Mustafa Umar – Islam and Feminism
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the complex issue of women's rights and the pressure on women to take their children and control their power. They also touch on the idea of differentiation and the idea of a larger social unit, which is not seen as equal. A workshop on difference feminism is offered to help people find it, and a seminar on difference feminism is suggested to provide insight into the need for women's rights workers.
AI: Summary ©
So let's begin with the dua. We ask
Allah to
help us to benefit from the things which
are said, and to take that which is
correct, and to
benefit from it and to discard which is
incorrect and to leave it. We ask Allah
to open our hearts and minds to understand
this topic
and to be able to understand what the
true perspective of Islam is on it. Amin.
So
let's begin.
How many of you is your first time
at IAOC, by the way? Anyone? First time?
A few guys? Okay.
It's good to see you guys. Welcome.
Alright. So the the topic is Islam and
feminism,
Confrontation or Cooperation.
And I've taken this title actually from an
article,
by doctor Lois Farooqi, which I'm gonna be
talking about, in this in the course of
this presentation.
So we have about an hour.
So I've actually presented I actually prepared about
maybe 10 hours of material. So this should
be a seminar, actually, but we're gonna have
to restrict it to 1 hour. So just
try to understand that there's not as much
we can cover in 1 hour than we
can cover in 10 hours, so just keep
that in mind. Alright. So first of all,
let me start with,
why am I speaking?
I got a lot of people inquiring and
saying, but you're not a woman, so why
are you speaking about feminism?
And I guess I understand where that question
is coming from, so let me give a
little bit background.
The way that our Friday family night programs
work in the mosque
is that they set a date for different
people who are gonna be speaking on that
date. So sheikh Mohammed Fakih has a date,
I have a date, doctor Ahmad Bayouin has
a date. And when it comes to myself
and sheikh Fakih, we have to basically give
a lecture on a topic that we choose
on the date that we're assigned, either once
a month or once every other month.
So I was assigned a topic,
and I've spoken on different topics, you know,
in the past months. I've spoken about, you
know, Thomas Jefferson and the Quran, and I've
talked about cryptocurrency
and
just different topics. So I figured, you know,
this would be, an an important topic which
I've been asked to speak about,
several times.
And I don't think too many,
people are actually addressing this issue in the
Muslim community, at least specifically,
you know, from the Muslim scholars,
that exist. They don't really,
tackle this topic head on.
And there was one auntie in particular who
regularly attends IAOC and one is one of
our students, and she really encouraged me and
she sent me an article,
by Doctor. Lamia.
And she said, You should read this article
and you should really address this topic. So,
alhamdulillah,
unfortunately, she's not here today because she's on
vacation,
but I know she's gonna be watching this
video afterwards.
So she really motivated me to do that.
So that's kind of how this topic was
chosen.
So they said, you know, well, why didn't
you have a woman come and speak about
it? Or why isn't there a woman on
a panel and you why didn't you make
a panel?
Honestly,
we don't
put
that much preparation or thought into how our
Friday family night lectures are gonna go. We
just simply we choose a date, we choose
a topic, and we say, okay, someone should
address this topic. You know, so, like, when
I presented on cryptocurrency,
it would have been nice if I had,
like,
an expert on cryptocurrency
or a professor of economics, you know, there
present with us reflecting on the economic aspects
as well. But that's just
difficult to organize, and it just takes extra
effort. And that's pretty much the simple reason
of of why we why we didn't really
do that. Okay? So that's the simple reason.
The second reason
is because it's actually very difficult to find,
women
scholars
who are scholars of Islam and then can
give in a take
on feminism from an Islamic perspective. And when
I say scholars, I mean at least someone
who has studied
about a decade of Islamic studies and has
a good, rounded, deep understanding of the religion
of Islam and all its different sciences. It's
kind of rare
understanding of the religion of Islam and all
its different sciences. It's kind of rare to
find those people, in terms of the women
who are there. And the ones who do
exist, and there are some who exist,
they're either extremely busy because they're traveling around
the country giving lectures everywhere else because they're
in high demand
due to the fact that they're, you know,
they're a rare asset,
or they're unwilling to speak about this topic
because they're actually afraid
they could destroy
their reputation,
of speaking on a topic like this. Right?
So I'm just conveying to you some of
the realities that exist, in our community.
And then lastly,
I don't wanna keep going on for a
long time, but,
doctor Sherman Jackson is another reason why I
was motivated to speak about this topic.
So he mentioned in a program that we
had I was at the ISNA conference 1
year,
and he mentioned something. He was talking about
juridical empiricism and, you know, going into a
detailed concept,
and then he said there's a there's a
trend, and I didn't understand this a decade
ago. I was listening. I didn't fully grasp
what he's saying, but I understand it now.
He's saying there's a trend
that exists in the intellectual
milieu or the intellectual culture in which we
live where
you are not supposed to talk about a
topic unless you have direct experience of it.
So you're not supposed to speak about women's
rights unless you're a woman because you don't
know what it feels like to be a
woman. You're not supposed to speak about the
black community or the African American community unless
you're African American because you don't have a
direct experience of what that community is going
through.
And he critiqued this idea, and he said
this idea,
although it's nice, you know, it's nice to
have someone, and it's important to have someone
who's from that particular community, you know, representing
what
the sensibilities, the sensitivities, the feelings of, you
know, those people are on the topic, he
said imagine if we were to take that
to its logical extreme.
That means that someone who's talking about drug
addiction
should not be speaking about drug addiction
unless they've been a crack addict in the
past or unless they've been a heroin addict
in the past.
Someone who's talking about addiction to smoking or
the harms of smoking should not be speaking
about it unless they've been a smoker in
the past. Someone who's talking about * should
not do it unless they've been a *
addict in the past, etcetera, etcetera. So that
point really resonated with me and that gave
me, you know, an understanding that, you know,
I'm not claiming
to know exactly what it feels like to
be a woman, that's not what I'm trying
to do here, but at the same time,
you know, I've been studying Islam for a
very long time
and,
my goal is not to talk about what
it feels like to be a woman in
this talk, but rather it's about analyzing the
feminine discourse the feminist discourse that exists within
our within our society
and looking at that from from an Islamic
lens and seeing how that kind of fits
into Islam. Okay? So that's kind of one
disclaimer.
Disclaimer number 2
is that, you know, I'm open to discussion
on these topics. So if somebody doesn't agree
with me, if somebody says, you know, you're
you're way out there, you know, if you,
you know,
if you decide to leave, I'm gonna mention
this in the beginning,
in case you decide to leave in protest
or something like that, just know that I'm
open to discuss these topics. You can discuss
it with me, you can make an appointment,
you can meet me, you can meet somewhere,
and we can continue to discuss these topics.
Okay? So,
if you don't agree, that's perfectly fine. I'm
willing I'm open and I'm willing to talk
about these issues more, further, inshallah. So let's
begin with what is feminism.
Okay? So
who can who who thinks they know what
feminism is? Who's pretty confident that they have
an understanding of what feminism is? Just raise
your hand.
So there's nobody in the whole audience that
knows what feminism is. No, just it's okay.
Okay. So there's I'm just trying to see.
So, like,
20%
of our audience
feels comfortable in understanding what feminism is. Is
that about accurate?
Okay.
Who would like to answer the question, what
is feminism?
Anybody?
Yes.
Okay. It's an aspect of bringing women's rights
to be in equality with men, but not
in competition with. Okay? Good. Anyone else have
a different definition?
Yes.
Okay. Overall equality in general between men and
women. Okay. Good. Anyone else?
Okay. So that's those are pretty good definitions
actually.
So pretty much,
feminism is an ideology,
and there's different definitions about what it entails,
but feminism is pretty much
the idea of trying to achieve
political,
economic,
personal,
and social equality
of the sexes, of male and female together.
Okay? So that's pretty much what feminism is.
And the term feminism itself was coined in
18/37
in France. It was called feminisseme or however
you pronounce it. Sadly my French is not
good even though I lived in France for
3 years. Pardon me for that. So it's
something that
has really been coined. The term itself is
fairly new in the past 2 centuries or
so.
And the feminist movement has focused primarily on
trying to get women
the right to vote,
the right to hold public office, the right
to work,
the right to earn equal pay when they
work, the right to own property, the right
to receive education,
the right to enter into contracts,
the right to equal marriage rights.
And in addition to that, different forms of
feminism also try to
legalize abortion so that women can decide whether
they want to have a child or not,
try to promote social integration so that there's
no division between men and women in social
spaces,
try to promote change in dress and change
in physical activity. This is kind of just
in a nutshell
what feminism is, and there's
scholars of feminism or feminist theory. They classify
the feminist movement into 3 different waves. Right?
I'm not gonna get into all of that
stuff to be honest with you because it's
gonna get very theoretical and we wanna focus
on something that's more practical in this talk.
So let us talk briefly about,
who are feminists or where are the feminists.
So it was interesting that in 2015
there was a poll
done in different countries in the world, particularly
developed countries,
and they surveyed people and asked them whether
you would define yourself
as a feminist.
And 18% of American women said that they
would identify themselves as feminists.
18%.
Right? So that's kind of surprising to a
lot of people because you would think it
would have been at 50%
or you'd think it'd be at, like, at
70%.
But instead there was another question.
They said would you identify yourself as a
feminist or would you identify
that you believe in equality for women?
So 85%
of women, they said we believe in equality
for women,
but we would not define ourselves as feminists.
Only 18%
of women in America
define themselves as feminists.
The same survey was done
in Sweden,
36%,
which was the highest rate that you find
in any of the developed con quote unquote
developed countries
that define themselves as women define themselves as
feminists. 36%
in Sweden,
31% in Italy,
29% in Argentina. I'm giving you these statistics
so that you understand
where,
the feminist movement is primarily active, where its
ideological
roots are, so it kinda gives you a
perspective. Argentina, 29%,
UK, 22%,
Spain, 22%,
Australia,
18%,
Belgium, 18%,
France, 18%.
The lowest countries that they surveyed
that where women
said that they are feminists, they would identify
as feminists,
was Japan, 8%,
Germany,
7%,
and South Korea, 7%.
Right? So that kinda gives you a little
bit perspective on the background of where feminism
is right now.
At the same time, they surveyed men and
they asked how many men
identified
themselves
as being feminists.
So the numbers were slightly lower but they
were quite predictable. So if in America it
was like 18% of women identify as feminists,
it's like, you know, 10 to 15%
of men would identify the same. If it's
somewhere like 30%, the men would be like
15, 20%.
Fairly predictable. The only one country that was
surveyed
that found the situation flipped was Poland
where 21%
of men in Poland identified as feminists
and only 17%
of women identified as feminists. So more men
identified themselves as feminists
than women actually did. Alright? So
that's just kind of a little bit demographic
survey of, you know, who
ascribes themselves,
to feminism as a label
even though most people are saying that they
believe in the equality of women but they
wouldn't define themselves as feminists,
perhaps because they don't know what the term
entails,
like most of our audience or they're not
sure, or perhaps for some other reasons.
Now
there are different forms of feminism and I'm
aware of that. So one of the other
critiques that I get whenever I mention feminism
is that, you know, you're only talking about
one particular type of feminism, and that is
the,
middle class,
white,
privileged feminism of women who live in the
west. And there's different forms of feminism and
there's different, you know, understandings of what feminism
is and I understand that. There is feminism.
There is black feminism.
There is a new thing called Islamic feminism.
How Islamic it is is debatable.
And different, you know, forms of lat Latino
or Latinx feminism and all sorts of different,
you know, categories.
So I'm aware of that.
Alright? So
but that's not what we're talking about tonight.
And the reason why we're not talking about
that tonight is because what I wanna focus
on is I wanna focus on what feminism
primarily is and not what it should be
or what ideally it's supposed to be. And
what that means
is the most
influential or the most powerful
type of feminism that exists within the societies
we're talking about, that's what I wanna focus
on. So black feminism may be a thing
and it may be a movement and it
may be something that people are developing. Arab
feminism may be something,
but western,
white, middle class feminism
is the most powerful form of feminism that
exists and has affected our society
in which the society in which we live
in, and much of the world in a
particular way. So that's why we're specifically,
focusing on that.
So, we could
talk about
an academic review or an academic study of
all different feminist ideas,
but what's gonna happen? And I'm being very
careful on this topic because I know it's
a very sensitive topic. K? And, you know,
a lot of people came and said, you
know, you're basically putting your neck under the
guillotine, you know, by talking about this topic.
Another sheikh told me, you're walking into a
landmine. You're gonna blow up. And I said,
you know, may Allah consider me a martyr
if that happens. You know, inshallah.
No. But,
and that sheikh just walked in the room.
Anyways, so
alright.
Sorry, Shay. Alright. So, and and other people
told me that, you know, you need to
be really careful about this topic. I'm aware
of that. Okay? But this topic is very
important to me as well, and I want
you to understand why. It's because
this is a topic that I've been this
is a topic that's affected me and I've
been thinking about, you know, for the past
20 years.
My
coming back into Islam and actually taking Islam
seriously, one of the impediments
that drove me away from Islam,
even though I grew up in a Muslim
family,
was
Islam status when it comes to women. It
was something that bothered me, and it's something
that bothers a lot of people, male and
female, both.
So for me,
having an understanding of what Islam really says
about women was a very important factor
in my kind of having an appreciation and
love and understanding of Islam. So this is
a very important topic to me,
and I just want I wanna clarify that.
So that's why,
I'm going to be very careful on this
topic, but at the same time I'm talking
about it. So what I'm gonna do instead
of just mentioning a bunch of different points
that the feminist movement has and look at
it as a whole, instead because someone can
come and critique and say, you know what?
Oh, well, that's one form of feminism. You're
not talking about the other form of feminism.
Or why don't you talk about Arab feminism?
Or why don't you talk about Keisha Ali?
Or why don't you talk about what Amina
Wadud is doing in her books? Or why
don't you talk about, you know, Ayaan Hirsi
Ali's critiques of, you know, Islam, or why
don't you talk about all of these other
things? I'm aware of these things. I read
these things. This is my field. This is
what I do. But instead
of, you know, just to kind of avoid
that,
what I'm trying to focus on are books
or ideas which have been influential
in the minds of people in our society,
and I wanna focus and limit my,
restrict my subject to that specifically.
That are popular in the feminist movement. I'm
gonna give some summary of some of those
points, and then I'm gonna take some responses
by Muslims
who had some critiques or some, you know,
ideas on feminism and how it relates to
Islam, and I'm gonna summarize that, and that's
pretty much what our lecture is gonna be
for tonight. Okay? And then we'll have a
Q and A session.
Alright. So let's start with,
Mary
Wolstoncraft. Alright. She wrote a book called A
Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Alright. Has anyone read this book?
One person only? 2 people?
3 people. In class? Was it required reading?
Required reading. Alright. Have any guys heard this
book?
No. Okay.
Alright. That's fine. So this was in 17/92.
So the book was written in England in
17/92.
It's considered to be
one of the very early,
feminist texts. Technically, it's a proto feminist text
because feminism wasn't considered to be a movement
at the time, but it's a text which
inspired people from the feminist movement
and it was actually very well received
when it was written, and there's some critique
on that, but we can talk about that
another day. So here is a summary of
some of the points that she brings up,
and I'm not gonna give a detailed commentary
on it.
I'm gonna allow our Muslim thinkers to give
a commentary,
on the principles of how to address those.
I just want us to understand
what are the ideas that exist
in the books which are inspiring feminist thinkers.
SubhanAllah.
Alright. And, you know, what can we do
about it?
So, while,
before I begin talking about that I want
to explain something
about computers to you. Okay? So, Dell,
has made a new computer which is very
small in its form factor. It has a
very nice shape,
it's very portable, it has a great screen
and everything. But one of the problems with
that computer
is that if you have a document open,
you're in the middle of a khutbah, you're
in the middle of a lecture, it will
just randomly shut down
and completely ruin the train of thought of
the speaker,
eliminate all of his notes. So one of
the things I did was, because I'm a
computer science major, I thought I'm smart, so
I downloaded a software called shutdown blocker, which
basically
prevents your computer from shutting down. It'll actually
stop it from shutting down. But what's really
interesting
is that this shutdown blocker software
is actually garbage because it doesn't work, you
know, and,
my computer just shut down. But the great
thing about it is I know that this
happens,
so I know how to immediately load my
notes back up and get right back into
the subject. And And I've actually had to
do this in a Khutba, where there was
5,000 people in the audience, and the the
the notes just decided to immediately the computer
just shut itself down, but nobody noticed that
I was restarting. The notes came back up,
and alhamdulillah,
everything was perfectly fine. You know? So this
is,
the result of some practice that I have.
So let's get back to Mary Wollstonecraft.
Okay? So in 17/92,
she writes this book, and some of the
points that she mentions are, first of all,
that there's a difference in education between men
and women. Now, understand she's writing about England
in the early, you know, late 18th century.
So she writes that there's a difference in
education between men and women. And she says
why,
she talks about that this is unfair, it's
unjust, and this is in England, and she
says why do men and women have to
have different characteristics in society?
Why are they viewed differently? Why do they
why why is there a differentiation
between male and female in society? Then she
talks about how women should be part of
democracy in the sense that they should have
a say in political affairs. They should be
able to vote. Again, this is very early
on, so, you know, this is prior to
the form of democracies that, you know, we
understand them to be, but she's kind of
hinting at these ideas.
Then she says that women should not be
looked down as second class citizens and that
they are looked down in England
during her time as second class citizens. And
she says one of the reasons why this
is
is because of the bible.
She says the bible has said
that there's Adam and Eve, and Eve was
created from the rib of Adam,
and that automatically
puts her into a
subservient state or a second class state.
And there's no way to there's no work
around this. If you accept the story of
Adam and Eve according to the bible,
from the
perspective of Judaism and Christianity,
you're stuck into this idea
that women are somehow second class and they
cannot get out of this. Then she says,
on top of that, women need to have
we need to kind of get beyond that.
And women need to have a greater voice
in literature,
and the different standards that we have in
society are unjust. So she starts talking about
some of them. She says that if a
woman expresses disagreement,
it's considered unladylike
in society.
And therefore, this double standard needs to be
eliminated. When she disagrees,
she should she should be as potentially vocal
or aggressive or whatever word you wanna use.
She should be able to disagree
or have certain characteristics that men have rather
than having this false notion of being ladylike,
which should not necessarily
exist within society.
And she says women deserve representation in government.
Women
she says women,
unfortunately, according to her, are taught to focus
on beauty
and grace,
and this focus limits them in society and
prevents them from achieving
their full potential.
She says that women do not have access
to the same education as boys, which was
true in that society. And she says,
why
she
and there's no reason why they shouldn't have
exactly the same type of education.
And she says boys
are raised differently than girls when they're children.
So boys are told by their parents to
go and play outside,
and girls are told to stay inside
and play with their dolls.
Right? So she says this is a double
standard which needs to be eliminated.
And she says one of the problems which
it causes is that if women cannot go
outside and play and get physical activity, they
already have
a physical weakness
relative to man in terms of their body
structure, in terms of their muscle development, muscle
mass, and all of that. Now this will
continue their physical weakness even more by not
letting them go out and play while they're
young and then going and being involved in
more, you know, grueling physical activities.
And then she says,
the idea
of giving
girls
dolls when they're young,
what it does, it actually tells them that
beauty
is the only thing that is important in
society,
and it,
you know, pushes them in that particular direction.
And therefore, we need to change the way
in which we actually raise our kids
in terms of what whether we give dolls
to our, you know, daughters or whether we
give, you know, guns or, you know, action
figures or something like that to our to
our boys. Again, keep in mind, this is
all 19, 1798.
So then she writes that men want to
keep women as * objects
or they want to keep women in control.
So this is the primary,
mission or goal of many men in society.
And she says this results in women being
suppressed.
She says getting a good husband in our
society today
means that you should be pretty
and you should be docile. And if you
have these two characteristics, you're gonna be able
to get a good husband.
Then she says that women can sometimes be
very sneaky
and deceitful.
And the reason why they're sneaky and deceitful
and they can gossip and everything is because
they don't feel that they're equal.
And if we make them equal,
then they will stop this sneaking around and
gossiping and stuff like that. So that's a
solution to that problem. That's why that problem
exists.
Then she says men
treat women as a fashionable accessory, as something
just on the side.
Right? And she said the solution to that
problem is that men and women, when they're
in a relationship,
they need to have friendship.
Friendship is the core
or key to having a good relationship,
and the only way they can ever be
friends is if they're treated as being intellectual
equals.
And until that happens, they're not gonna be
treated at that level. And then she says,
one of the problems we have is prostitution.
And if
we have the intellectual development of women,
there will actually be less prostitution
because now they will have opportunities for better
jobs and they will not end up in
prostitution jobs.
And she says that there are double standards
in our society.
Another one of the double standards is that
men are allowed to sleep around
while women must be faithful.
So the standard
should be removed. There should not be this
double standard.
She doesn't exactly clarify which side she wants
it removed to,
but, you know, I'm not gonna comment on
that, but because there was a big controversy
about her,
what happened was is that after she died
this is just a side note. I'm not
making a point with this. But as a
side note, after she died, her book was
very popular when it was written, and you
wouldn't think it was popular because many people
have a perception that 17 nineties in England,
they would not accept these ideas. Actually, they
were accepting these ideas, and they were open
to these ideas. The book was very popular
at the time. But what happened was, after
she died, her husband
started
write publishing a memoir about her and saying
things like, you know, what type of woman
she was, and he was not trying to
insult her. He thought he was doing her
some service by saying, you know, this is
the type of woman she was. She was
adventurous and this and that. But instead, he
revealed some things about her that she had,
you know, children out of wedlock, and she
had a bunch of love affairs, and she
had a bunch of these things. So what
happened was
that people who were respecting her, they lost
respect for her because they thought that that's
too radical of a thing that, you know,
she was engaged in, so she was not
a role model,
for people. So for a long time, for
about a 100 years,
people did not really
give so much weight,
to her ideas once that information, you know,
leaked out. But then after a 100 years,
then people kind of said, okay, let's go
beyond that. We we can go back to
that idea. So anyways, side note. So then
she says if women were equals
this is a really interesting point. Okay?
They're all interesting, but I find this to
be really interesting.
Just understand the mentality. Despite all of the
ideas she's coming with, right, they seem pretty
modern. We're like, yeah, we agree with all
of that, but she's still living in a
certain context. So she says, if women were
equals,
they could better raise their children,
and that better raising of children would actually
improve society.
So she said that educated women could if
women were educated,
they could help children
with their studies and with their homework so
that you don't need tutors anymore. So one
of the things that used to happen in
English society at the time is that these
middle class or upper class women, they would
have to hire tutors to go and teach
the subjects and the tutors are male because
there's no female tutors because they're not studying.
So she's saying if women would be more
educated,
then instead of hiring
tutors we don't have to hire tutors at
all because women actually have science, math, all
of that knowledge, literature, and they could go
and teach their own children so we don't
have to
hire tutors anymore. Then she says, and again,
this society has servants in it. So she
says that
if women were more educated,
then they would be kinder to their servants
in the household,
especially in front of their children.
So what happens is she's saying that there's
this rivalry between women in the household and
their servants.
And that's she's saying that's something natural, and
it's a long explanation of that. But then
she's saying that
the women in the household feel that they
need to exert their power over the servants
to keep them in line.
And she says if
the women had better access to education,
they would be kinder to their servants because
they don't need to show their power over
them because their education would be the power
over them.
And then she says, this is going to
affect the children because the girls
who are watching
their mother treat servants bad and the servant
is taking care of the girl as well,
the girls start to imitate that bad behavior
of their mothers when they grow up.
She's saying, if we were to educate women,
we would actually have this entire,
you know, cycle or
this this tangent of being able to
solve this problem as well. And then the
last thing she mentions, she has women,
if they if they're educated so the focus
is on education here. If women are educated,
then they can start worrying about real issues.
Right? Like, they can start discovering things. They
can invent things. They can come up and
discover new cures for diseases and illnesses, and
they can do so many other things which
could be a contribution to society.
Instead,
what they're doing, because they're not doing that,
is all they do is just focus on
what they wanna wear in the day, and
they spend all of their time and energy
and all of these other things,
and they should be directed
in this direction instead.
So that's
a very old book, but a book which
kind of inspired many feminist thinkers. Okay? So
that's the first book. The next book,
to summarize,
is a book called The Second * by
Simone de Beauvoir.
I don't know if I pronounced that right
again. My French is not good, but this
was written in 1949.
K? So fast forward
several years. Okay? But, technically,
2nd wave feminism has not begun yet. So
this we're still talking about 1st wave feminism
until now. 2nd wave is something in America,
19 sixties began.
So some of the points that she mentions.
Now, you're gonna see a very a radical
departure
from
what our previous author was saying compared to
what our current author is saying. So she
says
that the idea of womanhood
is a product
of
cultural
forces
rather than an innate quality in people.
What that basically means is that the idea
of being a woman
is something that is so people are socialized
into becoming a woman. Woman is not something
that exists just there in reality.
So,
you're gonna see where she's going with this.
She's gonna say we need to modify that
socializing,
to be so that womanhood becomes something different.
So she's gonna define what womanhood
is
according to her understanding
in Western Europe, in particular in her area.
So she says women have passive lives, and
they live in the shadow of men, and
she says this has been the case throughout
history in most societies of the world. The
women are given a secluded domain
where they're passive
and they're immersed in themselves. So the reason
why they focus on themselves so much is
because they've been secluded and they've not been
allowed to go outside of this domain.
And on the contrary,
men are active. Men are creative, they're productive,
their
efforts
exert out there into the world and they
have some effect on the world and women
don't have that same effect. And then she
says, human males are stronger because of the
muscle mass and everything that they have, but
these traits are only important in a society
where strength,
physical strength, is valued above everything else. But
she's basically saying we don't live in that
society. The world has changed. And today the
world has changed much more with technology and
everything we have. Physical strength is not so
much in just the muscle mass that you
have as it was in some primitive society.
She's saying that we the world has changed.
We need to acknowledge that change.
And then she talks about a patriarchal
society, and she says, what patriarchy means
is that men occupy
most positions of power in that society.
And she says, but
it's not always been that way. And again,
I'm just telling you what she's saying. Okay?
I'm not commenting on it yet. She's saying,
but in the past, women once wielded more
power than men did
in some societies.
She says women could women are the only
ones who could have children.
And because of the fact that could have
children, they were given a sacred status.
So what happened was that there were some
societies where
you would actually take
the mother's clan name instead of the father's
clan name. And she's saying this is an
example of where women were dominant in a
society. She's saying there are societies where female
gods or female idols were worshipped
rather than male idols.
And she says there are societies where men
feared women rather than women fearing men. And
then she says, but what happened was this
patriarchy became established somewhere
and the entire thing flipped, and it flipped
so bad that male gods, male deities and
idols like Zeus started overpowering
or
overshadowing even all the female deities. The entire
thing just flipped around, and now we're in
the situation that we're in.
Then she says that patriarchy,
this idea of men being dominant and in
control of most positions of power, it is
strengthened by 2 factors.
1, by inheritance,
and 2, by marriage.
So these two factors keep women subservient.
She says, why? Because in the past, in
some societies,
property was held communally.
Meaning, it doesn't belong to anyone. It's like
a communism
type of thing. Everyone owns the same type
of property.
But then property became privatized.
And this was the worst thing that ever
happened for women, because
women were excluded from property rights,
and they were excluded from inheritance
in many societies. Right? And she's talking about
Western Europe in particular as well. She's saying
not having property will alienate women from society
as a whole,
and marriage will continue to dehumanize a woman
by simply making her an asset.
So what happens is that a woman is
controlled by her father,
and if her father is not alive, she's
controlled by her eldest male relative. And then
after she gets married, she's passed on to
her husband and then her husband will control
her. And then she says, there was even
a Greek custom called,
epiklarate,
or I can't pronounce it right, which basically
forced women to marry the eldest male in
the husband's family if their husband actually passes
away and dies.
She's saying this is an effort to keep
women in absolute control, and this is what
happened and something that evolved.
So she's saying, look, today, we're looking in
the, you know, almost the fifties, she's saying,
look, there are improvements today.
Women are better off than they were in
the past in all of these civilizations. 1949,
she's writing.
She's there there are improvements,
but the subjugation of women continues.
Women are not allowed to go to, you
know in the past, women were not allowed
to go to university.
Now they're allowed to go to university.
Progress.
Women who are not allowed into politics, women
are not allowed into politics. Progress.
But then she says,
by remaining unmarried,
the women who were able to be powerful,
by remaining unmarried,
they were not subjugated
by men
when their fathers died, when the male relatives
died, and when either they didn't get married
or their husbands died, that's when they were
actually able to get their full freedom.
Right? So then she says in 1918,
another,
example of,
you know, where women are still subjugated or
women are still treated unequally,
in 1918
in America,
she says women earned half of what men
earned
even if they were performing the exact same
job. So if they're collecting the exact same
amount of coal from a mine, they would
get half the amount of money that a
man would actually get. And of course, we're
gonna we can talk about how that still
plays out today. And then she says housewives
were seen as unable they were viewed housewives
are viewed as being intellectually
incapable
of doing any work outside,
and then they're unpaid and they sit at
home and they get stuck, and they're viewed
as being inferior beings as well. So then
she comes back to the bible and she
says, much of the problems
are resulting from the bible. She says, once
you accept the story of Adam and Eve,
it degrades women.
Eve is responsible for tempting man, tempting Adam
in the first place, which resulted in the
entire fall of human beings to this earth,
and therefore, from the Christian perspective,
people have what's called original sin. And she
has the fact that people are born with
sin is all the burden is actually placed
on the woman because she's the one who's
responsible, who tempted
Adam in the first place. So you can
see her religious perspective on that as well.
And then she says, but it's not just
Christianity.
There's so many myths about women across so
many different cultures. So, she said, even if
you look at Greek mythology,
not
Christian, not Judaism,
not, you know, monotheistic,
she says even the Greek muses, you know,
the women who are singing and all that,
it just shows the same myth that women
basically are beings
which can inspire,
you know, production,
but they cannot create anything in and of
themselves. Basically, what she's saying is that even
the Greek mythology and putting the muses and
what they're doing is inspiring men and all
that, it's like today. You know, women are
supposed to be cheerleaders for the football team
or the basketball team, but they're not playing
the sport themself.
Right? So she's saying even those things are
myths,
and that just degrades women further. And then
she says another thing which degrades women further,
which goes back to Christianity,
and she says
even the idea of Mary,
Maryam, the mother of Jesus,
is degrading
because she has no individual
contribution herself. Her contribution
is delivering
the child rather than actually having an independent
contribution. Again, this is from her perspective. K.
Islam has another perspective on this. But,
so she's saying and Christians, keep in mind,
Christian environment, they believe that this is God,
you know, son of God.
So for them, this is, like, the most
important thing, but she just what is her
role in that? It's almost like someone who's
inspiring or a cheerleader or someone who's just
producing, but there's no direct role in, you
know, the most important person who was born
for Christians.
Then she talks about a few more points
and then we'll kind of move on. She
starts she says that becoming a woman starts
in childhood.
So we need to rethink how we view
childhood, very similar to what,
our previous author was saying. She says
that we divide boys and girls,
and boys are told to be a man.
Who's heard of that before? Right? You heard
that before. Be a man. What does that
mean? It means be independent
and be strong. And she says, but girls,
they don't get that. They're treated like infants,
like little babies for a longer period of
time and they're given more warmth and care
and nurturing,
and she's saying this is
this results
further
perpetuates
the,
the subjugation of women.
And then she says boys
are allowed to urinate while standing up,
and this gives them a sense of agency.
And And the fact that they have agency,
they actually become more empowered.
And women, they have to sit down or
they have to squat and they have to
do it in they're taught to, like, cover
themselves up rather than expose themselves. So that,
you know, what we call in Islam hayah
kind of thing, like, you know, you should
be a little bit, you know, having some
shame when it comes to that. What it
does is
it actually instills the idea into women that
their * organs are taboo
and actually it causes them to become more
ashamed of their body when they grow up.
And she says the boy
has a penis,
and he this is interesting. So the boy
has a penis to play with. Okay? When
he's a boy.
The girl has nothing. So So what does
she do? She ends up getting a doll,
and having a doll signifies
that she should be like her mother
and she should start preparing for taking care
of children when she gets older.
She says, all of this that we have
from from the physical
characteristics of boys and girls to the type
of toys we give them to the type
of, you know, manner in which we treat
them, all of this
contributes to the subjugation of women at the
end of the day.
And then she says,
when girls become adolescent and they start to
grow up, they realize
that their mother's role is confined
and that their mother is subjugated,
so they want to be in their father's
role.
So she said that the statistic was performed
during her time and she said that they
asked and they checked how many boys wanted
to be girls. It's 1949.
What percentage do you think it was?
1%.
Alright?
How many girls want it to be boys?
75%.
75%.
Alright. So totally different statistic.
And then she continues on and on and
she says just there's it just continues. The
burden continues for women.
The fact that women have *
is a further burden for her. It's physical
discomfort and all things. The fact that she
has to menstruate and she has a period,
it becomes a further burden for her. Alright?
And then it continues on and on. So
you can kind of see
some of her ideas
and how they've been influential in shaping, you
know, the hearts and minds of people. Okay?
Now, let's look at the next book real
quick. So we're gonna summarize because we're I
know it's we're running out of time here.
So the next book is The Feminine Mystique,
okay, by Betty Freeman,
Betty Friedan. So I'm sure
some of you have definitely read this book
because it's a very popular book.
This was written in 1960
3,
and this book basically sparked what's called second
wave feminism in the United States.
This was the best selling nonfiction book, over
a 1000000 copies sold in 1964,
and a lot of people, you know, have
read this book. So basically,
I'm just gonna summarize in a nutshell. What
this is basically saying is she's speaking to
American
housewives.
Okay? And she's saying that she specifically says
that in 1949,
after the World War 2,
fulfillment as a woman had only one definition
for American women after 1949,
and that is the housewife mother.
So the only
concept of fulfillment was the housewife the housewife
mother for American women, but if you go
back to the twenties thirties, it was different.
So this baby boom generation that we're talking
about, she's saying
you can basically the summary is you cannot
ever be fulfilled
by simply being a housewife.
You're tricking yourself.
You yourself are not only being subjugated but
there's no ultimate purpose. You need to do
something above and beyond that. So a very
influential book as well. We won't go into
it in detail because we need to move
on to the next part. So,
next part.
So this is
these are some Islamic
responses
from different Muslim thinkers.
K?
One of them, I could not find her
picture, unfortunately,
but, doctor Lois Lamia Farooqri,
has anyone heard of her before?
I knew you had heard of her. You're
the only one. I knew you'd be the
only one. So Alright. Anyways, alhamdulillah.
So, yeah, I remember reading her book, Cultural
Atlas of Islam. It's an amazing book. She's
the husband of doctor Ismail Raji Farooqih. They're
both,
you know, amazing intellectuals,
and, both of them, unfortunately, were killed,
and it's suspected that they were martyred for
their political views on Palestine specifically.
So may Allah grant them paradise.
So she was a really,
really gifted woman.
I couldn't find her picture for some reason.
So she wrote,
an article
called Islamic Traditions and the Feminist Movement,
Confrontation or Cooperation,
which is basically where I just stole the
title from her, for my own presentation.
Alright. So she,
she mentions,
a few things
in here
reflecting
on the feminist movement,
around the world, and she has some commentary
on that. So she's saying, first of all,
that Muslim women
are disappointed
or they openly reject certain parts of the
feminist movement.
And she's saying, why is that?
The reason why she's writing kind of to
the western world saying, you need to understand
what Muslim women
really think, or in her idea, maybe should
think, about feminism. You guys need to understand
before you take your feminist,
movement program and try and implement it on
Muslims around the world, you need to understand
why there's some hesitation here. Either we don't
like some of the ideas or we completely
reject some of the ideas.
And she says that's because
we have an Islamic culture
which has social,
psychological
and economic
culture or traditions built into it, and if
you don't take that into consideration,
there's gonna be a mismatch between these two
movements here. So you saw kinda how the
movements were, you saw what religion,
their perspective on religion, their perspective on Adam
and Eve, their perspective on certain things. So
now she's gonna offer a critique and she
says, the first point we need to understand
is that Islam promotes a family system.
So the family system in Islam
is advocated
to the extent that they're supposed to be
a large extended family,
and family values
are supposed to not only be in the
nuclear family.
Not only husband, wife and kids,
but in the extended family. Your parents and
your grandparents and your uncles and your aunts
and everyone,
they matter.
She's there's a very big difference between focusing
purely on the nuclear family and focusing on
the extended family. And in a Muslim culture
or in an Islamic culture,
that is going to affect some of the
ideas that are coming in there. And she
says it's very clear cut from the Quran,
from the hadith, what Islam says about family.
So instead of quoting all of that, we'll
just talk about that as a point. She
says, the family system
is very different
in the works of or the view of
the family system.
Even in the
feminist thinkers who believe in family, they're still
thinking of nuclear family, and they're not so
much focusing on the extended family.
And then she says that family participation
in marriage
is something which is encouraged in Islam.
So this is interesting. So she says that
feminists,
they will restrict
they think that family participation
in marriage
will restrict individual freedoms because someone else is
coming and telling you what to do or
advising you what to do. But doctor Farooqi
says no.
Doctor Farooqi says that,
the family
participation
in marriage
is actually advantageous
to the individual and it's advantageous to society,
assuming you're not part of a dysfunctional family.
Okay? Assuming your family is not broken and
all messed up. So she says, why is
that? She says, number 1, marriages are gonna
be based on sounder principles than simply the
rule of attraction.
Right? So when you're getting interested in marriage,
your family is gonna give you good advice
on what type of person you should be
trying to marry, so it's not just between
you and that individual. You're gonna be thinking
that, hey, I have to think what type
of person I'm gonna marry and how that's
gonna affect my greater family. It's not just
between 2 people. Alright? That's a good point.
Number 2,
family
the family will support the new couple.
Not only financially, they'll support them, you know,
emotionally, they'll support them in so many different
ways, but obviously
financially would be one of the important things
that we even see today. Whereas, you see,
in the absence of family, people cannot get
married because they cannot afford marriage. The family
is not willing to support for whatever
reason. Number 3. She's saying that you have
social interaction
built in so that people do not end
up becoming lonely.
So this happens to a lot of couples,
and we do a lot of, you know,
we see a lot of couples,
come in and they say, you know, as
soon as they get married, the woman goes
her own way or she's sitting at home
and the guy goes and he's traveling on
business trips. The woman is sitting there lonely
and she has no extended family to, you
know, help her out and just prevent her
from being lonely or even vice versa and
the guy starts becoming lonely and all that.
So number 4,
spouses will actually be kept in line
due to opposition from a larger group. And
she's alluding to the verse of the Quran
which says if there's a conflict between spouses,
you have one person from one side of
the family come, another side of the family
come. She's saying that what's gonna happen is
there's always gonna be conflict in marriage. K?
But when that conflict comes,
assuming the families, again, are not dysfunctional,
right, they will come because they have a
vested interest
of keeping this family together. So they will
come in and they will put people in
their place when they need to, and they'll
say, you know, you need to just, you
know, stop stop being petty or whatever it
is, as long as it's not, like, on
a serious issue. So he's saying the opposition
from a larger group is gonna help the
spouses
keep themselves in line when they're fighting.
Number 5. Children will be taken care of
when they're working. So if a woman is
even working and a man is working and
they're both working and they have children,
the extended family will be there to take
care of them. You got the grandparents there,
you got some uncles there, you got other
people who may not be out. There's always
someone to go and take care of the
rest of the family. And then number 6,
she says the larger social unit in the
case of divorce,
in the case of family breakdown,
the larger social unit of the family will
actually absorb the effects
of that divorce
on the spouse
as well as on the kids. So a
spouse will start getting depressed, I'm divorced, this
and that. The family's there. Even the whatever
it is, the guy will go back to
his family, girl will go back to their
family. Let's assume that's the case. They're gonna
they're gonna be that support system for them.
And in terms of the children as well.
So if a woman needs to go and
let's say she has to fend for herself
or work, whatever, the family's there to be
there and to take care of her, and
and, you know, help with the kids and
all of that stuff. She's saying that is
one very important difference between the feminist discourse
on family or on individual rights or even
on the nuclear family versus the extended family.
The next point she mentions is she says
that
the the idea of individualism
versus the larger organization.
So she says Islam
channels,
individual
goals of people
into
the goals for the greater welfare of the
larger group.
And she says you don't see this
in the
ideology
of feminism for the most part. So what
does that mean? She basically, what she's saying
is that
it's not about individual fulfillment. It's not about
what makes me happy and what makes me
fulfilled and what brings my success.
It's not from an individual
context, but instead Islam takes the individual goals
that you may have and they have to
be channeled into a greater goal for a
family,
whether it's a nuclear family or an extended
family as a whole. And she's saying what
happens is that a female's goals
on an individual level, they may be in
line with the benefits of the family or
maybe they have to be subordinate to the
actual goals of the group. So what she's
saying is that from an Islamic perspective,
you may have to sacrifice for the benefit
of your family,
and that is not opposed
to
fulfillment or fulfilling a particular goal. Whereas, in
feminism, because the focus is primarily on the
individual, why would you because the focus is
primarily on the individual. Why would you sacrifice
your individual goals or individual fulfillment for the
greater good of the family? There's no sacrifice.
And, of course, it's the same for men.
So she's saying that perspective is radically different,
and that leads to different conclusions. And then
she says that the promotion of individual
goals can actually threaten the social interdependence
that Islam is trying to bring. Okay. So
that's individuals versus the larger family unit organization.
Then she says
the
organization. Then she says the idea of differentiation
of * roles. K? So from this, she's
saying that male and females in Islam, they
have different roles. And then she just alludes
to this
and she
doesn't really build on it.
She says, it is both natural
and it's desirable.
And if we have time, I'm gonna talk
about the natural part in the next thinker.
If not, we'll just skip him. But she
says it's natural and it's desirable. So she's
saying 2 things. 1,
the fact that there are different roles for
men and women,
it's the way which human beings are built.
And number 2, it's actually desirable.
Whereas you you find, like, for example, the
other books, we're talking about
how there's
disadvantageous
traits that women will have. She's saying, no.
Actually, when you have different roles,
we're actually designed to complement one another, and
that's something that's good. So she says that
the feminine ideal or the feminist ideal
is a unisex
society
where there's a single set of roles and
a single set of concerns
that are given precedence and everyone should have
the same goals and the same concerns and
the same roles.
And she says the feminist movement
gives preference
to traditional male roles
of financial support,
career success,
and decision making.
She's saying, well, what happens in western feminism,
the one that we're talking about here, she's
saying, if everyone is supposed to be in
the same role, they're supposed to have the
same goals, the same values, and going towards
the same direction,
she's saying, which
in Islam, if there's different roles, generally that
are assigned,
which traits
are given precedence
in western feminism? She says these 3, and
these are traditionally
the male roles. So they're given precedence over
the other roles, which are the domestic matters,
childcare,
aesthetics,
social relationships,
etcetera.
She's what happens is the women's traditional roles
become either devalued or they become despised and
they're looked down upon, and then therefore they
don't they're they're not an actual goal to
try and strive to to get to. Instead,
women should try to get to the male
traditional male roles, and that's where their success
actually lies. And then she says men and
women are being forced into a single mold,
whereas in Islam,
both of these roles
equally deserve respect. 1 is not seen as
superior than the other. In fact, they're seen
as complementary,
and they're seen both as being praised and
one is not superior to the other. But
from the western feminist framework, one of them
is viewed as being categorically
superior to the other, whether it's power or
whether it's money or whether it's, you know,
all of these things that we mentioned.
Then she says
that
having a division of labor
along * lines
is actually beneficial to the larger group. Meaning,
having this division of labor is beneficial to
the greater group which is the family as
a whole. She says the roles of men
and women are equal,
but they're not identical.
And she says when they become identical,
there is
a green light for competition
rather than for complementing one another. And then
inter competition happens within the spouses.
And then she says, economic responsibilities
differ. And the reason why they differ is
because
reproduction and child rearing differ.
They only apply for women. So she's saying
that women are not equally responsible economically
because,
you know, the fact that women are not
equally responsible economically
is not a type of gender inequality.
But instead, it's a type of compensation
for another duty, and that is the child
rearing and the services and all of the
other things that she's talking about.
And then she talks about inheritance, and inheritance
is one of those things that we can't,
you know, even talk about,
this topic without, you know, usually getting into
that. So she says that the inheritance rates
in Islam and the inheritance rates that exist
in the Quran,
they're part of a comprehensive system
of male financial responsibility,
and you have to understand them from the
whole
perspective. Okay? So just to give you some
insight in here, you know,
people have this perception that women always get
less than a man gets in inheritance.
That's not the case. You know, we have
a class on inheritance, you know, in our
school, California Islamic University.
And when you study inheritance, it's not always
the case. So let's
give an example. A woman dies. She leaves
a husband,
a father, and a daughter.
2 males, 1 female. K?
The husband will get 1 fourth of her
inheritance. The father will get one fourth of
her inheritance. The daughter will get half of
her inheritance.
So in this case, just one random example,
the daughter will actually get double the inheritance
of the 2 males which were surviving here.
So it's not always the case. But it's
the case
when there's a daughter and there's a son
from the same,
what do you call it? From the same,
not the same line.
The same plane. Okay. Whatever. The same
blood
distance from,
the the person who passed away, the deceased.
I'm getting tired now. So the person from
the deceased. So,
it's considered to be half. So you say,
well, why is it half? Why does a
why does a son get double the share
of inheritance than a woman? She says you
have to understand in the context that
this son is supposed to be financially responsible.
When he gets married, he's financially responsible for
his household. When the woman gets married, she's
not financially responsible
for a household.
And we can continue to, you know, reflect
upon that for a long time. But she
makes that point. And she says, if you
don't see it as a whole, you're not
gonna understand what the rules are. So then
she comes to the solution. And she says,
okay,
what is the solution
to this dilemma?
She says, should we maintain the status quo
that exists
in Muslim societies today?
And she writes a giant no way. Right?
Which basically means that she's saying that, no,
The Muslim countries or the Muslim lands, they
are not
representing Islamic ideals by any means
at all. Right? So they are not good
role models or examples to look at in
terms of what we're trying to actually achieve.
But some of the things we need to
understand, she says, first of all, that
the idea of a separate legal status for
women, which was part of the first wave
feminist movement,
which we talked about in some of the
earlier writings here, she says that is something
that Islam has already given to women when
the Quran was first revealed. So she has
a separate identity. She has the right to
own property. She has the right to contract.
She has the right to earn. Her marriage
does not affect her legal status. If there's
a crime, her criminal penalties are equal to
the same criminal penalties that have exist for
a man. All of that stuff has been
equal, whereas in Western Europe where feminism was
originating and being developed,
it was not the case. So she said
we need to go back and we need
to understand, first of all, a lot of
these ideas,
right, were particular to one part of the
world or maybe different parts of the world,
but Islam didn't really have that issue.
Then she addresses the issue of polygyny or
polygamy.
We're gonna skip that for now because it's
gonna become very long. And then she gives
some tips for women's rights workers. So she
says, look,
those people who are working for women's rights,
here's something you need to keep in mind.
She says, Islam gave women many of the
first wave rights,
first wave feminism. So these things tend to
generally be irrelevant
for Muslims.
So that's one thing we need to understand.
And then she says, the second thing you
need to understand is you need to look
at the other goals of the 2nd wave
feminism, and 3rd wave is just a reiteration
of 2nd wave saying that it has not
been achieved. So some goals are diametrically
opposed to Islamic values, and they should never
be accepted, and they will never be accepted.
So the more you try to implement that
on Muslims,
they're not gonna accept those things which are
not part of,
you know,
part of the Islamic ethos or the Islamic,
you know, foundational
understanding.
And then she says that there's an intercultural
incompatibility
between the idea of feminism and the perception
of Islam
when it comes to women,
their rights, their status, their perspective and the
idea of family. She's saying that feminism was
conceived in the west
and the primary goal
was to remove
the legal impediments that existed in England and
in France and in other parts of the
world. And she says most of the laws
were derived from Christianity.
They were derived from a feudal system.
And then there was an industrial revolution that
took place.
Women were needed in the workforce,
and according to her,
the reason why most of those changes happened,
those changes took place,
was because
of that industrial revolution and the fact that
women were needed.
It was not just something where people's moral
sentiments somehow shifted or changed, but they were
actually needed for a particular purpose, and that's
why the laws began to change as well.
So then she says, what would an Islamic
feminism
actually look like?
She says feminism
has viewed religion
as the main opponent
of its progress, as you've seen in the
story of Adam and Eve and Mary and
all of these critiques.
And she says, but Islam needs to be
viewed as the ally to actually achieve some
of some of the goals that were there,
and we should not somehow all of a
sudden
put Islam, you know, on trial and think
that all of a sudden Islam is somehow
a problem, the way that Judaism and Christianity
was a problem for people who were fighting
for women's rights as being part of the
feminist movement. And then she mentions another point
at the end, and she's just about done
here, and she says feminism
should not chauvinistically
work for women's interests only.
That is a very important point.
Feminism should not chauvinistically
work for women's interests only, but it should
align with the wider interest to support society
as a whole.
And this is very important because
her dichotomy between individualism
and between the greater
social unit, whether it's family or something greater.
It's not just what is good for you,
it's what is good for a larger unit,
and then we can define what those units
are. And she concludes by saying that from
an Islamic perspective,
society is seen as an organic whole.
And she's referring to a hadith, which basically
says if one part of the ummah is
suffering,
one part of the community as a whole
is is in pain or something's going on,
the entire body suffers and feels that pain.
So she says we need to, you know,
rethink the way in which we view things
from an individualist
perspective and we look at them from a
holistic perspective. So she's basically saying that, in
a nutshell, that
Islam and feminism is kind of like a
Venn diagram. I didn't put one of these
slides in here, but it's like there's overlap.
And she's saying that overlap,
there's some things which are outside in the
realm of feminism that are outside the realm
of Islam, and then there's things which are
overlap. But she's warning people and saying before
we adopt a philosophy like this in total,
in, you know, in completely,
we need to be very cognizant of what
Islam is teaching, what Islamic values are, and
what is the feminist movement actually talking about
specifically.
Alright? So we're running out of time, unfortunately,
so I should have prepared better. That's my
fault. So I wanted to actually talk about,
another,
author,
who is professor Tim Winter from Cambridge University.
He's a Muslim scholar. He's a sheikh as
well. He wrote an article.
That picture just looks a little strange, so
I put another slide in there. So he
wrote an article called Boys Will Be Boys,
Gender Identity Issues. And this is a really
interesting article.
The summary of this article basically is
that there was a woman by the name
of Germaine Greer.
Anyone read Germaine Greer?
Nobody? Okay. So she wrote a book called
The Female Eunuch
or eunuch, in 1969.
Anyone know what a eunuch is? Am I
pronouncing it correctly?
Someone who's castrated.
A eunuch. Yeah.
Eunuch?
Eunuch, yeah. The female eunuch, someone who's castrated.
So she's basically saying that, you know, females
are, you know, kind of society has basically
castrated women to become subservient and to become
sexless, and then she defines what that is.
But what's really interesting so this I'm gonna
summarize real quick what his thing is. Otherwise,
I could go for another hour or 2.
He
she wrote that in 1969.
In 1999,
she wrote another book called The Whole Woman,
and she's a very, you know, very important
woman in the feminist movement in the sixties.
She wrote a book called The Whole Woman
in 1999,
where she critiqued her former self. And she
says, 30 years ago, I've been propounding
these ideas,
and you know what?
We were mistaken about one particular thing, and
that is the idea of equality feminism.
There's something instead called difference feminism, where we
need to acknowledge and accept that men and
women now are proven biologically,
proven neurologically
to be different
from males. And people in the past didn't
know that. Freud did not have the science
and the technology to figure that out. Marx
did not have the science and technology to
figure that out. When David Hume and Thomas
Paine were writing about egalitarianism,
they did not have the understanding to figure
that out in terms of conclusively prove it.
And she's saying, now we've proved it. So
we need to change our discourse and our
understanding of what feminism is, and there's this
new movement that she kind of has become
part of, what's called difference feminism. Some of
you may have heard of it or whatever
it is. So what
doctor Winter is arguing
in the very long article, an essay that
he writes,
is that
there is a congruence
or there's a compatibility
between what Islam is saying
about men and women
and what this new age difference feminism or
the revised feminism
that people are kind of starting to gravitate
towards, there's a congruence between the two of
these, and we should investigate that in more
detail. Okay? So maybe we can have a
seminar on this someday because it's definitely longer,
but open it up for a few questions
inshaAllah, sala Allah. Yes.
Sure. Doctor Murad or doctor Winter is 19
9, probably 2,001.
If you just type boys will be boys,
gender identity issues, you'll find it. If you
type the title of doctor Lamia, Islamic Traditions
and the Feminist Movement, you'll find it as
well. So if you wanna find it, you
can find it on Google.
You couldn't find it? Email me.
Oh, okay. Okay. I can look it up
for you for the I don't know the
year of this one, but
I can look it up for you. I
think she was assassinated in the nineties, late
nineties, I believe. So it's probably somewhere before
that, but I can look it up for
you, Insha'Allah.
Any other questions?
Before the nineties? In the eighties?
Subhanallah.
Early eighties. Subhanallah.
Yeah.
They were Subhanallah. They were a really amazing
couple, but, they produced a lot. Any other
questions?
I've never had a talk with so few
questions at the end.
Either you're being
courteous and nice to me or
okay.
Kher. Okay. If anyone does wanna discuss it,
if anyone does again, I mentioned if anyone
disagrees, if anyone is gonna be like, you
know what? We're never gonna attend a talk
by this sheikh ever again in our life,
you know, I'm open to critique, I'm open
to meeting with you.
1986? She she died in 1986? Okay. Jazakamu
alayra.
So yeah. So I'm open to that. We
can make an appointment. We can talk about
it insha'Allah.
Otherwise,
would anybody be interested in attending, like, a
full seminar
on feminism?
Yes? Just raise your hand. Would any men
be interested in that? Okay. Okay. So now
we can organize it. What would 3 hours?
6 hours? 9 hours? What works for you?
I mean, I could I could go for,
you know I've read a lot on this
subject, and it's a very important subject for
me. I've been reading for 20 years on
this. So,
2 day seminar or 1 day seminar?
I'm getting no's. I'm getting
2. Alright. What happens is people don't make
it past the 1st day and then the
second day is empty. So, inshallah, we organize
a one day seminar on this, inshallah. Alright?
May Allah
help us to understand what is correct and
true and help guide us towards that. Ameen.