Many people have long
held the erroneous notion that men are better than women. In Men & Women,
Hamza Yusuf makes clear the
positions and roles of men and women in society according to the Quran and Sunnah and sheds much-needed light on several often
misunderstood Quranic verses and hadiths
concerning the relationship between the two.
His eye-opening discussion of issues such as the hijab,
marital rights, and domestic violence, will prove invaluable for all listeners,
particularly couples who want to improve understanding in their marriages and
individuals who want to be reassured of Islam's honor
of women.
Bismillahir Rahmanir
Raheem
Before I talk about what
I want to talk about I just want to dispel a myth, I am sure most of you are
aware that it is a myth but some of you might not be and that is the idea that
has somehow crept into Muslim culture that boys are better than girls or
actually more preferable and I think part of the problems that we have in our
Muslim communities have to do with cultural problems and I would say that if
they are universalised they just manifest differently according to different
cultures.
The United States is also
a country that suffers from that same problem in its view and attitudes towards
women and in fact Dr Abdul Hakim Winter wrote a paper that is really worth
reading called “boys will be boys” and in that paper he describes the fact that
it is actually Islam that prevents this very insidious idea from taking over
because if you look outwardly at the situation that we have the vast majority
of men have certain qualities that are superior to the vast majority of women
in the outward and most of them have to do with physical qualities and in fact
the physiology of women’s design, it is not designed for rough sports and one
of the major problems occurring in America because young girls are beginning to
play contact sports and rough sports is the increase in the number of sport
related injuries that actually related to physical structures, the difference
between the knees of men and the knees of women, the difference between the
hips, female hips are very different. The shoulder blades, if you look at the
basic bone structure of a woman and you look at the basic bone structure of men
they are different, there is a physical difference.
Now obviously there are
certain women that are very strong and there are certain men that they are weak
and so it is something that is more of bell curve type of understanding but one
of the things that Dr Winter points out in that paper is that when you have a
society that begins to create a culture of this outward over-achievement that
basically he says it is the women will eventually suffer greatly because they
are compelled to compete with men in areas that there was never meant to be any
competition and this is why there is
this attempt now to reach this threshold where females can actually compete in
make sports categories so there is the idea of finally getting a woman who can
make it pro-basketball in the men’s league. Now, as of now it was a great
historical event when this poor woman dunked a basketball in a basketball game
recently, it was considered like this immense event that she was able to do
this dunk that occurs every single day all over the country by men playing
basketball. Is this what we want out women to be doing and competing in and
what Islam does it creates a competition not in the outward but in the inward
and in that it is the men who are disadvantaged which is really interesting. So
the opposite happens.
If you look at a sports
track, if you watch an Olympic sport or even in high school, you have the
people in the outward lap are given a head start because the people in the
inward lap have a shorter run on that first lap. By the second lap because they
can all move into the inward lap it will equal out but they put the runner who
was in that outward lap, they give him a head start so it equals out and that
is why men are given things that they do spiritually like the quwamma. You see men are there to maintain women, that is
that little head start that they get and that is hwy Allah mentioned that in
the Quran that giving men the infaq was something
that He have a fadal there. A fadal
is an excess because men need that in a relatiohsip
in which the woman is raising children, a woman is having childbirth. A woman
has a jihad according to the hadith which is sahih in her house that is ongoing
and many men will never get the opportunity to actually by involved in a jihad
which is one of the highest maqams in Islam and so
Allah gives men a head start spiritually because when they reach out on yaum al qiyammah, it is basically
equalled out in a lot of things.
One of the other things
is one of the greatest qualities of the human heart is riqah
is a type of brittleness and the Prophet praised the Yemenis because they are
more brittle hearted than other people in other words they wept easier and that
was better for them in terms of their relationship with Allah because one the
descriptions that Allah gives about people that love Allah is that they weep
easily. Now spiritually women have a total advantage over men in that area
because most men have a very difficult time weeping and the Prophet actually
said that if you cannot do it then at least fake it.