THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN
When the companion of the Prophet entered a town to bring them the message of Islam, he put it
very beautifully. He said, “I have come to free you from the servitude of the slave and bring you to the
servitude of the Lord of the slave.”
Within this statement lies a powerful treasure. Locked within these words, is the key to empowerment
and the only real path to liberation.
You see, the moment you or I allow anything, other than our Creator, to define our success, our
failure, our happiness, or our worth, we have entered into a silent, but destructive form of slavery.
That thing which defines myself-worth, my success and my failure is what controls me. And it
becomes my Master.
The master who has defined a woman’s worth, has taken many forms throughout time. One of the most
prevalent standards made for woman, has been the standard of men. But what we so often forget is
that God has honored the woman by giving her value in relation to Himself—not in relation to men.
Yet, as western feminism erased God from the scene, there was no standard left—but men. As a result
the western feminist was forced to find her value in relation to a man. And in so doing she had
accepted a faulty assumption. She had accepted that man is the standard, and thus a woman can never
be a full human being until she becomes just like a man: the standard.
When a man cut his hair short, she wanted to cut her hair short. When a man joined the army, she
wanted to join the army. She wanted these things for no other reason than because the “standard” had
them.
What she didn’t recognize was that God dignifies both men and women in their distinctiveness–not in
their sameness. When we accept men as the standard, suddenly anything uniquely feminine becomes
by definition inferior. Being sensitive is an insult, becoming a full-time mother—a degradation. In the
battle between stoic rationality (considered masculine) and selfless compassion (considered
feminine), rationality reigned supreme.
As soon as we accepted that everything a man has and does is better, all that followed was just a
knee-jerk reaction: if men have it—we want it too. If men pray in the front rows, we assume this is
better, so we want to pray in the front rows too. If men lead prayer, we assume the imam is closer to
God, so we want to lead prayer too. Somewhere along the line we’d accepted the notion that having a
position of worldly leadership is some indication of one’s position with God.
But a Muslim woman does not need to degrade herself in this way. She has God as the standard. She
has God to give her value; she doesn’t need a man to do this.
Given our privilege as women, we only degrade ourselves by trying to be something we’re not–and in
all honesty–don’t want to be: a man. As women, we will never reach true liberation until we stop
trying to mimic men, and value the beauty in our own God-given distinctiveness.
And yet, in society, there is another prevalent “master” which has defined for women their worth.
And that is the so-called standard of beauty. Since the time we were little, we as women, have been
taught a very clear message by society. And that message is: “Be thin. Be sexy. Be attractive. Or...be
nothing.”