Question:
What are some parts of Islam (scripture or practices) that made you feel inferior as a woman?
My relationship with my mother was also awkward. I remember when I got my first period. I screamed and told her I need to go to the emergency room. I was bleeding. She nonchalantly threw a sanitary napkin at me and told me it would go away in five days. She also told me not to touch things. I felt like an untouchable. And I felt alone – with something happening to my body that I had never experienced before. Since then, my mother would make it a point to remove me from prayers and fasts when I was menstruating.
I was never allowed to spend time with the uncles at parties. I was constantly told that my father was the head of the household and I was to respect him. My mother also used to threaten me for mumbling as a little girl. She said the Prophet Muhammad didn’t like it and he’d send me to hell if I didn’t start speaking properly.
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No matter how grand the mosque, the women’s section was always in the back. Always more cramped, always with lesser resources than the men’s sections. That infuriated me. I was literally made to walk through the back door. If women are “separate but equal,” in Islam, then why are the women’s sections always so badly resourced? I once asked around to my female relatives why men always got to be in the front and was told that when we bend at the knee and lean forward for “sajda” during prayers, our backsides are prominent and that would distract men from prayer. I was and am still furious about this. Why couldn’t the men develop better morals during prayer? Why was it my duty to help them not screw up their prayer? Why was their prayer concentration more important than my equality at the mosque? A lot of women said to me, “this is just the way things are, this is how we’re made, its unfair but you have to accept it”. I wondered, if Allah was so merciful and all knowing and good, then why didn’t he make it so that men and women had equal rights? Islam was a good sociopolitical development for its time when compared to other religions it came women more legal rights, but if Islam is THE one true path, shouldn’t Allah have been more fair?
In a culture that vehemently suppresses sexual desire, how ironic is it that everything becomes laced with notions of sex?
One test that I began using to test equality between men and women, in an Islamic or non-Islamic context, is to flip gender roles and expectations. By doing this, I realize the absurdity of rules and obligations that are enforced upon women by men.
Men and women’s rights are not equal because you say that they’re equal, they’re equal when you outwardly express the equality.
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“There will be more female inhabitants in hell.” …because they gossip, are ungrateful to their husbands, seductive… etc. Um, ok. The stupidity of this is too much that I don’t want to give it any dignity by explaining all the wrong with this -and what a WAKE-UP CALL this should be to all Muslim women. I know this is one hadith, and that some hadiths don’t have much support – but that’s an excuse.
I’m hated. Spit on. Reviled. Look down upon. My mother gets calls from relatives who barely know me. Who never talk to me. Declaring what a whore I am. What a failure of a mother she is. What a failure of a daughter I am.
My one sin? I left home. I wanted a career. I wanted something other than babies and a husband. I wanted to protect myself. I would never become my aunt whose husband beats her but she can’t leave because she has no means to support herself. I would never become my cousin whose husband cheats on her and flaunts it in her face, but she can’t leave because no one else will take her in. Honor your husband, her family tells her. I would never be put down, be told I’m less than an equal.
They don’t even know that I not only left home. But I also left Allah. I can only imagine what they would do then.
Continue reading…
Introduction
Part 1: Self worth, self image
Part 2: Inferiority
Part 3: Your former self
Part 4: To understand
Part 5: Muslim privilege
Part 6: Ex-Muslim privilege
Part 7: Open