Women Role In Islam :-

Tahira (women), in your mind you have quite easily concluded that since the "Sharia Laws" (Religious Laws) have been formulated by men, they give them an upper hand and tend to suppress women. There is no doubt that our prevalent ''Sharia Laws'' would result in the same mess. However, the reason is not as you have understood it. If we consider your reason to be correct, then men 'by nature' are such that they want an upper hand and want to overpower and enslave women. If you remember, I had analyzed this fact in a letter to Saleem, that there is no such thing as 'human nature'. What we call 'Nature' consists of something that he has brought along from his animal life. As far as animals are concerned, you never see a male keeping an upper hand over his female. As such, men cannot have this streak because of their animal instincts. Besides animal instincts, the qualities that manifest in 'human nature' are in fact the result of heredity, circumstances, education and nurturing. Therefore, it would be incorrect to claim that because our ''Sharia Laws'' have been made by men, they have given women a degraded position in them. Instead, it would be more appropriate to say that these laws had been formulated under such circumstances when tyranny, instead of justice, was the order of the day.

At that time, the 'woman' was hated. Hence, according to these laws and ideas, a woman's status was that of a down-trodden, enslaved and degraded being. These laws relate to our monarchical period and, as I have often repeated before, our prevalent 'Islam', too, was more or less formulated at that time. Life in this period, whether it concerned men or women had coercion as its prominent feature. For example, all the laws formulated at that time reserved all the rights for the ruling class. The ruled had no rights; they could only beg for the royal benevolence. They could not demand anything as of right. According to these laws, the landlord had all the rights, and the tiller of the land was treated as a servant. According to these rules a rich man could get all the luxuries whenever he wanted, and the poor received even their daily bread as a charity. In fact the poor got something, too, but this was only to save the giver from the influence of the evil eye. So much so that according to these beliefs, a rich man could buy his paradise with his money, but a poor man had to cry and beg for his salvation.It is so obvious, therefore, that in an environment where such laws and beliefs have been devised even for male subordinates, a woman cannot expect better treatment.