Answering Secular Feminism -- Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

[Mujib]

[Mujib]

Muslim thinkers have been unconsciously secularized by a Western training into assuming that gender is about society, it’s all about society. And this is not ultimately the religious understanding, because, unlike the modern secular understanding, our understanding is that every principle has a meaning, and that Allah is never guilty of `abath or randomness or futility in any of the consistent principles which He has built into the structure of the universe and of our lives. Everything has a meaning. Every sura has a ma`na. And the attempt of modern Muslim feminists, in many cases very committed, religious women, to reflect upon gender in Islam has been drastically handicapped and even crippled by this forgetting of the fundamental principle that gender has to mean something. And it’s only when you can grasp what are Allah’s purposes in instituting this bifurcation of all of the higher animals, and certainly humanity, into two poles, only when you have grasped that can you really start to understand what the Shari`a’s agenda is in its allocation of roles, and spaces, and ideals differently to the two sexes. So we’ve put the cart before the horse, and we have accepted, unconsciously, a purely Western understanding of justice, which is that justice means equality. Now, our concept of justice is a thousand times more nuanced than that. Our concept of justice means ultimately not the equal access of human beings to goods and to services and to rights and to responsibilities and to opportunities for personal enjoyment. Our definition of justice may incidentally encompass some of those things, in its own way, but our definition of justice really is about the guaranteeing of human equality in the issue that really counts, which is becoming luminous candidates for salvation. That’s what we care about. Because this dunya doesn’t really last very long. It’s extremely sure that the end of our lives ka annahum yawma yarawnaha lam yalbathu illa `ashiyatan aw duhaha that day when the finally see it they will feel that they’d only remained in the dunya an evening or a forenoon; time is folded up for people at the end of their lives and at the qiyama. And what we really care about is providing men and women with equal, maximalized opportunities for becoming beings who are pleasing to Allah. And what secular critics, blinkered by atheism, make of our social arrangements is to us entirely irrelevant, because we don’t share their objectives – we don’t care. We might in our polemical moments say that even on their own terms they have failed to secure a happy society, but even that isn’t important to us. What is important is our own internal search for equality of opportunity for salvation, that’s the beginning and end of it, that’s all we care about; as people of tawhid we are single-minded. And Islam has sought to bring about that equality in different ways for men and for women. Now, it has done this in ways about which it’s hard to generalize, because one of the meanings of the statement of Rasulullah sallallahu `alayhi wa sallam that bu`ithtu linnasi kaffa I have been sent to all mankind, or, nas, which included women, is that his way has to be fully transformative for every human type, not just for Arabs and Persian and Englishman and the rest, that’s one meaning of it – one of his khasa’is is that his mission is for everybody, unlike earlier prophets who were only sent to their own peoples – (this is in the sound hadith) it also means sent to both genders, and it also means sent to every individual human type. And we all know that people are ashkal and ajnas. It is part of the wisdom, the creative genius of Allah that He should not have made human beings kind of identical androids, but that every human being should be unique; it’s an indication of His creative power, of His qudra, that He is badi`us-samawati wal-ard the iniciator, the splendid inaugurator of the heavens and the earth. It’s also an indication of his plentitude, because He wishes to be worshipped and He wishes that worship to take not just a totalitarian single form but to be a form of worship that’s multiple according to the multiplicity of human souls. And the salat means slightly different things to different participants in the salat; this is inevitable because human beings are different and they will interpret and benefit from the institutions of the religion in different ways; this is commonsensical. And it’s one of the miracles of the Shari`a that the detailed practices that were laid down 1400 years ago are still so imminently transformative and effective and attractive to an indefinite variety of human types today as they were then.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Excellent piece that should be translated into Pashto and disseminated. This author has identified key problems but one thing for him to consider is militant secularism and it's nihilism.

Muslim thinkers have been unconsciously secularized by a Western training into assuming that gender is about society, it’s all about society. And this is not ultimately the religious understanding, because, unlike the modern secular understanding, our understanding is that every principle has a meaning, and that Allah is never guilty of `abath or randomness or futility in any of the consistent principles which He has built into the structure of the universe and of our lives. Everything has a meaning. Every sura has a ma`na. And the attempt of modern Muslim feminists, in many cases very committed, religious women, to reflect upon gender in Islam has been drastically handicapped and even crippled by this forgetting of the fundamental principle that gender has to mean something. And it’s only when you can grasp what are Allah’s purposes in instituting this bifurcation of all of the higher animals, and certainly humanity, into two poles, only when you have grasped that can you really start to understand what the Shari`a’s agenda is in its allocation of roles,
and spaces, and ideals differently to the two sexes. So we’ve put the cart before
the horse, and we have accepted, unconsciously, a purely Western understanding of justice, which is that justice means equality. Now, our concept of justice is a thousand times more nuanced than that. Our concept of justice means ultimately not the equal access of human beings to goods and to services and to rights and to responsibilities and to opportunities for personal enjoyment. Our definition of justice may incidentally encompass some of those things, in its own way, but our definition of justice really is about the guaranteeing of human equality in the issue that really counts, which is becoming luminous candidates for salvation. That’s what we care about. Because this dunya doesn’t really last very long. It’s extremely sure that the end of our lives ka annahum yawma yarawnaha lam yalbathu illa `ashiyatan aw duhaha that day when the finally see it they will feel that they’d only remained in the dunya an evening or a forenoon; time is folded up for people at the end of their lives and at the qiyama. And what we really care about is providing men and women with equal, maximalized opportunities for becoming beings who are pleasing to Allah. And what secular critics, blinkered by atheism, make of our social arrangements is to us entirely irrelevant, because we don’t share their objectives – we don’t care. We might in our polemical moments say that even on their own terms they have failed to secure a happy society, but even that isn’t important to us. What is important is our own internal search for equality of opportunity for salvation, that’s the beginning and end of it, that’s all we care about; as people of tawhid we are single-minded. And Islam has sought to bring about that equality in different ways for men and for women. Now, it has done this in ways about which it’s hard to generalize, because one of the meanings of the statement of Rasulullah sallallahu `alayhi wa sallam that bu`ithtu linnasi kaffa I have been sent to all mankind, or, nas, which included women, is that his way has to be fully transformative for every human type, not just for Arabs and Persian and Englishman and the rest, that’s one meaning of it – one of his khasa’is is that his mission is for everybody, unlike earlier prophets who were only sent to their own peoples – (this is in the sound hadith) it also means sent to both genders, and it also means sent to every individual human type. And we all know that people are ashkal and ajnas. It is part of the wisdom, the creative genius of Allah that He should not have made human beings kind of identical androids, but that every human being should be unique; it’s an indication of His creative power, of His qudra, that He is badi`us-samawati wal-ard the iniciator, the splendid inaugurator of the heavens and the earth. It’s also an indication of his plentitude, because He wishes to be worshipped and He wishes that worship to take not just a totalitarian single form but to be a form of worship that’s multiple according to the multiplicity of human souls. And the salat means slightly different things to different participants in the salat; this is inevitable because human beings are different and they will interpret and benefit from the institutions of the religion in different ways; this is commonsensical. And it’s one of the miracles of the Shari`a that the detailed practices that were laid down 1400 years ago are still so imminently transformative and effective and attractive to an indefinite variety of human types today as they were then.