Woman Between Islam and Western Society

WOMAN

BETWEEN

I S LAM

AND

WESTERN

SOCIETY

 

 

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

 

 

First Published 1995

Reprinted 2021

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Foreword

An anthology of the Quran, prepared by English Orientalist Edward William Lane (1801-1876), was published in 1843. It carried a foreword by way of introduction to Islamic teaching, which, inter-alia, stated that “the fatal point in Islam is the degradation of woman.”¹

This ill-considered observation gained such currency that it was commonly repeated as if it were an established fact. Almost a century and a half has elapsed since then, and, with the passage of time, this conviction has, if anything, deepened. It has even been quoted as if it were gospel truth in a judgement passed in the Supreme Court of India by the Chief Justice of India, Mr. Y.V. Chandra Chud, in the now notorious Muhammad Ahmad-Shah Bano divorce case.

To interpret the Islamic concept of woman as “degradation” of woman is to distort the actual issue. Islam has never asserted that woman is inferior to man: it has only made the point that woman is differently constituted.

Let us suppose that a doctor tells his patient that his eye is a very delicate organ of the body, to be treated gently and with great care, unlike his fingernails, which can be cut and filed, if necessary. The doctor’s instruction does not mean that he is degrading the eye vis-à-vis the nail. He is only pointing out the difference between the nail and the eye.

If all the laws relating to men and women in Islam are based on this fundamental reality that men and women are of two different sexes, it is because distinctive differences between man and woman are established biological facts.

This being so, male and female spheres of activity cannot be one and the same, whether in family or in social life. There must necessarily be differences in the kind of work that they do, and also in their places of work.

All the revealed scriptures have held the same concept of woman, and thousands of years have passed without its ever having been doubted. It is only in modern times that it has been challenged by the women’s liberation movement, which holds that men and women are alike in every respect and that both should, therefore, be given equal opportunities.

This movement first reared its head in Britain in the 18th century, later spreading across the whole of Europe and America. In 1772, a certain impetus was given to the movement by the publication of a book by Mary Wollstonecraft, entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The gist of this book was that women should receive the same treatment as men in education, work opportunities and politics, and the same moral standards should be applied to both sexes.² Such was the zeal and fervor with which this movement was launched that it spread far and wide. Both men and women participated in it, and even talking about the differences between man and woman was brushed aside as being a sign of backwardness. By the beginning of the 20th century, this trend of thought had established its hold all over the world, and laws came to be made or modified accordingly. All doors were to be thrown open to men and women alike.

In practice, however, this experiment has met with utter failure. Even after a struggle of almost 200 years, women have failed to achieve a status equal to that of men. They are almost as backward today as they were before the launching of the “women’s lib” movement. The only practical result has been that women have come out of the home, and are to be seen everywhere in the company of men. By degrees they have lost their femininity without having achieved the goal of equal status with men in every domain for which they paid this very high price.

The failure of women’s liberation has led to wide-ranging research being carried out on this topic, employing strictly scientific methods. Finally, the patent biological differences between men and women have been scientifically proved. These differences have all along been a reason for women’s failure to find an equal place in every department of life. Where philosophers had cast doubts upon the religious concept of women—quite erroneously as it turned out—scientific findings have now re-established this concept’s veracity.

Now the question arises as to why it is that once science has supported the religious concept of man and woman as being the right one, the allegation continues to be made that Islam has “degraded” woman. For instance, the Indian freedom fighter, S.M. Joshi, who was interviewed in connection with a government-sponsored scheme to record the voices of freedom fighters for posterity, stated that “the Shariat of the Muslims and the Manusmruti of the Hindus—followed by both communities for centuries—were equally socially reactionary.”³

Such remarks are made so indiscriminately and so frequently that it is high time we concerned ourselves less with our own sense of injury and more with the possible root causes. The main reason is that the results of research on the differences between man and woman have remained only an academic finding and have not yet formed the basis of a popular intellectual revolution. The social penetration of these ideas will have to take place in the same way as monotheism replaced polytheism, that is, through the kind of intellectual revolution set in motion by the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions with the special succor of God.

Such an intellectual revolution in our own times is certainly not far-fetched, since modern science has provided all the arguments in its favor. It is only a question now of sufficient number of believers engaging themselves wholeheartedly in the dissemination of those findings for a popular, intellectual revolution to take place. It is my earnest desire that the following chapters should provide the inspiration for this history-making task.

Wahiduddin Khan

May 19, 1994

New Delhi, India

Notes

   1.        Edward William Lane, Selections from Kuran (London 1982), p. XC.

   2.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. 10, p. 733.

   3.        The Times of India, April 6, 1986.

CHAPTER 1

 

A Survey

Human intelligence having its limits, the universe seems difficult to interpret. Man can only guess at facts: he is in no position to comprehend them. The history of man’s struggle to come to grips with the baffling factors in his terrestrial and celestial environment has been recorded throughout the ages in the writings of sages, philosophers and men of religion, one more recent, and very commendable effort being a book by Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) which gives us prior warning in its very apt title—The Mysterious Universe—of just how impenetrable the secrets of the cosmos can be.

It was this mystery surrounding the universe which gave rise in ancient times to many stories, now called myths. On the basis of pure conjecture, man developed many suppositions which, in the course of time, became widespread beliefs, rooted in the human imagination.

We find that in every age man has had a set of beliefs which molded his thoughts and deeds. In ancient times this set of beliefs was entirely based on myths. It was not until the 7th century A.D. that there was any change in this pattern of thinking. Now importance was attached to facts instead of superstitions. A revolution indeed, and it was brought about by the advent of Islam.

Myths were developed to account for the cosmos. How did the gods bring heavens, earth, plants, beasts and men into existence? What is the divine origin of human institutions and of the ecumene? What divine process is responsible for prosperity or failure? To explain such basic questions etiological (origin or causal) myths were developed. For example, the attraction between man and woman (and the consequent institution of marriage) is explained by the myth that primeval man was one creature, subsequently divided into two parts, male and female, which are attracted to one another to regain their pristine unity. Aristophanes expresses this theory of sexual attraction in Plato’s Symposium. Genesis has the same theory in the familiar
myth that a rib, taken out of Adam, was fashioned into Eve; and precisely because woman was taken out of man, man forsakes his
father and mother to “cleave unto his wife” so that they become “one flesh” (Gen. 2:23-24).¹

Here are two examples which illustrate, on the one hand, the difference between science (knowledge) and superstition, and on the other, how Islam was originally responsible for putting an end to the age of myth and superstition and heralding the new era of enlightenment.

One of the phenomena of nature in our world is the eclipse, sometimes the sun going into eclipse and at other times the moon. Today we have discovered the astronomical laws governing these phenomena but, in ancient times, man was ignorant of what these phenomena and their causes actually were. Strange and wonderful stories on the basis of conjecture were, therefore, concocted to bring them within the realm of human understanding. The Chinese account of the eclipse and its “remedy” is one of the more fanciful:

When an eclipse occurred, the Chinese thought that the sun was being swallowed by a huge dragon. The whole population joined in making as much noise as possible to scare it away. They always succeeded!²

Considering their “success,” it is little wonder that the Chinese used the same tactics with happy conviction on subsequent occasions. It is now common knowledge that the dates and durations of such eclipses are entirely calculable, just as the course of Halley’s comet was entirely predictable.

It was during this age of superstition that Islam appeared on the horizon to herald a new era of enlightenment. Its account of the solar eclipse was just one of the ideas which were totally at variance with the beliefs of the day, and which have subsequently been deemed quite in accordance with the findings of modern research. The Prophet Muhammad’s own explanation of the solar eclipse is worthy of note. It so happened that the death of his only son, Ibrahim, at the age of one and a half, coincided with a solar eclipse in the tenth year of the Hijra (January, 632 A.D.). The ancient belief still being prevalent that eclipses were caused by the death of an important person, some of the inhabitants of Medina began spreading the story that the eclipse was due to the death of the Prophet’s son. The Prophet, therefore, felt it necessary to gather his people together and explain the truth to them. This account of his is set forth in the Hadith of two writers of peerless authenticity, Muslim and Bukhari:

After praising and glorifying God, he said: “Eclipses of the sun and moon are not due to the death of any human being; they are just two signs given by God. When you observe an eclipse, you should pray to God, praise Him, ask for His mercy and blessings, and give something in charity.”³

He again stressed the fact that they were signs from God, had no connection with the life or death of any particular individual, and that, through them, God wished to convey to man His warnings. Therefore, when you see any such thing, remember God, fear Him, pray to Him and ask His forgiveness.⁴

Thus Islam put an end to myths and superstitions of this kind for the first time in human history. Another incident of this nature which took place during the time of the second Caliph, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, has been recorded in history as follows: “Ibn Luhai’a relates that, according to Qais ibn Hajjaj, when Egypt was conquered, its inhabitants went to ‘Amr ibn al-’As, the Amir (governor) of Egypt at that time, and told him that when, according to the local calendar, the month of Bauna came round, the river Nile had to be offered the customary sacrifice, without which it would not flow. It seemed that after the twelfth night of that month, they had to find a young girl who was a virgin and the only child of her parents, then they had to persuade her parents to give her in sacrifice, whereupon they dressed her in the finest clothes and jewels and cast her into the river Nile.”

‘Amr ibn al-’As told them that such practices were prohibited by Islam, which indeed had put an end to all idolatrous practices which had been prevalent prior to its advent.

The people of Egypt, therefore, refrained from making the sacrifice, and waited for the water to flow into the bed of the Nile, but the entire month of Bauna passed without the water making its appearance. They then decided to migrate.

At this point, ‘Amr ibn al-’As wrote to explain the entire situation to the Caliph, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab. The latter replied that the action he had taken was correct, and, in his letter, he enclosed a note which he said should be thrown into the River Nile.

On receiving this letter, ‘Amr ibn al-’As opened the note and found these words written therein: “To the Nile, river of the Egyptians, from ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, Chief of the Faithful and humble servant of God. If the flow of your waters is under your control then let your waters not flow. But if it was Almighty God who made your waters flow, then we pray to Him to make your water flow again.”

‘Amr ibn al-’As duly complied with the Caliph’s injunction and cast the note into the river. The very next morning, the people saw with their own eyes that the waters had started to flow—by the will of God. In the course of a single night its level rose by 12 feet. Thus, God put an end to this inhuman custom of the Egyptians, and never again to this day has there been a repetition of it.⁵

A PRACTICAL NECESSITY

The myths and superstitions of ancient times had affected people’s thinking to the point where their approach to most things had become unrealistic. This was especially true of society’s determination to regard woman as inferior to man. But there was an additional reason for this flawed concept having evolved, and that was the failure to recognize the importance of the home as the basic unit which collectively constitutes society, the training ground for future generations, in short, the cohesive force without which society would cease to exist. Just as the strength of a building lies in the quality of its individual bricks, so does the strength of society depend upon the quality of its constituent families.

The work done within the home is, therefore, of prime importance. It may take greater gentleness and delicacy than responsibilities outside the home, which require greater vigor, superior physical strength and stronger nerves, but, for the survival and progress of human civilization, feminine qualities are just as essential as masculine qualities—which is why nature has cast man and woman in very different molds. Women are endowed by nature with more of the passive qualities in order to make them better suited to domesticity, while men are endowed with more of the active qualities which make them better qualified to shoulder responsibilities outside the home. This ensures a natural and effective complementarity in family life.

SUPERSTITIONS CONCERNING WOMEN

This downgrading of women, because they came to be identified with “inferior” tasks, resulted in their debasement in society. In the eyes of the law, women could not enjoy the same rights as men and, therefore, were not considered deserving of a share in family property. In practice, there was little distinction made between women and slaves. The opprobrium attaching to womanhood became so great that in certain tribes it led to female infanticide: it was considered humiliating to be the father of a female child.

Ancient legends which perpetuated these erroneous ideas grew out of the all-too-common human tendency to exalt the supposedly great and to deprecate the supposedly inferior. Woman then became not only inferior, but truly despicable in the eyes of society. These ideas, which spread with the legends, were quite false, but took root so firmly in the cultures of many nations, that they came to be universally accepted as the truth. We shall mention here two such stories.

The first is an ancient Greek tale which later gained currency in Europe. It concerns the very first woman, who was created out of earth by Hephaestus at the instance of Zeus, the king of the gods, and sent down into the world with a box containing all kinds of misery and evil. It was the intention of Zeus in so doing to set at naught the blessing of fire which Prometheus had bestowed upon mortals by stealing it from heaven. The story goes that from the moment the box was opened, the world has been plagued with wickedness and sorrow. This woman was given the name Pandora, a Greek word which originally meant “all-giving,” but which came to be synonymous with “giver of all evils.”

The second story has certain points of similarity. It too concerns the first woman, Eve, and having already become famous among Jews, was even incorporated into the Bible, which meant, of course, that it was later accepted by Christians too. The Bible version as told in the second chapter of the book of Genesis is as follows:

        7.     And the Lord God formed man of the dust of ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

        8.     And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.

        9.     And out of the ground made the Lord grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

        15.   And the Lord God took the man, and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

        16.   And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

        17.   But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

        18.   And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

        21.   And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

        22.   And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made he a woman and brought her unto the man.⁶

Chapter 3 tells the story of the fall of man.

        1.     Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

        2.     And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

        3.     But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

        4.     And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

        5.     For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

        6.     And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

        7.     And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

        8.     And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day:  and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

        9.     And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

        10.   And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

        11.   And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

        12.   And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

        13.   And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

        14.   And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

        15.   And I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

        16.   Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

        17.   And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

        18.   Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

        19.   In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

        20.   And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.

        21.   Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothes them.

        22.   And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

        23.   Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

        24.   So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.⁷  

This story, enshrined as it is in the pages of the Bible, would have us believe that the cause of Adam’s expulsion from a life of comfort and happiness and his subsequent trials and tribulations was Eve’s having yielded to temptation, and that this was how the first man came to bear the burden of Original Sin which according to Christianity was to be shared by the entire human race.

This story has no basis whatsoever in fact, but it had such a strong hold over the popular imagination that it spread not only amongst the Jews and Christians, but amongst almost all the nations of the world. In becoming a part of language and literature, it managed to reach every class of people.

Just as the Quran has rectified many distortions of the accounts of the Bible, so has it also refuted this distorted account of Adam and Eve. The following passage from the Quran puts the incident in its true perspective:

        To Adam He said: “Oh Adam! Dwell with your wife in Paradise, and eat from whatever you please; but never approach this tree or you shall both become transgressors.”

        But the devil tempted them, so that he might reveal to them that which had been hidden from them of their shame. He said: “Your Lord has forbidden you to approach this tree only to prevent you from becoming angels or immortals.” Then he swore to them that he would give them friendly counsel.

        Thus he cunningly seduced them. And when they had eaten of the tree, their shame became visible to them, and they both covered themselves with leaves of the garden.

        Their Lord called out to them, saying: “Did I not forbid you to approach that tree, and did I not warn you that the devil was your sworn enemy?”

        They replied: “Lord, we have wronged ourselves. Pardon us and have mercy on us, or we shall surely be among the lost.”

        He said: “Go hence, and may your descendants be enemies to each other. The earth will for a while provides your sustenance and dwelling-place. There you shall live and there you shall die, and thence you shall be raised to life.”⁸

In the above-quoted passage the dual form of the verb in Arabic has been used throughout, so that it is made abundantly clear that for every transgression both Adam and Eve have been held equally responsible. Thus it becomes quite evident that Satan tempted them together, both fell into his trap, both ate the forbidden fruit and both were equally held responsible and both suffered equally in consequence. This surely demonstrates that they were on an equal footing in the eyes of God.

CELIBACY

Celibacy has existed in some form or another throughout man’s religious history and has appeared in virtually all the major religious traditions of the world.⁹

It is true that prior to Islam, in almost every religion, celibacy was considered to be the highest criterion of piety, the fundamental reason for this being the inferior status of women. There were periods in the history of certain countries when women were considered almost sub-human and a source of sin. Those who associated with them were, therefore, regarded as being inferior. By contrast, those who lived a life of celibacy had an aura of sanctity about them and basked in the esteem of society.

The basic function of celibacy was to establish the internal wholeness and spiritual self-sufficiency of the truly religious person, so that he might become a living symbol of sacredness and purity. It was meant to prove to him that the ultimate reality was beyond his physical needs, so that he in turn might demonstrate to others that fulfillment may be achieved by total dependence upon what is sacred. Throughout the history of primitive religions, priests have been forbidden sexual activity, and abstinence there from has been regarded as ritual purification. Religious literature has perpetuated such notions about celibacy with the objective of enhancing the moral and spiritual advancement of the religiously inclined. The exemplary perfection attained in this way was supposed to make it possible to induce certain altered states of mystical consciousness which gave one direct experience of the spiritual absolute. Those who wished to attain this state or perform certain special religious services were required to make a vow of celibacy in the presence of another.

Celibacy probably derives originally from taboos of sexual power as being a rival to religious power, and of sexuality as being a polluting factor, especially in situations where sanctity was all-important. The Romans, for example, adhered to the dictum of ascetic philosophers and priests that the ideal teacher should be unmarried. For women too, virginity and celibacy have been considered to be assets in the attainment of spiritual goals. The ideal held up before them was that they should remain unmarried throughout their lives, and pass into the next world in the same virgin state.

Take, for example, what must be the fate of women living in Jain communities. The monastic groups of Jainism being marked by the greatest austerity, all Jain monks are to avoid even looking at women, for, according to a Jain source, “they are to monks what a cat is to a chicken.”¹⁰ Buddhism and allied religions take a very similar view.¹¹                

Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, was the first of the historical personalities to refute these fallacies in word and deed: celibacy was shown to be no genuine symbol of spirituality. He showed that true spirituality meant remaining in the midst of the family and adhering to the limits prescribed by God. Woman was then clearly seen to be a good in life and not an evil.

Not only did the Prophet break the tradition of celibacy, but he repeatedly encouraged his Companions to do so as well. In order to show that celibacy and sanctity did not go hand in hand, he went so far as to say “woman and perfume has been endeared to me,”¹² thus breaking with an age-old tradition. In ancient times, the notion of a man of religion having relations with a woman was so abhorred that, if the Prophet had not spoken out forcefully on this issue, people would have continued to revere the tradition of celibacy under the influence of the past.

Research carried out in modem times has proved that the concept of celibacy is wholly unnatural and unrealistic. In comparison, Islamic ideology is perfectly natural and in accordance with reality. On this subject the Noble Laureate, Dr. Alexis Carrel, has this to say:

The sexual glands have other functions than that of impelling man to the gesture which, in primitive life, perpetuated the race. They also intensify all physiological, mental, and spiritual activities. No eunuch has ever become a great philosopher, a great scientist, or even a great criminal. Testicles and ovaries possess functions of overwhelming importance.¹³

Far from considering marriage with a woman to be a shameful act, Islam, which is basically a realistic religion, considers it praiseworthy for a man to marry a woman. This is a clear indication that the teachings of Islam are wholesomely consistent with modern scientific findings and in complete consonance with nature.

ORDER OF NATURE

Sculpture is an ancient form of art. There is, no doubt, an obvious resemblance between living beings and statues, but if someone were to presume that the concerns of human beings were the same as those of statues and began to study man under the heading of sculpture, what would be the outcome? This method of study would certainly lead to strange conclusions. A carved image has no need of food and drink; therefore, the student of sculpture would naturally assume that arrangements to this effect were not necessary for man either. He would proceed to the assumption that if a statue can be locked inside a room for any length of time, so could a man be put inside a locked room for years without anyone having to worry about him.

During the time of the former President of Egypt, Jamal Abdun Nasir, an ancient statue of Abu Simbel, 20 meters high and firmly fixed in the rocks, had to be removed from its place to make way for the construction of a huge dam. This work, undertaken between 1964 and 1966, necessitated the use of special machines which could cut the statue into several pieces so that they could be shifted to a safer place, and then reassembled. Now, on this parallel, the student who views man as a statue, can also, as part of some scheme, start chopping up the human body.

Of course, there is no sculptor in this world who would do such a thing. But in another department, that of education, such experts have come into being in modern times as are experimenting with man as if he were a statue and doing everything to him that could be done to a statue. This branch of knowledge is called “anthropology.” This field of study began at the turn of the 19th century. In the light of data collected on external information regarding the conditions of ancient man, his beliefs, customs, traditions, certain conclusions about human beings in general were arrived at.

Religion naturally came within this field of study, necessitating the collection of information on the religions practised by different tribes and communities. Thus, a list of the customs which went under the name of religion was produced.

A natural outcome of this method of study was that religion came to be regarded as a social phenomenon. That is to say, religion was presented as something which had evolved out of the influences of human myths, customs and social conditions. Religion is essentially a divine truth (a commandment of God), but thanks to the anthropologists’ particular method of study, it has been reduced to a mere artifact of historical accretion.

The greatest harm done to religion by this method of study is that in modern times it has been shorn of its credibility, and reduced to insignificance, whereas, as the commandment of God’s religion it had an unassailable authenticity, because it possessed divine credibility in its own right. Every religious statement was accepted as the ultimate statement of a superior being and, as such, worthy of being adhered to. Conversely, when religion is regarded merely as a social phenomenon, all its credibility is dissipated. This can be compared to relegating the science of chemistry to the position of alchemy, or to equating astronomy with astrology.

The fact is that this method of study, when applied to religion, is totally wrong. It turns a reality into a non-reality. It is to accord human status to something which is essentially divine. To understand the reality of religion let us peruse this verse of the Quran: “Are they seeking a religion other than God’s when every soul in heaven and earth has submitted to Him, willingly or by compulsion? To Him they shall all return.”¹⁴

According to this verse, the religion which God desires man to adopt in his daily living is the same divine law which God has imposed upon the entire universe. Religion is the name of this same universal law.

THE LAW OF BALANCE

Now let us examine this divine law. In the words of the Quran it is the law of balance: “He raised the heaven on high and set the balance, that you might not transgress the balance. Give just weight and full measure.”¹⁵

The universe is not composed of just one item. It is rather a collection of highly disparate elements. Besides this, each and every one of its components is in motion. Not a single constituent, from the minutest atom to the most gigantic galaxy, can ever for a second remain static. For the precise functioning of this infinitely complex assemblage of moving components, limits in space and time had to be applied so that the different parts did not come into conflict with each other. God, therefore—besides creating all these things—established a systematic balance between them. This principle is known as the “Law of Nature.”

Similarly, in the human world—also a vast assemblage of disparate individuals—everyone is in motion. And in order that each should continue on his life’s journey without colliding with his fellow men, it was likewise necessary to establish boundaries, both moral and physical, for all human beings without exception: a balance had to be struck so that there should be no clash between individuals or societies. It is, indeed, this law of nature which has been revealed to humanity through the medium of the prophets. God’s will on this subject is recorded in the Quran: “We have sent our Messengers with clear signs and brought down with them scriptures and the scales of justice so that men might deal with fairness.”¹⁶

That is to say that God sent a balance of justice in the form of a book through His prophets. This book was supported by arguments and evidence so that people could believe in its authenticity and would not hesitate to order their lives according to this balance, that is, the just law. While the law of balance is inherent in the rest of creation, for man, it has been provided externally through the revelations of this divine book.

THE BANEFUL EFFECTS OF DEVIATION

Any deviation from the divine balance established by God leads to chaos and confusion. It is, therefore, laid down in the Quran that no changes should be made in the balance God has created by means of His laws of reform.¹⁷

One example of universal balance is the fixity of the distance between the sun and earth (about 90 million miles). This distance is extremely balanced, ensuring a whole range of temperatures on earth which is favorable to the continuance of the human species. If this balance were upset in any way, it would result in all kinds of disasters. For instance, if the distance between the sun and the earth were reduced by half, temperatures would rise to such extremes, that everything and everyone on the surface of the earth would be reduced to ashes. There would be no possibility of life existing in any form whatsoever.

The same applies to the girth of our planet. Its present circumference is about 25,000 miles, but if this were reduced by half, the pull of its gravity would be so weakened that we should all go flying off into space. If, on the contrary, the circumference were doubled, the effect of gravity would be so overwhelming that all growth would cease. Man would be reduced to the size of a mouse and a mouse would be little bigger than an ant.

The unparalleled balance that exists on earth is aptly illustrated by the strange example of the insects which, unlike human beings, do not possess lungs, but breathe through tubes. When insects grow large the tubes cannot grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body of the insect. Hence there never has been an insect more than a few inches long with a slightly longer wing spread. Because of the mechanism of their structure and their method of breathing, there never could be an insect of great size. This limit in their growth held all insects in check and prevented them from dominating the world. If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine a man meeting a hornet as big as a lion or a spider equally large.¹⁸

Of course, the notion of order in the world has periodically been called into question. A certain western writer has suggested that the gravitational pull of the earth is far greater than is absolutely essential, hence the difficulty one experiences in carrying even a weight of ten kilos. Had it been less, he points out, we should have been able to walk about, carrying a weight with ease. But this objection is ill-founded. It is entirely due to gravity having the pull that it does, that our homes remain firmly fixed to the ground. Had it been less, they would have flown about like kites, and civilization, as we know it would hardly have been possible.

It is fortunate that the order of the universe is not in the hands of men. If it were, we should experience intermittent tampering with the immutable laws of nature. Gravity would wax and wane, the earth would move nearer to or further from the sun and, on the pretext that nature had been cruel to insects in fixing the size of their breathing tubes, the said creatures would be encouraged to grow to elephantine proportions, thus filling the whole earth with them. None of these developments would, however, be encouraging to the human species!

Luckily, man cannot effect such changes in the universe, since he has no power over its ordering. But he is free to act as he wills in his own world, and the result has been chaos on a grand scale. The extremes to which he has gone are thus referred to in the Quran: “Evil appears on land and sea as a result of the (evil) which men’s hands have done.”¹⁹

WOMAN VERSUS MAN

In view of the divine law of balance, let us consider the relationship between man and woman. According to divine law, this relationship was set up on the principle of the division of labor, i.e. it is the responsibility of the man to carry out tasks outside the home, while the woman takes charge of tasks within the home. The Quran states that “men are the protectors and maintainers of women.”²⁰

This does not make a man a woman’s superior, or her master. This only means that in running a home and bringing up a family, it is for the man, with his more active capabilities, to earn a living, deal with all official matters, and, when called upon, defend his country. A man is by nature more suited to such tasks, and that is why it is in the nature of things that they should be his responsibilities and not woman’s. The word qawwam in the above verse, is an intensive form of qa’im meaning, “one who is responsible for or takes care of a thing or a person.” Thus, the use of this word is indicative of the wisdom of the division of labor rather than the superiority of man over woman. It should be conceded that if the woman finds herself in a position of responsibility in running the home, it is because her more passive nature, her talent for household tasks, her gentleness and affection all fit her admirably for domesticity, to which she is certainly better adapted than her male counterpart.

Since time immemorial life had been equably systemized by this division of labor. Earning a living had most often meant hunting, farming, fishing, working in orchards, transporting merchandise for barter or trading, all tasks physically difficult to perform, and, therefore, better and more easily done by men. While men were thus engaged, it was simply more practical for women to stay at home and manage the household. But with the advent of the industrial revolution, conditions were created which tended to break up this natural order, for now jobs came into existence which, to some extent, were suitable for women, and, since tradition in western countries did not require women to segregate themselves from men and live in seclusion, they came out of their homes and began working in offices and factories. Gradually, the traditional pattern of living began to change. Men were no longer the sole breadwinners: women had begun to share that responsibility. With economic independence came the realization in women that they should “break out of the shackles forged for them by men” to make new and independent lives for themselves. This trend in thinking eventually paved the way for the women’s liberation movement. Since feminism was given its first impetus by the industrial revolution, “women’s lib” began in those countries where industrialization had first made its appearance. The first noteworthy book to demand equal rights for women was published in London in 1792. Authored by Mary Wollstonecraft, it was entitled, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The industrial revolution came later to America and that is why the women’s liberation movement did not begin there until the nineteenth century. With the progress of the industrial revolution, women’s liberation gained momentum, reaching its zenith in the 20th century.

The upholders of this movement maintained that the cause of the difference existing between men and women in societies with ancient traditions lay not in nature but in a man-made social framework. Their contention was that a woman could do anything that a man could do, but that outdated social customs prevented her from coming into her own. They held that, once given the opportunity to demonstrate her capabilities, a woman would be able to work shoulder to shoulder with men in every walk of life. In no respect would she lag behind.

This movement is now over two hundred years old and, in modem developed countries, it has been so successful that neither the law nor tradition now places the slightest obstacle in the path of women who wish to step into the shoes of men. Yet women still lag far behind men, there being very few instances of their having actually placed themselves on an equal footing with them.

Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say on the subject of women in modern society:

In the economic sphere women who work outside the home are heavily concentrated in the lowest paying work and that having the lowest
status. Women also earn less than men in the same kinds of jobs. The
median pay of women workers in the U.S. was 60 percent that of men
in 1982. In Japan the percentage of average pay was 55. Politically,
women are greatly underrepresented in national and local government
and in political parties.²¹

Today the social boundaries set by time-honored conventions have broken down, and all countries now have laws favoring equality of the sexes. Yet modern woman still finds herself on a lower rung than man, not having been able to achieve equal status in any of the economically or professionally important areas of modern living. This state of affairs would appear to indicate that, contrary to the women’s libbers’ way of thinking, social conditioning cannot be blamed for the centuries-old difference in the status of men and women. If this had been so, surely by the end of the 20th century women would have been enjoying an equal status with men. Obviously, we must search for the reasons elsewhere.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

In every period of history—even today in western developed countries—women have remained subordinate to men. The western upholders of the so-called women’s lib movement are still saying that this is not a natural division and that the difference should be attributed to artificial social conditioning. Recent research, however, has discredited this supposition.

We reproduce below a report on this issue published in Daily Express:

“It is a rough old world for women, as the feminists never cease to remind us. They blame centuries of social conditioning—a kind of conspiracy whereby men all over the world somehow contrive to keep women in a subordinate role. A much simpler, and more probable explanation is that universal male dominance stems not from social oppression but fundamental differences between the sexes.” This is the view put forward by Professor Steven Goldberg of New York in his book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, which has earned him some shrill abuse from feminists in America (“Fascist Pig” and “Male Sadist” are two of the milder epithets), and has upset a few here, too, since he arrived to launch the British publication. “The feminists hate me,” Goldberg told me cheerfully, “I like to think their intense wrath stems from my inherent rightness. Putting it simply, I believe that the universality of male dominance in all societies cannot be explained by social conditioning.”

But it can be explained by the male hormone testosterone which “programmes” the infant male for a life of greater aggression and dominance while he is still in the womb. That’s why little boys are clearly more aggressive than little girls even before they’ve had a chance to be socially conditioned. And in later life, same dominance means that men are far more ready to sacrifice holidays, health and family for the sake of their career. In truth the feminist case is none too strong. If it really were true that male dominance was due to social conditioning rather than innate male qualities, then surely somewhere in the world at some time a society would have evolved in which women were dominant. None has. And even in societies like those behind the Iron Curtain which boast of sexual equality, one sex is obviously “more equal” than the other. You can see it in Russia’s 62 strong council of ministers. Not one is a Woman.

After a lifetime spent researching the diverse societies of the world that expert woman anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who is commonly thought to be on the feminist side, has declared: “All the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed ... Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home.”

Does that mean that men are better than women? Professor Goldberg wags a warning finger. “Not better, but different.” The male brain works differently from the female brain. In I.Q. tests with men and women of similar intelligence levels, the men tend to score higher on logical and deductive problems, though the women will generally do better in verbal skills.

Unquestionably women have greater emotional awareness even before they have children. Little girls are commonly more thoughtful and sensitive to parental moods than little boys.

Professor Goldberg’s proposition is quite simply, that they are much less likely to get to the top—and all because of testosterone. The masculinization of the brain by this hormone has been demonstrated conclusively by experiments on female rats and other mammals. “And we have now found the same thing with human beings,” says Goldberg. The professor concludes: “The central fact is that men and women are different from each other from the gene to the thought to the act. These differences flow from the biological natures of man and woman.”

Women who deny their natures and covet a state of second rate manhood are forever condemned to argue against their own juices. The experience of men is that there are few women who can out-fight them and few who can out-argue them, but when a woman uses feminine means she can deal with any man as an equal. In this and every other society men look to women for gentleness, kindness and love. The basic male motivation is protection of women and children. The feminist cannot have it both ways: If she wishes to sacrifice all this, all that she will get in return is the right to meet men on male terms. She will lose.²²

FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

Nobel Laureate Dr. Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) has discussed this issue great perception. After enumerating the biological facts which crucial to the issue, he sums up the profundity of the difference between men and women:

The differences existing between man and woman do not come from the particular form of the sexual organs, the presence of the uterus, from gestation, or from the mode of education. They are of a more fundamental nature. They are caused by the very structure of the tissues and by the impregnation of the entire organism with specific chemical substances secreted by the ovary. Ignorance of these fundamental facts has led promoters of feminism to believe that both sexes should have the same education, the same powers and the same responsibilities. In reality woman differs profoundly from man. Every one of the cells of her body bears the mark of her sex. The same is true of her organs and, above all, of her nervous system. Physiological laws are as inexorable as those of the sidereal world. They cannot be replaced by human wishes. We are obliged to accept them just as they are. Women should develop their aptitudes in accordance with their own nature, without trying to imitate the males. Their part in the progress of civilization is higher than that of men. They should not abandon their specific functions.²³

Another article, “Why Women Are Second Rate,” which appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India on April 2, 1978, stresses the findings of professor H.J. Eysenck, the inventor of Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.) tests: “As an ardent supporter of equal opportunities for women, I am constantly nagged by doubts about their creative ability. How is it that women have produced so few writers, poets, composers, artists of top calibre? How is it that even in professions which are traditionally regarded as theirs, e.g. cooking and dress designing, men beat them to the second place. All the famous chefs and dressmakers (even women’s wear) are men. Hitherto I had accepted the sociologist’s point of view that it was tradition and environment that militated against them. Somehow the sociological answer did not carry total conviction and I felt there was more than environment and lack of opportunity behind women’s second-ratedness.”

Professor H.J. Eysenck who pronounced that the black and brown races had a lower I.Q. than the white, has now proclaimed the same about women. Their genes make them what they are: from the time of conception their feminineness is programmed as in a computer. It is not, as sociologists maintain, tradition or environment which makes a female child play with dolls while her brother plays with toy soldiers, but her biological constitution. Even within the womb, the female develops a broader pelvis than the male. The broader the pelvis, the more feminine will its possessor be, says Eysenck. Males with broad pelvises tend to be feminine, passive, even homosexual. Females with narrow pelvises tend to be masculine, aggressive, even lesbian. Random sampling amongst your own acquaintances will confirm some of Eysenck’s postulates. “Eysenck had earlier brought the wrath of the champions of racial equality on his head. Now women’s libbers are out for his scalp with their rolling pins.”²⁴

THE HELPLESSNESS OF WOMAN

In an attempt to provide women with an equal status, modern civilization has, in fact, only managed to provide her a permanently unequal status. In whatever sector of the western economy a woman may be working, she is considered second rate as compared to a man. Even to achieve this second-rate position, a woman has to pay a certain price. She must willy-nilly become the plaything of men, allowing herself to be subjected to masculine cruelty and lasciviousness. The following is an extract about a report on American working women:

They sound like experiences in a Delhi bus. Lewd gestures, offensive language, attacks on your person—the American workplace is for its women workers what public transport is for women in Delhi. A bank teller, Michelle Vinson, suffered physical abuse and alleged rape by the bank’s vice-president Sidney Taylor for four years until finally, assisted by a women’s organisation, she went to court. The district court rejected her appeal, largely because she had remained silent for four years and had not used the bank’s complaint procedure to ask for help. It held that any relationship between the two was voluntary. The higher court of appeal rejected every finding of the district court and the matter finally found its way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that sexual harassment is a direct infringement of a woman’s right to employment. It creates a hostile and abusive work environment in which she may be forced to leave her job or in which she cannot function to her full potential, even if such unwelcome sexual demands are not directly linked to concrete employment benefits. In other words, the court ruled that it violates U.S. civil laws against sex discrimination in the workplace.

Sexual harassment of working women is endemic, said the friends-of-the-court brief filed by numerous women’s organisations for this case. In the last five years, about half the American female working force has suffered this type of harassment at work. This does not just happen to women in factories or at blue collar workplaces. Within the fibreglass, multi-storied skyscrapers, the American office is not as pleasant for its women secretaries, lawyers, and other professionals as its air-conditioned, carpeted and muted decor makes it appear.

About 42 percent of federally employed women were harassed in their jobs, stated a recent two-year survey done by the Official Merits Protection Board. Another 60 percent of the members of the American Federation of State, Country and Municipal Employees said that sexual harassment was a frequent problem for them. And between 1981 and 1985, the number of such complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, established to monitor employment practices, shot up by 70 percent. The complaints vary from the physical violence of rape and assault to the insidious harassment of unwanted pushing and touching, persistent sexual demands, offensive sexual
comments, constant conversations containing sexual innuendoes and coarse language.

The offender usually makes his moves swiftly and silently, when there are not witnesses around. He is usually confident that fear, embarrassment, and often the Hopelessness of the situation will keep the victim from making public complaints. And when complaints are made, he can use every defence that this grey area of social attitudes and innuendoes provides. When it is so hard for a rape victim to prove she has been violated, one can imagine how much harder it is for a victim of the less dramatic forms of violence to prove her case.

In such instances, if the offenders are their supervisors, women who resist or complain find themselves burdened with an increased workload, scathing work evaluation, unwarranted reprimands and sheer hostility. So many quit their jobs rather than go to court. When neither alternative seems feasible, they give in, quietly.²⁵

This is the condition of the American female worker, in spite of laws having been passed assigning equal status to both sexes. There are even laws prohibiting harassment of women workers by men, but this has not prevented women being victimized by unprincipled male colleagues and superiors. Their helplessness stems from the fact that they have already left their parents and husbands and need to work for a living. If they left their offices as well, there would be nowhere left for them to go. If the factory or office were not last in the line of social and economic refuges for women, many workplaces would find their female task force becoming rapidly depleted.

The state of women workers in western offices is no mere accident, so that legislation can do little to improve the situation. It is such a serious and complex matter that no rule or regulation can effectively deal with it. If we hold that a bird and a bull are equal and bring them into a field to fight a duel on an equal footing, as a result of which the bird gets crushed, can we then stop this cruelty by imposing laws to this effect? Can there be a law to prevent a bird from being trampled on when it encounters a bull?

It has to be conceded that nature has cast men in the stronger and women in the weaker and more delicate mold. This accounts for nature making different demands upon men and women, resulting in a convenient division of labor. Any alteration in the division of labor is a deviation from nature: the solution to the ensuing problems lies only in a reversion to nature. They can never be solved while continuing on the path of rebellion from nature.

A flower, for instance, finds a prestigious position for itself as part of a bouquet, but if the same flower is placed under a rock, it will get crushed beyond all recognition. The same is true of a woman. In her own natural setting—the home—she is in a position of honour and prestige, and all her qualities shine forth as a result. But the moment she steps out of it to enter a crassly competitive world, she descends from the pedestal on which her family has placed her, and sinks deep into the mire of masculine oppression. Instead of her feminine talents coming into play quite naturally within the domestic framework, and bringing joy to herself and to her nearest and dearest ones, they become the object of the lustful exploitation of total strangers, and sources of frustration and stultification to the woman herself. The humiliations of the office, the shop and the factory are no fair exchange for the honor of family life. Outside the home, a woman feels constantly under siege.

There is no doubt that nature has cast men in the stronger, and women in the weaker mold. This accounts for nature making different demands upon men and women, resulting in a convenient division of labor. Any divergence from this pattern only creates problems in the home, especially for children. Many solutions have been sought to these problems, but the only effective way of setting matters right is to return to the order established by nature.

THE CURSE OF AIDS

AIDS, the most terrible scourge of modern times, has proved how fatal it is to deviate from nature. The high-risk groups are promiscuous homosexuals, bisexual men, intravenous drug-abusers and those having multiple sexual partners. Its highest incidence is among male homosexuals. For such people, AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is the ultimate in divine retribution. With the defence mechanisms of the body rendered completely useless, the AIDS victim has as little hope of recovery as malaria victims used to have before the advent of modern therapeutics. AIDS renders medication ineffective, fevers do not respond even to injections and the body’s acceptance of food is almost nil. The victim becomes weak, his joints ache and he is in a constant state of depression. What is worse is that AIDS victims have become social outcasts. Even their gifts are not acceptable for fear of contagion from them. They find themselves deserted by friends of both sexes and when they travel, hotel servants and call girls are afraid to approach them. Now a stage has come when the department of health in America has had to issue strict orders to doctors to carry out tests on blood taken from blood banks for transfusion, as this has been found to be a source of infection. During the year 1985-86, there were in America nearly 50,000 AIDS patients who were not direct victims of AIDS but who had contracted the disease due to contacts with such patients. Here is a report based on 1986 statistics:

AIDS IN AMERICA: The dreaded AIDS disease and related diseases are far more prevalent in the U.S. than is generally realised, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The paper said the number of Americans who suffer from AIDS is 21,000 and nearly half of them are expected to die. About 100,000 to 200,000 have AIDS-related diseases including lymphadenopathy, thrombocytopemia, condidiasis, diarrhoea, fever, hairy leukoplakia, dementia, neuropathy and Hodgkins.²⁶

Here is another report, this time of a conference held in the first week of July 1986 in Paris:

According to experts participating in a conference on AIDS held in Paris last week, there will be 300,000 new cases of AIDS in 1991 alone if the virus spreads in the rest of the world as it has in the U.S. In the U.S., 74,000 new AIDS cases are forecast for the same year. It was estimated that by then more than a quarter of a million Americans would have caught the disease and 179,000 would have died. The U.S. hospital bill for AIDS for 1991 is forecast to be $ 8 billion. At present, France is the worst affected European country and had recorded about 700 cases by the first quarter of this year. West Germany is next with 457, Britain third with 340 and Italy fourth with 219.²⁷

In a society where homosexuality had come out into the open, AIDS had to be meted out as a kind of punishment to stem this massive upsurge of gross unnaturalness. Having now discovered that AIDS is contracted through sexual promiscuity in general and homosexual practices in particular, would-be sexual partners are beginning to flee from one another.

Research in zoology has brought to light the “green monkey,” a native of the jungles of Africa. Of all the known species of monkey, this is the only one which indulges in homosexual practices and suffers from a disease similar to AIDS. Perhaps God created it with its perversions and afflictions in order to provide a salutary lesson for mankind. But all such lessons have been swept away by the wave of permissiveness which is carrying all before it in the western world of today. A glaring example is provided by San Francisco:

AIDS is sweeping San Francisco, the city known as the ‘gay capital
of the world,’ according to medical statistics published on Wednesday.
Of the 520 new cases of AIDS recorded in the first six months of the
year, more than two out of three—67 per cent—proved to be fatal.
This compared with the previous record of 58 per cent fatalities last
year.²⁸

Now AIDS victims are being fled from as plague victims used ‘to be in the old days. Localities which used to be the happy hunting grounds of “gays” now wear a deserted look. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, homosexuality had been practised in western countries long before the recent spate of publicity given to it, but it had not been studied scientifically until early in the 20th century. It was only after World War II that there was any proper collection of data on the subject. A.C. Kinsey, who conducted a large-scale, systematic appraisal of the incidence and social correlates of homosexuality (1948,1953), found that 37 percent of all U.S. males, and 13 percent of all U.S. females had at least one overt homosexual experience with orgasm. In other western countries, the facts largely corresponded with these figures.

In most countries, there are no laws against homosexuality perse, almost all of them having repealed the laws against homosexual activities between “consenting adults in private,” and, whereas homosexuals used to be denoted by a term loaded with opprobrium—sodomites—they are now referred to by the newly coined expression, “gay,” which would appear to lend a harmless aspect of lively cheerfulness to their activities. Society now only draws the line at an adult having homosexual relations with a minor or with an unwilling partner by force. It appears to have forgotten that it was exactly this practice which led to the destruction of the Prophet Lot’s compatriots. In Britain, in addition to having been legalized in 1967, it has ‘progressed’ to the point of attaining a legal status similar to that of marriage. Denmark has also followed suit:

Denmark has granted homosexual and lesbian couples the same rights
of inheritance as married couples, reports Reuter. The Danish
parliament on Friday voted by 78 votes to 62 in favour of a law granting inheritance rights to couples who can prove they are living together.
The new inheritance rights will also apply to brothers and sisters who
share a home.²⁹

In modem times, it is the concept of unlimited freedom which has led to the acceptance of homosexuality and the breakdown of the traditional institution of marriage. A clever phrase has even been coined to denote the sexual relations established between man and man and woman and woman: sexual preference. But the consequences of this deviation from the natural order have been nothing short of evil. In truth, there is only one right path for man to follow and that is the natural order shown to us by the prophets of God. No one who deviates from this path can hope to be spared from its evil consequences.

The West has had to pay a doubly high price for its transgressions. By exposing the delicate female sex to the strong male world, it has permanently lowered their status. What Dr. Louise F. Montgomery has said about the status of women in the publishing world is true also of American women in all spheres of life: Women in the United States remain in the lower ranks in the newspaper hierarchy. Even in TV news programmes, the leaders who influence Americans are males.³⁰ An even greater harm done by deviation from nature has been the fatal degeneration arising from the innumerable evils of widespread sexual promiscuity in the developed world.

Notes

   1.        Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 12 pp. 919-920.

   2.        Ian Nicolson, Astronomy, 1978.

   3.        AI-Bukhari, Sahih, Abwab al-Kusuf, (Fath al-Bari, 2/424).

   4.        Ibid., 2/437.

   5.        Ibn Kathir, Al-Bidayah wa an-Nihayah (Beirut, 1932), 7/111.

   6.        Bible, Genesis, 2:7-22.

   7.        Bible, Genesis, 3:1-24.

   8.        The Quran, 7:19-25.

   9.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. 3, p. 1040.

10.        Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 1040-42.

11.        Ibid., vol. 16, p. 599.

12.        An-Nasa’i, Sunan, Kitab ‘Ishrah an-Nisa’, 7/61.

13.        Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown (London,1984), p. 91.

14.        The Quran, 3:83.

15.        The Quran, 55:7-9.

16.        The Quran, 57:25.

17.        The Quran, 7:85.

18.        Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown, pp. 79-80.

19.        The Quran, 30:41.

20.        The Quran, 4:34.

21.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. X, p.732.

22.        Daily Express (London), July 4, 1977.

23.        Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown (New York, 1949), p. 91.

24.        Illustrated Weekly of India (Bombay), April 2, 1978.

25.        Indian Express (New Delhi), August 3, 1986.

26.        The Times of India (New Delhi), June I, 1986.

27.        Ibid., July 5, 1986.

28.        Ibid., July 4, 1986.

29.        Ibid., June I, 1986.

30.        The Hindustan Times (New Delhi), August 23, 1986.

CHAPTER 2

Woman in Society

WOMEN IN ANCIENT SOCIETY

In almost every inhabited corner of the globe, the societies of
ancient times regarded the status of women as being inferior to that of man. “In Athens,” says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “woman’s status had degenerated to that of slaves. Wives were secluded in their homes, had no education and few rights, and were considered by their husbands no better than chattels ... In ancient Rome, a woman’s legal position was one of complete subordination, first to the power of her father or brother and later to that of her husband, who held paternal power over his wife. In the eyes of the law, women were regarded as imbeciles.”¹

The reason for the ill-treatment of women in ancient times was the prevalence of superstition. There were, in fact, very few matters upon which irrational beliefs of one sort or another had not been adopted. Such perverted thinking became elevated to the status of religion and, as such, had a pervasively baneful influence upon all human relations.

Speculation was another mode of thought which produced strange, and often pernicious results. Ridiculing the thought processes of the ancient Greeks, Bertrand Russell writes: “Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wive’s mouths.”²

Christianity did little to improve this situation, having attached great importance to the erroneous belief given in the very first book of the Bible, that it had been Eve’s wrongdoing which had caused Adam’s ejection from the garden of Eden. Referring to women in general in this context, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: “[According to Christianity] they were regarded as temptresses, responsible for the fall of Adam, and as second class human beings.”³ With such a myth ever-present in the collective consciousness of society, it is little wonder that women were allotted an inferior position in both religious and secular matters. In the first letter addressed to the Corinthians, St. Paul says: “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman for the man.”⁴ In this, St. Paul is simply reaffirming what is laid down as gospel truth in the Old Testament Book of Genesis.

WOMEN’S STATUS IN ISLAM

In ancient times, thanks to the unreasoning and unreasonable approach fostered by superstition, speculation and other forms of irrational thinking, woman came to be considered inferior, one distressing result of which was that she was deprived, among many other things, of the right to inherit property. She was not even entitled to a share of family property. How great an incapacitating factor this was may be judged from the neglect and degrading treatment which women had to suffer for centuries. It was not until the advent of Islam, that, for the first time in the history of mankind, women were given their due legal rights over property. The famous historian J.M. Roberts writes:

Its coming was in many ways revolutionary. It kept women, for example, in an inferior position, but gave them legal rights over property not available to women in many European countries until the nineteenth century. Even the slave had rights and inside the community of the believers there were no castes nor inherited status. This revolution was rooted in a religion which—like that of the Jews—was not distinct from other sides of life, but embraced them all.⁵

The same point has been made about ancient India by a retired Chief Justice of the Delhi Court, Mr. Rajindar Sachar:

... Historically, Islam had been very liberal and progressive in granting property rights to women. It is a fact that there were no property rights
given to Hindu women until 1956, when the Hindu Code Bill was
passed, whereas Islam had granted these rights to Muslim women over
1400 years ago.⁶

This is not, however, just a matter of anteriority. What is
significant is that, in granting women equal status and their proper rights, Islam set up an important precedent which had as far-reaching an effect on the civilization of the times as western civilization has had on the world of today. If Islam was able to accomplish such an ‘evolution in human affairs, it was because it did not remain just a philosophical creed but went on to conquer most parts of the inhabited world of the times.

In the world of today, even those commentators who generously acknowledge the virtues of Islam often repeat the dictum that Islam has relegated women to an inferior status. But to say that Islam gives women a share in property and then to say at the same time that Islam has degraded women is contradictory. From ancient times till today, the question of inheritance has been the most important social issue and might well be considered the sole criterion of status in society. Entitling women to have a share in property, contrary to the custom of the time, is a clear proof that Islam had no desire to degrade them. Had this been so, the first demonstration of this desire would have been to deprive them of their share in property, a correct and justifiable practice according to the traditions of the times.

It is interesting to see the reverse side of the coin as presented by a recent convert to Islam, namely, the English pop singer, Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam. Asked by a Jewish woman how he intended to deal with the problem of Islam’s “degradation” of women, he said that he had not actually made a study of women’s status in Islam, but that for his own part, he had, since his conversion, asked his mother to come and stay with him and that he loved looking after her. His relations with his wife had also considerably improved.

In its assessment of the status of women, the western mind has made the same error as was made by ancient man: it has formed opinions based on irrational beliefs. This accounts for latter-day distortions of thought regarding women in the advanced western countries and for the resultant grave distortion in the concept of women.

WOMEN IN MODERN CIVILIZATION

Where modern western man fell deeply into error, was in his blind acceptance of the concept of the equality of the sexes without giving due consideration of what equality—in its best sense—ought to mean, or what in practice it entails. According to modern thinking, giving equal status to women meant bringing them out of their homes and standing them face to face with men in all facets of life without any regard for the practical and moral problems which might ensue. Islam, on the other hand, defines separate roles, and, therefore, separate spheres of work for men and women, since it is natural and realistic to do so. The other great error made by modern western thinkers was to assume that a role which was separate and different, and played out in other than traditionally masculine strongholds, was necessarily of trifling importance—in short, inferior. As such, the West concluded that in giving a separate role to woman Islam gives them an inferior position. Conversely, since it is held in the West (in theory) that women must be given a place in all masculine spheres it is also concluded that the West gives her a superior position.

So modern man imagines that his feminine counterpart has, in actuality, been accorded a superior position. But let us examine what, in fact, is the state of women’s affairs. In the societies of the West, which have attained a high level of material development, theory has yet to be put into practice, and men and women still live and work in their own very separate domains. The status of women is, in practice, almost the same as it was in ancient times, there still being mutually exclusive divisions into male and female spheres, with the corresponding attitudes still very much in evidence. If this were not so, what need would there be for “women’s lib?”

Fourteen hundred years ago, Islam launched a much-needed “women’s lib” movement, whose purpose was to free women from artificial curbs, and to give them the position which any normal human being should have in society. (One instance, for example is to give them a share in family property). This movement raised their status without any sacrifice of femininity or traditional values, and without creating any perversion in society.

Having launched its movement under the guidance of revelation, its Islamic exponents were in no doubt as to what limits should be set to societal change. The West, however, in its preoccupation with modernity, plunged headlong into experimentation with the old order of values, sweeping away traditional moral precepts and “restrictive” conventions. All of this was done under the banners of “reason,” “empiricism,” “logic,” “liberalism,” and so on, but, in actual fact, the whole “liberation” movement has been swamped in a welter of emotion, creating a number of social problems.

UNNATURAL EQUALITY

Selected readings from the Quran were prepared in English by the English Orientalist, Edward William Lane, and were first published in London in book form in 1843. In his foreword, Lane wrote that “the fatal point in Islam was the degradation of woman.” Since then this remark has been regularly taken up as a stick with which to beat Islam. In fact, whenever Islamic affairs were mentioned, it became such a common observation, that not only the enemies of Islam, but also relatively fair-minded writers such as the historian, J.M. Roberts, who did justice to Islam in pointing out its virtues, mentioned it as if it were an established fact.

We have shown in detail, at another point in this book, that this allegation is entirely baseless. The facts are quite the reverse. Islam has, in actual fact, raised the status of woman. If the truth were told, woman’s degradation has come about at the hands of two major civilizations, one ancient and polytheistic, the other modern and atheistic. The former has been culpable both in theory and in practice, while the latter has been so in practice, despite its theorizing to the contrary.

We must never lose sight of the fact that what governed the ethics and lifestyles of ancient polytheistic civilizations were myths. Certain highly fanciful, but obviously baseless suppositions were believed in as truths, and all aspects of human existence were subordinated to them. For instance, ancient man regarded certain natural phenomena, such as the sun and the moon, with the awe of ignorance, and venerated them as deities. Conversely, he supposed certain other phenomena to be inferior, therefore, undeserving of respect. It was into the latter category that women fell, possibly because menstruation and their inability to fight alongside their men folk were interpreted in an adversely superstitious manner. Woman was regarded as the inferior sex and, therefore, deserving of degrading treatment by men.

Modern western civilization has hardly produced a better result in ostensibly exalting the status of women. It may have pronounced men and women equal in every respect and decreed that all work that can be done by a man can be done by a woman too: it may have encouraged women to come out of their homes and try to find a position equal to a man’s in every department of life (hence the slogan, “Don’t make coffee, make policy”); but, in practice, this concept of equality has done more to degrade women than any traditional view could have done. The next chapter deals with this topic in detail.

What is the reason then for this state of affairs? The reason, to put it briefly, is the erroneous concept of absolute equality in western countries. For example, equality between men is held to be an indisputable fact. But if this equality between men is taken to mean that in every field every man can compete with every other man, the upholder of such an unnatural concept should be able to take an Einstein to a boxing ring and expect him to put up a good fight against the heavyweight champion. Conversely, he would also expect the boxer to be able to hold his own while presiding over international, scientific conferences. This may seem laughable, but that is what absolute equality would mean. The Einstein who was at the top of the list in university or science conferences would be seen as a sadly inferior person in a bout with a boxer and the boxer would be completely out of his depth at the conference table. It is clear that applying this rule of equality would result in disaster.

True equality mean equality not in the workplace but in status. Human equality does not mean that every man should be engaged in the same work as everyone else. It means rather that every man should be looked upon with the same respect, and should be able to expect the same treatment, legally and morally.

The error into which the West has fallen is its attempt to establish an unnatural equality in the workplace for men and women. The result is as might have been expected: the greatest inequality in human history has developed between men and women. If men and women are of two different sexes, it is because they were created to serve separate purposes. Place them in their respective fields and they will be equally successful, although in different ways. Place both men and women in the same field, and the women will fail to excel: the men will do better due to their natural abilities. As a result, the women will suffer a fall in status vis-à-vis the men.

Inspired by false notions of equality, a certain country girl once fled her home to seek an independent life in a city intending to make money as men do. She failed, however, to find a place in the world of men. What remained at her disposal now was her femininity. This she traded for an independent life. This independent life was not, however, gained by securing “equality” in social life, it was gained rather by having condescended to become the plaything of men.

Somewhat similar, but on a larger scale, has been the case of western women. The West encouraged women to come out of their homes to earn like men. They did so only to find that it was impossible to have an independent life by working like men in the outside world. The only alternative available to them to making money was their femininity. Like the country girl who fled her home, they had to sell their femininity in the marketplace. Such unnatural and immoral acts failed to give women an equal status. This resulted rather in the creation of innumerable new problems. One of them is pornography, which is not a separate problem in itself, but the inevitable result of unrestricted freedom having given way to licence.

PORNOGRAPHY

Pornography is the representation of erotic behavior, as in books, pictures, or films, intended to cause sexual excitement. Pornographic matter has fallen under legislative prohibition in most countries in the world on at least one of the following assumptions: (1) pornography will tend to deprave or corrupt the morals of youth, or of adults and youth; and, (2) consumption of such matter is a cause of sexual crimes.⁷

The demand for pornography has become so great that, in western countries, it has developed into a regular industry. In America itself this industry has an annual turnover of $ 8 billion. The problems created by it are of such magnitude that a U.S. government commission has issued a report linking sex crimes with hard-core pornography. The commission, headed by then U.S. Attorney General Mr. Edwin Meese, called for a law enforcement effort of unprecedented scope against the $ 8 billion-a-year pornography industry.⁸ Another commission set up by the U.S. Justice Department has come to a similar conclusion. This report, entitled Degrading Women, was published in the national press.

In an introduction to its final report, the Attorney General’s commission on pornography urged action against the pornography industry, including more severe penalties for violation of obscenity laws. The report found that exposure to most pornography bears some causal relationship to the level of sexual violence, sexual coercion or unwanted sexual aggression. The commission’s conclusions conflict with those of a 1970 presidential commission that found no link between pornography and violence or other anti-social behavior. The 11-member commission formed by Attorney General Edwin Meese said most pornography in the United States would be classified as “degrading,” particularly to women. “We have reached the conclusion, unanimously and confidently, that the available evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that substantial exposure to sexually violent materials as described here bears a causal relationship to anti-social acts of sexual violence and, for some subgroups, possibly to unlawful acts of sexual violence,” the report said. The commission also concluded that there were ties between the pornography industry and organized crime. “There seems strong evidence that significant portions of the pornography magazine industry are either directly operated or closely controlled by La Cosa Nostra members or very close associates,” the commission said.⁹

THE CONSEQUENCES OF UNRESTRICTED FREEDOM

Women’s emergence from their homes, the free mixing of the sexes and the pervasiveness of pornography add up to a situation in which sexual excitement is inevitable. The institution of marriage having proved inadequate for the satisfaction of such artificially stimulated and now unbounded sexual urges, free sexual relations have gradually become the order of the day, and in the modern West, there seems to be no limit to the occasions on which sexual liberties may be indulged in. By representing free relations between men and women as being as harmless as shaking hands with one’s friend, books, films, plays, etc., have played a major role in encouraging the acceptance of such behaviour as the norm.

The marriage bond, as a result, has come to be viewed as burdensome, superfluous and outdated. So many young men and women have started to live together without being married that the term “unmarried couple” has now come to be considered just as lawful a term as “married couple.”

Where the divine shari’ah has established a balance between men and women such as renders them complements to each other, “women’s lib” claims that they are duplicates of each other—almost like clones. This ill-judged concept has become tremendously popular in recent years, upsetting the balance which had existed for hundreds of years between men and women. The results, however, have been no gain to humanity, while the harm done is too much even to quantify.

The first and most obvious result of women’s new-found economic independence has been the higher incidence of divorce. Scientific research has proved that women are more emotional than men, and, as such, can take hasty, ill-considered decisions. Before the industrial revolution, having no permanent, independent, economic footing acted as a check to their emotionalism. When, for example, they felt aggrieved at what they considered the negative aspects of married life, the question of how and where they would live if they opted for divorce inevitably acted as a deterrent. But such fears have been swept away in modern times. On this point the Encyclopaedia Britannica says:

Industrialization has made it easier for women to support themselves,
whether they are single, married, divorcees, or widowed. In this
connection it is interesting to note that the Great Depression the 1930s
stopped the rise in the number of divorces in the United States for a
time.¹⁰

In some western countries the divorce rates have increased to an alarming degree. In France half the number of marriages end in divorce, while in Canada the divorce rate is about 40 percent. In the U.S. the divorce rate is as high as the marriage rate. Ten percent of American women have gone through the experience of divorce.¹¹

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

Modern times have seen women coming out of their homes to enter every department of life. But they have not benefitted by being accorded equal status with men in life outside the home. What this new departure has done is leave insoluble problems in its wake, one of them being illegal sexual relationships. For the free mixing of men and women can seldom culminate in any other way.

A sexual relationship which is formed outside the fold of marriage seems initially to be a simple matter, but when a child is born in such a situation, it becomes evident—generally too late—that it is not such a simple matter, and that normally welcome event—the birth of a child—can have the gravest of consequences both for the child and the parents. It is a sad fact that a large number of illegitimate children are born in the West, despite contraceptive devices being in general use. An official report in 1985 revealed that nearly one in five children born in Britain was illegitimate and that nearly one in three had been conceived by unmarried parents. Such illegitimate children frequently begin their lives in ignorance of who their fathers and mothers are. They are looked after in official institutions and then enter society more in the manner of animals than human beings.

The subject of juvenile delinquency has been studied exhaustively. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that it is among the most baffling social maladies of the 20th century. A world-wide phenomenon, it varies in quality and frequency from country to country.¹² The child delinquent is depicted as a nervous, negative creature suffering from psychological abnormalities, which can be traced to their having been deprived of their parents and which sooner or later manifest themselves in criminal activity.¹³

In a report of Time magazine, it is revealed that in America each year about 300 children kill either their father or mother.¹⁴

It is a known fact that the weakest of all newborn creatures is the human child. He needs, more than any living thing, the love, care and guidance of his parents. But the encouragement given by western, civilization to women to do something so unnatural as to leave home and enter into illicit relationships has resulted in children having been deprived of blessings which God had intended to provide for them through their parents. Sometimes they are denied the attention they need because their parents are out at work for the whole day in some office. Sometimes it is because their parents have separated that they are left alone; and sometimes it is because they were born out of wedlock, that the parents do not consider it their responsibility to look after them.

In western countries, where the marriage bond has weakened to a very great extent, and even quite trifling differences can result in separation, divorce has become common, and the resultant broken homes have had the same disastrous effects on children as illegitimacy. It is little wonder that children, who are deprived of the normal tender, loving care of a united family, degenerate into animal-like creatures and frequently develop criminal tendencies. One glaring example is Charles Sobhraj, the internationally notorious criminal. Sobhraj’s Indian father and European mother did marry, but separated soon after his birth, so that he never knew what it was to live in a united home. He was brought up independently without receiving any proper education, and it is not, therefore, surprising that he gradually developed criminal tendencies. Later a life of the most horrifying crime, he is now serving out a lengthy sentence in an Indian jail.

Should not this give pause to the headlong rush into women’s emancipation and all the social instability which ensues?

Notes

   1.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. 19, p. 909.

   2.        Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1976), p. 17.

   3.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. 19, p. 909.

   4.        Bible, I Corinthians, 11:8.

   5.        J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World (New York, 1984), p. 334.

   6.        Statesman (New Delhi), April 26, 1986.

   7.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. VIII, p. 127.

   8.        The Times of India (New Delhi), July 11, 1986.

   9.        Ibid., May 23, 1986.

10.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. III, p. 586.

11.        Plain Truth, May 1987.

12.        Encyclopaedia Britannica (1984), vol. II, p. 913

13.        Ibid., vol. 5, p. 273.

14.        Time, October 19, 1987, p. 60.

CHAPTER 3

 

Western Woman

The “New Woman” has been proclaimed with a certain regularity for a century or more, Time magazine reminded its readers in a 1972 special edition devoted to an exploration of the status of women in America.¹ In 1989 the Scots traveller James F. Muirhead observed that it was man who was subservient in American life because he was “the hewer of wood, the drawer of water and beast of burden for the superior sex” (i.e. females). The feminists disagreed, insisting it was they who were dominated.

In 1920 American women won the right to vote, and in the 1920s and 1930s began to go to college in considerable numbers, with the expectation of entering the professions. Women believed that “the battle had been won.” But, after the vicissitudes of the Great Depression of post-World War II economic boom, the feminist movement was reborn. It was a time of turmoil in American society: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, and the U.S. engagement in the Vietnam War prompted radical protests and widespread questioning of traditional values and institutions, especially among the youth.

The “new feminism” movement was a phenomenon of the restlessness found in the American woman of the 1960s and 1970s. “By all rights, the American woman today should be the happiest in history,” Bonnie Angelo observed in Time’s 1972 cover story. “She is healthier that U.S. women have ever been, better educated, more affluent, better dressed, more comfortable, pampered by gadgets. But there is a worm in the apple. She is restless in her familiar familial role, no longer quite content with the homemaker-wife-mother part in which her society has cast her ... Many are in search of a new role that is more independent, less restricted to the traditional triangle of—children, kitchen and church.”

According to Angelo, all but the staunchest advocates of “women’s liberation” agree that woman’s place is different than man’s—but the restless American woman of the 1970s was not so sure just what that place was. The “new feminism” increasingly influenced young women to stay single and transformed marriages by ending once automatic assumptions about woman’s place, stated Angelo. Widespread commercial dissemination of oral contraceptives—the Pill—together with the overturning of state laws prohibiting abortion on demand—a process which began in the mid-1960s, but remains enmired in controversy today—had the effect of separating sexual relations from the solemn institution of marriage.

In 1972, women already made up one third of the U.S. work force, but their pay was much lower than men and they were generally confined to the lower ranking and lower skilled jobs. A soaring divorce rate, however, meant that in 1972 some 20 million Americans lived in households dependent on women as the sole or principal bread winners. A Psychology Today survey at the time found that even among male respondents, 51 percent agreed that “U.S. society exploits women as much as blacks.”² In the more colorful phraseology of the American politician, diplomat and author, Booth Luce: “Power, money and sex are the three great American values today, and women have almost no access to power except through their husbands. They can get money mostly through sex—either legitimate sex, in the form of marriage, or non-married sex.”³

 Indeed, the changes in sexual morality in Europe and the United States during the 1960s and 1970s were drastic and pervasive. Unlike their parents, many members of the young generation view premarital sex as good instead of bad. A Gallup poll in 1970 in the United States found that three out of four students were indifferent to virginity, or the lack of it, in the person they marry.⁴ Said British gynecologist John Slome: ‘‘The kiss of the 1940s and 1950s has become the sexual intercourse of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”⁵

The effect on women has been dramatic. For those feminists who decried the fact that woman’s reproductive role made her a “prisoner of sex,” the Pill appeared as the key to freedom. “Without the full capacity to limit your own reproduction,” wrote Lucinda Cisler in Sisterhood Is Powerful, “a woman’s other freedoms are tantalizing mockeries that cannot be exercized.”⁶ But in the view of University of Michigan psychologist Judith Bardwick, instead of liberating women to enjoy sex, the Pill has replaced fear of pregnancy with fear of being used. “Far from giving young women the sexual license that men have so long enjoyed, the Pill has caused some women to resent male freedom even more,” Bardwick stated. “Far from alleviating anxiety over sexual use of the body, the Pill has exacerbated it.”⁷

The pill notwithstanding, unwanted pregnancies still occur by the tens of thousands, and the fight over legalization of abortion-on demand remains on center stage. And, the effects of long-term use of the Pill, which acts to prevent ovulation, are now a matter of public record. The changed hormonal balance caused by the Pill is blamed for headaches and weight gain in some women. British and other medical studies have found a connection between the Pill and the formation of blood clots that can cause strokes as well as an increased susceptibility to various forms of uterine cancer. Successive generations of female contraceptives—oral, sub-dermal and all the rest—have become even more potent and questionable in their long-term effect.

It should not be surprising to find that as of the 1970s female suicide was on the rise in the United States. Though it has always been the case that more men than women kill themselves, trends had begun to change in certain large cities. In Los Angeles, for example, whereas in 1960 of those who committed suicide 35 percent were women, by 1970 the percentage of women among suicides had jumped to 45 percent.⁸ Another indication that women had begun to experience more conflict came from a University of Wisconsin study during the same period, which found that women psychiatric patients complained of more anxiety, depression, alienation and inability to cope with stress than did their counterparts of ten years earlier.⁹

THE “WOMEN’S LIB” MOVEMENT

“Women’s liberation” began formally with the founding in 1966 of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest and most influential movement group. In 1985 NOW had a nationwide membership in the United States of some 185,000 women and men. NOW was conceived as a civil rights lobby for women, active in organizing support for enactment and enforcement of law prohibiting discrimination against women in employment, education and so forth. NOW has also led numerous campaigns in the Congress and in the courts on issues ranging from childcare to abortion reform.

The National Women’s Political Caucus is another mass-based organization, with a membership of 77,000 in 1985, and a commitment to get women involved full time in politics. “Women! Make policy, not coffee!” is the organization’s motto.¹⁰ The Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, formed in 1977 and opened to male congressmen and senators in 1981, supports federal policy initiatives to improve the status of women and families. There are in addition a myriad old and new women’s groups and organizations concerned with specific issues such as education, abortion or pension rights.

This current of the “new feminism,” led predominantly by professional women and women in the labor movement, was joined by another current of younger women who were active in the civil rights and student protest movements, including the anti-Vietnam War and youth “counter-culture” movements, of the 1960s and 1970s. The latter group’s focus was less on legal or policy changes affecting women than on a frontal challenge to cultural definitions of maleness and femaleness.¹¹

As a result of its varied composition, the women’s liberation movement’s goals range from the modest, sensible amelioration of the female condition to extreme and revolutionary visions.¹² The first camp emphasizes a more egalitarian society: equal pay for equal work, a nation in which women are not blocked from access to education, political influence and economic power. The more radical wing of the movement, however, is disdainful of such mundane concerns and wants nothing less than a drastic revision of society in general. In their view, the sexual roles must be redefined to free both sexes from the stereotypes and responsibilities that have existed for ages. The concept of man as hunter and woman as keeper of the hearth, these feminists declare, is obsolete and destructive for both sexes.

Language itself became an issue for the “new feminists:” namely, do males use language to help perpetuate their roles as masters?¹³ Yes! Shout the feminists, language is “living proof’ of women’s oppression. Thus, titles such as “chairperson”— instead of “chairman”— and “congressone”—instead of “congressman”—have begun to be heard in the West. Likewise, “sportsoneship” instead of “sportsmanship,” “herstory” instead of “history,” and “spokesone” instead of “spokesman.” More well-known is the feminists’ rejection of “Mrs.” and “Miss.” as a form of address—because it allegedly stigmatizes women by revealing their marital status. Instead, “Ms.”—pronounced miz—has been widely adopted.

At the extreme radical fringe, the “new feminists” are waging an assault not just on society, but on the limitations of biology. Some argue that through the science of eugenics the genetic code could be altered to produce a different kind of man or woman. Sputnik magazine of October 1987 gave substance to this view with an article titled, “Should Daddies Be Mummies?” The article dealt with the theory of sex change forwarded by a German doctor, in which the uterus of a woman is taken out by surgery and placed into a man’s stomach so that the man, too, can perform the child-bearing task, thus putting an end to the inequality created by nature itself between the sexes. Short of that, extremist feminists demand a complete withdrawal from dependence on men, including sexual ties, and advocate embrace of lesbianism.¹⁴

The views and aims of the women’s liberation movement are wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory. Likewise, the broad response to the “new feminism” has been as varied as the circumstances in which ordinary American women have found themselves. A series of Vignettes of women interviewed by Time magazine in 1972, and excerpted below, makes this variety clear.¹⁵

Ÿ    Betty Jackson dreamed of being a singer or a nurse and, someday, a wife. Instead, at 15 she had an illegitimate child. “I live in dope city and on one of the worst streets,” said Betty. “We have no heat. We get hot water once in a while. The wall is coming apart from the leaks. Roaches are everywhere. The rats minuet and waltz around the floor.” The Welfare Department paid Betty’s rent, but the two additional checks they provided monthly barely covered the purchases of necessities, much less “luxuries” such as a telephone, radio, TV or vacuum cleaner. “I am a slave to my financial problems,” Betty said, “and my life is meaningless as far as having things that people are supposed to have.” Whatever hopes she had of returning to work were dashed, Betty reported, when her 19-year-old daughter gave birth to an illegitimate child.

Survival, Betty explained, was her primary concern. Women’s lib? “I’m not interested.” Religion? “I don’t go to church. They’re robbers. I can prey at home, and He’ll hear me just the same. I don’t have to pay for it.”

Ÿ    Luaretta Galligan married in 1944. She found herself alone most of the time when her husband’s company assigned him a job that kept him away from home six days a week. To make friends and keep busy, Lauretta opted for a job and attended night school. As her household expanded to include five sons, she dropped her outside interests to spend more time at home, “making sure everyone is going in the right direction,” as she put it. At age 52 she still rises at 6:30 to prepare her husband’s breakfast and get the two sons off to school. She smiles happily when her husband, Thomas, calls her his “greatest asset.”

Said Lauretta: “My first priority is my family and my husband’s work, and then I work on other things.” She never plays bridge and only occasionally goes to fashion shows or luncheons. Most of her social life revolves around her husband’s business. “Being a homemaker and mother is very stimulating. I realize there are many things about homemaking that are a little bit monotonous, but a lot of things about a woman’s career or a man’s career can be monotonous too.”

Ÿ    “Why should I have children?” asked Suzanne Sape, 23, and a happily married woman who is upward bound in a management planning career. “I’m glad I’m married,” Suzanne said, “and I enjoy being feminine. I like to sew, and I was once really interested in fashion.” But Suzanne’s bent toward homemaking and shared joys did not extend to having children. “If I were to conceive,” she stated frankly, “I would have an abortion. I like children very much. I consider it an enormous challenge to raise them the way they should be raised. It takes an awful lot of time and energy and intellect to raise them to cope with the problems of a pretty crummy world.” Suzanne had talked with doctors, she said, about sterilization, but concluded that she did not want to risk the possible physical and psychological side effect.

“If you are a career woman, how can you bring the child up?” Suzanne asked. “If a woman has a child, it should be a fulltime occupation for at least the first year, perhaps two or three. Three years is an awful big bite out of a career, and I’ve spent a long time preparing for my career.”

Ÿ    Noraine O’Callaghan is against abortion—“It’s murder she told Time—and she worried that some mothers use day care centers as a substitute for child rearing. But she sympathizes with most of the aims of women’s liberation, she said. Her one reservation: “In order to get into the system, a woman has to become like a man, and is therefore, probably no better.”

Ÿ    Marcia Heuber’s world is one of seasons and crops, dawn-to-dusk farm chores, the kitchen and children in a rambling farmhouse. When she was in high school, Marcia told Time, “My biggest goal was to get married.” Though she works just as hard as her husband, Roger, she has no doubts about where she stands in relation to him: “I still feel the male sex should be dominant. I want my husband to feel he is the head of the household. We decide things together, but I think the final word should mostly be his.”

Marcia also found time for social service activity like teaching Sunday school, playing the church organ, and so on. She is deeply proud of the life she has carved out for herself: “Being married and having a family were the most important things for me. I’m very happy with my profession.”

Ÿ    Lynn Young is 33, attractive, unmarried and likes it that way. “I wanted to be a surgeon,” she admitted, “but a friend at Stanford medical school discouraged me. He showed me how tough medicine is for a woman.” Lynn never feels the least pressure to marry. “There simply aren’t that many marriages I envy,” she said. “A lot of women are just hanging in there for the security, but that’s a dumb reason to get married.”

Ÿ I used to call my husband, “AB—arrogant bastard,” started Eleanor Driver. “And he was, but he was strong and dominant, and I liked that. When the university offered me a job, he said, ‘Go ahead—but I want my socks washed.”

A revealing portrait of the average American housewife and her response to “women’s lib” was drawn by author, wife and mother, Sue Kaufman:¹⁶

She is anywhere from 24 to 45—a wife, a mother, a housewife. She is usually far from mad (crazy or angry), far from being wildly bitter—but also far from being satisfied with what or where she is. Though she isn’t too clear on where she would rather be, she knows it isn’t up there on the big, steam rolling bandwagon of Women’s Lib, or in the front ranks of the marching phalanx, waving banners. Much as she admires them.

And she does admire them ...

She is overwhelmed by a terrible sense of wrongness, of jarring
inconsistency. There was that surging, powerful feeling in the hall (when she went to hear a prominent feminist speak), and now, stranded on the linoleum under the battery of fluorescent kitchen lights, there is this terrible sense of isolation, of walls closing in, of being trapped…

She has begun to think about the necessity of financial independence... About a job, part-time now, full-time later. If she has money of her own, she has begun to ask questions about separate bank accounts ...

But most likely she will not divorce. At least not casually, and certainly not for any principle or idea. Moreover, she like, or loves, her children, and though they are often a terrible drain on her emotions and strength, she is simply not prepared to delegate most of their care to someone else. She also likes, or loves, her husband, and though she is no longer willing to put up with anything she considers an infringement on her rights or dignity, she is not about to blow up the whole works by refusing to do what was contracted at the onset of her marriage—namely Women’s Work—which covers everything from enduring labor pains to counting laundry ...

The siren song of “women’s liberation” is complicated and contradictory. Indeed, as soon as the vote was won, American suffragists split over a proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. Many women with a background in the social reform movement believed strongly in female differences, and feared that the ERA would preclude legislation protective of women.¹⁷ More than 50 years later, in 1972, the ERA was passed in the U.S. Congress, but then failed to receive sufficient backing from state legislatures to be adopted.

“If the feminist revolution simply wanted to exchange one ruling class for another, if it aimed at outright female domination, the goal would be easier to visualize,” concluded Bonnie Angelo in her overview of American women’s status in 1972.¹⁸ “The demand for equality, not domination, is immensely complicated. True equality between autonomous partners is hard to achieve even if both partners are of the same sex. The careful balancing of roles and obligations and privileges, without the traditional patterns to fall back on, sometimes seems like an almost utopian vision.

While nearly everyone favors some of the basic goals of the New Feminism—equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunity, equal treatment by the law—satisfying even those minimum demands could require more wrenching change than many casual sympathizers with the women’s cause have seriously considered. Should women be drafted? Ought protective legislation about women’s hours and working conditions be repealed?

WOMEN INTO THE MARKETPLACE

Complex currents of social change converged to produce the “new feminism” of the 1970s, but British historian and writer Arnold Toynbee identified an essential dilemma years earlier. Middle-class woman acquired education and a chance at a career, wrote Toynbee, at the very time she lost her domestic servants and the unpaid household help of relatives living in the old, large family; she had to become either a “household drudge” or “carry the intolerably heavy load of two simultaneous full-time jobs.”¹⁹

In 1972, though American women already made up more than one third of the national workforce, they were concentrated in lower-skilled and lower-paying positions. An average woman employed in a full-time job earned only two thirds of the salary paid to a man with a similar job. Childcare facilities were few and far between, and often too expensive. The same number of women as men graduated from high school that year, but only 41 percent of the women compared to 59 percent of the men went on to college. There had never been a woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, and less than 3 percent of the nation’s lawyers were women. The first five female agents for the U.S. Secret Service were only then beginning training. And politically, women were barely visible: in 1975, only one in ten statewide elected officials and state legislators were women; and, at the national level, only 4 percent of the members of congress were women.

During the next two decades, from 1970 through 1990, all of these indicators of women’s status changed, most rather dramatically, and women are now visible if not prominent in virtually every walk of life in the United States.²⁰

Ÿ    Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982, and as of 1990 12.5 percent of all U.S. federal judges, and more than 8 percent of the judges on state benches, were women.

Ÿ    In 1984, Representative Geraldine Ferraro, a wife and mother, was the Democratic Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate and the first woman in American history to run on a presidential ticket.

Ÿ    In 1991, 17 percent of all elected mayors were women, up from just 1 percent in 1971. During the same period the number of statewide elected officials and legislators doubled, from 10 percent to just under 20 percent. At the national level progress has been slower: the proportion of female members of congress went up from 4 percent in 1975 to 10 percent in 1994.

Ÿ    In 1991, 20 percent of then-President Bush’s Senate confirmed appointments—that is, the higher-ranking appointments—were women, up from18 percent in 1977 under then-President Jimmy Carter. President William Clinton’s cabinet is peppered with women—as of September 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala were in the Cabinet proper. Laura D’Andrea Tyson was Chairman of the prestigious Council of Economic Advisers, Sheila Widnall was Secretary of the Air Force, Dr. Joycelyn Elders was U.S. Surgeon General, and the heads of the Peace Corps, the Environmental Protection Agency and Commodity Futures Trading Commission were women. One out of the five governors on the Federal Reserve Board and one out of the four commissioners on the U.S. International Trade Commission are women. There are about ten women in top posts within the Executive Office of the President, and there are more than 25 women under-secretaries in the various government departments or ministries.

Ÿ    Women have also broken into the front ranks of the media, with Connie Chung holding a prized anchor position on the evening news for one of the three major commercial television networks and scores more women in the position of network reporters, and even more women anchoring and reporting for local news stations, not to mention hosting some of the most popular talk and variety shows.

Ÿ    In 1989, a survey of ‘Fortune 500’ companies found that women made up 12.7 percent of corporate board membership, up from a single digit figure in 1970. And businesses owned by women soared in the decade 1977-1978, from 7.1 to 30 percent of all business.

Ÿ    In education, where women have historically lagged behind men, especially in post-secondary education, over the decade from 1970 to 1990 women’s achievements converged with and in some cases surpassed men. From 1966 to 1987, the percentage of female high school graduates who completed four years of college increased from 16 to 25 percent, to equal that of men.

In 1989, the majority of degrees at all levels except doctorate were earned by women: whereas in 1970, 43 percent of the Bachelor’s degrees and 39 percent of the Master’s degrees were awarded to women, in 1989 it was 53 and 52 percent respectively. Though only 36 percent of the doctorates were awarded to women, that was a substantial jump from 13 percent in 1970.

Significantly, too, the proportion of degree in science and engineering earned by women showed a dramatic increase from 1960 to 1990. In 1989, 50 percent of all biological science degrees were earned by women, up from 28 percent in 1970. The proportion of degrees awarded to women in computer science and the physical sciences doubled from 14 percent in 1970 to 31 and 30 percent respectively in 1989. Mathematics, also a traditional preserve of men, saw an increase in degrees awarded to women during the same period of from 37 to 49 percent. And in business, 47 percent of the degrees went to women, compared to 9 percent in 1970. Though in 1989 women earned only 15 percent of all Bachelor’s degrees in engineering, this was up from just 1 percent in 1970.

In the medical and other professional areas too, women have
become increasingly qualified. In 1989, 26 percent of the dentistry degrees, 33 percent of the medical degrees, 50 percent of the
veterinary medicine degrees and 40 percent of the law degrees were awarded to women.

From 1975 to 1989 the number of colleges and universities headed by women doubled, but women continued to be under-represented in the upper management of higher education. In 1989 only 10 percent of the ‘chief executive officers of colleges and universities were female. Women’s position in college faculties is likewise still insecure. In 1910 women made up 20 percent of college faculties: in 1985, a full seventy-five years later, just 28 percent of college faculties were female, and most women educators were clustered in the lower ranks, below the level of full professor, with lower pay and less job security.

A CLOSER LOOK

Western women have come out of the house and into the marketplace in full force, but a closer look raises the question as to how much of this is “liberation,” and, even more important, what is its cost in human and social terms for women and for society.

In 1990, 53.5 million women, or 58 percent of all American women, were in the labor force—three fourths of them working full time. From 1975 to 1990, 20 million women had been added to the work force. Labor force participation of all women between 16 and 65 years of age rose dramatically, but the steepest increase was among married women with a husband present in the home. In 1990, nearly 60 percent of all married mothers with children under six years of age were working outside the home. In 1980 less than 20 percent of married mothers with toddlers under three years of age were full-time workers; by 1990 more than 33 percent of these mothers were in the work force.

Though women have made substantial advances in professional, technical and administrative-management occupational areas, they are still overwhelmingly employed in the administrative support occupations, including clerical and secretarial jobs, and services (such as sales-girls, waitresses, hairdressers, etc.). In 1975, only 5.2 percent of employed females were in executive, administrative or management occupations, whereas by 1990 this had grown to 11.1 percent. Similarly, in 1975, 13.2 percent of employed women worked in the traditional professions (i.e., as physicians, lawyers, registered nurses), and 2.7 percent worked in technical and related professions but, by 1990 this had increased to 15.1 percent and 3.5 percent respectively. In 1975, 63.7 percent of female employees were confined to four areas—namely, sales, administrative support, private household and other service occupations. In 1990 58.6 percent of employed women still worked in these fields.

So, although women in America are now 13.9 percent of all police and detectives, 19.3 percent of all physicians, 36 percent of all computer programmers, 43.5 percent of all manufacturing assemblers, 44.3 percent of all financial managers and 51.5 percent of all bus drivers, they are also 99 percent of all secretaries, 89.2 percent of all textile sewing machine operators, 84.8 percent of all health aides and 80.8 percent of all waitresses.

Among government employees, though women are a minority at the highest grade levels, their representation there has been increasing sharply. For instance, in 1982, 22.4 percent of the employees in Grades 11-12 and only 9.7 percent in Grades 13-15, were women. By 1988, 31.9 percent of Grades 11-12 employees and 15.9 percent of Grades 13-15 employees were women. Still, the bulk of women in government employment are concentrated at the six lowest grades. In 1982, and still in 1988, fully 75 percent of the employees in the lowest six levels were women.

Though the pay gap between men and women has closed somewhat, and more so in some occupations than in others, discrimination in earnings and benefits remains pervasive. In 1980 women earned, on average, 64 cents for every dollar earned by men in the United States; by 1990 it was 72 cents. In certain areas, such as technical, sales, administrative support and service jobs, the male-female wage gap narrowed in recent years as much because of declines in men’s salaries (due to recession condition) as of increases in women’s wages. As of 1989, women were still more likely than men to be working at minimum wage jobs. Female workers were less likely than males to have employer or union-sponsored pension plans in 1987 (but between 1980 and 1987 the proportion of male workers with pension plans dropped by 6 percentage points).

In spite of the fact that nearly half the American work force consists of women, neither maternity/paternity leave nor childcare support was by any means the norm in American firms, even in 1989. At that time, no more than 3 percent of medium and large size firms, on average, provided paid maternity leave, and this went down to 2 percent for small firms (with less than 100 employees). In 1988, more than 60 percent of American children under age 18 had working mothers, but as far as childcare assistance is concerned, no more than 10 percent of firms of all sizes provided any real benefits or support for childcare. However, 35-45 percent of all firms did provide flexible schedules and flexible leave times for parents with young children.

“Flexitime” notwithstanding, in 1987 6.2 million working mothers in America paid for childcare. Of these 750,000 had incomes at or below the poverty line, and for them childcare expenses ate up 20 percent of their income. Though mothers with children under age 21 and no father present are entitled to government child support, often they do not get it at all or do not get the full amount.

Closely related to the issue of women’s earnings and benefits in the fact that between 1970 and 1989 the number of women workers of age 16 and above holding multiple jobs increased by almost 400 percent—from 636,000 to more than 3 million. Women who worked more than one job in 1989 were more likely than men to be doing so because the additional earnings were necessary to meet regular household expenses.

THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY UNDER SIEGE

Sweeping as the change may be, the phenomenon of working mothers is the least of the shock to the traditional American family over the past several decades. Though married couple families still heavily predominate, that predominance has dropped from 87 to 80 percent in just two decades as “other family types” became more common. The “male householder with no spouse present” from 11 to 16.5 percent. This varies by race: among black Americans, for instance, only the barest majority of families were married couples in 1989. The overall result: in 1990, fully one quarter of all American children resided with just one parent.

Already climbing in the 1960s, the divorce rate in America literally soared from 1970 to 1990. In 1990, the divorce ratio (i.e., the number of currently divorced persons per 1000 currently married persons) was at an all-time high of 166 for women and 118 for men. In that year 56 percent of American women over age 18 were married, with husband present; 3.7 percent were married with husband absent; 12.1 percent were widowed; 9.3 percent were divorced; and 18.9 percent were single (i.e., never married).

Though most women continued to marry, the average age at first marriage increased from 21 to 24 years between 1970 and 1988, and marriage tended to become a kind of way-station for many, only one of several different, and now acceptable, “family types.” After entering adulthood, many women will live with a man prior to marriage. Such “co-habitation” outside of marriage, as it is called, was uncommon prior to 1970. In that year the U.S. Bureau of the Census counted 523,000 households with two unrelated adults of the opposite sex; by 1984 the number had grown to nearly two million. For most women such co-habitation is a temporary stage before marriage. But statistics do show that while at least five out of six young women in 1985 will marry, lifelong singleness (possibly in combination with one or more co-habiting relationships) is becoming more acceptable and common.²¹

Not only has the divorce rate soared, but the birth rate (i.e., the number of live births for each 1000 women of childbearing age) plunged—down from 118 in 1960 to 67.2 in 1988, a nearly 50 percent drop. By the early 1980s voluntary childlessness had become so acceptable and common—among married couples as well as among never-married women—that one researcher estimated that perhaps as many as 25 percent of the young women of the 1970s would in fact never have children.²² In 1990, four out of every ten American families contained children, though the presence of children was more common in families maintained by women than either those maintained by men or in married couple families.

Simultaneously, the number of legal abortions has more than doubled. In 1987 in the United States, 13,54,000 pregnancies were terminated by abortion, up from 5,88,000 in 1972. Approximately 70 percent of the legal abortions are obtained by unmarried women, and these women are concentrated in the lower end of the income scales. Women with an annual household income at the poverty line or below account for only 15 percent of all American women, but they account for 33 percent of the women obtaining abortions.

NATURE’S VERDICT

The equality of man and woman is one of the main concepts of western civilization. It has been in vogue in the western world for the last one hundred years, but that has been quite long enough to show that, as an experiment in living, it has been a failure. In spite of women having been legally accorded equal status with men in many countries, and in spite of advances in the educational level of women and their entry into most arenas of economic and political life, in practice they have yet to achieve an equal professional status or secure an equal footing in society. And, meanwhile, the shift in women’s role and identity in society has led directly to the breakdown of the family and a serious breakdown of public morality generally in the West.

Initially, supporters of the concept of equality of the sexes claimed that the differences between men and women resulted from environmental influences, but modem investigation shows that the cause must be sought elsewhere. Research carried out on a wide cross-section of society and over a broad range of different fields has established that this difference, far from having been externally imposed, by the environment, or through historical processes, is innate. That is to say, that it is biological in nature, something that women are simply born with and not something which is eradicable by legislation or the whipping up of popular sentiment. It is nature and not nurture which is to be blamed.

In 1981, Newsweek magazine reported in detail on the conclusions drawn from in-depth research carried out in America by both male and female investigators on the differences in the physical and mental make-up of men and women, namely, that women are emotional in their thinking and that men are superior to them in mathematics, problem solving, leadership and fighting.²³ Women’s differences are traced not to their conditioned responses to a traditionally male dominated society, but to their own biology which fits them for an altogether different sphere of living.

It has now been established that hormones play an important role in creating this difference between the two sexes. When the male hormone testosterone was experimentally injected into females, they began to develop masculine characteristics. Girls who had been injected with male hormones while still at the foetal stage showed less fondness for playing with dolls, and even developed aggressive temperaments like boys. Researchers found that hormones can change the structure of the brain itself, so that if the male and female brain structures differ, the cause may be traced to the difference in hormones.

Although this research has clearly established that a difference does exist, physically and mentally, between men and women—obviously indicating separate spheres of activity for them—old adherents of the male-female equality concept are still reluctant to accept the reversal of a favorite theory. As a western scholar says: “Whether these physiological differences destine men and women for separate role in society is another and far more delicate question.”²⁴

Almost a decade prior to the Newsweek report, Time magazine, in its special issue on the status of American women, asked the question: “Are women immutably different from men?” Their review of the research findings at that time, summarized in the following pages, is instructive.²⁵ Women’s liberationists believe that any differences other than anatomical are a result of conditioning by society. The opposing view is that all of the differences are fixed in goes. The idea that genetic predispositions exist is based on three kinds of evidence. First, there are the ‘cultural universals’ cited by anthropologist Margaret Mead: Almost everywhere, the mother is the principal caretaker of the child, and male dominance and aggression are the rule. Some anthropologists believe there has been an occasional female dominated society: others insist that none has ever existed.

Then there is the fact that among most ground dwelling primates, males are dominant and have as a major function the protection of females and offspring. Some research suggests that it is true even when the young are raised apart from adults, which seems to mean that they do not learn their roles from their society.

Finally, behavioral sex differences show up long before anybody could possibly perceive subtle differences between his parents or know which parent he is expected to imitate. “A useful strategy,” says Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, “is to assume that the earlier a particular difference appears, the more likely it is to be influenced by biological factors.” Physical differences appear even before birth. The heart of the female fetus often beats faster, and girls develop more rapidly. “Physiologically,” says sociologist Barbette Blackington, “women are better-made animals.” Males do have more strength and endurance—though that hardly matters in a technological society.

Recent research hints that there may even be sex differences in the brain. According to some experimenters, the presence of the male hormone testosterone in the fetus may “masculinize” the brain, organizing the fetal nerve centers in characteristic ways. This possible “sex typing” of the central nervous system before birth may make men and women respond differently to incoming stimuli.

In fact, newborn girls do show different responses in some situations. They react more strongly to the removal of a blanket and more quickly to touch and pain. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that twelve-week-old girls gaze longer at photographs of faces than at geometric figures. Boys show no preference then, though eventually they pay more attention to figures.

Even after infancy, the sexes show differential interests that do not seem to grow solely out of experience. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson found that boys and girls aged ten to twelve used space differently, when asked to construct a scene with toys. Girls often build allow wall, sometimes with an elaborate doorway, surrounding a ‘quiet interior scene. Boys are likely to construct towers, facades, with canons and lively exterior scenes. “The difference,” Erikson says, “seems to parallel the morphology (shape and form) of genital differentiation itself: in the male, an external organ, erectable and intrusive; and, internal organs in the female, with vestibular access, leading to statically expectant ova.”

In aptitude as well as in interest, sex differences become apparent early in life. Though girls are generally less adept than boys at mathematical and spatial reasoning, they learn to count sooner and to talk earlier and better. Some scientists think this female verbal superiority may be caused by sex-linked differences in the brain. While girls outdo boys verbally, they often lag behind in solving analytical problems, those that require attention to detail.

It is a paradox that even though the number of educated women is at an all-time high, the representation of women in traditionally male professions is still extremely low. Harvard psychologist Matina Horner guessed that one reason for this may be that women actively fear success, and began seriously looking into this when she discovered that the few studies that had been made of women’s motivation for achievement showed they had high anxiety. Reasonably certain that this meant women were afraid of competition, Horner decided nonetheless to test that assumption. Putting men and women into competitive and noncompetitive situations, she found that males showed a spurt of motivation in competition. Females did not. It was anxiety about competition that apparently held the women back.

There are personality differences between the sexes too. Some distinctions turn up remarkably early. At New York University, for example, researchers found that a female infant stops sucking a bottle and looks up when someone comes into the room; a male pays no attention to the visitor. Another experiment showed that girls of twelve months who become frightened in a strange room drift toward their mothers, while boys look for something interesting to do. At four months, twice as many girls as boys cry when frightened in a strange laboratory. And, according to Jerome Kagan, since similar differences can be seen in monkeys and baboons we are forced to consider the possibility that some of the psychological differences between men and women may not be the product of experience alone but of subtle biological differences.

Many researchers have found greater dependence and docility in very young girls, greater autonomy and activity in boys. When a barrier is set up to separate youngsters from their mothers, boys try to knock it down; girls cry helplessly.

Animal studies suggest that there may be a biological factor in maternal behavior; mothers of rhesus monkeys punish their male babies earlier and more often than their female offspring; and, they also touch their female babies more often and act more protective toward them.

The definitive research on hormones is still to be done, but one trait thought to be affected by hormones is aggressiveness. In all cultures, investigators report, male infants tend to play more aggressively than females. Some suggest that female may be as aggressive as men—but with words instead of deeds. However, it has been established that the female hormone estrogen inhibits aggression in both animal and human males. It has also been proved that the male hormone androgen influences aggression in animals. For example, castration produces tractable steers rather than fierce bulls.

The influence of androgen begins even before birth. Administered to pregnant primates, the hormones make newborn females play more aggressively than ordinary females. Moreover, such masculinized animals are unusually aggressive as long as they live, even if they are never again exposed to androgen. According to some experts, this long-lasting effect of hormones administered or secreted before birth may help to explain why boys are more aggressive than girls even during their early years when both sexes appear to produce equal amounts of male and female hormones.

Will there someday be a “unisex” society, with no differences between men and women except anatomical ones? Time magazine asked. It seems unlikely. According to psychoanalyst Therese Benedek: “Biology precedes personality.”

“Nature has been the oppressor,” observed psychologist Michael Lewis. Women’s role as caretaker was the evolutionary result of their biological role in birth and feeding. The baby bottle may have freed women from some of the tasks of that role, but, says University of Michigan psychologist Judith Bardwick, “the major responsibility for child rearing is the woman’s, even in the Soviet Union, the Israeli Kibbutz, Scandinavia and mainland China.” Furthermore, though mothering skills are mostly learned, it is a fact that if animals are raised in isolation and then put in a room with the young of the species, it is the females who go to the infants and take care of them.

“Perhaps the known biological differences can be totally overcome, and society can approach a state in which a person’s sex is of no consequence for any significant activity except child bearing,” admits Jerome Kagan.” But we must ask if such a society will be satisfying its members.” As Kagan sees it, “complementarity” is what makes relationships stable and pleasurable.

Psychoanalyst Martin Symonds agreed. “The basic reason why unisex must fail is that in the sexual act itself, the man has to be assertive, if tenderly, and the woman has to be receptive. What gives trouble is when men see assertiveness as aggression and women see receptiveness as submission.” Unisex, he sums up, would be “a disaster” because children need roles to identify with and rebel against. ‘You can’t identify with a blur. A Unisex world would be frictionless environment in which nobody would be able to grow up.”

The crucial point, however, is that a difference is not a deficiency. As one biologist put it: “We are all human beings and in this sense equal. We are not, however, the same.”

AT WAR WITH NATURE

In practice, men still have the upper hand. The cause is not social conditioning, as feminists would have us believe. It is wholly biological and psychological. It is the biological factor which—we are forced to conclude after 100 years of feminist struggle—is the stumbling block in according women an equal position (that is, in the outside world) with men. It is the cruelty of nature rather than the cruelty of society which is to blame. Now that this has been established, the more militant among the feminists have started demanding that, in the womb itself, the science of eugenics should be applied to changing the genetic code in order to create a new biological system which will in turn produce a new breed of women. They maintain that, in this way, the male-dominated society could be replaced by one in which the sexes are equal in ability and performance. This suggestion is rather like saying that fish, like goats, should be able to produce milk, and then, when, in spite of every encouragement the fish fails to produce milk, proclaiming that one will create, with the help of medical science, a new strain of milk-producing fish. Exactly like goats.

If, one fine day, it occurred to a doctor that the mouth should be situated not on the face but on the stomach, and he thereupon set about removing the mouth from the face, the world would ridicule his foolishness, for the places which nature has allotted to-the various physical features are unalterable. Our successful control of them depends upon our dealing with them as they are, and not in attempting to reshuffle them to suit man-made concepts.

This fanciful repositioning of women in society is rather like trying to juggle with the unalterable features of the human physiognomy. Similarly, when modern civilization began to draw up a new map of life, one of its features was to bring about complete equality between man and woman. The whole family and social structure had to be turned topsy-turvy in order to turn the fanciful supposition into a reality. In the end, women have come out of their homes, but they have been unable to become the equals of men in practical life. The reason is simple—nature did not obligingly go along with the human imagination.

The Russian scientist, Anton Nemilov, who himself desires to see total equality of the sexes become a reality, admits that this desire of ours has no basis in biology and agrees that this is the reason for this idea never having materialized. Citing scientific experiments and observations, he writes:

Very few people will agree if it is said today that women should be given limited rights in the social set up. We, too, are wholly against such a suggestion. However, we should not deceive ourselves in thinking that establishing equality between men and women in practical life is a simple matter. Nowhere have more attempts been made than in the USSR to establish this equality. Nowhere in the world have such unbiased and generous laws been made than in the USSR, yet it is a fact that the position of woman in the family has hardly changed for the better.²⁶

He goes on to say:

Up till now the concept of inequality between men and women has been so deeply rooted not only in the lesser educated people but also in the highly educated Soviet people as well as in women themselves, that if, on occasion, women are treated as having full equality with men, this is attributed to men’s weakness and impotency. If we pursue the thoughts of any scientist, writer, student, businessman, or hundred percent communist, we shall soon realize that he does not in his heart of hearts regard woman as his equal. If we read any recent novel, however free a thinker the writer might be, we shall certainly find something or the other in it which will expose as superficial his concept of woman as equal to man.²⁷

The reason is that this revolutionary concept clashes with an extremely important fact, i.e. that in respect of biology, both sexes are not equal, both are not meant to shoulder an equal amount of burden.²⁸

Deviation from nature not only fails to achieve any positive gain, but also entails the loss of desirable features of human existence. The correct place for a thing is that assigned to it by nature. Any bid on our part to displace or reorient it inevitably leads to a variety of evils.

This is exactly what has happened in the case of women who have been taken out of their homes in order to make them men’s equal. The result has not for them been the achievement of equal position. The result has been their becoming the objects of a flood of licentiousness and pornography.

Of this situation, Anton Nemilov writes:

The truth is that all signs of sexual anarchy have become apparent in the workers. This is a situation fraught with grave dangers threatening to destabilize the whole socialist system. It should be countered in all possible ways. Great difficulties will be faced to fight on this point. I can cite thousands of instances of sexual licentiousness, which goes to show that this has spread not only in the lower echelons but also on the top rungs of the ladder as well as among the intellectuals.²⁹

Nemilov’s view, published as long as fifty years ago, has been substantiated by recent experience. In fact, his words may be applied with even greater force and accuracy to the state of affairs prevailing today.

Modern man, regarding the old concept of man and woman as outdated, attempted to create equality between the two sexes. But this amounted to waging war with nature itself, to clashing with reality and his efforts proved counterproductive. Far from ‘achieving equality between the two sexes, efforts made to reach this artificial goal paved the way to the spread of various evils in society.

SOME EXAMPLES

Here are some examples of the grave results of deviation in the matter of women under the influence of western civilization.

NOT GETTING MARRIED—A MISTAKE

It is thanks to erroneous western concepts that marriage has come to be equated with bondage. This, in turn, has resulted in the emergence of a permissive society with all the attendant social and familial evils. One such problem is typified by Greta Garbo, a Swedish film actress who was one of the most famous Hollywood personalities of her time. In her heyday she had been greatly sought after, but when she grew old, her charms faded and her friends, one by one, deserted her. On the 18th of September 1980, at the age of 75, she celebrated her birthday all by herself. Her biographer, who was present at that time, asked whether she regretted having opted for a single and, consequently, lonely life. Greta Garbo replied sadly: “Not getting married was a mistake.” ³⁰

In their prime, such women attract people by their youthful charm. But as they advance in years, they lose their attraction for the opposite sex, and their friends forsake them like rats leaving a sinking ship. It becomes less and less possible for them to continue to enjoy all the different kinds of entertainment which had formerly engaged them day in and day out. Too late, it dawns on them that all their past activities have been of no value. They had been living in a dream world from which they have now been rudely awakened. It is only at this point that they realize the futility of regarding permanent loyalty as an obstacle to the enjoyment of life. The delights of youth are replaced by the emptiness and boredom of old age. Pets become their only solace, as there is no life partner with whom to share their joys and sorrows, and no children to give them tender, loving care. There is no one of their own who will keep their name alive when they leave this world. There is not even anyone to whom they can bequeath their life’s savings with any degree of satisfaction. There is no one to love and no one to return their love. They find themselves left alone and bewildered in a world which abounds in life. For them there can be no greater punishment than this.

BE A GOOD WIFE

Frank Borman, an American astronaut went into space with a woman astronaut in the same spacecraft. After his return from the voyage he said: “Having women on the spacecraft was okay except that it would be upsetting to put a male and a female too close together for a long time.” Borman’s comment certainly upset the feminists. One American lady remarked in the course of a fiery speech: “Mr. Frank Borman would never have existed had his parents not come together.”

Scientific research together with the realities of practical life have shocked the cherished concepts of feminists leading some of them to rethink their ideals. An American lady, Mrs. Marabel Morgan, a mother of two, recently published a book entitled Total Woman. Here is the simple magic formula she divulged to her American sisters so that they may lead successful married lives. “Be nice to your husband, stop nagging him and understand his needs.” In less than a year this book sold three million copies. To the writer the perfection of womanhood lies in her ability to become a good companion of her husband rather than seek an independent life.³¹

The truth is that the total woman is one who can be a total companion to her husband.

ADMITTING DEFEAT

Another example of the baneful consequences of western civilization’s deviation from nature’s course is that of Jean Seberg, an American actress who also achieved extraordinary fame and popularity because of her charming personality. Not only in the U.S., but also in Europe, she was the cynosure of all eyes. At an early stage in her career, she opted to become an object of entertainment to millions in preference to making a home for herself on the traditional pattern. But when her diary was gone through after her death, the last line turned out to be: “I wish I had stayed home.”³² How ironic that such a “successful” career should have ended in helpless failure.

God has endowed everything pertaining to the world of matter with particular characteristics. The objects of His creation are, therefore, able to perform satisfactorily only if they function strictly in accordance with their own particular properties. In the same way, God has created man and woman with their particular traits, and they can lead proper lives only when they act in consonance with their respective natures. Any deviation from this course will cause them to surrender their true place on life’s map.

A woman’s capacities are clearly different from those of a man. This very fact is a proof that the spheres of men and women, in general, are not the same. The man’s sphere is basically outside the home and the woman’s is within. If both change their spheres of activity, both will lose their respective identities and their ultimate meaningfulness in the context of society. Each, in displacing the other, will have a sense of disorientation.

ENDLESS PROBLEMS

The Lonely Lady, a novel by Harold Robbins first published in the U.S., throws light on one of the weaknesses of the highly developed society of America which causes an unmarried woman to end her life in a state of insufferable loneliness. It is the story of a beautiful, young, American woman who, dazzled by the glamour of the film world, abandons her married life to become an actress. Her perfect femininity helps her to climb the ladder of success and she quickly reaches dizzy heights of fame and wealth. She has a host of fans and is surrounded by luxuries, but the climax of her success does not bring her peace. Now she discovers the bitter truth—that “fame has a way of fading, and friends a way of disappearing when they are most needed.” ³³

With a sigh, she says, “Only a woman knows what loneliness is.”³⁴ The main point made by the novel is that a woman cannot afford to find herself in such a situation. Making vast sums of money working in films and securing an independent life may seem very attractive propositions, but as a woman ages, her friends no longer see any charm in her and this, to the woman, proves an unbearable shock.

 She may have amassed all kinds of wealth and material objects, but still lacks what she most needs—peace of mind. This is something which can only arise from the stability of a permanent companionship, but now there is no man in her life who could give her just that. Too late, she realizes what it means to possess no family of her own. “Here is a loneliness born of independence, of honest individualism in a society where only dishonesty brings profit.” ³⁵

The system of human life is a web of extremely delicate balances and counterbalances, in which even a minor change can wreak havoc. It is no different from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms in which the secret of success lies in never deviating from the pattern laid down by nature. Achieving the desired result is possible only when the established structure of nature is understood and accepted. But the very people who adhere strictly to this precept as regards the world of matter, forget that this is an eternal truth which applies to their own lives too. Nature’s system for men and women takes shape in the institution of marriage. A woman’s physique, psychology, familial urges and social relations all demand that she led a married—and, therefore, moral—life. This is a pattern which has been laid down for her own good.

Being free and independent seems an attractive phrase when applied to a woman, but the practical experience of personal liberty can range from the purely unpleasant to the downright disgusting.

In her youth a woman may easily fall prey to what strikes her—because of her inexperience—as an appealing way of life. But, as she grows older, and goes from one bitter experience to the next, she realizes that she has made a wrong choice. But this dawns on her only when things have gone too far for her to make amends. Now her only alternative is to console herself with her pet dogs, cats, parrots, etc., as it is too late to find a life partner with whom to share the ups and downs of her daily existence. When she finally leaves this world, it is in despair.

THE END OF PLEASURE

Married to John Kennedy (1917-1963), America’s 35th President, Jacqueline Kennedy basked in the limelight of her husband, and enjoyed the fame of being America’s First Lady. But this did not last for long, because Kennedy was shot dead in November 1963, just three years after being elected President. Jacqueline was suddenly bereft of all the fame and honor that went with her place in society as wife of the President. But, not long afterwards, the same feminine charm which had attracted John Kennedy in her younger days now brought to her side the Greek millionaire, Aristotle Onassis (1906 -1975), whom she subsequently married. At the time of her marriage, she was forty years of age and Onassis was 60. But this marriage was not a success. They soon began to live separately, until after a prolonged illness, Onassis died in 1975. Jacqueline was not even present at his deathbed during the last hours of his life.

Jacqueline found everything but happiness. Her biographer, Kitty Kelly, speaks of her “incurable desire to buy happiness, even if it meant spending as much in one hour as 3,000 dollars.”³⁶

This shows that even marriage cannot make a woman happy if what her mind is truly set on is not conjugal bliss, but wealth, fame and all the attendant worldly pleasures.

Marilyn Monroe (b. June 1, 1926), one of the most famous women in America, started her career as a photographer’s model and soon rose to fame as a film actress. Thanks to her extraordinary attractiveness, she became renowned as the “sex goddess” of the film world. Her films were all a tremendous success in that they never failed to draw crowds.

The last film she made was called The Misfits—a title which, in a sense, applied to her own life, because she frequently had a feeling of being out of place. In the midst of even the largest crowds, psychologically, she was alone. Photographs showing her smiling and laughing were regularly published in the newspapers, but, in reality, she was often sunk in depression. Finally, her mental and emotional state became unbearable and, on August 5, 1962, she committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She was just 36 years of age.

Such women appear to be happy on the stage and screen, but in their heart of hearts, they live with a sense of persecution, for they belong to everybody, but nobody belongs to them. They make others happy, but they have always to contend with the feeling deep down inside them that there is really no one with whom they can share their innermost thoughts, no one to whom they can pour out their hearts. At social gatherings they appear to be fulfilled as individuals, but in reality, their lives are empty. The initial spectacular quality of their lives is dimmed, bit-by-bit, until at the end, life seems little more than a dreary vacuum.

It is a fact that women are temperamentally unfit for solitude. Few women can endure loneliness over long periods of time. But the path along which western civilization pushes a woman can lead to nothing but isolation. Islam, on the contrary, leads a woman to a life where she is never alone, but a member of a united family. The Islamic way is natural, that of the western world quite the reverse.

THE BURDEN OF FAME

Brigitte Bardot (b. 1934), the most famous star in the history of the French cinema, scaled higher peaks of renown than even Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich. It was said that she brought more currency into France than the Renault Motor Company, and some even declared her to be the most famous Frenchwoman since Joan of Arc. English writer Tony Crawley calculated that by 1958 her photograph had appeared no less than 29,345 times on the covers of European and American magazines.³⁷

Film followed film, her popularity soared, and, at times, she even gave up trying to go out because the crowds of photographers outside prevented her from doing so. Every day, she was swamped by fan mail, so that it became impossible even to read a selection of the letters which poured in.

Despite all this ostensible glamour, she was so unsatisfied from within that just the fact of being a celebrity became a burden to her. One night, worn out by her own fame, Brigitte swallowed an overdose of tranquillizers. Even at that crucial moment, when her life hung in the balance, photographers forced the ambulance which was rushing her to the hospital to stop halfway so that they could take pictures of her. BB (as she was known in the film world) was once reported as saying that she never really felt at ease in front of the camera.

At the age of 39, after making 48 films, she suddenly ended her career, refusing even to accept the most enticing offers from Hollywood. She sold her Rolls Royce and went to live alone in her house on the Riviera “to cease to be considered a beautiful object and become a human being like any other.” 

The truth is that to become a heroine in the outside world and attain fame goes against the feminine grain. By nature, a woman is home loving and at heart she is a housewife. It is, in fact, her birthright. That is why it so frequently happens that women celebrities, who lead artificial lives outside the normal limits of the family, drop everything in favour of living in solitude either somewhere in the middle of their careers, or at the end. Where they finally find peace of mind, after a temporary exposure to bright city lights and glittering society, is in their very own homes, and not in the outside world.

What Islamic law lays down with regard to women is protective of their true nature, and is in no way cruel or repressive, as has been suggested by the uninitiated. When, after experimenting with a life and a career in the outside world, a woman finally realizes that her place is in the home, she has reached the point which Islam encourages every woman of marriageable age to reach at the very outset by way of following her natural womanly inclinations. Islamic law is designed to steer women away from the ordeals of the crassly competitive and brazenly immoral world in which only men can successfully make their way.

AN ENFORCED WITHDRAWAL FROM THE FIELD OF ACTION

Everyone, be it a man or a woman, is rewarded according to his or her abilities and performance. When women in search of equality emerged from their homes, they expected to be able to function in areas which had traditionally been masculine strongholds, and attempted to take up jobs as pilots, drivers, engineers, professors, administrators, police officers, military commanders, etc. But, biologically, women did not have the capacity to perform these tasks and proved sadly deficient in managerial skills. Their incapability having been demonstrated, the question arose as to what they should do now that they had left domestic life behind them. They began, sooner or later, to enter those spheres in which they could demand a price for their femininity, for instance, in advertising and on the stage, screen and television. But here, again, they were prevented from leading totally satisfactory lives because of an inherently feminine drawback: when a woman began to grow old, she found herself unwanted. In the world of entertainment, only young women were in demand, and the moment they lost their youthful attraction, no further value was attached to them as personalities.

Thanks to “women’s lib” having done away with all barriers between men and women in western countries, women now find themselves in the marketplace. It is only those who have obvious feminine charms who attract attention, become popular and manage to make something of their lives as objects of entertainment. Once launched on such a course, they begin to regard marriage as an obstacle to their further progress. They have no further taste for the quiet satisfaction of domestic life, preferring the glamour of the outside world.

But the glitter of such a life is short-lived, for the moment their youth shows signs of waning, these women find themselves cast off like so many rags. Having shirked all domestic responsibilities at an earlier, marriageable age, they can now stake no claim to domestic comfort and bliss. Forgotten and deserted, such women of the western world live on into a forlorn state of decrepitude.

The kind of life that takes shape from being associated with the family is very different from the above example. When a woman begins her life as a wife, she finds herself at the center of all activity, being in charge of everything and everyone within the domestic sphere. In her own little world, she builds up a reputation for herself as a wife, mother and grandmother. Each day adds to the honor and respect shown to her by her family, and she goes on increasing in worth in the eyes of her husband. If she shone as a young wife, how much greater is her luster as a mother and grandmother. This position of the woman is quite natural. That is why in the western world itself in circles where the matrimonial fold is still intact, a woman on the strength of nature, comes to acquire the same position. Here is an explicit example from the life of Ronald Reagan, former President of America. According to one American report published in the Hindustan Times: “Mr. Reagan is known to be deeply attached to his wife, whom he calls ‘mommy’ away from the public, according to their close associates.”³⁸ Having made the home and the family her whole world, a woman can certainly count on familial support in her middle and declining years. None of the sorrows of solitude for her!

While western civilization supports the liberated woman only for the early years of her life—her youth being her sole attraction—Islamic culture, being family-oriented, attaches value and gives its support to the married woman right throughout her life.

THE EXAMPLE OF JAPAN

In Japan, about 15 million women are employed in offices and factories. Far from enjoying a position equal to that of their male counterparts, they serve as assistants and subordinates.

Two Japanese women were, of course, elected to the Cabinet a few years ago, but that was thanks only to the institution of Women’s Year in 1985. Of the 608 diplomats in Japan, only twelve are women. Even to this day, Japan’s society is male dominated. It is significant that a woman minister noted in a recent report on the condition of women in Japan that “a bill, yet to be passed by the parliament on ending discrimination against women, is considered by many of its male critics to be reverse discriminatory.”³⁹

In former times the spheres of men’s and women’s activities were considered separate. In modern times, however, this clear demarcation has been dispensed with, one of the grounds being that a nation cannot progress if women are not offered equal opportunities in its construction. But the experiment of giving women a free hand has not contributed either to nation-building or to the progress of civilization. In countries where women have already been offered equal opportunities in every field, all of the more important and advanced fields are still dominated by men.

Those who subscribe to the view that a nation will fail to march ahead without the participation of women—who constitute almost half of the population—need only look at the example of Japan, one of the most developed countries of the modern world. They will be forced to change their ideas when they consider that all of the major developments in Japan have taken place without women’s involvement as equal in non-domestic activities. Japan’s example is the greatest challenge to the feminist view. Its continuing to be a male dominated society clearly shows that the development of a nation does not depend upon equal participation by women—a view erroneously held by feminists the world over. Ms. Sharmon Babior, an American, acknowledging the difference between Japan and America in this matter comments: “I don’t think American women would tolerate the Teishukanpaku (the husband is the ruler of his home) behaviour.”⁴⁰

Notes

   1.        Time, March 20, 1972.

   2.        Ibid., p. 26.

   3.        Ibid., p. 28.

   4.        Ibid., p. 47.

   5.        Ibid., p. 47.

   6.        Ibid., p. 89.

   7.        Ibid., p. 47.

   8.        Ibid., p. 47.

   9.        Ibid., p. 47.

10.        Ibid., p. 33

11.        Sara M. Evans, “Women in Twentieth Century America: An Overview,” The American Woman 1987-88. A Report In Depth, Ed. Sara E. Rix (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987).

12.        Time, op. cit., p. 29.

13.        Ibid., p. 55.

14.        Ibid., p. 30.

15.        Ibid., unnumbered pages following p. 29.

16.        Ibid., pp. 70-71.

17.        Sara M. Evans, op cit., p. 34.

18.        Time, op cit., p. 28.

19.        Ibid., p. 27.

20.        All of the data in this and the following two sections has been taken from two sources: The American Woman 1987-88. A Report in Depth, edited by Sara E. Rix (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), and The American Woman 1992-93, A Status Report, edited by Paula Ries and Anne J. Stone (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

21.        Andrew Cherlin, “Women and the Family,” The American Woman 1987-88, A Report in Depth, op cit., pp. 74-75.

22.        Ibid., p. 76.

23.        Newsweek, May 18, 1981.

24.        Reader’s Digest, October 1981.

25.        Time, op. cit., pp. 43-46.

26.        Anton Nemilov, The Biological Tragedy of Woman (London, 1932), p. 76.

27.        Ibid., pp. 194-95.

28.        Ibid., p. 77

29.        Ibid., pp. 102-103.

30.        The Hindustan Times (New Delhi), September 21, 1980.

31.        The Times of India (New Delhi), February 8, 1978.

32.        Ibid., November 8, 1981.

33.        Harold Robbins, The Lonely Lady (London: New English Library, 1976), p. 448.

34.        Ibid.

35.        Ibid.

CHAPTER 4

The Problems Facing Modern Civilization

PERVERSION IN MUSLIM SOCIETY AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

A contemporary commentator once observed that of perversion has set in in western society, so also has it taken root in Muslim society. Then how do you regard western civilization as being wrong and Islamic civilization as being right? This objection, if we examine it, will be found to be ill-judged, because our comparison of western and Islamic civilizations makes a judgement on the basis of standards versus behavior. The rot of Muslim society is the result of deviation from Islam, while the rot of western society is the result of putting into practice the very principles in which it believes.

The evils of Muslim societies stem from the gap between principle and practice, whereas the evils of western society are the result of a clash between principles and realities. Western civilization of modern times has formed principles, independent of religious principles, to govern social life, and has maintained that modern principles were superior to older principles. Through colonization and the industrial revolution, etc. the western nations achieved political and material domination over large areas of the world, which placed them in a position to reject the old principles of life and construct a human society based on modern principles of life.

This experiment in ethics has now been going on with the dominance of western nations for more than a century, but practical experiments have failed to verify the new principles. All that has been accomplished is to effectively demonstrate that the new principles favoured by the West are completely incompatible with what nature intends for mankind. The clash between ideals and reality has, in fact, given rise to ever-increasing manifestations of depravity in western life.

While the solution to moral backsliding in Muslim societies lies in a return to the Islamic principles adhered to in the past, this cannot be said about the West. If western society retreats to its past, this return, will be a return to exactly the same principles on which it still adheres to the letter. Those who gave credence to the concept of permissiveness, or those who insisted on the entrance of women in every department of man, or those who advocated that marriage is an unnecessary bond, if they were to return to their past where will they return. This going back will be to the same principles which they still observe and the disastrous consequences which they are now facing. The solution to the perversion of Muslims lies in their going back to the path of Islamic principles which they have left behind, while the rectification of western society lies in renouncing its self-made principles. Here we present some examples to illustrate this point.

REVERSE COURSE

Time magazine, which has a readership of over 23 million, spread over 95 countries, published a revealing report on the condition of women in America. The following is the gist of the report:

Over the past 25 years there has been an influx of women into the American job market. Some 65% of women of childbearing age now form part of the American workforce and 90% of them have had, or will have children during their careers. This has created a tremendous problem for women: the onerous task of holding down a job and having children at the same time.¹

One such American woman is Lillian Garland, who worked as a receptionist at the California Federal Savings and Loan Association in west Los Angeles until she became pregnant and left work to have her baby in 1982. Her baby girl was delivered by caesarian section and her doctor prescribed a three-month period of leave. When she returned to Cal Fed, Garland found that her position had been filled. She had lost an $850 dollar job just at a time when, with the birth of her child, her expenses had increased.

Garland filed a suit in the federal court against the company for having discriminated against her in terminating her employment. The lawyers of both parties entered into interminable arguments, and after prolonged litigation—five years to be exact—Thurgood Marshall, former Justice of the American Supreme Court, gave his ruling in January, 1987, that the state requires an employer to provide special job protection for workers temporarily disabled by pregnancy.

This ruling triggered a tremendous controversy. On the one hand, women are happy that they have secured the protection of the law for the bearing and rearing of children. On the other hand, serious American thinkers maintain that this ruling will harm the cause of women.

The debate over pregnancy leave has thus created a deep rift among feminists. One side argues that pregnancy leave, even though it benefits individual women, poses a general danger to female workers because it singles them out for special protection. Historically, they point out, such privileged treatment has eventually led to discrimination against women, says Marsha Levick of the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund: “That almost always backfires.”

Don Butler, President of the Los Angeles-based Merchants and Manufacturers Association, said that the decision “spells disaster.” To this he added: “Larger companies can makeshift to fill a hole, but small ones cannot do that very easily. If I employ ten females, and two or more get pregnant at one time, I might as well file for bankruptcy.” Discrimination against women might increase. Many companies “just won’t hire women in their childbearing years,” says the Chamber’s Attorney Lamp.

A well-known feminist, Betty Friedan, said in support of the ruling regarding Garland’s case, “Equality does not mean that women have to fit the male model.” There is something very incongruous about this argument. When women are so different in their biological structure that they cannot “fit the male model,” where is the necessity to bring women into every sphere of life to do the same work as men, and then attempt, by passing laws, to enforce an artificial equality of the sexes.

As economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett puts it: “This decision means that there is recognition at the highest legal levels that, in order to get equal status for women in the workplace, you have to create family supporters.” This is an indirect acknowledgement of the rationality and appropriateness of the old traditional system. The concept evolved by modem civilization that woman does not need man as her supporter implies that she should earn and be her own supporter. When this principle was put into practice, it soon became evident that a woman could not do without a supporter. The only difference was in the name. Formerly it was husband,’ now it is “the company.”

In old, traditional society, when religion was still a positive force, men used to do whatever was required outside the home, while women took care of all indoor work. This was a division of labor which was both practical and natural. But modern civilization has held that this “division” is nothing but sexual discrimination. It is this view which launched the women’s liberation movement and encouraged women to come out of their homes in order to take up employment in offices and factories.

At an early stage it became apparent that under this new arrangement, the path to progress for women was strewn with obstacles. For example, when a woman becomes pregnant and bears a child, she is thereby rendered incapable of tackling jobs outside her own home for a considerable period of time. To remove the disadvantages implied for the woman, a law was passed granting special paid leave to pregnant women and nursing mothers. This was the kind of law which legislators, who were far removed from the situation, could pass with no discomfort to themselves, but whose implementation could not be afforded by those who have to come to grips with the everyday running of a factory or management of an office. This is a situation which has sparked off an unending controversy.

The government so far is supporting women in this conflict in order to maintain the superiority of its cultural principle. But taking sides against reality is hardly practicable. If the government required the managements of all offices and factories to give four months paid leave to women, how many establishments would be able to afford what would seem to them an unwarranted extravagance? Finding the cost of such a cultural luxury prohibitive, many employers would simply not hire women during their childbearing years, and older women would themselves opt to stay at home. It seems very probable that such negative factors will reinforce the very discriminatory attitudes which the women’s liberation movement came into being to end.

WHITHER “WOMEN’S LIB”?

From the 12th to the 16th of January 1987, a conference was held in Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi, in which philosophers, scientists, writers and artists from 15 countries participated. This five-day conference was arranged by the Government of India on the topic, “Towards New Beginnings.” Many distinguished ladies of the western world, who have now grown old, were among those who participated. They had spent all their lives working for Women’s Lib, but their mood was one of frustration. The Indian Express cites Germaine Greer of Australia as a case in point:

They are feminists of different hues—Ms. Germaine Greer, the outspoken, aggressive writer from Australia, and Ms. Gisele Halimi, a Tunisian-born lawyer who spearheaded the women’s movement in France along with Simone de Beauvoir and others. But both voice a concern that is troubling feminists in the West today—Whither women’s lib? Ms. Greer seems more mellow today: the fire that raged in The Female Eunuch is strangely missing. “The movement has solved some problems and left us with a different set of problems,” exclaimed Ms. Greer. “Perhaps the problem was that we didn’t take our mothers with us. We left them behind, found them antiquated. And now that many of us are mothers ourselves with teenaged daughters, perhaps we understand our mothers better.”²

“The West has no answers to the problems of inequality between sexes,” says the internationally acclaimed writer Germaine Greer. The erroneous belief of western women that the females in veils are unequal and the ones with make-up minus the head-cover are free and liberated has to be rejected. Referring to the prevalence of “wife-beating” even in the so-called civilized West, she asks, how about the unequal treatment meted out to females in the U.S. and England in the areas of wages and jobs? Well, one-fourth of the crimes in England emanate from violence against women. The man-woman relationship understood in the West as an extension of role-models is the primary cause of strain in the sexual relationships. All the western women identify themselves with the bahu—the bride—forgetting that the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law are also the specific role models to be played by females. She feels that childbearing for a woman is a unique investment: “The joys of motherhood fill the blanks that cannot be satiated in the specific husband-wife role models.” Known for her non-conformist and non-traditional views, Ms. Greer advocates “coitus interruptus” in the area of birth-control: “The array of occlusive devices, spermicidal creams, quinine pessaries, douches, syringes, abortifacient pills and rubber goods of all shapes and sizes are the ill-effects of a growing consumer-culture. These have achieved nothing but added strain in the sexual relationships.”³

Ms. Halimi is more frank. “It is a bad time for the women’s movement” she admitted. “It is down at the moment and we are trying to find the reasons for it. Perhaps we got everything women wanted too fast—contraception, abortion, and divorce. And the problems that face women today are not strong enough to give the movement new force and strength.” Women have very specific values and morals. “They have a different view of humanity. I am not saying that it is better than that of men, but it is different. And women have to prove that they are women, and not men,” she emphasized.⁴

According to religious teaching, the woman’s “role model” was that of mother and housekeeper. She was meant to bear and rear children and manage the home. The modern role model is that of the busy woman executive, functioning on an equal footing with men in every sphere of the professional world. Years of experiment have shown that the latter role is unrealistic. In their old age, the same western women, who had fervently advocated the new role model, are the very ones who are now asking for a return to the status quo ante. Does this leave any room for doubt about the superiority of the role model postulated by religion?

TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES

Plain Truth, a well-known American magazine with a world-wide circulation of 7,850,000, published an article entitled ‘Teen Pregnancy’ along with a photograph of Sally, an American teenager. The article included a letter written by Sally, which, though short, is painful and shocking: 

When I was 8 years old I first had sex with a boy of 15. I did it because I lack love and attention from my parents. I need love, and my parents never show me any. Nothing really changed at home, and at 15 I became pregnant. My boyfriend blamed me and left. I had nowhere to turn, I was trapped, so I had an abortion. Now I’m afraid to date anyone, and I cry myself to sleep every night.⁵

“For every 1000 girls between 15 and 19 in America,” wrote New York correspondent George Gorden, “96 of them are pregnant.”⁶

Such are the tragic consequences of deviation from nature. This is the result of deliberately ignoring the fact that when God created men and women, He laid down rules for their relationship with each other: on reaching a sufficiently mature stage of development, they were to marry, have children and, by a process of mutual co-operation, make a home in which to bring up those children, thus providing a stable base for the progress of mankind. But western modernity became so preoccupied with the concept of freedom, that it dispensed with the kind of bonds which held men and women together in a healthy family relationship. The resulting disregard for the institution of marriage gave birth to various kinds of evils in western society, as may be judged from the above-mentioned examples.

The free mixing of men and women, with the sexual liberation it implies, is wholly against nature. In matters of sex, a woman prefers a single partner. It is in her nature to love only one man faithfully. Men, on the other hand, are promiscuous by nature. In a situation, therefore, where freedom of sexual relationships is damaging to faithful sexual partnerships, it is the women who suffer psychologically. Emotionally, they have to pay a very high price for their emancipation.

The famous Australian feminist, Ms. Germaine Greer, has acknowledged, now that she is of a more mature age, that her zeal for the sexual liberation movement in her youth was not realistic. In an interview with the Indian Express she lamented over the present state of affairs: “What is worrying today is the results of the sexual liberation movement—the number of teenaged girls who have been on the pill since they were 12 and 13, the number of teenaged girls who get pregnant by the time they are 15 and 16. What is happening to them? Sex means something quite different for men. They can love and leave. When the time comes to go to university, they can take off quite easily. Women have a different sensibility. They love with their heads, hearts and loins. And a broken love affair leaves them quite shattered. I have seen it happen to people close to me. And it is terrible.”⁷

In modern times Muslim society has fallen prey to many evils, but the reasons for this having happened are different in respect of the West and Islamic civilizations. In the case of the latter, it is deviation from Islamic principles which has caused the rot to set in, whereas in the former case, it is adherence to a new set of man-made principles which has had so deleterious an effect.

ARTIFICIAL PROBLEMS

The unique Nobel Sperm Bank set up by Dr. Robert Graham, a California millionaire, preserves the sperm of Nobel prizewinners so that women, who wish to produce children of above-average intelligence, may be impregnated with it. Dr. Graham established this bank with the aim of compensating for sterility on the part of husbands. But now, unmarried women—such is the degree of modem, western permissiveness—are coming forward to avail of the bank’s facilities. More interested in bearing above-average children, they prefer to ignore the possibilities of marriage, and freely seek the assistance of the bank.

One such unmarried mother is forty-year-old Dr. Afton Blake of California. When she contacted the Nobel Sperm Bank and explained the kind of child she wanted, she was advised that sperm number 28 was what she needed. (Donors of sperm remain unnamed and are given a code number.) Dr. Blake duly became pregnant with the specially selected sperm and bore a son whom she named Doron (a Greek word meaning “gift”). His photograph, at age four, appeared in The Hindustan Times of September 7, 1986. A Daily Telegraph representative, Ian Brodie, who met Dr. Blake at her Los Angeles residence, reports that her happiness is gradually turning to gall, the birth of a child without a father having created a number of problems. Top of the list of such problems is the boy’s repeated queries about his father, which he began to make as soon as he could speak.
Dr. Blake told Brodie that “there was one occasion when Doron got angry with me. He said he was going off to live with his Dad.” For Dr. Blake, what had started off as an interesting experience, latterly seems to have developed into a series of delicate problems. She now says with regret, “One thing Doron is deprived of is a Daddy.”

Deviation from nature has given rise to problems which were hitherto inconceivable.

MARRIAGE VERSUS FORNICATION

“The Big Chill?” a specially researched Time magazine cover story of February 16, 1987, startled the world with horrifying details of a new disease—AIDS. Since AIDS is infectious and fatal, it has produced a new breed of untouchables from whom both men and women flee in fear of their very lives. Publicity on the subject has created such a scare that barber shops in western countries often display signboards bearing the unlikely legend: “No Shaves Here.”

Government officials have described such a reaction as “AIDS hysteria.” Barbers, however, maintain that even the AIDS victims’ perspiration, or drops of blood from tiny cuts made during shaving, can transmit the virus and that it was, therefore, necessary to keep away from them.⁸

After making detailed investigations, Time’s team of experts confirmed that the prime cause of this deadly disease is promiscuity. Since it is transmitted mainly by homosexuals, it has come to be known as the “gay disease.” This disease spreads so rapidly that its explosion in the world of today has been geometric. Chilled by the fatality of AIDS, one of its victims exclaimed: “Oh, what will happen in this world, if we have to die when we make love? AIDS is the century’s evil.”⁹

Promiscuity, euphemistically referred to as “free love” in the western world, has brought down a curse upon humanity. It was estimated that by 1991, 270,000 people will have contracted this disease in the U.S., and that doctors will find it impossible to treat such a large number of patients. The situation will be completely beyond control. The government has started an anti-AIDS campaign whose slogan is “Love carefully.” This same advice, differently worded, would read: “Love within the bonds of marriage. Stop loving outside them.”

One of the great influences in socially “legitimizing” promiscuity was D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, first published in 1928. At the time of publication this work was considered obscene and almost immediately banned. Then, with a gradual change of moral climate, permission was given to republish it in 1959. Many young people in America were deeply affected by this novel and, a whole spate of similar literature having followed it, promiscuity began to be the rule rather than the exception. Now, once again, there is a public outcry to ban Lady Chatterly’s Lover and other such works.

Such a complete about-face has been caused by the devastating effects of AIDS. It has forced the west to re-think the whole question of free sex—a development which seems little short of miraculous. “Swingers of all persuasions may sooner or later be faced with the reality of a new era of sexual caution and restraint.”¹⁰

People had been delighted at having discovered the key to unlimited enjoyment in freeing themselves from the curbs of religion, for, according to divine law, a sexual relationship between a man and a woman was permitted only within the bonds of marriage. But now the realities of nature are finally forcing man to forsake the path of free love and follow the path of sexual restraint. It has taken the fatalities of the final quarter of the twentieth century to convince people that divine law and the law of nature are one. Too late, it has dawned on “free lovers” that promiscuity could be a killer. Time’s cartoon showing a man and a woman encircled by a deadly snake, epitomizes one of today’s major human dilemmas.

It was not without good reason that the Quran commanded that sexual relationships should be confined within the bonds of marriage:

(Lawful to you are), in wedlock, women from among those who believe, and, in wedlock, women from among those who have been given the Book before you—provided that you give them their dowers, taking them in honest wedlock, not in fornification, nor as secret love-companions.¹¹

This has been interpreted by Quranic commentators as a clear injunction to establish sexual relations only through marriage, and that there should be no extra-marital relationships. Experiments have shown that this is the only right and natural way. Marital relationships and fornication are not just matters of approval or disapproval by religious authorities, but matters of life and death. The married state is a blessing for human society; any other is a curse.

It is significant that the new education plan released by the U.S.¹² government stresses sexual abstinence as a preventive measure. This public exhortation to observe the rules of old-fashioned morality is a clear indication of the superiority of divine law over man-made law.

A believer in divine law, who errs by entering into an illicit sexual relationship, and contracting AIDS in the process, will be considered to have deviated from the principles of divine law. However, one who belongs to western civilization and contracts such a disease as the result of promiscuity will be said to have shown the error of the principle of western civilization itself. The former case proves the error of a man while the latter case proves the error of the principle of a civilization.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF UNNATURAL EQUALITY

“No one who has ever known me can believe what I did,” said a 35-year old American whose demeanor suggested innocence and seriousness of mind. He related how he had beaten the wife he loved, choked her till she was unconscious, pushed her face in the mud and held a kitchen knife to her throat.¹³ “How could I have done that?” he now wonders. “People know me as a good man. I own my own business. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t chase other women.” In spite of all such contrary indications, he repeatedly beat his wife.

Reader’s Digest gives many instances of wife-beating by Americans in an article entitled, “Why Men Hurt the Women They Love.” According to one survey, in America a woman is battered by a husband or boy- friend every 18 seconds. And every year, it is estimated that more than a million of these need medical help. Every day, four die.¹⁴

Why should the developed and civilized society of America be infested with the evil of wife-beating? A great deal of research has been done on this subject and its findings have been put in a nutshell by Mrs. Susan Schechter, a researcher at the Women’s Educational Institute in New York, when she writes, in her book, Women and Male Violence: “It is a pattern of coercive control.” Ellen Pence, Director of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs says, “Any batterer can tell you why he hit her. He wanted control over her. He wanted his way.”¹⁵

The above statements underline the state of affairs which has resulted from modem western civilization having formulated its own principles of human conduct. Its major mistake was to give its approval to the concept of male-female equality. It opened the doors of the workplace to women, thus giving them the opportunity to earn their own livelihood which, in turn, made them economically independent of men. This made women feel strongly that they were equal to men. They did not realize how artificial this notion was: in spite of the improved economic situation of women, western civilization could not, with all its powers, alter the dictates of nature—that men are the stronger and women the weaker sex.

As a result of this artificial equality domestic life as a whole has met with a contradiction. The women living in these western homes were physically as fragile as ever before, but psychologically (in their temperament, thinking) they had come to consider themselves as equals of men. Men being the stronger of the sexes wanted to hold their control over women. But women due to their artificial/unnatural temper refused to accept their control. The result of this contention proved very bad so far as women were concerned. “You need to feel powerful as a male. I don’t know why, but it is true,” says Chuck Wilder, a one-time batterer and now a counsellor for men at HAWC (Help Abused Women and their Children) in Massachussets.16 But women, thanks to their artificially acquired outlook, have refused to go on accepting their control. The consequences of this clash have been universal and are certainly worse for women than for men.

Had men and women been biological equals, sometimes the former and sometimes the latter would have gained the upper hand.

As it is, modern women have become so oppressed as a result of masculine reaction to their sense of total equality, that they cannot even run away to save themselves. According to the Reader’s Digest report, one woman said, “If you try to leave, your husband may threaten, ‘I’ll find you and kill you.’ Many of the worst injuries—and deaths—happen as women try to get away.” The battered woman often feels trapped. “Imagine you are such a woman,” suggests’ Richard Gells, a sociologist and author of Intimate Violence in Families. “Right now, leave your job. Leave your wallet, everything on the desk. Take nothing but a one-way ticket to a strange town. Could you do that? Could you also take away the children?”¹⁷

By nature’s division, man was given authority over woman. Now, if attempts are made to change this division artificially, the consequences will be as pictured in the above report. This beating of women in their own homes is just one more symptom of the malaise of modernity. Never before has there been so many instances of male violence against women as there are at present in modern civilization. It is true that there were cases of wife-beating in earlier periods, but these were the exceptions rather than the rule, and occurred mostly amongst the lower classes, who were poor and uneducated. In modem times, even the upper classes are no longer innocent on this score. What was formerly considered uncivilized behavior is now becoming a commonplace amongst so-called civilized members of society. This is a direct consequence of upsetting the natural balance of daily living in the futile quest for unnatural equality.

THE PROBLEM OF MODERN WOMEN

A tourist on a visit to America was once sitting in a club during a dance, when he was suddenly approached by an American girl who said to him, quite sadly, “Mr. Tourist, don’t I have any glamour?” ‘‘Why, of course you do, replied the tourist. “Then why don’t the boys date me?” the girl asked.

“Dating” in western countries refers to the social custom of boys inviting girls to go out somewhere with them. In this way, boys and girls become acquainted with each other before marriage. This practice has become so common in western life that a girl who is not “dated” by one or more boys begins to feel herself of inferior value on the marriage market. In former times, dating, as a system of courtship, was confined to meetings during which conversation could take place. But then morals became so lax that such meetings became occasions for sexual intimacy. The most recent development is to “date” a girl and then forcibly have sex with her—in fact, rape her.

Time magazine has published a revealing report entitled, “When the Date Turns into Rape”:

Susan, now 22 and a college senior, was raped almost three years ago on a first date. She met the man in a cafeteria at summer school and went to his dorm that evening to watch television news and get acquainted. After 45 minutes of chit chat about national affairs, he began pawing and kissing her, ignoring her pleas to stop. “You really don’t want me to stop,” he said, and forced her to have sex.¹⁸

Time’s report shows how common ‘date-rape’ has become in western countries: “Date rape,” according to some researchers, is a major social problem so far studied mostly through surveys of college students. In a three-year study of 6,200 male and female students on 32 campuses, Kentucky State psychologist Mary Koss found that 15% of all women reported experiences that met legal definitions of forcible rape. More than half those cases were date rapes. Andrea Parrot, a lecturer at Cornell University, estimates that 20% of college women at two campuses she surveyed had been forced into sex during their college years or before, and most of these incidents were date rapes. The number of forcible rapes reported each year—87,340 in 1985—is believed to be about half the total actually committed. Says Koss: “You’re a lot more likely to be raped by a date than by a stranger jumping out of the bushes.” Some feminists argue that the U.S. has a “rape culture” in which males are encouraged to treat women aggressively and women are trained to submit.¹⁹

Mr. Sri Prakash, former governor of Maharashtra, and India’s first High Commissioner in Pakistan mentions in his memoirs that in 1947 he once asked an Englishman why his countrymen had such a low opinion of Indians. One of the things which the Englishman cited was the number of restrictions there were regarding marriage, which was totally alien to the European concept of the boy and girl choosing one another and then getting married. He obviously despised the “social shackles” which prevented this happening in India.

When women’s liberation was launched, the demolishing of such “social shackles” seemed a very attractive idea. But when the lifting of restrictions on the degree of intimacy which could develop between the opposite sexes began to lead with increasing frequency to rape, the pendulum of opinion began to swing back in favor of traditional restrictions as being the healthiest social principles to follow. It has become all too obvious that the path of sexual freedom can lead society only to its own destruction.

A HADITH

The prevalent custom of dating, which permits unmarried boys and girls to meet and remain together unchaperoned for unlimited periods in complete seclusion, has been little short of disastrous in its consequences, thus illustrating the meaningfulness of the shari’ah in no uncertain manner. The following hadith, taking full account of the evil inherent in the situations arising from this custom, gives us a clear injunction prohibiting them:

One who believes in God and in the Judgement Day ought not to stay with a woman in private while no mahram (i.e. a near relative with whom marriage is not permitted, e.g. brother, father, uncle, etc.) is with her, because in such cases the third is Satan.²⁰

When an unmarried boy and girl meet alone, Satan immediately grasps this opportunity to tempt them. The presence of a third person guarantees that such a meeting will not go beyond limits.

THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRGINITY

Sexual permissiveness has become such an all-pervasive feature of modern life that the forming of sexual relationships before marriage has become a commonplace, the current philosophy being that advance experimentation is a better and safer way of choosing one’s partner for life. Pre-marital encounters between men and women are, therefore, marked by the same openness and lack of inhibition as those which take place within the sanctity of the marriage bond. This runs counter to nature itself. In fact, deviation from tradition has created problems which have become insoluble in the present-day social set-up. The very intractability of these problems has led to a general reappraisal of sexual permissiveness. Even those who were the greatest champions of permissiveness as a way of life are now beginning to turn against it.

A survey, carried out in America on more than 1400 college students aged 18-19, reveals that young women are more attracted to male virgins than they were 10 years ago.²¹ The New York psychologist, Mr. Srully Blotnick, whose company carried out the survey, said: “The male virgin may not make the best lover, but usually he’s eager to learn—and he’s the safest.” The safest, that is, from the risk of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Mr. Blotnick said it was the risk of sexually related diseases that makes the male virgins so attractive to women. His latest survey showed that 22 percent of college women now want their next lover to be a virgin, compared to just nine percent 10 years ago. This same report was published by the Hindustan Times under the title, “Male Virgins in Vogue.”²²

At the outset of the women’s liberation movement, virginity as a condition for marriage was ridiculed, more particularly as it was an obstacle to sexual licence. It was depicted as a preposterous concoction of the religious imagination. But experience showed that such a condition was not the result of a misconception, religious or otherwise, but a biological imperative: insistence on virginity is the only way to ensure that a married couple will be free of deadly communicable diseases. Whereas virginity had before been just a matter of a religious commandment, it has now been reinstated as the sole basis for a healthy marital relationship, what an amazing proof has been provided by human experimentation of religious commandments having a basis in reality. If, even after this, man does not give the divine shari’ah the importance which is due, it will be out of sheer caprice, or willful misinterpretation of the facts rather than a realistic approach.

THE PROBLEM OF CHILDREN BORN THROUGH ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION

The goal of the feminist movement was to make women equal to men in every respect. But this did not happen in practice. The feminist movement has completely failed in achieving its real objective. An American lady, Ti-Grace Atkinson says: “There is no movement. Movement means going some place, and the movement is not going anywhere. It hasn’t accomplished anything.”²³

Due to this experience, feminist extremists in western countries demand a complete withdrawal from dependence on men, including sexual ties. Village Voice columnist Jill Johnston, for example, insists that “feminism is lesbianism,” and that it is only when women do not rely upon men to fulfill their sexual needs that they are finally free of masculine control.²⁴

Living together like husbands and wives is not so simple a matter. Many problems have to be faced. For instance, if the couples want a child, how to find one? Modern medical science has provided the answer in the form of artificial insemination.

Two women from Holland, Paula Deijs and Jeanine Haaksman lived together like husband and wife. Then they felt a desire to have a child. For this purpose, they contacted the Lydden Institute of Birth Control. Their first attempt did not succeed, but in the second attempt Paula Deijs became pregnant. Through the semen of an unknown person a child was born to them. The child was named Thomas. But after the birth of the child they realized they again were in need of the same “man” whom they had shunned to become lesbians. The women are sensitive to the fact that Thomas needs men as role models. Uncles, a grandfather, brothers-in-law and male neighbours are encouraged to visit frequently. “We have a good friend not too far from here whom we have chosen to be a father image for Thomas,” says Haaksman. “We’ll send Thomas over to him for all the technical instructions.”²⁵

Providing a “father” to Thomas in this artificial way is in no way an alternative to a real father. It is certain that some strangeness must remain between such “sons and fathers.” And when Thomas grows up, this unconscious strangeness will turn into conscious strangeness. Thomas will know his mother, but not his father. This vacuum in Thomas’s life will produce different kinds of mental complications, which will most probably make it impossible for him to become a useful member of society.

It is as if in the system of lesbianism there is scope for producing girls but not boys. Even then, to produce a girl, lesbians will depend upon the same man whom they had rejected in order to have their own independent ways.

It is easy to deviate from the system of nature but the price that has to be paid for such deviation is too high for an individual or a society.

THE END OF MARRIAGES IN THE WEST

An American magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, put a question to its readers: ‘Do you think that family life in the U.S. is faced with troubles? Seventy-six percent answered in the affirmative.

Eighty-five percent said that their hopes of a happy life had not been fulfilled. Similarly, another American magazine, Newsweek, published its conclusion after conducting a survey in May 1978. According to its report about half of the marriages in America ended in divorce, then remarriage which again ended in divorce.

A marriage counsellor, Ronald D. Kelly, writes:

One of the saddest things to me as a marriage counsellor is the many couples who are married, yet strangers to each other in their own homes. They seem to share little in common. Each goes his or her own way, pausing only for occasional conversations—those often arguments about money, child rearing or sex. You wonder how they ever got together in the rust place.²⁶

With whatever good feelings a marriage takes place, unpleasantness does crop up at one stage or the other. This is generally due to the problems of life, or the loss of sexual attractions. Now if the husband and wife have come together sharing the concept of a “marriage for a purpose,” then, keeping in view the purpose they will overlook all such unpleasant circumstances and continue to live together. On the contrary, when the marriage is taken just as a pleasure jaunt (marriage for pleasure) then anything which is not to their liking will take a serious turn. In such a situation they will find no reason to tolerate that unpleasantness and continue to remain together.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE MISTAKE

A book published in the U.S., entitled Finding Our Fathers, by Dr. Sam Osherson, shows the beginning of a new age in American family life. In modem civilization the superior standard of life had come to mean that men and women worked in offices and the children were handed over to babysitters and day-care centers. After the ruination of several generations, Americans have come to understand that there is no substitute for the upbringing and training of children by their own parents. Now more and more parents in the U.S. are taking time off work and other activities to give time to their children.

There is the example of Ken Schuman. He was being offered a high post, but he contented himself with a job at a lower salary. This was because high posts keep people so busy that there is hardly any time left to spend on the upbringing and care of the children. He said that in his present job he couldn’t have lunch at high class hotels, nor could he travel first class by air. But he felt happy at his decision, as he had ample time to help his children in their formative stage. Being one of these new breeds of fathers, he said, “I’m a convert to this way of life.”

Having reached the culmination of his ideology, modern man is acknowledging his mistakes, but due to the powerful domination of previous concepts in modern society, the advocates of this change in thinking do not dare to reveal their names.²⁷

THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION

A book published in the U.S., entitled The Birth Dearth, has become a hot subject of discussion in various circles. In the light of statistics, the author showed that the population of the U.S. and other western countries had decreased to a dangerous extent. On the other hand, the birth rate in the socialist block was increasing. And so far as the third world was concerned, its population will double that of the western world in the next fifty years. Consequently, America in the 21st century will lose its world power status. Similarly, the whole western world will acquire second class status in international politics. The solution, according to one critic of the book, lies is slipping back to “the traditional woman as exclusive child-raiser.”²⁸

The place given to woman in modern civilization bears no true relation to life’s realities. Now western thinkers are beginning to feel that in order to have a successful life, the ancient concept of woman shall have to be fully reinstated.

DEPRIVED OF GUARDIANSHIP

A report entitled “Teen Suicide” published in Time magazine reveals that the incidence of suicide among the 10- to 20-year age group is rising sharply in the U.S., the annual number having tripled since 1950. In 1985 out of 100,000 people, if there were 60 adults who committed suicide, there were also 60 young people who took their own lives. We reproduce below the impressions of three women concerning the suicide of American children.

“I don’t think they think about being dead. They think it’s a way of ending pain and solving a problem,” says Barbara Wheeler, a suicide-prevention specialist in Omaha. “Everybody is in such a rusk that we don’t take the time to listen to our youngsters,” states Elaine Leader, co-founder of a teen crisis hotline at Cedars-Sinai medical Centre in Los Angeles. And Barbara O’Jeary, a hostess at a local diner, says: “When something like this happens, I think about my kids. I have to hope I raised them right. These are the dangerous years. You don’t always know what’s going on inside their heads.”²⁹

The American public responded with a spate of letters, selections from which were published by Time magazine. One of the letters reads: “My heart bleeds for the families of the teen suicides. I know. My 16-year-old grandson committed suicide by hanging. Our family will spend the rest of our lives wondering why, and we will never know” (Eloise Gradin, Pensacola Beach Florida).³⁰ What is the reason for this suicidal tendency among the younger generations of the developed countries? One major contributory cause is their being deprived of the kind of guardianship which a united family would hitherto have provided. Another is their development of unhealthy complexes in the absence of the loving care of the family circle. The breaking up of the family as a social unit must ultimately be recognized as the main underlying factor in the suicidal tendencies of the young people of today.

There are two principal reasons for the break-up of the family system in these countries. One is the concentration on pleasure in married life, rather than on responsibility. Couples marry now as if they were on a pleasure-seeking jaunt, so that when no further pleasure is to be extracted from the marital state, they go their separate ways. This has led to an erosion of the sanctity of marriage, and divorce, in consequence, has become common. Any children born to such couples, who subsequently opt to separate, are little better than orphans, though both parents are alive. Another cause of family fragmentation is traceable to the end of the joint family system, the main symptom of which is the increasing number of elderly parents and grandparents being sent to old people’s homes, where they live separately from the rest of the family. In the joint family system, grandparents were always present to look after grandchildren, but in western society, their place is no longer in the home.

In a sense, the focus of parental life is likewise no longer on the home, although for different reasons. Formerly, the mother was always at home to look after the children. But now, with both parents working, the children meet them only in the evenings when they are both already too tired to give them their proper attention, or on weekends, when they are generally too concerned with their own recreations. The western child is deprived of his mother because, like his father, she has gone to her office, and he is deprived of his grandparents, because they have conveniently been put away out of sight in old people’s homes. It is such children who become so emotionally unbalanced that they see no further point in going on living.

SUICIDE OF A WOMAN SINGER

When the 18-year-old pop singer Yukiko Okada jumped to her death from the roof of a high building in April 1986, because of an unhappy love affair, she ‘inspired’ many young people to follow her example. A large number of young people actually threw themselves off high rooftops because they felt sorry for her and wanted to be in heaven with her. A few left suicide notes mentioning the singer by name.³¹

This is the ultimate damage done by making a woman a mere object of the “screen,” a mere plaything of the imagination. If a woman devotes her life to managing her home, she becomes the giver of life to the young, whereas when she leaves her home to become a means of entertainment for others, she can do them the greatest injury—even becoming a morbid stimulus to annihilation.

AWAY FROM NATURE

The human baby is the weakest and most tender of all the babies of living creatures. It therefore needs its parents’ care and guidance in its physical and mental growth for a more extended period than any other young creature. That is why nature has endowed parents with a special attraction for their offspring.

In the past, the separation of children from their parents was caused only by emergencies such as war, or occasional premature death, and, in normal circumstances, it was taken for granted that the children would enjoy the protection of their parents for as long as they required it.

However, in advanced societies, a prolonged period of guardianship has become the exception rather than the rule, for the simple reason that the modern concept of living has destroyed the sanctity of marriage. Either children are born out of wedlock and are unwanted right from the very beginning, or they find themselves bandied about between parents who have decided to separate shortly after marriage. Their “orphaned” state during their parents’ lifetime soon becomes one of social alienation.

The rising incidence of this kind of orphaning is creating complex problems in modem society, one of which goes by the name of “deprivation dwarfism,” a disease, according to medical experts, that can cause sleeplessness and severe bowel disorders, and used to kill many children in orphanages. A recent report by western medical authorities says, “Lack of love can stunt children’s physical growth, retard their intellect, or even kill them.” Pediatricians say that as late as 1915, some 90 percent of the children who died in Baltimore orphanages (in Maryland, U.S.A.) within the first year of admission, did so because of lack of love.³²

According to Dr. Gardner, studies of human biology have shown that impulses arise from the higher level of the brain. These impulses enter into the bodily system and generate hormones of different kinds which are necessary for physical growth. One of these turns protein into sugar. This natural process in those children who grow up denied of their parents’ affection is greatly inhibited. As a result, their bodies are unable to make full use of the available protein necessary for their growth.

This is an example which shows how fatal it is to deviate from the path of nature. Man cannot make another world of his own by deviating from the world created by God. On the contrary, he must live out his life in accordance with this world. If he abandons the path of nature in favour of some other path, this will only end in failure, if not actual disaster.

THE EXPERIMENT OF UNRESTRICTED FREEDOM

On the question of abortion, Americans have now divided themselves into two opposing groups, one unreservedly upholding abortion, and describing themselves as “pro-choice” rather than “pro-abortion,” while the other is against abortion and calls itself “pro-life.” The American magazine Newsweek illustrates the current mood with a photograph of a procession of American women, whose leader, a young woman, is holding aloft a placard bearing in bold lettering the orders: “Keep your laws and your morality off my body.”³³

Modern western thinkers hold their greatest asset to be freedom. But the experiment in the West of having fewer and fewer restrictions on freedom has demonstrated that personal liberty cannot be the highest good. Had it been so, it would never have resulted in the ugly extremes which the above example suggests.

There is no disputing the fact that freedom as a quality of life is something of great value. But, for man, the highest good is freedom within limits, rather than absolute freedom. Personal liberty, however, must never be subject to man-made restrictions, for no man is superior to his fellow men, and no one has the right, therefore, to curtail another’s freedom. Restriction is a matter of God, and man must bow to God’s dictates when He so wills it.

Every man stands between God and his fellow men. So far as the man-to-man relationship is concerned, every man has his full freedom. But the great, overriding consideration is that man is in complete subjugation to God. As compared to the Almighty, no man has any freedom. This means that in the modern world, man has to use his freedom so that he abides by God’s commandments in all circumstances. It is this awareness of the value of restraint which is the greatest guarantee of the proper use of freedom.

THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF AN AMERICAN LEADER

The well-known American novelist and a leader of the feminist movement, Rhoda Lerman, visited India in 1987. The Times of India published her interview, which is reproduced here: “I come with very bad news,” says Rhoda Lerman. Speaking on the changing role of women in society, she revealed that 77 percent of the poor in America are women and children. The reason she offers is the high wage differential between the earnings of men and women. Women earn 62 percent of what men earn, merely because of the “pink-collared” jobs offered to them. “Equal opportunities and equal pay for equal work are just a myth,” she declares. Women have been able to infiltrate only the lower and middle management and are offered innumerable jobs in food chains and the secretarial cadres.

This discrimination, she believes, is due to the male bias which works against women, branding them as ‘undependable, since they go in for maternity leave and have children.’ Although 96 percent of the working women have children, only 67 percent of them can enjoy maternity leave, without fear of jeopardising their jobs. However, seniority almost always suffers, says Ms. Lerman. “Maternity and childcare are the cause of high wage differentials,” she adds, “economic reality having nothing to do with spiritual equality.” Activists had clamored for sexual equality and abortion rights and won them, without anticipating the economic backlash that would ensue.

With radical feminism accepted as the code, women are treated as equal, without any concessions to their biological differences. For instance, one out of two marriages in America is ending in divorce, with the responsibility of childcare devolving on the mother alone. Alimony and maintenance are merely laws, rarely put into practice. A mere 5-10 percent of the men pay maintenance, and that too, only for the first year. For the rest, the burden is borne solely by the mother. Thus, the quality of life of a divorced woman reduces by 73 percent and that of a man increases by 43 percent.

Single households, headed by women trying to play the role of “super-moms,” are on the increase, she revealed. In the next ten years, therefore, 40-50 percent of the children will be living in female-headed households, an unhealthy phenomenon, which has its repercussions in increased suicides amongst children. “Due to a lapse in the dependency structure, suicide is becoming endemic amongst children,” she said.

Socialist feminism, which takes into account the intrinsic differences between men and women, is the call of the hour, Ms. Lerman believes. We have had an excess of the American dream—of a husband who works, a house in the suburbs, two children, two cars and a mother who stays at home and bakes cookies. With the family structure falling apart, she feels that only government support in the form of day-care centers, maternity leave benefits and subsidies to override the economic limitations of single women can hold the social fabric together. “Otherwise, our victories will be merely Pyrrhic victories,”³⁴ she predicts, similar, perhaps to the freedom experienced on the funeral pyre.’³⁵

The feminist leader has acknowledged that the successes of feminism are little short of Pyrrhic victories. This is the most appropriate word to describe the victory of modem woman. She secured “equality” after a long and hard struggle. In the process, however, of achieving this imaginary equality, she has lost everything. Ms. Lerman feels that only large-scale government support can compensate for the deprivation of western women. This means placing herself under the guardianship of a government, which is completely in the hands of man. Woman was not willing to accept the guardianship of man at home; at her own cost, she has had to come to terms with the guardianship of men in the government.

TWO EXAMPLES

The problems created in western homes by this artificial concept of equality are confined not only to the lower or middle class but have also spread throughout the upper classes and the highly educated classes.

Recently some letters written by Albert Einstein to Mileva Maric (who was to become his first wife) were made public. These reveal the story of their relationship characterized by happiness and sorrow. These letters were found while collecting material for The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Mileva Maric was four years older than Einstein. His mother was not in favour of this match, which caused him to suffer from depression. Later somehow, they got married, a daughter having been born to them before marriage. What happened to her remains unknown. It appears, though, that she never stayed with Einstein. He had met Ms. Maric in 1896 at the Federal Technical Institute in Zurich. Wed in January 1903, their marriage ended in divorce in 1919.³⁶

The second example concerns the British heir, Prince Charles: “Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, married the wrong woman,” said his biographer, Mrs. Penny Junor in a recent interview with BBC. Charles, she said, was a sad character with the loneliest position on earth. He did not have the support he should have from a wife. Prince Charles and Princess Diana were growing more and more apart. Mrs. Junor said she had drawn her conclusions after talking to people who were close to him. “The palace has seen what I have written and the conclusions I have come to. No one has told me that I am on the wrong lines.”³⁷

UNDEPENDABLE CHARACTER

In its May 25, 1987, issue Time magazine published a report about the Pentagon entitled “Mixing Sex and Secrets.” It says: “The Pentagon has been fretting about the sexual practices of the 2.7 million people with Defence Department security clearances. In January (1987) the Pentagon expanded its rules to compel service personnel, civilian workers and contract employees with clearances to divulge whether they had engaged in such sexual acts as adultery, sodomy and incest. The rules were intended to ensure, that those with access to secrets are not vulnerable to blackmail.³⁸

Believers in permissiveness hold that sexual relations outside the bond of marriage are simply “sins” in the eyes of God but are far from harmful as regards human relationships. Experience, however,
has shown that one who does not adhere to the limits of the marriage bond in the matter of sexual relationships is not trustworthy. Through such a moral lacuna, an enemy can find an access to our secrets.

THE SCANDAL OF GARY HART

Mr. Gary Hart, the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidential election of 1987, had every chance of success. An incident, however, took place which set off such a storm of protest that Mr. Hart had to resign from the contest.

Fifty-year-old Mr. Hart was busy in the election campaign, for which he had borrowed one million dollars. During this time, he quietly left for Miami on May I to spend the weekend there. He spent one day and one night with a 29-year-old actress, Miss Donna Rice. An American newspaper, Miami Herald, got an inkling of this, and brought out a sensational story with this heading: “Miami Woman Is Linked to Hart.”³⁹ The news was given priority coverage by radio, television, newspapers and journals. Mr. Hart’s photographs along with Miss Donna Rice began to appear on the pages of newspapers. Wherever he went he was asked if he had committed adultery. “He stood in the public dock accused of adultery.”⁴⁰

Had the Miami Herald published the news that in a certain house Mr. Hart had spent the night with his wife, no one would have cared. But when the news broke of Mr. Hart’s spending a night with a woman he was not married to, it caused quite a furor. This incident is a clear indication that establishing sexual relations with a woman, who is not one’s wife, is against human nature. Had such an act not been against human nature, the agitators would never have succeeded in their plans.

Mr. Hart did his utmost to overcome this setback. First, he refuted the allegation; and, then he started giving evasive answers. Then he persuaded his wife, Lee Hart, to travel 1300 miles from New Hamshire to Denver to give her statement to the press. She said: ‘If it doesn’t bother me, I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else.’ When Mr. Hart saw that all his devices had been rendered useless, he finally admitted to the illicit relationship in these words: “Adultery is not a crime. It’s a sin. And that is between me and Lee, and me and God.”

However, this attempt at justification failed to satisfy the American public. Where Mr. Hart’s name as future president had topped the list of opinion polls, it now, after the incident, came last on the list. And in the end, he found himself alone. According to Time magazine, his sexual relationship with the actress amounted to his “political death.” The affair was discovered on May 3, and within five days, on May 8, he had to quit saying he was withdrawing from the race and would then quietly disappear from the stage.⁴¹

Time magazine⁴² rounds off its long article with these words: “Americans now demand the same intimate knowledge about their leaders that once was reserved for the romantic entanglements of Clark Gable or Elizabeth Taylor. Rather than wrestling with the complexities of arms control and a troubled economy, the public tends to look for personalities they can trust, whose judgement and integrity make them feel comfortable.”

The same point was made by George Reedy, press secretary of the former American president, Lyndon Johnson, in these words: “What counts with a candidate for President is his character, and nothing shows it like his relationship with women. Here you have a man who is asking you to trust him with your bank account, your children, your life and your country for four years. If his own wife can’t trust him, what does that say?”

It is a fact that one who establishes illicit sexual relations only proves that he has no mental discipline. He has no power to control his feelings and emotions. Such a person is not at all trustworthy in respect of his character. There is a strong fear that this psychological weakness might lead him to sacrifice great national interests for the fulfillment of his personal desires. Such a person is not even trustworthy in day-to-day life, let alone in a high government position.

Experience shows that breaking the limits set by God in matters of sexual relationships is not simply a religious evil. It is not just a sin, but a crime as well—possibly, in terms of its consequences, one of the greatest crimes of all.

SURROGACY

Surrogacy is one of the products of the modern age. The statistics have revealed that 500 children have been born through artificial insemination from 1976 to 1986 in the U.S. There are about one dozen surrogate centers at the moment in the U.S. The number is expected to increase because there are about fifteen percent married people who are infertile.⁴³

William Stern and Elizabeth Stern had no issue, so they decided to secure one through using the womb of someone on payment. In 1985 they made a contract with Mary Beth Whitehead for $ 20,000 to carry their child. Mr. Stern’s sperm was then injected into her womb, resulting in the birth of a baby girl. After carrying the child in her womb for nine months, her motherly instinct was aroused. She refused to hand over the child to the Stern couple. This case was taken to the court which decreed the handing over of the baby to Mr. Stern in view of the contract. After having won the case, Mr. Stern came with five policemen to Mrs. Whithead, who had already escaped through the back door with the child. However, she was later traced to another town and finally the child was delivered to the Sterns.

Such cases have set out ethical arguments in the U.S. on the matter of surrogacy. The Bishop of New Jersey commented: Surrogacy exploits a child as a commodity and exploits a woman as a baby-maker.’⁴⁴ The woman who bears a child for another person suffers severe psychological complexes. One such woman, by the name of Elizabeth Kane, said: “I miss my baby. I had to suppress those feelings for years.” The unnatural concept of sexual freedom results in unnatural problems, the above case being only one of many such examples.

WOMAN AND WAR

When Germany invaded the erstwhile U.S.S.R. in 1941, the Soviet government made emotional appeals to its citizens to treat the saving of their motherland as a sacred duty. Of those who joined the military in response to these appeals, 800,000 were girls between the ages of 15 and 16. A book has recently been published in Moscow entitled War’s Unwomanly Face⁴⁵ which deals with the experiences of these girls. During her four years of research, the authoress travelled to one hundred cities and interviewed 200 women who had participated in the war.

The book reveals many hitherto unknown facts about women’s participation in the war, one of which is that many women began to conceal the fact that they had ever had anything to do with the war. “We wanted to become ordinary girls again. Marriageable girls.” One of the interviewees, an educated woman by the name of Vera Safronova Davdova, said, “I believe that the women reacted to the war in a completely different way from the men. The men were more matter of fact and casual about the experience, whereas the women reacted in an overwhelmingly emotional manner.”

In recent times, a great deal of research has been done to discover the true nature of women and their inborn aptitudes. An attempt has been made to understand the female species scientifically. Astonishingly enough, the findings of these researches and investigations corroborate the view of women taken by Islam.

Modem research has shown that woman is sensitive by nature and is more emotional than man. This discovery makes it clear that it is not proper to have women enter those areas where cool and objective decision-making is required, irrespective of the circum-stances, and where “manliness” rather than “femininity” is a basic prerequisite.

In the departments of politics, war, international relations, large-scale industrial planning and, not the least important, in the law-courts, mental discipline and dispassionate decision-making are of the utmost importance. In such fields, the decision-makers have to be able to rise above the pressures of the immediate environment. Women, because of their inborn emotionalism, are unsuited to such tasks. Men, on the other hand, being relatively less emotional, are better able to deal with, the contingencies of their position.

It is because of this biological difference between men and women that Islam has assigned them separate spheres of influence. This is not a matter of gradation, but of a difference of workplace or field of action. This difference is supported in every way by scientific research. The truth is that it is the champions of feminism who are unscientific by the standards of today, and not the upholders of traditional Islamic attitudes.

DEGRADATION INSTEAD OF PROGRESS

The 29th December 1986 publication of Time was a special number which was titled, “A Letter to the year 2086.” This issue covered the happenings in the following century in the U.S. One part of it related to the state of the family as could be foreseen for the next century. A part of it is reproduced here: “The American family, not 50 years ago the rock on which the country built its church, has fractured into atoms with separate orbits. The American woman, having shunned motherhood and house-wifehood 15 years ago to establish herself in the labor market, now seeks to balance all three lives like dinner plates on sticks. The American man finds himself in new and scary territory and scrambles for adjustment. When the American man and woman part company, as half the newly married couples are expected to do these days, the American child is suddenly stranded, growing taller without a structure.”⁴⁶

As they near the close of the twentieth century the American intellectual class are acknowledging that what they thought of as the ladder of progress, at the beginning of the 20th century, has turned out to be the ladder of destruction. Taking women out of their homes has only resulted in the total disruption of the American family system. The rosy plan of liberating woman has, in practice, resulted in so many social evils.

Now new thinking is emerging from a revision of past errors, but modem woman is not ready to go back to her former role as a housewife, even if the life adopted by her of necessity involves her bearing the burdens of both the home and the workplace. What kind of progress is it which culminates in destruction? How strange is this freedom which, in practice, has turned into a new kind of bondage!

Notes

      1.     Time, January 26, 1987.

      2.     Indian Express (New Delhi), January 14, 1987.

      3.     The Hindustan Times (New Delhi), January 12, 1987.

      4.     Indian Express (New Delhi), January 14, 1987.

      5.     Plain Truth, September 1986.

      6.     Ibid.

      7.     Indian Express (New Delhi), January 14, 1987.

      8.     The Times of India (New Delhi), February 19, 1987.

      9.     Time, February 2, 1987.

   10.     Ibid.

   11.     The Quran, 5:5.

   12.     The Times of India (New Delhi), March 19, 1987.

   13.     Reader’s Digest, March 1987.

   14.     Ibid., p. 135.

   15.     Ibid., p. 142.

   16.     Ibid., p. 140.

   17.     Ibid., p. 137.

   18.     Time, March 23, 1987.

   19.     Ibid., p. 35.

   20.     Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Masnad, 3/446.

   21.     The Times of India, March 18, 1987.

   22.     The Hindustan Times, March 19, 1987.

   23.     Time, March 20, 1972.

   24.     Ibid., p. 30.

   25.     Ibid., August 10, 1987, p. 25.

   26.     Plain Truth, June 1987.

   27.     This information has been derived from Span, an American magazine, in its issue of September 1987. The article is titled: “Putting Kids First. The New generation of American fathers is balancing the demands of careers and children.”

   28.     Ben J. Wattenberg, The Birth Dearth (1987), p. 48.

   29.     Time, March 23, 1987, pp. 18-19.

   30.     Ibid., April 13, 1987.

   31.     The Times of India (New Delhi), March 30, 1987.

   32.     Evening News (New Delhi), June 27, 1984.

   33.     Newsweek, January 21, 1985.

   34.     The word “Pyrrhic” has come from a Greek king, Pyrrhus (295-272 B.C.) who invaded Italy in the third century B.C. to aid Tarentun against Rome. After a protracted battle, in which he sustained heavy losses, Pyrrhus won a victory over Rome, finally to be defeated at Beneventum in 275. Hence “Pyrrhic victory” has come to be associated with a victory which brings disaster in its wake.

   35.     The Times of India (New Delhi), April 30, 1987.

   36.     Ibid., May 5, 1987.

   37.     Time, May 11, 1987.

   38.     Ibid., May 25, 1987.

   39.     Miami Herald, May 3, 1987.

   40.     Time, May 18, 1987.

   41.     Ibid.

   42.     Ibid.

   43.     Ibid., January 19, 1987.

   44.     Ibid.

   45.     S. Alexiyerich, War’s Unwomanly Face, Progress Publishers, Moscow.

   46.     Time, December 29, 1986.