Banished to basement rooms or banned from the mosque entirely. American convert to Islam, Yahya M tells it how it is... and how it should be.
The
Prophet (peace be upon him) said: If any among your women asks permission to go
to the mosque, don't stop her from going. But in some Muslim societies
overseas, they don't let women in the mosques. They've turned the mosques into
men-only clubs, contrary to what the Prophet ordered.
In North
America and Britain, hard as it is to believe, too many Muslims have brought
over this ignorant attitude and many mosques here don't allow women in. It's
hard to understand why anybody would perpetuate such un-Islamic injustice.
And among
those mosques that do let women in, I'm sorry to say that most of the ones I
have seen relegate the women to an inferior status. They banish them to
basement rooms or other segregated spaces. Too often the second-class spaces
allotted to the women are poorly maintained, uncomfortable, cramped, filthy, or
otherwise substandard, while the men reserve the best areas for their exclusive
use. This kind of treatment makes the preaching about women's status being
equal in Islam sound awfully hollow. Too many places don't allow women any
chance to speak and be heard, let alone have any say in the way the mosque is
run.
Too many
religions throughout history have put down women and condemned them as inferior
beings. A little-known fact is that Islam brought by Prophet Muhammad is the
first religion to raise women's status to be equal with men. You couldn't tell
that nowadays when Muslim countries are among the worst in their unjust
treatment of women (especially the Taliban). Talk about ahsan al-taqwîm
degenerating into asfal sâfilîn. This is a major disgrace, the best of
religions for women behaving as the worst. As Malcolm X said, the fate of a
nation depends on how it treats its women.
If some
mullas insist on absolute apartheid between men and women, that is going to an
extreme (and one could point out several examples from the Sahâbah to
contradict it), and good Muslims shouldn't go to extremes. The danger of total
sexual apartheid is that Muslim women become marginalized, have no say in their
lives, no voice, no access to decision-making that affects their lives; it
seems more a matter of the male elite protecting their privilege of power by
treating women as infants.
There are
many examples from the very earliest Islam of Muslim women exercising their
God-given rights and freedoms to the fullest extent, rights and freedoms which
the mullas of later generations succeeded in denying to them. If Muslim women
were able to make their voices heard instead of being suppressed by this
extreme apartheid, then men in Muslim countries could not so easily get away
with beatings, burnings, rapes, and denial of basic human rights like
education, employment, and medical care.
In the
original Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the women and men all prayed in one open
space, with no sexual apartheid. The best mosques that I have seen in America
follow the Prophet's model. In a few enlightened mosques, like the ADAMS Mosque in Virginia,
the women pray in the same large room as the men, they can speak to everyone,
and they can vote in mosque elections and be elected to office (they recently
nominated a woman for vice-president in a mosque election; now let's see one
become president!). I love that mosque because it is a family-friendly
environment; whole families can attend together in an open, welcoming
atmosphere. The mosque needs to be responsive to every Muslim in the community,
equally. I chose to live in this community because the mosque here accords my
wife and daughters their full dignity as spiritual human beings.
