Deoband denies ‘fatwa’ against working women
By IANSWednesday, May 12, 2010
LUCKNOW/NEW DELHI - Darul Uloom Deoband, India’s foremost Islamic seminary, Wednesday denied it has asked Muslim women not to work along with men and said it only suggested that working women should dress “properly”.
“We had only given an opinion based on Sharia that women need to be properly covered in government and private offices,” said Maulana Adnan Munshi, spokesman for the seminary in Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
He denied a media report that the seminary was opposed to men and women working together.
“No new fatwa was issued,” Maulana Munshi told IANS on telephone, adding that even the opinion on dress code was given when a Muslim woman desired to know if women could go to work without a ‘purdah’ or veil.
“That too is one-and-a-half months old,” he said.
The Deoband institution also denied having issued a ‘fatwa’ whereby a husband’s dependence on his wife’s earnings was declared illegal.
“We have not issued any such ‘fatwa’ declaring a woman’s financial support to the family as illegal. I fail to understand how such a news was flashed across a section of the media,” Mufti Mohammad Shakeel of the ‘Fatwa’ department told IANS over telephone from Deoband.
According to him, the only case where the income of the lady of the house could be treated as ‘haram’ or illegal was when the means of her earnings were unlawful.
He stressed that neither has such a fatwa been issued in the past, nor was there any scope for such a ‘fatwa’ to be issued in future as it was against the basic spirit of Islam, which believed in equality between man and wife.
“I would not be surprised if someone was misusing the name of this esteemed Deoband institution to paint a distorted picture of the Shariat by projecting such a view,” Mufti Shakeel said.
Maulana Khalid Rasheed, Naib Imam of Lucknow’s Idgah who also heads the city’s oldest seminary Firangi Mahal, said Islam did not discriminate between men and women.
“There was no question of the tenets of Islam dismissing a women’s earnings through legitimate means as illegal. A woman has as much right to contribute financially towards running a family household as her husband,” he said.
But the media report claiming that the Deoband seminary had issued a “fatwa” against working women has led to sharp reactions from leaders and scholars from the Muslim community.
Maulana N.A. Farooqui, secretary of the Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hind, said the Deoband fiat “should be understood in the correct perspective”.
He said Islam does not prohibit women from taking up jobs or moving outside the house but it was obligatory for them to keep themselves “properly covered”.
Congress MP Rashid Alvi said every religion had its own rules but the law of the land must prevail ultimately.
“Whatever a preacher says, it is according to religion. But if there is a conflict between religion and constitution, then the law of the land will prevail,” Alvi told IANS.
Former MP Syed Shahabuddin said Muslim women in contemporary life were educated, had taken up jobs and, in some cases, were helping their husbands in running businesses. “It is not possible to follow such a fatwa.”
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May 13, 2010: 7:14 am
For Favour of publication To, Recent controversy over Muslim women’s participation in public life and working in offices to support family is highly unfortunate and, if continued, may harm the interest of whole Muslim community. Recent fatwa in this regard from Deoband Seminary must be opposed by intellectual Muslims vehemently. By these fatwas , narrow-minded clerics try to keep common Muslims shackled. As a result of rather revolutionary laws for women, early Islamic societies saw Muslim women being involved in diverse occupations and economic activities. They worked in Hospitals as physicians and nurses. They were employed even in Secret Services (part of Postal Department) during the period of Abbasids and Islamic Spain. Maulana Mohammad Akram Nadwi has compiled biographies of 8,000 female jurists during Islamic Rise. Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher estimated that 15 percent of medieval hadith (Prophetic Traditions) scholars were women. Women were also important Transmitters of Hadith compiled in Sahih Sitthah (Six Collections of Prophetic Traditions). After fifteenth century, things started changing in the Islamic world against the interest of women. Harsh restrictions on women and general violation of human rights began. Local culture and patriarchal constraints played instrumental roles in restricting Muslim women’s educational and economic participation. This was the period of Decline (Fall) of the Islamic World. Now the situation has gone so bad that many people believe that Muslim women are highly oppressed in Islamic Societies. But one must understand that these oppressive practices do not come from Islam. Recent claims of Mr. L.K. Advani and Mr. Jaswant Singh that Mr. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a secular leader, may not be correct. But it can not be denied that Mr. Jinnah and his sister Fatima always promoted the cause of oppressed women. It was in this context that Mr. Jinnah, in his speech of 1944 (March 10, AMU, Aligarh) lamented, “No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live”. At another occasion (March 25, 1940 ) he said, “I have always maintained that no nation can ever be worthy of its existence that cannot take its women along with the men. No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men”. (Websites) Your’s faithfully, Dr. M.I.H. Farooqi |
Dr. MIH Farooqi