Boys will be Boys - Gender identity issues

"Walaysa al-dhakaru ka’l-untha, says the Qur’an: the male is not like the female.
This is why we say, respectfully ignoring the protests of old-fashioned feminists,
that men and women, in a God-fearing society, will tend towards different
concerns and spheres of activity. Our aim, after all, is human happiness, not
political correctness."
By Abdal-Hakim Murad.
conspicuous functionality, or power, or status, or consumption, we are able to insist on the
worth of women in a way that is not possible outside a religious context. For we have not
been created for the idols worshipped in the pages of GQ or Loaded Magazine. The
biological advantages of the male, which, unless one day a massive reconstructive surgery
and hormonal reprogramming is carried out on every one of us, do not for us denote
superiority, as they must for the secular mind when it follows its own arguments through.

The key to understanding this is supplied by our rich theology of the Ninety-nine Names of
God. And these reveal what the biologists describe as gender dimorphism. That is to say,
just as procreation bears fruit through the shaping received from androgens and estrogens,
so too creation itself is bathed in androgens and estrogens. The entire cosmos is gendered;
in fact, it comes into being, and attains the complexity of manifestation after the
experience of undifferentiated unity, through the interaction of the divine Names, where
the supreme and governing category is the polarity of Jalal and Jamal.

The gender issue ramifies massively into every other area of religion, and far more could
be written. What I have tried to do in this essay is show that an opposition to the Shari‘a is
an opposition to science, inasmuch as science is currently affirming an innate distinction
between the sexes, a distinction that God clearly calls us to celebrate rather than to
suppress. The social architecture of Islam is very different to that of the modern secular
West: that should be a source of pride to us. We are permitted to speculate, however, that
the disastrous social problems now overcoming the West, and westernising classes
elsewhere, will combine with the new science to provide a revised definition of gender and
social roles which will, in the longer term, convince our critics of the superior wisdom and
compassion of the Prophetic social model.

wa-akhiru da‘wana ani’l-hamdu li’Llahi rabbi’l-alamin

© Abdal-Hakim Murad

British convert to Islam, Abdal-Hakim Murad, was born in 1960 in London. He was
educated Cambridge University (MA Arabic), and at al-Azhar University, the highest seat of
learning in Sunni Islam. He has studied under traditional Islamic scholars in Cairo and
Jeddah, including Shaykh Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad, and Shaykh Ismail al-Adawi. Abdal-
Hakim Murad has translated several classical Arabic works, including Imam al-Bayhaqi's
'Seventy-Seven Branches of Faith', and 'Selections from the Fath al-Bari'. He is also the
Trustee and Secretary of The Muslim Academic Trust and Director of The Anglo-Muslim
Fellowship for Eastern Europe.

Read other articles by Abdal-Hakim Murad on this site here.