Woman and Paradise in Islam

The secular feminist revolution rose upon the world from the West with an essentially godless agenda to liberate women from the “shackles” of the ages by totally transforming her status, role and function in society. In so doing it has turned the previous religious and sacred order upside-down in such a way that the sun now appears to be rising from the west.

Secularism led to materialism which in turn denied woman any reality beyond her material reality. Consequently the young beautiful woman became the goddess of the age. But she was a goddess who was shamelessly exploited in advertising to sell everything. She became a thing enjoyed, exploited, abused, degraded and discarded when her physical beauty and sex appeal began to wane. Then a host of schoolgirls would rush in to replace her. Even the national calypsonian gave his view on the subject quite some time ago when he sang of the prostitute, “… and if you catch them broken (i.e., in financial difficulty), you can get them all for nothing.”

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) prophesied the deception that would enslave women. He said, “women would be dressed and yet be naked”, thus anticipating an age of increasing feminine nudity that would be integrally linked to the feminist revolution. Carnival bandleaders in Trinidad are now complaining that they cannot use enough cloth to make creative designs since women increasingly demand the skimpiest of costumes. The ‘naked’ woman’s body was used to usher a sexual revolution that would culminate, according to the Prophet, with “the majority of children being born out of wedlock” and “people having sexual intercourse in public like donkeys.” When we see sex publicly simulated in Trinidad carnival we know that the feminist revolution will soon climax with woman being transformed into a donkey. Despite this colossal failure, the modern godless world has insisted on opening a ‘gender’ battlefield in quest of ‘equality’ while waging war on Islam. The latest target is the innocent Hijab that is maliciously attacked because it obstructs the way for the Muslim woman to be absorbed into the godless melting pot.

Islam has never sought to put an equal sign between the sexes. ‘Woman’ can neither be studied nor understood in a context independent of ‘man’. The two are inseparable. The Prophet declared that women were “… the twin-halves of men.” The Qur’an confirmed this inter-dependence when it declared “They are your garments, and you are their garments.” And in a passage with sublime literary beauty the Qur’an (al-Lail, 92:1-4) first directed attention to the ‘night’ and that which it shrouds and conceals with such mystery and splendor, and then turned to the ‘day’ with its bright light which exposes everything and leaves nothing concealed, and then proceeded to explain that the ‘male’ and the ‘female’ are functionally analogous to the ‘day’ and the ‘night’. In the same way that ‘day’ and ‘night’ are functionally different yet interdependent, so too are the ‘male’ and ‘female’.

When this philosophy of gender was applied to Muslim society the ‘night’ never attempted to become ‘day’. Rather ‘night’ and ‘day’ eternally longed for each other. And so we were never subjected to the abominable phenomenon (that European civilization is now exporting to the rest of the world) of the ‘day’ mating with ‘day’ and vice-versa. Women in such a society not only fulfilled all their sacred functional duties as wives and as mothers, and thus contributed in a significant way to preservation of the health, strength and stability of the family, but, in addition, they preserved both their femininity as well as their fertility. And so the Muslim woman remained truly and enchantingly a woman! An age that produced the celibate priest had obstinately insisted that one had to turn away from woman in order to turn to God. Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) responded by declaring “Three things have been made dear to me in this world of yours – perfume, women and prayer.” And so Islam rejected both celibacy and the ‘object’ while recognizing woman, like prayer, to be a medium through which a man might journey to paradise.