Salam Alykum Warahmatullah,
I would like to start by sharing a joke with you which I found on a brother’s facebook page.
Feminist 1: If men are allowed to grow beards! THEN WE CAN TOO!
Feminist 2: YEAH!!... Wait what?
Apart from mere amusement, this joke underlines the psyche of the modern feminist movement. What started out as a movement for the rights of women in the western world, has now transformed into a godless, man-hating, self-privileged phenomenon treading across the world. This transformation of feminism started early on from the second wave feminism and gradually became worse during the third wave feminism movement.
Feminism is defined as the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.
But the important question is, who will define and decide this equality?
For the average agnostic, atheist or secular person this notion of equality comes from the human faculties. Their sense of what’s right and what’s wrong based on their experience or observations.
And so as a result these decision makers concluded women can dress any way they like (and most of the time they leave nothing to the imagination), they can have abortions if they don’t “feel" like having a child, they are encouraged to embrace their sexuality i.e. be promiscuous, They are told whatever men can do they can do as well, so now the children are growing up without the nurturing care of a mother because mommy has to work.
But as with all godless movements modern feminism has also started crumbling beneath its own weight and it’s not due to religious people but due to people who describe themselves as secular, atheist, agnostic & even people who hate religion; people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.
The problem these people see with modern feminism is that it supports female privilege rather than equal rights for females, which is in fact true. If you look at the modern western feminist she complains about a pay gap or violence against women & at the same time they say that men aren’t supposed to hit women even if the woman is the aggressor and the man only hits back in self-defense.
These people say to the feminist that this is not a movement for equality if it advocates such sort of ideas because it is a fact that pay gap is not because of gender but rather because on average men take more dangerous jobs than women such as in construction, mining or in the army and men are willing to work longer hours than women because women prefer to spend more time with their families.
Furthermore gender egalitarians say that it is in the essence of true equality that men treat aggressive or violent women like they would treat other men when it comes to self-defense. So if a women provokes or assaults you then you have the right to defend yourself with physical force if necessary. If you go easy on a woman just because she is a woman then you are a sexist because your behavior implies that a woman is not equal to you in strength or in the ability to defend herself.
There is even a video of this particular theme which went viral, which shows what happens when men treat women with absolute equality. The most remarkable sentence I heard from the video was from a person who hits a women back after she hits him & a bystander yells that's a female & he replies“I don’t care if she wanna be a man I will treat her like a man.” (I didn’t share the video because of its obscene nature.)
In essence these people who are against feminism argue that you cannot have it both ways either you go for absolute equality or act as a woman which are more suited to a nurturing role rather than competing with men and keep your privileges.
Alhamdulillah for Islam;
Unlike the modern secular civilization, which is undergoing this clash of the social order due to man-made ideologies, the laws of Islam are not from the perception of the limited human mind but from the infinite wisdom of Allah swt.
Islam gave rights to women and men associated with their roles in society and these rights became a part of the Islamic law. Although these laws are mostly ignored in today's “Muslim countries” but that is not the fault of the deen but rather the failure of the people to implement it.
But this failure has led to this corrupt feminist movement to rear its ugly head in the Muslim ummah & as result the feminist blames Islam for oppression of Muslim women.
Islam recognizes that men & women are not the same but are complementary to each other. They are equal in the sight of Allah but not similar.
وَلَيْسَ الذَّكَرُ كَالْأُنْثَىٰ
...And the male is not like the female [Al Imran:36]
هُنَّ لِبَاسٌ لَكُمْ وَأَنْتُمْ لِبَاسٌ لَهُنّ
They are clothing for you and you are clothing for them [Al Baqarah:187]
Women don’t have to compete with men to show that they are capable as men because we as muslims now that they are honored in Islam as mothers, daughters & wives. Ofcourse there were examples of women like Khadija R.A who was a business woman and Umm Imarah R.A who fought bravely to protect the Prophet ﷺ during the battle of Badr. But their priorities were always towards their roles as caregivers first.
Islam gave women many rights which the modern feminists only acquired recently. Such as the right of inheritance, the right to be recognized as an individual of the state, the right to choose your spouse the right to divorce your spouse, along with many others.
Because Islam is the complete religion it does not only grant rights to females it also grants rights to males i.e. rights according to their roles. The laws of Islam were perfected by Allah and do not need any man-made laws to complement them but the modern feminist believes that it is a woman who knows what’s best for her not Allah. Feminists believe that a woman has the right to do anything she wants with her body & Allah has no right to tell her what she should and should not do.
Not surprisingly the most influential figures of the 3rd wave feminist movement were Jewish women, who advocated same sex marriage.
Now this western feminist movement has taken roots in the Islamic world with something it calls Islamic feminism, which supports mixed gatherings & says the hijab is a symbol of subjugation of women and is not Islamic, & of-course they bring up ayahs from the Quran, with their personal interpretations, which helps them to get their point across & they even use Ahadith, regardless of if they are Sahih, Hasan, Daif, Mawdu or anything else, as long as it serves their purpose.
It is quite ironic that these feminist say that they are against objectification of women yet they support wearing clothes which accentuates every part of their bodies, transforming them into eye-candy for men. They become mere objects of sexual fantasies by this so called liberation.
And now anything the western feminist movement throws at these women they embrace it in the name of feminism whether it be about forsaking the hijab or shaming men who have or want multiple wives, all of which have been ordained by Allah.
In reality modern feminism is nothing more than a sham to pit women against men, which only benefits those who stand to gain from exploiting both genders and creating social chaos.
Unfortunately this movement has already infected a lot of the muslim youth because of its popularity & the secular indoctrination they receive in their "muslim countries".
If modern feminism isn’t the very reflection of the conditions that the ummah will face during the coming of dajjal then it is at least one of the most potent tools of Satan which is taking us in that direction, where a man will have to coercively restrain his mother, daughter, sister, aunt so that they may be safe from the fitna dajjal brings.
Dajjal will come to this pond in Marriqanaat - a valley in Madinah - and most of those who go out to him will be women, until a man will come to his mother-in-law, his mother, his daughter, his sister, and his aunt, and he will tie them up strongly for fear that they will go out to him [Narrated by Ahmed]
And Allah knows best.
