this chauvinist accord in Islamic jurisprudence essentially caused the decline
of Islam because without the equal treatment of feminine wisdom and
intuition in the affairs of marriage and community, civic unity imbued with
the grace of true piety cannot be maintained well enough to establish the
regency of truth and justice.
“Some women requested the prophet to fix a day for them as the men were taking
all of his time. On that he promised them one day for religious lessons and
commandments.”^47Muslims instinctively know this, but because most do not understand
women and many, including women, believe it is impossible, they
subsequently refuse to also admit that her divinely given gifts are
directly related to the well being of the polity outside of domestic
engineering. Therefore, they generally exclude or pay lip service to her
counsel in both private and public policy forums. To the contrary,
rather than admit her light to the inner sanctums of council, with few
exceptions she is kept like a child for centuries while sexist assemblies
plot the unbalanced course of Islam’s ruin without her unique
perspective! Mind you, I said ‘unique perspective’ and not ‘direction’.
The fact is that men and women literally think differently and this is not by
happenchance any more than is the ubiquitous manifestation of the spiral in
nature! The multiple differences between men and women are by divine
design and present us with the challenge of uniting their independent gifts
and roles so that tawhid consciously permeates the marriage and hence also
the community according to what Allah has given to each gender. And just as
the moon reflects sunlight and gently pulls her weight against the earth while
solar rays bathe the cosmic communion for the benefit of mankind, marital
and communal government requires similar conjugation rather than the
current asymmetric veil of bigoted censorship. I propose that male-female
dialogue is even more essential to a nation’s success than that of inter-faith
discourse. It is as essential to successful governance as is the corpus callosum
that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
47
Bukhari , Book 3, # 101