The metric of a woman being noble and pious is widely believed to be highly proportional to her submissiveness to men in her life. No matter how sincere her personal relationship is with her God or how much earnestness she’s putting into her prayers, society somehow finds a way to disregard it based on her deference to either her husband, her brother, her father or any dominant male figure in her life. Suddenly everyone earns the right to call out her character. Comments like “You’re ungrateful,” “Angels will curse at you,” and “You’ll never enter paradise” come flooding her way, gaslighting her into believing that her faith is weak and she’ll never attain divine proximity.
A woman is not easily gaslighted, but this vulnerability happens due to deep-seated conditioning that begins even before pre-adolescence; little girls are taught narratives like “Your dad is your key to paradise.” Or simply by watching the relationship dynamics between her parents or other ones around her. The male figures are treated extravagantly while the women exhaust themselves in order to please men.
This male-centric framing never came from Allah. Instead, it stems from centuries of religious texts being filtered, interpreted and explained exclusively by men. They took the divine message and weaponised it against women to serve their own interests.
Islam was never meant to cater to men alone. While there are certain revelations that delineate specific responsibilities or roles, there are countless revelations that elevate and define the status of a woman just as much. Islam has glorified women more than perhaps any tradition – it’s the sole religion that fundamentally provided women with an independent legal and spiritual status, teaching society to respect women. However, over the centuries these filtered-out male-focused interpretations were emphasised above all else. Consequently, suppressing the true status of women to the point where the average woman now finds it hard to believe that she too possesses equal spiritual significance and divine rights Islam gave her.
This is why many married women trapped in abusive, abrasive marriages are unwilling to accept the fact that they’re in a toxic situation. They have grown up believing that enduring this abuse is equivalent to earning good deeds and that if they tolerate all of it silently, they’ll be rewarded because a husband holds the status of a deity — commonly referred to as “Majazi Khuda.” Moreover, narrations regarding the glorification of husbands, such as “If there was permission to prostrate to anyone after Allah, it would be to a husband”, are highly weaponised. Some women even believe that they are entirely forbidden from initiating divorce under any circumstance, be it verbal/physical abuse, financial neglect, and so on unless the husband explicitly asks them to disobey Allah. This common mindset reveals a false perception of “sabar” (patience) as taught in society, in contrast to the true concept established in Islam. Accepting injustice contradicts Islam as a whole; a woman is neither allowed to accept abuse nor permitted to allow her home to facilitate such disrespect and degradation.
When our society normalises this oppression and gives up on trying to break out of the norm, it not only harms women but also alters the image of Islam worldwide. Because we allow the male-centric population to gatekeep the divine message, a negative perception of Islam continues to be projected to the rest of the world. It is because of these exact reasons Western media also fails to understand Islam as a religion of equity and protection, resulting in a fragile, distorted image of faith.