Gender justice

Gender justice

by Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi
Oxford

Gender justice cannot be, and is not deliverable by means of a mechanical conception of gender equality. The differences that are expressed as gender are intimately connected to the biological difference between male and female. That difference exists to enable diversification and distribution of genetic traits. Gender is partly socially constructed to prepare individuals for their different roles in parenting. Parenting for humans is probably the longest and most demanding commitments to the next generation of any animal – minimally it is about 20-25 years. The difference between roles is not exclusive, on the contrary the activities and responsibilities of either parents need to be shareable and in most practice they are shared.

It is a contemporary absurdity, bordering on intellectual perversion, to pretend that a child does not care about, has no independent awareness of, the difference between father and mother. In point of fact, the baby in the womb can already distinguish the voice and vocal patterns of his mother and father if both are present. It is excellent for a man to change nappies, push push-chairs and so on, but the child will still know him as male because he is. This ability to distinguish male and female is essential for survival, for this reason: there is a transition from the phase of being nurtured and dependent to the phase of independence when the mature individual leaves the parental home to start a parental home of their own. The idea that a child doesn’t need its own parents, because parenting is just a bundle of functions that can be formed by anyone, institutionally or individually, perhaps even robotically, is utopian. Every utopia ever dreamed up by philosophers or novelists contains some provisions for the disruption or erasure of family life, precisely to replace haphazard parenting by the biological parents and close relatives with the rationalised, centralised, uniformised nurture and education favoured for the structures that favour the economic and political elite.

The Qur’an emphatically affirms gender differences, it does not seek to erase those differences. On the contrary, it seeks to emphasise the reciprocal responsibilities that men and women have to each other and to their children, and the wider family and community. That said, there are many specific pointers – I call them pointers because they are generally implicit – to the abuse by men of their natural (bodily) power relative to women, and of their social and economic power (responsibility) over women. The Qur’an does not say that: men deprive women of their right to hold and dispose wealth; their right to imagine and propose what is good for themselves, their children, their family and wider community; the right to teach and encourage what is good (al-ma`ruf) and to forbid and discourage what is harmful; the right to understand and publicly to discuss their understanding of the Book of God, sunnah of His Messenger and the implementation thereof in personal and public life. Most particularly, the Qur’an does not say that women are inferior in intellect or in any other capacity relevant to the seeking of the approval of God. Instead of explicit statements to this effect, the Qur’an by indication or explanation or demonstration or by direct command tells the believers what they must do that is right, which will undo the harms and abuses between men and women where there is a failure to implement proper reciprocity. (The only exception, the only instance where men as men are condemned for their attitude to females explicitly, is that some men are accused of burying infant girls alive. This is self-evidently horrible and known to be so by the men doing the burying.)

The social relationships commended or commanded in the Qur’an have nothing to do with gender justice as currently preached. The justice that the Qur’an teaches supports women’s self image as mothers, as the responsibility that distinguishes them from fathers. In contemporary ideology, motherhood is a nuisance, a harm, something that interrupts or somehow diminishes their potential as independent economic agents. Despite the dominance of this ideology, the reality remains that men are required to pay for mothers and their children, whether directly from their personal salaries or indirectly through taxation. Similarly, the courts continue to recognise, when passing sentence, that children need their mothers much more and much sooner than they need their fathers. Similarly, again, men in general are expected to come to the aid of a woman who is in trouble or being attacked, whereas if a man was being attacked by one or more women, there is more chance that he would be laughed at rather than helped. The need men have to help women because they are bearers of the next generation is still strong, which is why so much gender equality legislation passes into the society as the norm, even when it is blatantly obvious that there is no justice in the equality that women demand, for example in terms of prizes, pay packets, and opportunities generally.

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