Hicham Maged's blog Acquiring knowledge lead to the acquisition of power

Modesty of the Mind

This year seems to be an exclusive one for the case of ‘niqab’ in Egypt and the Arab/Muslim world due to the controversial that aroused as the aftermath of many calls for banning it either locally or internationally. In this post, I am neither interested in placing my opinion about niqab nor in discussing banning it since the pro/anti have covered this topic on various media outlets. I am rather interested in going beyond the whole controversial.

Society and Women

Let me start by asking who are targeted by those various controversial? They are mainly women who represent in Egypt almost half of the society (49 %) according to a recent study at the beginning of the year. You may have read over here how I am not happy with their situation, and in fact, I see that the rising of such controversial backs-up this idea because it is a sign for how Muslim women are still obsessed in our societies.

I am sad that we are about to cross the threshold of first 10 years of the 21st century yet we are still debating about the ‘body’ which is supposed to come at a very late position on our priority list behind more complicated issues regarding the situation of women.

On contrary, you find that ‘empowering of women’ is lagging behind such controversial, which seems to be one of the direct outputs for what had been settled down in our minds in the form of stereotyped image(s) regarding them since 15 decades or so. Here I mean by stereotypes the actions taken by both sides:

• Left Mentalities: Those who call for liberating women from all type of shackles;
• Right Mentalities: Those who call for adhering women to all types of shackles.

I intentionally used the term shackles since it represents what both teams plus their anti/pro ones see as preventing women from moving forward. Surprisingly, if you read deeply about Islam, you shall find that both mentalities are mainly related to what people used to practice either as part of cultural misleading applied by the first team or social obligations applied by the second one, more than being related to the obligations that Islam calls for and barely applied.

In other words, our societies are still dealing with women as ‘own property’ not ‘persons’ and hence you shall find that the whole discourse(s) presented in the mainstream media are just spinning around the ‘female’ portion of the women; in movies, talk shows and advertisements while ignoring the rest of the person, i.e. the character as I have elaborated in a previous post(s) before. This is a core problem that actually leads to other ones which we are facing and may explains whey people are fond of spotlighting on whom wears/puts-off whatever more than discussing development problems in our societies.

Nevertheless, I hope you have not scanned the post quickly because this definitely is not a call to take off / put on clothes; rather it is a call that we -Men and Women- put aside exaggerating on both sides and start wondering and pondering about our problems. When this case is implemented, we shall go for intellectual discussions that can lead to better solutions for them by all members of the society in a country like Egypt and other Arab/Muslim societies, especially in empowering women and maximizing the power of civil society.

Not Alike

I am to discuss this in a future post but generally speaking, it seems when I say empowerment of women that another stereotyped image pop-up into our minds which is the trial to make them superior and fighting Men. Actually I do not mean this because when Islam came as a revelation from Almighty Allah to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) via Archangel Gabriel since 1430 years ago, one of the basic messages was ‘the equality’ between Men and Women in terms of rights and obligations but they are not alike in terms of mentality and personality. Now take look and tell me what kind of equality do you find in our societies? You shall find nothing real; just retouching for the image but if you scratch the surface, real problems are found underneath which appears in all of our discourses; the left and the right.

In a nutshell, if we want to move forward, we are called to stop hiding our heads in the sand either by accusing others of everything or circling around problems that appeared due to the lake of priorities and go for such intellectual discussions that push Egyptian society forward; we need to find solutions that match with us in this current era away from the exaggeration either by importing/imitating other civilisations or by reveting back to import/imitate the situation of thouthands years ago.

Consequently, when this happen, many of the body-and-clothes related issues shall fade out because in this case people will take decisions based on both ‘conviction plus understanding’ not based on ‘what people want’ , ‘what people think’ or ‘what people force’ and this is what we should be concerned about. Furthermore, the integration of all the members of the society in solving such problems is a must regardless their religion.

Finally, I wonder whether this can happen while I am alive or not so let me end my post by sharing this supplication with you that was twittered in Arabic few days ago:

“Oh Allah! I want to see this day when we spotlight on our main issues same as we do for our secondary ones. Amen!”

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