Sunnah

For me personally, the history of ruling women in Muslim history is a history of silence, exclusion, segregation and oblivion. Women strongly participated in Muslim politics and social affairs in the first generations after the Prophet Muhammad’s era. Then, step by step, the androcentric interpretations of Quran and Sunnah put women aside and caused their progressive horizontal segregation by prohibiting them from participation in the social and political life of the Ummah.

For Islamic feminism today, it is of central importance to stress the participation of women in Muslim history, and to show the insurmountable obstacles they had to shoulder to fight for their difficult and proscribed political career in male-dominated societies. To rediscover socio-political female power in Muslim societies today, it is essential to read books like “İslam Devletinde Kadın Hükümdarlar.”

It was written by Dr. Bahriye Üçok, a Turkish historian, Islam expert and feminist in 1965, as PhD thesis at the University of Ankara — where she also taught for years until her untimely in 1990 death by parcel bomb at her house. In order to reaffirm the importance of female political participation in our time, we must rediscover these forgotten books about Muslim rulers in history.

“The Political Rights of Women in Islam” is a provocative essay written by Prof. Abdulhamid al-Ansari, former Dean of the Faculty of Islamic Law at the University of Qatar about political rights of women in Islam. Using this work, I would like to show the relation between politics and Muslim women from an interpretive and open perspective.

I would like to negatively show how the unrights of women existing in today’s Muslim societies are not Islamic at all even if, without contradicting myself, I would like to involve in this discussion also scholars who exclude women from Muslim politics.

They are part of a tradition of exclusion and segregation which started in Muslim history to ban women from social and political activism, and to simultaneously make them disappear from social and political life. I would like to name this tradition of exclusion as a folklore forced on women in history by making them believe that this is the true message of Islam. The true message of Islam is not female submission to a male-dominated world, but the submission of both men and women to Allah, the Creator of the world, and as it says in the Quran, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth.

Introduction: A Forgotten Study Of Female Political Power In Muslim History

The Political Rights of Women In Islam