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Can Women Become Imams And Rulers Of Muslim Countries ?
What is the ruling for women to lead the men in namaz and become imams ? I got two different views from Ghamidi saab and Engineer Mirza .. who is more correct ?
Ghamidi saab view :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0kOZK9Re3g
Engineer Mirza view (from 4:11)
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21 Replies
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Can Women Become Imams And Rulers Of Muslim Countries ?
updated 3 years, 9 months ago
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21
Replies
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Ghamidi sahab – remember you’re on Ask Ghamidi 😁😁
Jokes aside, and as a matter of principle, one should figure out the correct viewpoint on the basis of reasoning and evidence.
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Ha ha.. Ghamidi saab gives good reasons, but I found the other view also has some reasoning. Is there any practice of a woman imam or ruler approved by Prophet or sahabas in their time ?
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What about the hadith where Prophet said that no nation will succeed which has a woman as its ruler ?
Islamqa says :
“There is no dispute among the scholars that one of the conditions of the imaam or leader is that he should be male. Ibn Hazam reported in his book Maraatib al-Ijmaa’ that there was scholarly consensus on this point. In the section he says: “Out of all groups of the people of the Qiblah [i.e., all Muslim sects], there is not one that allows the leadership of women.” Al-Qurtubi reported something similar, and al-‘Allaamah al-Shanqeeti said, “There is no difference of opinion among the scholars on this point.”
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Imaam al-Muwaffaq Ibn Qudaamah said:
“For this reason the Prophet SAWS (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and his successors (khulafa’) and those who came after them never appointed a woman to be a judge or a governor of a province, as far as we know. If it were permissible, it should have happened.”
Imaam al-Ghazaali said:
“The position of leader (imaam) could never be given to a woman even if she possessed all the qualities of perfection and self-reliance. How could a woman take the position of leader when she did not have the right to be a judge or a witness under most of the historical governments?”
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Religion is derived from Quran and sunnah. Aa’ima and scholars of the past can have opinions, but we should judge those opinions on the basis of evidence from the Quran and sunnah.
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Umer bhai,
Here Dr. Shehzad Saleem says that husband will be the head of the family and it won’t prevent the wife to become head of the state.
Now.. a wife is supposed to obey and honor her husband, and how will it be possible as her role of a head of state, where her husband is one of her subjects ?
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I don’t remember seeing any such conflict when Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister.
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We don’t know Benazir’s personal life and I don’t want to comment on her imaan and her relation with her husband.
I am talking about a general concept. A woman who is supposed to be obedient to her husband (as Ghamidi saab says, a family can’t have two bosses), will find it difficult to be his boss overall in terms of state, where he has to obey her.
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I don’t see any such conflict and instead of hypothesis, I gave you a practical example. We don’t obey the rulers, we obey the law. Similarly, a Husband is bound to obey those laws as well, how is this conflicting their relationship? and this obedience is not absolute; just like a husband can’t ask her wife to go out and earn for them both, a wife is under no obligation to obey that, the same can be applied to any other unreasonable demand made by Husband.
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That practical example is not clear because we don’t know how was her imaan and how good a muslim woman was she, and how her husband behaved.
Ghamidi saab clearly said that an institution can’t have two bosses.. now husband is the boss of the family, and wife is the boss of the state and thus his boss too, clearly create conflict with the statement of Ghamidi saab.
If wife is under no compulsion to obey any demand of husband, then what is the meaning of obedience ? Similarly, a lady boss will have to be obeyed by her husband. Do you say that in a company, you obey the rules, but not obey the boss? If that’s the case, is wife also not obeying the husband in the family, but obeying the rules only ?
Then why Ghamidi saab said husband is the boss in the family, and he can discipline his wife physically ? Does it mean a ruler of the state can physically discipline her husband too ?
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Here, a reputed scholar Yasir Qadhi doesn’t reject the authenticity of the hadith, but he changes the words of the Prophet to mean as a specific ruler, rather than a general rule for all women.
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Here Dr. Zakir Naik also accepts the hadith, and he goes the other way, saying that women are not fit to be rulers.
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Dr. Shehzad has read the whole narration and seeing from the context its quite apparent to me that it was related to princess of Persia.
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Dr. Shehzad has doubted the authenticity of the hadith itself.. in the video you posted. Yasir Qadhi and Zakir Naik accepted the hadith as authentic but both derived opposite meaning of Prophet’s statement. One said it was specific for Persian ruler, but other said it was for all time.
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We can judge on the basis of whatever evidence each scholar provides for the basis of their argument. We are not going to be judged on whether we believed if a woman can perform a certain duty or not, but we will be judged on the basis of our attitude towards the truth.
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Faisal bhai,
We will be judged if we attribute false thing to Prophet.
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I was talking apart from authenticity issue, even if we accept the health of narration, it still points to a very specific situation. But on health of narration, here are the points raised by Dr. Shehzad. Rest you can weigh the arguments from each side yourself.
This Hadith suffers from the following flaws:
1. It is evident from the very text of the narrative that it was never known until the battle of Jamal took place in 36 AH. It was brought forward only after A’ishah (rta) faced ‘Ali (rta) in battle. Before that it was never heard of – which of course is quite strange.
2. One of the narrators is ‘Awf Ibn Abi Jamilah about whom scholars of Rijal know that he used to give preference to ‘Ali (rta) over ‘Uthman (rta) and it is also known that since A’ishah (rta) sided with ‘Uthman (rta), a group of the followers of ‘Ali (rta) targeted her to besmear her character. Moreover, the Hadith can never be applied to the case of A’ishah (rta) since she never claimed to be the ruler of the Muslims.
3. It is a Gharib Hadith. In Hadith parlance, a narrative which has just one narrator in any section of its chain is called ‘Gharib’. It makes the narrative quite weak. It is only Abu Bakrah who is reporting this narrative at the top of this chain. The nature of the narrative is such that other companions too should have reported it from the Prophet (sws) but we find none.
4. If the content of the Hadith is analyzed, one can easily conclude that the Prophet (sws) could never have uttered these words. After all, success in this world was attained by many nations who had women rulers until the time of the Prophet (sws) and even after him.
5. Last but not the least, this Hadith is against the Quran. It is the purport of the Quran (42:38) that anyone who enjoys the confidence of the majority is eligible to become the ruler of the Muslims:
وَأَمْرُهُمْ شُورَى بَيْنَهُمْ (٣٨:٤٢)
And their system is based on their consultation. (42:38)
Nowhere does the Quraan exclude women from this general principle.
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1. I seem to find your 1st point of this hadith not being heard long, as having merit. If Prophet indeed said it, it should have been more common than that. I don’t know the history of the hadith.
2. You are doubting the integrity of the narrator because he sided with Ali over Uthman. In other words, you are indicating the possibility of the narrator deliberately attributing false thing to the Prophet. That clearly means he will go to hell.
3. If it is a Garib hadith, why Dr. Zakir Naik and Yasir Qadhi are considering it authentic ? This again points me to my unanswered question here:
4. For a muslim, yes, but for a non-Muslim, Prophet can be wrong and he could utter wrong things too, as many hadiths are there which mention many wrong things said by him.
5. Again, for a Muslim, yes your argument is correct, that a hadith should not contradict Qur’an, but we know that many hadiths do contradict Qur’an and are considered authentic. Is there any example of a woman ruler/judge/governor in Prophet’s time or in the rule of the 4 rightly guided caliphs ?
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I find the contradiction in wife obeying the husband in the family, and the husband obeying the wife if she becomes state ruler, where she gets rights to be obeyed by the public.
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https://www.al-feqh.com/en/a-ruler-s-rights-and-obligations
It is the right of the legal Muslim ruler that people obey him to do Ma`ruf (that which is judged as good, beneficial, or fitting by Islamic law and Muslims of sound intellect) in their adversity, prosperity, pleasure and displeasure even when he is given (rather undue) preference over them.
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