By: Dr. Mohammad Akram Nadwi Oxford London
The question of women’s empowerment is frequently discussed in contemporary society through the language of rights, autonomy, equality and participation. Within an Islamic framework, however, the question must be approached through a deeper theological and moral conception of human dignity. Islam does not regard women merely as beneficiaries of rights granted by society, nor does it define their worth in opposition to men. Rather, both men and women are servants of Allah, morally responsible before Him, and entrusted with the task of cultivating a just and virtuous human society. Click Here To Follow Our WhatsApp Channel
One of the most important Qur’anic foundations for this understanding is found in Sūrat al-Tawbah: “The believing men and believing women are supporters of one another. They enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, establish prayer, give zakāh, and obey Allah and His Messenger. Those—Allah will have mercy upon them. Indeed, Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.” (9:71)
This verse offers a remarkably comprehensive conception of the relationship between men and women. The Qur’an does not portray them as inherently hostile competitors, nor does it reduce their relationship to a hierarchy in which one gender is merely passive while the other possesses moral agency. Instead, believing men and believing women are described as awliyāʾ of one another, supporters, allies and protectors. Their relationship is therefore one of mutual responsibility and cooperation in the pursuit of righteousness.
The verse is particularly significant because it assigns to both men and women responsibility for the moral direction of society. They are jointly commanded to enjoin what is right and restrain what is wrong. They participate in worship, uphold the moral order, and obey Allah and His Messenger. The promise at the conclusion of the verse is likewise universal: divine mercy is extended to both. The Qur’anic vision is consequently not one of female dependence upon male moral agency, but of a believing community in which women and men together bear responsibility for the preservation and improvement of society.
This principle has profound implications for the contemporary discussion of women’s empowerment. If women and men are both entrusted with the responsibility of promoting good and resisting wrong, then both must possess the intellectual and spiritual means necessary to discharge that responsibility. A person cannot meaningfully fulfil a moral responsibility without acquiring knowledge. For this reason, the education of women is not a peripheral question within an Islamic society; it is an essential component of its moral health.
The obligation, therefore, is not simply to permit women to acquire knowledge but to ensure that they have genuine and meaningful opportunities to do so. Men and women alike need access to sound religious learning, intellectual development and the skills required to contribute constructively to their families and communities. Women who are educated in their faith are able to transmit knowledge to their children, guide future generations, participate intelligently in communal affairs, and contribute to the reform of society. To deprive them of such opportunities is not merely to restrict an individual; it is to impoverish the community itself.
Indeed, the Qur’anic conception of human dignity rests upon principles that transcend gender. In Sūrat al-Nisāʾ, Allah addresses humanity as a whole: “O humankind, be conscious of your Lord, who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate, and from both spread countless men and women. Be mindful of Allah, through whom you ask one another [for rights and needs] and with whom you have close kinship. Truly, Allah is ever-watchful over you.” (4:1)
The theological foundation is unmistakable: humanity has a common origin. Men and women are not two fundamentally different orders of humanity, with one possessing an intrinsic monopoly over moral worth, intellectual capacity or access to divine guidance. They emerge from a single human origin and stand equally before their Creator.
At the heart of Islamic anthropology lies another fundamental principle: every human being is ultimately a servant of Allah. The individual’s primary relationship is therefore not with another human being, but with the Creator. Human beings may possess different responsibilities, abilities and social circumstances, but none possesses divine sovereignty over another. Authority, wherever it legitimately exists, remains bounded by the commands of Allah and the principles of justice.
This has particular significance for the question of women’s autonomy. A society in which men regard themselves as the ultimate proprietors of women’s freedom risks transforming legitimate responsibility into domination. Islam certainly recognises family responsibilities, mutual obligations and differentiated roles in particular areas of life; but these should not be confused with the notion that women are the property of men or that men possess an unrestricted right to determine the intellectual, spiritual or social horizons of women.
The Qur’an repeatedly presents the individual as personally accountable before Allah. On the Day of Judgment, each soul will answer for its own faith and conduct. No person will be able to transfer his or her moral responsibility to another. This principle of individual accountability necessarily entails individual moral agency. Women, no less than men, are addressed by divine revelation, commanded to worship, encouraged to pursue righteousness and warned against wrongdoing. They are therefore not religious minors whose relationship with Allah must permanently be mediated by men.
This point is beautifully reinforced by the Qur’anic passage mentioned in the well-known narration concerning Umm Salamah, the wife of the Prophet ﷺ. She asked why women were not mentioned in the Qur’an in the same manner as men. In response, the Prophet ﷺ proclaimed the revelation in which Allah explicitly mentions Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women, obedient men and obedient women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, charitable men and charitable women, fasting men and fasting women, chaste men and chaste women, and those men and women who remember Allah frequently. Allah then promises all of them forgiveness and a great reward.
The theological significance of this passage is considerable. Divine revelation does not recognise women merely as extensions of male believers; women possess their own moral and spiritual identity before Allah. Their deeds are individually recognised, their virtues individually described, and their reward individually promised. The Qur’anic language therefore establishes a profound principle of spiritual and moral equality: both men and women are independently accountable servants of God.
This understanding also enables us to approach the contemporary question of abuse and safeguarding with greater clarity. Recent allegations of sexual abuse involving minor girls and religious teachers have rightly generated horror, anger and profound disappointment among Muslims, including scholars, community leaders, parents and women. Such allegations, whether ultimately established through proper investigation or not, demand a serious response. Where abuse is substantiated, the perpetrator must be held accountable; where allegations are made, they must be handled through lawful, transparent and competent procedures that protect children and ensure due process.
What cannot be accepted, however, is the idea that the existence of abuse by some men constitutes an argument for restricting the legitimate freedoms and opportunities of women. Such reasoning reverses the direction of responsibility. If a man abuses his position, the appropriate response is to investigate the alleged misconduct, protect those who may be vulnerable, strengthen safeguarding procedures and hold wrongdoers accountable. It is neither just nor intellectually coherent to respond by removing women from mosques, educational institutions, workplaces or legitimate social spaces.
To restrict women because some men have abused their authority is to impose the consequences of male misconduct upon women. It risks punishing those who have suffered harm rather than addressing the structures and individuals responsible for that harm. Justice requires that responsibility be attached to the person who commits the wrong, not transferred indiscriminately to an entire class of people.
Nor should religious authority be treated as a substitute for safeguarding. A teacher of the Qur’an, a scholar, an imam or a religious leader may occupy a position of respect, but religious status does not render a person incapable of wrongdoing. Indeed, precisely because religious teachers exercise trust and influence, institutions must establish appropriate safeguards around them. Reverence for knowledge and scholars must never become a mechanism for immunity from scrutiny.
There is a dangerous misconception that exposing misconduct brings shame upon Islam. The opposite is closer to the truth. Islam is not protected by concealing injustice. The Qur’anic ethic is founded upon truth, justice and accountability. Concealing wrongdoing, intimidating victims, discouraging legitimate reporting, or protecting influential individuals from investigation does not serve religion; it undermines it.
A principled Muslim response to abuse must therefore begin with justice. Allegations involving the sexual abuse or exploitation of children should be reported promptly to the appropriate authorities, in accordance with the law and established safeguarding procedures. Victims and potential victims must be protected, allegations must be taken seriously, and investigations must be conducted competently and impartially. Where wrongdoing is established, accountability must follow.
Such accountability is not a threat to the honour of the Muslim community. It is an expression of its moral principles.
At the same time, safeguarding requires more than retrospective punishment. Institutions and families should develop clear boundaries and professional standards that reduce opportunities for abuse. Children should be taught appropriate personal-safety principles, parents should exercise responsible oversight, and educational institutions should avoid unnecessary situations of private or unsupervised interaction between adults and children. Teachers and religious leaders should work within transparent professional structures rather than relying solely upon personal trust.
This principle should apply consistently. A person does not become beyond scrutiny merely because he is a scholar, imam, Qur’an teacher or community leader. Respect and caution are not opposites. Indeed, appropriate boundaries protect teachers as well as students and help preserve the integrity of educational relationships.
The same principle applies to interactions between adult men and women. Islam does not require the abandonment of social interaction; rather, it regulates it through principles of modesty, dignity, propriety and appropriate boundaries. Educational and professional environments can therefore be structured in ways that are safe, transparent and respectful without requiring the exclusion of women from public life.
This distinction is crucial. Safeguarding should make participation safer, not make women disappear from society.
There is also a profound Qur’anic lesson in the way Islam confronted pre-Islamic attitudes towards women. The Qur’an describes the reaction of some people of the Jāhiliyyah to the birth of a daughter: “When news is brought to one of them of [the birth of] a girl, his face darkens, and he is filled with inward grief! He hides himself from his people because of the ill news he has received. Should he keep her with dishonour or bury her in the dust? Ah—how evil the choice they make!” (16:58–59) The Qur’an then presents one of the most powerful scenes of moral indictment:
“And when the girl who was buried alive is asked, for what sin she was killed.” (81:8–9) The practice of burying infant girls alive existed among some pre-Islamic Arab groups, although it should not be generalised to every tribe or family. The Qur’an nevertheless uses the practice as a profound symbol of a society in which a girl’s existence could be regarded as a source of shame rather than dignity.
The form of the injustice may change while its underlying mentality survives in different guises. Modern societies do not ordinarily bury girls physically in the earth, but there can be subtler forms of burial: burying their aspirations, suppressing their intellectual development, denying them access to knowledge, excluding them from legitimate participation, or persuading them that their religious and social responsibilities are inherently secondary to those of men.
To deprive women of the opportunity to understand their faith can, metaphorically, amount to burying the mind and spirit while leaving the body alive. A woman who is denied knowledge cannot easily exercise the moral agency that the Qur’an itself presupposes when it describes believing women as partners and supporters in the work of enjoining good and preventing evil.
True empowerment, therefore, does not consist simply in importing a particular modern ideological model. From an Islamic perspective, empowerment means enabling human beings to fulfil the purposes for which Allah created them. For women, this necessarily includes access to knowledge, worship, moral responsibility, intellectual development and legitimate participation in the life of the community.
This does not mean that Islam erases every distinction between men and women. Equality in Islamic thought should not be reduced to the proposition that every responsibility, biological function or social role must be identical. Men and women possess different characteristics and may have different responsibilities in particular contexts. The more fundamental point is that difference does not entail inequality of human worth, spiritual accountability or entitlement to divine guidance.
A mature understanding of women’s empowerment must therefore move beyond the false choice between complete identity of roles and complete segregation of the sexes. The Qur’anic model is one of moral partnership: men and women cooperate in righteousness while observing the ethical boundaries established by revelation.
This partnership demands education. It demands institutions in which women can learn their religion from qualified teachers and scholars. It demands spaces in which they can ask questions, develop their intellectual capacities, participate responsibly in communal affairs and transmit knowledge to future generations. It also demands mechanisms through which women can speak when they experience injustice and can expect their concerns to be taken seriously.
There is no legitimate basis for making access to the Qur’an and Sunnah the preserve of a particular gender, tribe, ethnicity or social class. The Qur’an was revealed as guidance for humanity. Knowledge and piety, rather than ancestry or gender, determine a person’s standing in the sight of Allah. No intermediary class possesses an exclusive right to divine guidance.
This principle was embodied in the intellectual history of Islam itself. Muslim women were not absent from the transmission of knowledge. Women participated in the preservation and transmission of ḥadīth, taught students, narrated religious knowledge and contributed to the intellectual life of the Muslim community. The historical record therefore provides little support for the notion that religious learning is intrinsically a male domain.
The challenge before contemporary Muslim communities is consequently not whether women should be empowered, but what kind of empowerment is consistent with Islam. The answer cannot be the uncritical adoption of every contemporary conception of autonomy, because Islamic freedom is ultimately situated within servitude to Allah. Nor can the answer be the indiscriminate restriction of women, because Islam does not authorise human beings to extinguish the moral and intellectual agency that revelation itself recognises.
The Qur’anic ideal is more balanced and more demanding. It asks men and women to become morally responsible human beings who worship Allah, acquire knowledge, uphold justice, protect the vulnerable and contribute to the common good.
In this framework, women’s empowerment begins not with hostility towards men but with partnership between men and women. It does not seek to replace one form of domination with another. It seeks to establish a society in which every individual can fulfil his or her obligations before Allah.
When wrongdoing occurs, therefore, the answer should be justice rather than collective restriction; safeguarding rather than exclusion; accountability rather than concealment; education rather than ignorance; and reform rather than reactionary control.
The Qur’anic message is ultimately one of responsibility. Men and women are both servants of Allah. Both are capable of obedience and disobedience. Both are entrusted with moral duties. Both will stand before their Creator. Both can attain His forgiveness and reward. And both have a role in making the world in which they live more just, compassionate and righteous.
Women’s empowerment, understood in this light, is not a concession to modernity. It is part of a much older Islamic principle: that every human being, male or female, has been created by Allah with dignity, entrusted with responsibility, granted access to divine guidance, and called to account for how that trust was fulfilled.
The task of a genuinely Islamic society is therefore not to silence women in response to the failures of men, but to create conditions in which both women and men can fulfil their God-given responsibilities safely, knowledgeably and with dignity. That is not merely an argument for women’s participation. It is an argument for justice itself.
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