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Hadith #34 - "We Used to Have No Regard for Women"

April 20, 2018Dr. Omar Suleiman

What are Islam’s solutions to the clear problem of injustices against women? In Hadith #34 of the 40 Hadiths on Social Justice series, Sh. Omar Suleiman discusses gender equity in Islam.

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
If the people on the screen can't hear you, then it's too loud. It's a new rule that we have. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Alhamdulillah wa salatu wa salam wa rasulullah wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa man wala. So we're getting to the last 6-7 hadith now of the 40 hadith series. We're not going to finish before Ramadan as I wanted to, but inshallah ta'ala we'll finish before I leave for Hajj, before I leave slightly before Eid al-Adha. It's too loud, isn't it? It's way too loud. So, inshallah we'll have about 4 halaqas left to do, 3 or 4 halaqas left to do after Ramadan inshallah, which we'll knock out probably a week after Eid. But I do recognize that sometimes there are topics that you want to get in, and as I keep on looking through the topics, I'm like, oh there's another topic, there's another topic, so it comes out to like 50-60. So we'll see what happens, but I do plan on keeping it as a 40 collection inshallah and covering as much as we can within 40, just for the sake of staying true to the name. We've covered a lot of ground though. If you go back and you look through the topics that we've covered so far, we've hit on many issues and I would hope that everyone goes through the notes and goes through, I think we're good now, we're good. Is it good now? Yeah, it's good now. So I think if everyone goes through the notes and makes sure that they've covered the entire series, then there's really a reframing of many different issues. Now some of the more sensitive issues are the ones that are in popular discourse are harder to discuss within the context of justice because there are some things that are clear reforms from an Islamic perspective, meaning there is a clear violation and it would be recognized even by the American Muslim in the 21st century as a violation of rights or an injustice in the 7th century, and Islam came and did away with that. And no one would dispute that Islam made a reform to a particular problem.
And then there are some issues that are more complicated. Like racism is not a very complicated one, I would hope, though to some people it might be. But there is a problem and Islam comes and has a very explicit tradition, anti-racist tradition, and that's what made it so popular to many of the liberation movements that have existed, starting with Edward Blyden in Africa in the 18th century and beyond, where people identify Islam as a liberating theology. So Islam is a justice-based theology. But what happens when there is a discussion about something where what is considered justice is so hotly disputed and debatable? So what happens, for example, I'm going to use the word feminism, when a discussion of feminism takes place. What is liberation of women? So there's a clear problem. There are violations of women's rights around the world, and we would say that Islam has solutions to them. But there are certain ideologies or certain iterations, especially certain iterations maybe to a greater extent of feminism as it exists, that would completely negate that and would actually view what we would view as a reform, as Muslims, as being regressive. So what happens when you're dealing with new ideologies, and not just new ideologies, but ideologies that are in constant evolution and a religion that's supposed to be timeless? How do you actually reconcile between those two things? It's a very difficult discussion. So I'm going to start this class with a question, and I hope someone gets the right answer. It will make me feel really good about the first 34 halafas. If you could say, if someone asked you, what did Islam do for women? What's the greatest thing that Islam did for women? What would be your response? I want to hear some answers. Men can answer too.
You're a man. You can answer. Make them look good. All right. How old are you? You don't mind me asking how old are you? Okay, you can tell me. Okay, mashallah. For everyone on the stream. All right. Acknowledge their value. Acknowledge their value in society. Can you be more, can you clarify? Is that the definition of value though? Close. Don't finish my halafa for me though. You don't mind? Because you're mentioning some things I'm supposed to be quoting. The stream can't hear you. The answer is correct between both of you, which is the greatest contribution that Islam made to women's rights is recognizing the full humanity of a woman, which was revolutionary, that was unheard of, especially in spaces of theology, especially from a theological perspective. In fact, from an Abrahamic perspective, hot debates that would continue on until modern times, the recognition of a woman's full humanity, a woman's full humanity. Now, before I even go into the details of that, I want to share with you all an experience I had a few weeks ago. I was reading this article online, and it was talking about the disproportionate amount of nudity for women,
excuse me for being blunt, or how women are portrayed nude in movies in Hollywood. And I'm reading the first half of this article, and I'm going, great. It's talking about the objectification of women, and how that's a problem, and how this is regressive, and how this isn't okay. And it was talking about particularly in ads and magazines and stuff like that, even the idea, what are the cognitive responses to seeing many women in a picture posing in a certain way, and how that feeds objectification. And I'm reading the first half of the article, and I'm going, this is fantastic. Except that the second part of the article was that the solution is to put more nude men in ads and movies, and to objectify men more often, to settle that equilibrium. I'm sitting there reading, I'm like, how is this okay? So Islam's reform and recognition of the full humanity of a woman would also be a response to that too, right? But no, or most current day iterations of feminism would not tackle that as an issue that needs to be dealt with from a feminist paradigm. Especially when we're talking about third wave feminism. Another experience I'll share with you. I was teaching a class, Islam and the Civil Rights Movement, last semester at SMU. I'll be teaching it again this coming semester, inshallah. So you might hear me talk about Malcolm X for an hour or three hours, but this is a full class where we go into the full history of Islam and the Civil Rights Movement, biographical and sociological and political, and what that meant, and how theology also accommodated and was accommodated in the Civil Rights Movement. And we're reading this book, and one of the books that we read is Women in the Nation, which is a book by Dr. Jamila Karim and Dawn Marie Gibson, Women in the Nation. So she talks about the transition of women from the Nation of Islam into Sunni Islam and some of the differences, the things that had to be negotiated. If you look at the Nation of Islam, one of their distinctive features, and one of their most attractive features, is discipline. A whole lot of discipline.
It benefited Malcolm. People benefit from that discipline, right? So the uniformity of the Nation. And there's a strong emphasis on gender roles in the Nation. And we had this debate in class, and it was women and women that were debating what was written in the books, because basically the book has a bunch of different experiences from women that transitioned between the Nation and Sunni Islam as how they viewed empowerment. Did they feel empowered by the way that the Nation of Islam looked at women or treated women, or did they feel belittled by it? And it was very interesting because when we had that discussion in class, the women in class had very different views. My students had a very... it was a respectful debate. Obviously everyone was doing it and trying to come to a conclusion. But there was great variation in how empowerment would be viewed. Whether the way that women in the Nation of Islam were looked at was empowering or degrading, diminishing. In fact, and I didn't watch Beyoncé's stuff, I just have a news alert. Anything about Malcolm X that comes up in academia, I get an alert about it. So apparently she referenced some sort of clip in one of her performances where Malcolm is talking about in his Nation of Islam days, this was in his post in 1962 or 1963, where he says the most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. And he actually says, we will kill you for our women. Now that protectiveness could be looked at as belittling to some. Whereas others could take pride in it. And the debate that took place in class was very fascinating because what it came down to is that if you look at the socio-historical influences, particularly in a Jim Crow era, in the Jim Crow era, black women were so tired of seeing black men emasculated
that the empowerment of black men meant the empowerment of the black human being, period. So black women, many black women felt empowered and do feel empowered. So the point is that ideology, especially in the modern day where ideology is more fluid than it's ever been, can be very short-sighted sometimes and can be very restricted to one particular socio-cultural context. And so the debate about technicalities and what is empowerment versus what is diminishing will show that difference. And that's in, we're talking about grad students at a well-to-do university, so well-to-do grad students, then what about a woman in Valley Ranch that lives in a 4,000 square foot home versus a woman in Palestine, in Gaza, that has seven kids and lives in the slums? Are they going to have different views as to what is empowerment versus what is diminishing? Of course they will. If we can't have that, if there are going to be different views within a classroom to that extent in the United States, two people that live in the same time but still have different experiences, then what does that say about two people that live in completely different contexts? Now what does that say about a woman then, or how would you compare the view of a woman now or the view of a man now in regards to empowerment versus what's diminishing to someone that lives in Arabia in the 7th century? You see the problem here? So we have to first take a step back, and what's the greatest way to deal with this subject first and foremost? The restoration of full humanity. The best way to decide whether a faith tradition was empowering versus diminishing is to see how women felt with the advent of Islam in 7th century Arabia
as the revelation was coming, and how the men now viewed women as a result of the revelation of the Quran and the Sunnah. We talked about complementarianism and differential feminism and these types of things when we talked about the rights or how rights are conceived in a marriage in Islamic tradition. We talked about that, so if you go back to that lecture, we did touch on this subject a bit, but I want to focus on that. So we start off with two sayings, and there's a paper that we wrote at Yafin called We Used to Have No Regard for Women, Gender Equity in the Advent of Islam. So you can actually go through it. There are three papers that I'd recommend, or four papers actually, on our website. One of them is going to be released next week, inshallah. One of them is Honor Killings by Dr. Jonathan Brown, looking at honor killings. So when you think honor killings, what do you associate it with, or the average American associates it with? Not just Muslims, but particularly like brown Muslims in a very particular area, right? Whereas the country which has the most honor killings per capita is El Salvador. So how our views have been so skewed in regards to the situation of women around the world, and a lot of times we ourselves have internalized this idea that Muslims are more backwards in regards to women's rights than any other group of people, whereas most of the time these things are regional versus religious anyway. The way that women will be treated in a region will usually not differ radically between culture or religion. It's about the region itself. In any case, that's one paper. The other paper is the one that I just mentioned, which I'll talk about. We Used to Have No Regard for Women, Gender Equity in the Advent of Islam. The other one is Why Ideological Bandwagons Fail Islam, a paper on feminism. It's just a primer. Why Ideological Bandwagons Fail in Islam, or Are Failing Muslims?
The next one, inshallah, is a paper next week that's going to be released, which is Examining Myths in Islamic Law about Women, examining actually questions of inheritance and testimony and domestic violence and these types of things, so actually scrutinizing those myths and how they have come to be viewed as normative, inshallah ta'ala. That will be next week, as I said. But I just mentioned that the most revolutionary thing that Islam did was restoring the full humanity of women. The best way to decide whether it's an empowering tradition or not is to look at how women viewed themselves with the advent of Islam and how men now readjusted their lens in regards to women with the advent of Islam. So you take it from two directions. It first starts off with Omar bin Khattab, radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhum. Now Omar has a very proud personality, especially prior to Islam. Harshness is what he's known for. He's known for having a domineering personality. And Omar is the one who has this quote. He says, kunna fil jahibiyya la na'uddu din nisa'i shayya. Starts off with this. It's powerful. He says, in the days of ignorance, we used to have no regard for women whatsoever. hatta anzalallahu fihinnama anzal Until Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala revealed about them what he revealed. qasamalahunnama qasam And allotted for them what he allotted. I'm going to say that again. We used to have no regard, in the days of ignorance, we used to have no regard for women until Allah revealed about them what he revealed and allotted for them or apportioned for them what he apportioned. What does Omar prioritize here? The law or the view of the essential value, the intrinsic value of women? Starts with that, right?
And we used to have no regard for them until Allah revealed about them what he revealed. Then it comes to the legal aspects of it as well, what Allah allotted for them as well. What about women? How did women feel about the tradition? Find a hadith, find any situation. And our tradition is revealing, right? Because it takes into consideration the lowest perspective in society, the perspective of a layperson in society. These things were collected in books. Can you find sahabiyat, female companions of the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, who felt like Islam diminished them? Or is it across the board that women themselves felt empowered by the message of the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam? And that's actually a challenge. You can find the tradition where a woman mentions that she felt like the tradition diminished her as opposed to empowered her. Then do so. In fact, there's a hadith or there's a saying where the women mentioned, and it's authentic, that they said that Allah and his messenger are more merciful to us than ourselves. Allah and his messenger are more merciful to us than ourselves. So it starts off with the restoration of humanity, and then it goes to the spirit in which the law, the framework of the law is conceived in the first place. And then everything is based off of that. So you have to look at the paradigm first. What is the paradigm shift that's taking place with the lens of a man like Umar al-Khattab? And also Umm Salama radiallahu ta'ala anha. This is a powerful narration where she says to the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, she says, you know, all the verses in the Quran, even though when they're praising the believers, in the Arabic language, when you say al-mu'mineen without saying al-mu'minat, when you say the believers, it means believing men and women.
But still, you know, the craving for that specific reward for al-mu'minat, the acknowledgement for the believing women. And when she lodged that complaint to the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, she's combing her hair and she hears the revelation that the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, is mentioning, revelation has come to him, inna al-mu'mineena wal-mu'minat wal-muslimina wal-muslimat wal-qanitina wal-qanitat, and so on and so forth in surah al-Ahzab, where Allah mentions the believing men, the believing women, the Muslim men, the Muslim women, the devout men, the devout women, the charitable men, the charitable women, those that seek forgiveness from the men, those that seek forgiveness from the women, all the way to the end, all these categories. And Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, has promised for them their full reward without any deficiency whatsoever. I forgot to mention the hadith. It's the 40 hadith class. I should probably start with the hadith. So what's the hadith that outlines all of this? How many of you have heard the hadith, fear Allah, be conscious of Allah, walaw bishaqi tamra, or be conscious of the punishment of God, even with half a date? Everyone's heard that, right? So the word is shaqi tamra. Shaqi tamra is literally if you took a date and you tore it in half, which was common for people that were trying to conserve, people that didn't have enough food. There's a famous narration where a woman came to her, and Aisha gave her charity, gave her three dates. She had two hungry children. She gave both of them a date, and then she was about to eat hers, and then they complained for more. So what did she do? She tore it in two, and then she gave it to her two daughters. And when Aisha was so touched by that, she told the Prophet, Sallallahu alaihi wasallam, and the Prophet, Sallallahu alaihi wasallam, said that Allah has entered her into paradise by that action. That action alone was enough to guarantee that woman paradise, right? So shaqi tamra, when someone's hungry or when someone's trying to split something, or they've got to, you split the date in half, right? The Prophet, Sallallahu alaihi wasallam, said,
an-nisaa shaqa'aq al-rijal. Women are the twin halves of men. He used that same language. Women are the twin halves of men. I know because the translation of that hadith is usually kind of awkward. innama an-nisaa shaqa'aq al-rijal. That women are the twin halves of men. What that's speaking to is essential value, and what that's speaking to is the value of the Prophet. It's wholeness in humanity. And then everything else is viewed within that spirit. So any difference in law, first of all, the default is that in legislation, in roles and responsibilities, wa laa hunna mithr al-ladi alaihina bil ma'ruf. For them is like that which is upon them. So the default is that everything, even in regards to the law, is equal, unless specified otherwise. Unless something is specified, a difference is specified. That difference is not specified because of the value of a person being different. You know, because when you say, for example, when you say differential, like in this country, they said separate but equal. Do they really mean separate but equal? Was Jim Crow separate but equal? Was that really a thing? No. And by the way, even now in integration, it's still not a thing. There is no equality. Okay? There are just more different ways to degrade parts of your population, but doing it in a more sophisticated way so that people notice it a little bit less. It's not as obvious as the two water fountains being next to each other. All right? So when the law differs, it doesn't differ, or the role or the responsibility does not differ out of the inherent superiority of one gender over the other. Is that clear? Now why is it revolutionary to recognize the full humanity? So, you know, I could read off a bunch of quotes from Aristotle. Everyone's heard of Aristotle, right? Aristotle who said, a woman is defective and a misbegotten man.
All right? Or you could read the literature of the church, the Catholic Church in particular. You could read Hammurabi's Law, the oldest laws and how those conceived of women, and what that meant from a legal perspective. So if a man strikes a pregnant woman, thereby causing her to miscarry and die, the assailant's daughter shall be put to death in the oldest book of law. All right? You kill the assailant's daughter because God forbid, you actually hold the man accountable. All right? So you can find those things and you can find, you know, debates that are taking place even within the Abrahamic corpus. Till now, by the way. So the Nidda laws, the Nidda laws, for example, in Judaism. Judaism has reform, conservative, and orthodox, right? So when a woman is on her menses, does she contaminate utensils? Does she need to be isolated? Is she forbidden from supplication? And does she have to atone? Because the word atonement is used in Leviticus by casting a stone, or you know, when she finishes, or offering, you know, an atonement for her uncleanliness during her menstruation. So what's the difference between that and Ha'id and how those laws are in Islam, right? So there are debates that take place in there and what that meant from the text. And was there a feeling of punishment or degradation that wasn't about law, but it was about the value of a woman as a whole? And of course, you were just hinting on, it's actually the Council of Macon in the year 585. This is a debate about whether or not women had souls. So you go from debates about whether a woman is soulless, to, إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ The most noble of you in the sight of God is the one who is most pious. And Allah mentioning at the beginning of the verse, إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُمْ مِنْ ذَكْرٍ وَأُنْسَىٰ وَجَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلًا We created you from male and female,
nations and tribes, so that you may get to know one another. The most noble of you is the one who is most pious, right? So you go from equality, equity and salvation, the same equality and salvation, equality and reward. Is there any difference in Islam when a man does something or a woman does something in terms of ajr, in terms of reward, in terms of spirituality, in terms of taqwa, in terms of ihsan, you know, faith and excellence and all of these different types of things? No. That's revolutionary. That was something, the recognition of that full humanity. So recognizing that Islam was born into that world as a whole, and then also it's important to recognize where the derogatory law comes from. All right? So obviously, we know that in the Arab world, the poorer tribes, they used to bury their daughters alive. It was a common practice. Okay? وَإِذَا الْمَوْؤُدَةُ سُئِلَتْ بِأَيِّ ذَمْ بِنْ قُتِلَتْ Right? So Allah condemns the practice of burying the girl alive. But then Allah goes back, Allah also mentions what? وَإِذَا بُشِّرَ أَحَدُهُم بِالْأُنْثَةِ When one of you is given the good news of a daughter, you know, ظَلَّ وَجْهُهُ مُسْوَدًا كَأَنَّهُ قَدِيمًا That a person's face is covered with darkness and they're embarrassed and ashamed, like, wait, before you get to the burying her, you've already buried her value. And that's what allows you as a society to be okay with people burying their daughters alive. And not bat an eyelid at it, right? That this is something that's become acceptable because of the very way that women were conceived of. The marital schemes that existed in the time of the Prophet ﷺ. Now this is something, I remember when I did first course in fiqh al-usra and the fiqh family. And I looked at the book on marital schemes and I said, hmm, I had all these different names for marital schemes. And I was like, okay, so I'm guessing this is like monogamy and polygamy. I'm guessing that's what marital schemes means, right? When you look at fiqh al-usra.
And I opened up and there were 12 jahili, 12 marital schemes from the days of ignorance. So for example, the quote of Ibn Abbas that when a man's father would die, he would be most entitled to his wife. Yes, you heard that right. If he wished, he would keep her for himself or hold her until she is ransomed with a bridal dowry or she dies and takes her wealth. Not poverty, okay? The strange marital schemes of men actually sending their women to be intimate with others so that they could have a child from a more noble tribe and actually enacting contracts around that. You go from that to the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalam telling a young girl that comes to him and says, my father married me off without my permission. And the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalam saying, you have the right to either continue with that marriage or to let it go, that your consent is necessary. You go from that to a society where it was normal for people to trade wives. And by the way, I'm not even gonna talk, but I mean, you think about where we are right now as a society and, all right, so things are differently packaged, but they essentially do the exact same thing, all right? So you look at marital schemes as they existed and then you look at the rights and the contracts and the necessary obligations and prerequisites and terminology, just the terminology that surrounded zawaz, that surrounded marriage as a whole with the advent of Islam. Iddah. In Islam, when a, the widow has to observe a waiting period, right? Is she punished? Is she blamed for her husband's death? Is she looked at as being lower because her husband died in society? Is she, I mean, what happens with iddah? Well, what happened before Islam and jahiliyya was something called iftidat.
It's actually so disgusting, it's hard for me to read it and because the kids are in the room, I'll actually be a little bit kind, but you can look up iftidat. Zainab, radhiallahu anha, said that when a woman's husband would die, she would be confined to a small dark room. She would don her worst clothes. She would not touch perfume or anything similar until an entire year passed away. Then, after the year, she'd come out of this small room, a dungeon, basically, and she would be brought an animal, a donkey, a bird, or a lamb, and she would do iftidat with it. Iftidat is the wiping of the private with that. That was common in their society. And then she would cast it as a sign of her bereavement. Like, it was punishment and torture for her. Their iddah, the spirit of their iddah, as it's described in Islam, was described with what? Out of consideration for the woman and her well-being after her husband passes away. So not confining to a dungeon or forcing to cast some sort of stone or to harm yourself. And obviously, it's in that same spirit that you have like sati in some places where a woman is widow-burning and stuff like that. In that same idea that you are somehow a curse, you brought a curse upon the family by your very existence and by your very being. So Islam actually shifting iftidat versus iddah. What about the way that hayd, menstruation, was viewed? The revolutionary rhetoric of the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, saying, a believer is never impure. The believer is never impure. Meaning what? That ritual impurity does not mean spiritual impurity or you're soulless or you're to be punished or you're to be looked down upon. In fact, the hadith, innama nisa shiqaq alrijal, comes in the discussion, the long hadith, it comes in the bottom of a discussion about janabah versus men and women, ritual impurity versus men and women. And the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam,
is saying essentially ritual impurity for the man and the woman is the same. Janabah, with very slight differences, ritual impurity for the man and the woman is the same. The Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, you read some of the hadith and you're like, why was this such a big deal back then? The Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, still touching his wife when she was menstruating, still kissing her, still showing her kindness, still being in the same room, was revolutionary, not just for Arabian society, but Abrahamic text. Because Islam is an extension, looked up, the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, is coming with the same revelation as Ibrahim and Musa and Isa, alayhimu's-salam. So how is it then that a woman is not isolated because that was the practice of Ahlul Kitab, the people of the book, was that a woman would actually not sleep in the same room and she would be confined to a different room. That was the practice of the people of the book in Medina. So they were like, wait, so we're different in that regard. The Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, telling Aisha, radiallahu anha, when she cried in Hajj because of her ritual impurity and the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, said, you are not cursed, this is merely something that Allah has given to the daughters of Adam, alayhimu's-salam. But then who are the daughters of Adam, alayhimu's-salam? What's revolutionary about not blaming Eve for the mistake of Adam? Because if you look at all the literature that belittled women from a theological perspective, it used the angle of daughters of Eve. So daughters of Eve are evil, not inherently evil. So Allah, azza wa jal, changing the entire conversation about how we look at Adam and Eve. It actually has, if you're gonna restore the humanity of a person, you actually need to go back to how humanity starts, all right? So if the woman is blamed for the action of the man from the start, and that's how it's going to be projected
for the rest of history, then that opens the door for blame in the realm of widow, in the realm of iddah, iftihad, the widow, and all the other things, that these are curses and punishments and what have you. So it's important to start off from that. And by the way, I do mention this, because it's important. I talked about the difference between how a woman would view feminism, a black woman, a woman in particular in Jim Crow era in America versus a white woman in 2018, and how feminism would be viewed, or third wave feminism, or a very particular iteration of feminism would be viewed differently by those two. When you think about this barbaric treatment of women, as I said, we have to ask ourselves, and this is about reframing the conversation, and this is gonna be a really, it might be a problematic or controversial statement. Are women in the 21st century in America really less objectified than they were in Mecca in the 7th century? It's a discussion to have, okay? So what is objectification? What is taking away the humanity of a person? And when you look at what happens in some places where prescriptive secularism is, because anywhere where prescriptive secularism has taken over, it has become far more oppressive than any religious system in history. Europe in the 20th century is enough of that. Communism, Nazism, Malcolm X calls it American dollarism, is just as bad as European imperialism, and all the isms that come were so much more oppressive. And you think about, like, if there was someone reading 1,400 years later about how in France a woman wearing a burkini on a beach, trying to cover her skin on a beach, has to have cops come apprehend her and make her take off her burkini, they might be talking about them in 1,400 years,
hopefully less than that, the way that we're talking about seventh century jahili Arabs, you understand? So the importance of reframing the conversation as a whole, and we have to be willing to do that, but it starts off with the restoration of full humanity, plus how ancient is ancient? Like, are we really talking about these systems that existed back in the day and don't exist anymore? Well, what about 19th and 20th century England and France, right, where during the reign of Henry VIII, the English parliament prohibited women from reading the New Testament because they were inherently impure, not ritually impure, inherently impure, so women were not allowed to touch the Bible, to touch the New Testament up until the 19th century. And by the way, up until the year 1805, English law permitted a man to sell his wife for as little as six pennies. When you think about ownership rights and property rights in the United States and what that looks like, so you can mention how an inheritance law, for example, Islam brought inheritance, was the first religion, really theological system, period, to assign inheritance to women. But then you ask yourself, well, why is it that women inherit half of what men inherit? Isn't that still regressive? Is that someone's phone? I was about to say, someone has a really nice sedan in Valley Meadows. Not that we don't have great mu'adhinim, right? So if you were to look at that, I forgot my turn of thought. What was I saying? Inheritance. So for example, a question comes up, why is it that in Islam, a woman inherits half of what a man inherits? The average Muslim will respond, well, in Islam, the man is obliged to spend on his wife, right? What if I told you that out of 34 scenarios, a woman actually inherits more than a man in 30 out of 34? In the discussion of Muslim women, in the discussion of inheritance law.
It's not that black and white. So there's an average situation Islam takes into consideration, not just the cultural context, but the individual situation of people. And what that means. Testimony is the same thing. A woman's testimony is not half of a man's testimony. Making that statement unqualified is actually factually incorrect. Okay? Because guess what? There are many areas where a woman's testimony is not only to the same effect of a man, but it would actually even be more. Like in issues of rada'a and breastfeeding and things of that sort. So instead of getting caught up in these exceptions, not just exceptions, but really the law itself, you go back and you look at how the law is conceived, and is it conceived in a way that truly does belittle, demean, and diminish. And I would think that, this is where we look at, for example, honor killings. So if you open, I'm actually gonna do it right now because it's actually cool. And if you search honor killings in Islam, should be the first result that comes up. If it's not, then Yaqeen's not doing his job. But if you search honor killings in Islam, oh no, it's not the first results. This is a paper by Dr. Jonathan Brown on Yaqeen. He actually starts off with this situation. Islam is not the cause of honor killings, it's part of the solution. So he gives the scenario that took place. So this part of history, you're unlikely to read or hear about. In 1947, in the British colony of Nigeria, because you guys do know Africa was colonized, right? Black Panther didn't teach you guys that, did it? I'm not gonna have a killmonger debate right now. I'm just saying, you guys know Africa was colonized, right? All right, just making sure. 1947, in the British colony of Nigeria, English judges had to overturn what they viewed as the backward ruling of a local Sharia court.
You know, just like the Sharia courts we have in Irving. We got like 10 of them now, right? We don't have the same mayor, it's okay. We don't have to worry about that anymore. A man had been sentenced to death for murder, but the British, I have to mention, we don't have Sharia courts in Irving. The British Superior Court, the British Superior Court steps in on a Sharia court in Nigeria in 1947. What was the British Superior Court? The Sharia court had said that this man had to die. Why? Because that man killed his wife, okay? The British court overruled the Sharia court on the excuse that this was a crime of passion and a crime of passion is not punishable by death. So you can actually read this in case law in 1947 in the British colony of Nigeria, where the Sharia court was trying to prosecute the man to the fullest extent for killing his wife under the excuse that it was an honor killing. And the British Superior Court said, no, no, this was a crime of passion, this is excusable. Now, let me come to a conclusion on this, all right? Because I do think it's very important. I wanna mention this in particular. Islamic history should not be romanticized. The current state of the Muslim Ummah should not be romanticized. So to just say that Islam helped Muslim women realize their rights in the seventh century is not sufficient. Are there legitimate grievances? Yes, and usually when there are legitimate grievances, then there are illegitimate means to exploit or illegitimate agendas that exploit legitimate grievances. All right, so that's gonna happen. So obviously, and that's why the article about ideological bandwagon is important, is that it's not simply enough to deconstruct, though that's an important part of it, to deconstruct and to show the excesses of certain ideologies that operate and all the isms that exist and how incoherent they truly are, all right? Not enough to do that. It's important to speak to legitimate grievances
with the empowering nature of Islam and to actually have that shine through the Sunnah of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. So historical examples of women's rights are not enough. That same spirit of empowerment should be employed by modern-day Muslim scholars with an Islamic framework, speaking from truly the Quran and the Sunnah and an appropriate usul, an appropriate framework, as we have. And of course, the results did speak for themselves. You're talking about a generation of the companions, because at the end of the day, 40 hadiths of social justice, we do talk about the paradigm shift. You're talking about a society. Where a woman was buried physically after being buried in her value and looked at as an inherent curse. In the same generation, you can produce female Muslim scholars that could speak with authority to the entire generation of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, like Aisha radiallahu anha, and be recognized as an authority in her field. Not just be called the mother of the believers, but could speak as the authority on fiqh, the authority on jurisprudence. And of course, you can read in that paper about the two women that Omar radiallahu anhu appointed to oversee the marketplace, and then Shura, Shifa bint Abdullah al-Adawiyya, and different women that were elevated in their actual positions in society as a result of the reorienting of how women were viewed in their essential nature. Allahu ta'ala a'lam. Questions? No questions, great. Either that means I did a really good job, or that means that you guys are afraid to open up any subject. Yes?
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