The Philosophy of Gender in Islam

The Philosophy of Genderin Islam

Articles - Women in Islam

Wednesday, 01 Sha'ban 1428

If God is a man, that’s bad news for women – because masculinity would then be divine – and hence only the male would have been created in the divine image. This explains why the feminist revolution has redefined God as being both male and female. Islam declares that Allah Most High created both the male and the female but is neither male nor female. In addition, He never appeared in the person of anyone, male or female. And so neither at point of creation, nor at any time thereafter, has the male ever defined the female in Islam. Islam is thus unique in offering to women the opportunity to pray to a God who is not a man.

Nor has Islam ever discriminated between the male and the female in an unjust way. A woman complained to the Prophet (peace be upon him) that divine revelation in the Qur’an was addressing men only. What about women? she asked. In response, revelation came down in the Qur’an that addressed both men and women in such constant repetition that the matter was conclusively settled that Allah Most High does not discriminate in matters concerning gender in any unjust way. Indeed the blessed Prophet declared that all of mankind (male and female) would stand before Allah on the Last Day “as equal in His sight as are the teeth of a comb.”

The Qur’an has clearly established that men have (a measure of) authority over women, and has obliged a woman to be obedient to her husband (or guardian). In this connection Islam has gone to great lengths to reaffirm the natural order pertaining to the status, role and function of gender in society. Consider the following:

• The Qur’an refers to Allah Most High in the masculine, and never in the feminine gender. (The masculine gender in Arabic does not necessarily connote masculinity.)

• The Prophets sent by Allah to mankind to function as spiritual guides and leaders were all men. There was never a woman Prophet. But there is a perverted European effort which seeks to promote Mary to Prophethood.

• Although angels are neither male nor female the Qur’an gives them male names and denounces those who give them female names.

• When a child is born a thanksgiving feast called ‘Aqiqah’ is held. For a male child two animals must be sacrificed, but a female child requires the sacrifice of only one animal.

• The Prophet said that “the best row (in congregational prayer) for men is the first, and the worse is the last. And the best row for women is the last, and the worse is the first” (Sahih Muslim).

Thus men were placed physically in front of women in prayer for all times. A misguided American woman, in true Yankee style, recently put herself in front of all the Muslim men (the Americans call them guys) and led them in a completely invalid Islamic congregational prayer in a Euro-Christian church. America is a strange place! 

Every morning when the sparkling sunshine envelops us as we welcome the ‘day’ as ‘day’, and every night as we gaze in wonder at the romance of the stars and moonlight and recognize ‘night’ as ‘night’, the splendor and harmonious symphony of gender overwhelms us. It is this that Islam seeks to preserve, even as the essentially godless European world and its carbon copies around the world struggle to overturn it.

Nevertheless Islam does employ a philosophy of gender that reinforces the functional differences of the male and the female in society, and that is the focus of our essay. The Qur’an teaches analogically that as day and night are functionally different yet interdependent, so too are the male and female. The ominous warning is that if this were ever to be changed, if the ‘night’ were to attempt to become ‘day’ and the sacred order of gender were to be overturned, as in the modern feminist revolution, then the anarchy and disintegration of society that would ensue would be equivalent of cosmic mayhem. The process of unraveling of social order has already commenced. The police service knows this quite well. But so many who have eyes yet cannot see, and cannot connect ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.

Source

The Philosophy of Gender in Islam