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I must say frankly here that Islamic work has been the scene of spreading hard-line ideas that now govern the relationship between man and woman, adopting the strictest opinions to be ever found on this issue. This is what I saw for myself in many conferences and symposiums even in Europe and the United States. For several years in a row, I attended the annual conferences of the Muslim Student Union in the United States and Canada in the mid 1970s. Both men and women attended the lectures and debates, listening to comments, questions, answers and discussions in every major Islamic issue, including the academic, social, educational and political. The only sessions restricted to women were those allocated to dealing with the questions that concerned women alone.

However, I attended some conferences in the United States and Europe in the 1980s, and found that women were kept away from a good part of the important lectures and debates. Some of the women also complained that they had become bored with the lectures that focus on woman’s role, rights, responsibilities and position in Islam and had come to regard the repetition of those lectures as a sort of punishment imposed on them. I denounced that in more than one conference I attended, telling the participants that the rule in worship and religious learning was participation and that there never existed in Islam a mosque that had been reserved to women alone and not visited by men.

[In the lifetime of the Prophet (saw)] Women attended the sessions in which the Prophet taught Muslims the religion. They also participated in (or at least attended) the Juma’a (Friday), the two Ids (bairams) and congregational prayers together with men. They asked questions about matters related to women without being prevented from learning the religion by their shyness, as Áisha (may Allah be pleased with her) herself said. The books of Sunnah abound in questions that were directed to the Prophet (peace be upon him) by women, including those asked by women who wanted answers to questions that concerned only themselves and those asked by women on behalf of all women, as the woman who said “O Messenger of Allah, I have been sent to you by women”. Women also asked the Prophet to allocate a separate day for them that they would have to themselves without the men, so that they might have the time and privacy to ask whatever they liked without being inhibited by the presence of men. This was another privilege given to women besides the public lessons they attended together with men.

The problem of women’s Islamic work is that it is men who direct it, not women, and men are careful to maintain their grip on it, so they would not allow female leadership to emerge. Men impose themselves on women’s Islamic work, including even women’s meetings, as they exploit the shyness of reticent Muslim women and never allow them to take command of their own affairs. This way, no female talents are given a chance to prove themselves in the pursuits of the Islamic Movement or to be seasoned by experience and struggle and taught in the school of life by trial and error.

However, our Muslim sisters are not wholly free of blame, for they have surrendered to this sorry state of affairs’ contenting themselves with a life of ease and tranquility in which men thought and chose for them. It is high time they took the initiative, opened wide the doors of effort and work for the Call and shut up those self-appointed female voices that have imposed themselves on the doctrine, laws and values of this Nation. These strange voices, loud as they are, represent only a defeated, downtrodden minority that has no weight both in religion and in worldly affairs.

I was invited to give a lecture to female students of an Algiers university last year. As is customary after a lecture, I started taking questions from the girls in written or oral forms. Some young men were present, and one of them took it upon himself to collect the questions, sort them out and pass along to me what he thought should be answered and abandon what should not. I objected to his conduct, saying, “Why does not one of the girls do that on behalf of her colleagues?” and “Why do you men have to ‘poke your nose’ in women’s affairs? Take your hands off them!  Let them do whatever they like, sorting out their own questions and choosing what they deem fit and then making one of their kind read them aloud”, I said. Girls were elated by my interruption and one of them hurriedly came forward to assume the role that one of the men who had escorted me to the gathering was playing.