Women in Islam

The requirements of our age is to make it necessary to examine and weigh once more many matters about which it is no longer enough to accept the old assessments. The system of family rights and responsibilities is one of these matters. In this age for reasons to be pointed out later, it has been commonly supposed that the basic questions in this area are the liberation of Women and the equality of their rights with men. All other problems are off-shoots of these two matters. However, in our opinion the most fundamental problem concerning the system of family rights, or at least one which is on the same level as the basic problems is to decide whether the family system is independent of other social systems, and whether it employs a special logic and special criteria different from the logic and criteria of any other social institutions; or whether no kind of disparity exists between this social unit and other social units. Do the very same logic, the very same philosophy, and the very same criteria govern this unit as govern other units and institutions? The root cause of this doubt is, on the one hand, that the two main parties of this unit are the two different sexes, and, on the other hand, there is the succession of sons and daughters. The creative process has established the members of this unit with dissimilar and unequal dispositions, and with differing and with differing qualities and temperaments. The social structure of the family is one which is semi- innate and semi-conventional, that is to say it occupies an intermediary position between an instinctive social structure, like that of bees and ants, all of those whose behavioral limits, rights and laws are determined by nature, and a social structure based on convention, like that of human civic society which has a smaller ‘natural’ or instinctive component. The ancient philosophers, as we know, counted the philosophy of family life as an independent branch of “practical philosophy”,