives, their
women folk.
Now more than ever,
men do not have that same characteristic.
And she tells a very funny story about
a an article that was written about this
the Costa Concordia which was a ship that
was shipwrecked.
A ship that was,
shipwrecked
or half shipwrecked
recently.
And, you know, in in 2012.
And how the men on the ship actually
rushed,
pushed past the women,
and started
getting onto the lifeboats.
An old lady talks about how, you know,
the men just this big man just walked
past her, pushed her aside, and and wanted
to save himself.
And they said, you know, a 100 years
after the Titanic,
you know, in the Titanic, the men had
let the women and children go first.
Not we're not talking about the movie. We're
talking historically, right?
And the the honorable
captain of the Titanic,
he went down with the Titanic even though
he must have known early on that the
ship was going to sink. Why? Because he
had this sense of honor. How can I,
as the captain of this ship, save myself
when all of these people are going to
die? So he locked himself in his cabin
and prayed.
And he died like that. I mean, that's
how men used to be, right?
And so in this article, the, author was
saying, the writer was saying,
the Costa with the Costa Concordia sinking,
it seems that chivalry has also sunk.
Chivalry has also gone
because men are not willing to do that
anymore.
If we look at womanhood today,
and I have mostly statistics for the UK,
but as you know, the saying goes,
when,
I think it's when America sneezes,
Britain catches a cold. Right? So whatever happens
in Britain, you've got it probably 10 times
worse. So just look at these statistics and
multiply them probably by 10.
In the UK, and we have a smaller
population than you. You You could consider us
to be like a state, 1 state, right?
In the UK, 200, 000 babies a year
are aborted.
Over 1 and a half 1000 of those
are
22 weeks.
That's a viable baby. That's a baby that
if it was a wanted baby,
the parents would fight for it to be
put into an incubator and you know,
that it would survive.
In the US, 1, 200, 000
babies a year
are aborted.
It's a holocaust.
It's a holocaust against children.
80, 000
prostitutes are working in the UK at any
1 time. 1 in 10 men in the
world have visited such
women.
2 point 5, 000, 000 victims are currently
being trafficked at any 1 time around the
world.
This this is a few years ago so
this probably has probably increased.
You can see the statistics.
Okay? I don't need to read them out.
I don't know there's children here. I don't
really want to read all of them out.
And we see that
single parent families have more than tripled in
the UK
since the second wave of feminism, since the
'60s '70s. 92%
of those
single parent families are mothers. So mothers are
the ones who end up literally carrying the
baby. They're literally the ones who are
carrying the burden of this.
*.
You know, this movement, this trans movement
seeking to redefine womanhood and motherhood. Erase womanhood.
And all of these kind of clashes between
men and women and
the so called rights
that women have been given
have actually are actually causing something else to
happen which is population collapse.
And it's not just something that right wing
people
catastrophize about. It's actually something that's backed up
if you look at the research.
Most economies, I mean why is it that
for example Germany
is always welcoming new immigrants
even though like plenty of the racists in
Europe hate it? It's because they literally have
done the maths. We say maths, by the
way. Don't say math.
Okay?
We've they've done the maths.
And they know that
if they don't replenish the population, the younger
population,
they're going to end up having an aged
population that cannot be supported.
So population collapse is
severe and sudden decline in the number of
people within a specific geographic area.
And some of the causes of population collapse
are a decline in marriage. People are not
settling down. They're just simply not settling down.
They can just have a carousel of partners
without
committing, without settling down. They
fear having children, right?
No 1 is focused on the home anymore.
Everyone is focused on their careers, on themselves,
on their own individual progress. And of course
that is a result of individualism.
The hyper individualistic society that we live in.
There's a fear of the future. Climate change
and all of these things. When you don't
have Iman,
you fear the future. You think, well I
don't want to bring a child into this
world.
Lack of faith.
Gender confusion.
Alternative lifestyles in the West. You know? It's
quite funny because people if you if you've
heard of, you know, some of these Islamophobes
like Douglas Murray,
who I've met and I've had a discussion
with on television once.
These people who write books, you know, the
strange death of Europe, talking about how Islam
is or Muslims are causing the death of
Europe.
Why? Due to their population,
the fact that they have so many children,
etcetera, etcetera. It's quite funny because
they have lifestyles
which means that they don't they're not going
to have children.
Right?
If you know anything about Douglas Murray, maybe
you wanna look it up.
He's basically
he has a male partner. Right?
So he's not going to have children. He
complains about Muslims having children.
And yet a lot of these Islamophobes and
these right wing people, they've adopted lifestyles that
mean
they're not going to help the situation that
they feel is a problem in the West.
And pets are replacing children.
* functions as a replacement for real relationships.
This might seem alien to some of us
but this is what's happening in wider society.
And we should be aware of it
because anything that happens in wider society can
affect us too.
And what's wrong with population collapse is
it causes instability in society.
Right? An aging population means
that there are many
economic challenges.
And the entire economy can actually collapse as
well.
And there are there are a number of
implications.
Okay? You can look them up.
Now I'm not blaming all of that on
feminism.
K? Of course not.
But I do think that all of the
cultural shifts that have happened in the West,
the pitting of men against women, all of
that has kind of contributed towards this.
I'm going to briefly go over some of
the historical elements of feminism, but I'm not
going to go into every single point. I
will send this presentation to the sheikh, and
he will send it to you.
But you know that the church
in the ch you know the church actually
blamed Eve for the downfall of man.
Blamed Eve for the downfall
of
Adam.
We don't have that in our Sharia, right?
But you can see from way back there
was always this negative connotation
attached
to women.
Celibacy is a virtue.
We don't have that. So we have a
completely different history.
Between 15th 17th centuries, people don't usually mention
this,
the Catholic church
was
carrying out mass killings of what they called
witches.
And anyone could accuse anyone of being a
witch,
of witchcraft.
85%
of those killed as witches were women.
And some,
historical scholars actually have called this period
as being a type of holocaust against women.
Because so many women, 40, 000 to a
100, 000, of course that's
a lot,
in proportion to the population of that time
were killed.
Not not taken for any kind of trial
or anything like that. You know they used
to throw them in the river and see
if they float.
And they had these weird
ways of finding out if if they were
witches.
And they had these terrible definitions for
women, right? So this clergyman, for example,
he writes in his book about how to
identify a witch. He says, what else is
woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable
punishment,
a necessary evil,
a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, and on
and on and on.
So there's this negative connotation attached to women.
And then during the enlightenment,
we find suddenly rationality
is being
worshiped. The brain
being rational,
not emotional.
And men
are always cast as the rational and women
cast as the emotional. Again, we don't have
that
distinction
in Islam.
But this is the history
that led up to what we call feminism
today.
Women had no property rights.
At the moment, 1 of my children is
reading the book Jane Eyre.
And there's a character in Jane Eyre and
he's he was forced to marry a woman
who was mentally ill.
And the reason why his parents married her
to him, even though they knew that she
was ill and, you know, she was not
able to function as a wife,
was because she was rich.
And because in the west, in that time
so I I I'm not sure when Jaina
is set, I think 17th or 18th century,
When you got married, your your wife's wealth
and anything she inherited
would be yours.
It didn't actually belong to you, belong to
the woman at all. In other words, a
woman didn't, there was nothing written
that says this is, belongs to this woman.
Not property, not anything.
A woman could not own things.
Now just think about that. Like what does
that mean?
Everything was under the name of a man.
Women did not have the right to petition
a court.
You know, as the jurist William Blackstone's very
famous
lawyer in the UK or judge.
He said, By marriage, the husband and wife
are 1 person in law.
Okay? So you see this is the history.
Again, we don't have that history. The prophet
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
always allowed women to have access to the
court, if you like. The
Qadi. Women could always petition a Qadi for
things like divorce,
for any kind of issue that they had,
any,
thing that they needed resolving.
Right? We never had this history.
Colleges were not open to women. Cambridge University,
you know, 1 of the colleges that we're
so proud of in Britain,
did not allow women in until the late
19th
century. Can you just imagine that?
And this is when women in the Muslim
world like Fatima al Fihri were actually
financing and supporting the building of universities
even before this.
And so we can see why the first
wave of feminism came. You know? The focus
of the first wave was
to
give women a voice. They didn't even have
the right to vote. They didn't have a
right to set to have any kind of
political statement.
So they they fought for that right. They
wanted access to education. They wanted to be
able to go to universities. Women used to
go to universities
like Cambridge and
finish the course but not get a degree
certificate.
Equal amount of work as the as their
male counterparts but not get any recognition.
Again, a different history to ours. And then,
of course, the world wars came
and women were needed in the factories.
They they had to be incentivized to come
out to work. Women were given the vote.
Of course, I'm
oversimplifying
here.
Then we come to the 2nd wave. And
I think this is the most problematic wave
of feminism. In the 60s 70s what they
call the sexual revolution.
When they actually fought for so called freedom,
free love they called it. Which was basically
a movement about promiscuity.
Freedom to be promiscuous.
Freedom from marriage.
They cast marriage as something that was a
type of slavery rather than seeing it as
a protection for women, which is what it
was.
Right? They instead said,
we don't need this piece of paper.
And there were certain notable figures
who made statements, who really,
pushed this agenda.
Right? The contraceptive pill was also introduced in
Britain
And abortion legalised. All of these things galvanised
and came together.
The women's liberation movement in, in, in America
was actually funded by the CIA.
The head of the 1 of the figureheads,
Gloria Steinem, she actually says it in her
biography, in her autobiography,
that the CIA actually funded them. So so
government started seeing a benefit in women being
pushed out to work.
If you think about it, you can
you can get twice the work and you
can pay
both husband and wife less.
Right? So instead of now 1 man being
able to support an entire household,
you need 2 people,
you get twice the workforce,
but you can pay them each less.
You might call it cynical but
I think we always have to ask. Who's
actually benefiting from this system? Who's benefiting from
this system?
And during that second wave it was very
anti nuclear family, anti motherhood.
They said gender is just a construct. There's
no there's nothing biological about maleness and femaleness
or femininity and masculinity.
There's no such thing as maternal instinct. Women
are just kind of,
you know, conditioned to be
motherly.
They demanded 24 hour childcare. They were anti
breastfeeding.
So people started
feeding their babies bottle milk.
Right?
And all of this
added to the environment. Look, This is just
1 protest from that time.
And the women are holding up a placard
that says, End human sacrifice. Don't get married.
Okay?
And they're saying washing diapers is not fulfilling.
So this they're very anti,
actually, they're very anti femininity.
Anti womanhood.
And so surprise, surprise, in the 1980s,
AIDS
and an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases became
prevalent.
Right? So many women now they write articles.
Now they're in their fifties or whatever and
or later,
and they talk about the sixties seventies and
they say,
you know, we were lied
to. We were lied to. We were used.
We were told children are not important. It's
not important to be a mother.
We were told that we should have free
love, but we ended
up lonely.
We ended up, what do they call them?
Cat.
Cat mothers.
Right? That's how we ended up. It was
all a lie.
And then the 3rd 4th waves of feminism
are more about,
yes.
Yep.
Okay.
The 3rd and 4th wave of feminism were
more about, you know, internationalizing
the cause. But actually, 1 of the things
you find is
there's a lot of, I would say,
supremacy western supremacy that is embedded in those,
forms of feminism. I'm going to skip to
something that I really wanna highlight for you.
I think it's quite clear to us how
that all of these narratives
trying to cast men and women as the
same, girls and boys as the same, has
harmed
children, has harmed
women,
has harmed families.
But what I want to now
ask you or tell you about is how
feminism can actually lead women, especially
towards kufr
in our times. And I call this the
slippery slope.
So often, and I want the brothers to
be aware of this as well because you
might see this in your daughters.
You know, sometimes what starts off as a
legitimate grievance
You have a legitimate grievance. A girl has
a legitimate grievance.
You know, why is it that
there's no women's section in the masjid?
You know, I would I would really like
to go to the masjid and there's no
women's section.
Why is it that
this oppression is happening in my community
or in in that place?
Now if those legitimate grievances are not addressed
properly, and they're not addressed within the Islamic
framework,
this kind of escalates to
questioning other Islamic norms under the influence of
Western liberalism. So you're growing up in this
Western society. You're looking at things through the
Western lens whether you like it or not
because it's like, you know, a fish in
water. Right? You you don't even realize you've
adopted
Western liberal ideals as a young person.
And now you start questioning everything.
You start asking, well, why do women have
to dress in a certain way and men
don't?
Why are men allowed to do this and
women are not? And you start looking at
things in from Western lens.
And this starts causing doubts.
And we see this all the time.
And then if that, at that stage if
it's not addressed
you
find
sisters accusing Islamic scholars of being an oppressive
patriarchal
system.
Okay. Oh, it's the way the men have
interpreted
Islam.
It's the way that men interpreted the Quran.
But of course this is based on such
a fundamental flaw and that is
it's as if you're saying that
that your understanding of the Quran and sunnah
is superior
to the understanding that the sahaba, men and
women,
and the ijima, the consensus of the scholars,
was.
It's as if you're saying the meaning of
the Quran is not preserved. You're coming now,
And this is what so called Muslim feminists
or Islamic feminists sometimes come with. You're coming
with an interpretation that
they never thought of. You know Islam better
than them.
And it's fundamentally as though you're saying that
Allah is unjust.
That women scholars did not have any contribution.
You know, what about Aisha radiAllana? The scholars
said she was a quarter
responsible for a quarter of the Sharia
in terms of her contribution.
It's fundamentally sexist because you're saying that men
are incapable of being fair to women. And
then if you
believe you start adopting the idea of patriarchy.
Okay? I don't like that word because it
means it actually means oppression.
An oppressive system of male dominance. That's what
it actually means.
Then sisters might start questioning the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam.
You know, they might start questioning the prophets
because our prophets were all men.
Right?
So are you saying that the prophet salallahu
alaihi wasallam was part of some kind of
oppressive patriarchy?
And then this leads to the slippery slope
of calling for the Quran to be reinterpreted.
To fit with modern liberal norms.
Right? It's quite funny how the Islamic feminists,
so called,
everything they want the Quran to be interpreted
as
fits perfectly with what west the west wants.
Right? What with what Western ideology and Western
society
preaches.
And then sadly
it can lead to Kufr because then a
person can start questioning Allah
as unjust
and to reject Allah. And sadly, as part
of the Sapiens Institute,
where I'm I was helping with being a
mentor,
we have people phoning up, you know, with
these sorts of doubts. And this is the
exact slippery slope that they've gone down. Something
starts off with as a legitimate grievance.
It ends up with them questioning Allah.
So this is why we've got to be
very
careful.
And I will wrap up, insha'Allah.
What do Islamic feminists want? Often they want
a new,
unprecedented
reading of the Quran.
Typically they will reject Hadith.
Typically they will assert that traditional Islamic scholarship
has a male bias in its interpretation. Of
course it's possible
that some male scholars made some statements that
are not right.
Okay? Or that seem
unfair towards women.
But to say that Islam as a system
is biased towards women
or against women?
First of all, it's not true because there's
so many of so much of the Sharia
is against men's desires. Right?
I'm sure men would like to wear silk.
I'm sure they would like to wear gold.
I'm sure they would like to have days
when they don't fast and they don't
pray. Right? And yet the Sharia seems to
be harder on them in many ways.
So the question, the answer to the question,
do we need feminism?
Is the same as if somebody was to
ask you, do we need capitalism?
Do we need,
socialism or communism
as Muslims?
There might be some ideas in capitalism,
in socialism, in communism that we agree with.
Right?
But we have our own system.
A system that was given to us by
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. The creator. The 1
who knows us better than we know ourselves.
Not human beings just fumbling around in the
dark trying to find the truth.
So just as we would not call ourselves
communists
or capitalists
or any other ists. Right?
But we might agree with some elements.
I'm advocating that we also
recognize feminism as an external ideology. Yes, there
might be some elements we agree with,
But not to adopt it as a label.
Not to adopt it as an ideology. And
to be careful.
And so instead of the red pill or
the blue pill I don't know if you
know about these terms, red pill and blue
pill. You know, it's from the film The
Matrix.
So
the main character, he gets to choose to
have a red pill or a blue pill.
And the red pill represents
the truth.
Right? So if you take the red pill,
you'll become aware of the reality of the
world.
You take the blue pill, you'll be deluded
and
within the matrix,
as they say.
So we would advocate, no.
Take the green pill.
Use the Islamic framework to bring about change
and justice.
Follow
the creator's guidance regarding men and women. Be
at peace with your nature as men and
women.
Be virtuous
because we know that it's a it's a
framework
that works.
And in that, InshaAllah with that, I will
leave you.