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Let me first say how delighted I feel about your choice of theme for this year’s FOMWAN Week, the Role of Muslim Women in the Transformation of Society. It suggests that Muslim women in Nigeria have graduated from discussions on the position of women in Islam. Indeed even non Muslims world over are increasingly conceding to the unassailable and unprecedented position Islam had accorded women and are now turning their combat else where. In fact the majority of the Muslim converts in Europe and the America today are women, not men. It must be noted that while the world is just discovering the potentials and therefore role of women today, Islam had done so from its inception, some 14 centuries ago. The Qur’an first elevated the position of women and brought them at par with their menfolk and made both of them responsible for ensuring that the Ummah is kept on course. But the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, carried the role of women even further when he said that educating a woman is educating a nation while educating a man is simply educating an individual. Even the Muslim Ummah has not quite finished appreciating the profoundness of this statement, much less the rest of the world.

Indeed the very seerah of the Prophet is a testimony to this new role of women in the transformation of society, not only because they participated in the transformation the prophet brought about but also because they played roles that were unprecedented in the history of humanity, roles that were crucial to the very mission of the prophet. Time and the occasion may not allow for details, but it may be necessary to mention at least three such women to illustrate the point. If the role Baraka, the Prophet’s wet nurse, played can be considered routine, remarkable as it was, certainly the one played by Khadija in Makka, Rumaysa (Umm Sulaym) in Madina and Ramla b. Abi Sufyan (Umm Habiba) in Abyssinia, was unprecedented and formed the foundations of the Islamic Ummah.

Khadija - The story of Khadija is too well known to this august gathering to warrant recounting here. I would rather recall the more profound points that illustrate the crucial role she played in the transformation of that 7th century Arabian society. Khadija had the singular honour of being the first person to accept Islam. That the first person to have accepted Islam is a woman and not a man has in itself a significance for the role of women in the venture of Islam. But that is not quite the point that I wish to draw our attention here. The point here is the fact that Khadija accepted Islam at that crucial time when he was not quite sure if people will believe him, and therefore had the most encouraging effect on his morale for the great mission. Not only did it give the first and most important assurance but it propelled him in to venturing outside the home, fully confident that he has all the sympathies and support of his spouse. You will recall that there were Prophets whose wives were undermining their mission.

Khadija’s contribution did not stop with her accepting Islam, rather her acceptance of Islam was only the beginning of her contribution. She was one of the wealthiest persons in Makka and from the day the Prophet started his mission until she died she made available all her wealth for the propagation of Islam, with-holding nothing back for her children or relation. Here again her contribution cannot be like any other, for that wealth at that time when not only the Prophet but the nascent Muslim community was in dire need of material support was crucial to the continuity of the mission of Islam. This was particularly so during the period of the boycott, when the whole of Makka placed an embargo on the Muslim community and it was on Khadija’s wealth, business and clan connection that the Muslim community survived the three tough years of boycott.

To be sure, for the prophet the material support may not be as important as the emotional, that unshaken faith which Khadija had in him, that willingness to stand by him when all others repelled him and that commitment to the cause he lived for through the trials and tribulations which characterized the Makkan period in particular. These are only some of the profound contributions of Khadija the first of the wives of the Prophet. It did not come as a surprise therefore that Allah the Most high sent Jibril to the Prophet to assure Khadija of special place preserved for her in al-Jannah. This is a contribution of a Muslim wife to the cause of Islam, a total commitment, dedication and sacrifice for the cause she believed in and lived her life for. In this way Khadija’s contribution to the transformation of society is both indelible and inestimable, as the first Muslim woman she represents a model and has shown the way for all Muslim women who wish to live the life of a true Muslim woman.[1]

Rumaysa bint Milhan - Also known as Umm Sulaym, Rumaysa was the wife of Malik b. Nadr and the mother of the famous Anas b. Malik. She was one of the first women to accept Islam in Madina, that was before the Prophet's Hijra. She accepted Islam in Madina when her husband was away. On return, her husband demanded that she returned to her former faith and she blatantly refused and in fact invited him to come over to Islam. Malik left furiously and never returned as he got killed in a feud. Abu Talha, one of the wealthy and most respected men of Madina, immediately came to request Rumaysa’s hand for marriage. Rumaysa refused on the ground that Abu Talha was not a Muslim. But Abu Talha thought that she needed wealth and promised her, in his words, "a lot of Gold and silver". She felt devalued and assured him that what she wants is not his wealth but his Islam. She in fact offered him that if he should accept Islam she would immediately marry him and would not need any of his Gold or silver, she would take his conversion to Islam as her Mahr (sadakiin Hausa or dowry in English). Abu Talha gave the matter some thoughts and eventually accepted Islam and Rumaysa, true to her words, married him. The people of Madina said of her that "we have never yet heard of a mahr that was more valuable and precious than that of Umm Sulaym for she made Islam her mahr."

What Rumaysa did was certainly unprecedented. Her preference of faith over wealth was to revolutionarise gender relationship in a society where women were very much like chattels. It gave women a new honour, a new value and an entirely new stature in society. This upgrading of the personality of women was to put them at par with men and carve out for them a role in the task of society building.[2]

Ramla bint Abu Sufyan - As the names suggests, Ramla was the daughter of the famous Abu Sufyan ibn Harb. In the early Makkan days when Abu Sufyan was at the forefront of the opposition against Islam and the few that dared convert to Islam had to bear the brunt of torture and humiliation, Ramla, Abu Sufyan’s own daughter, decided to convert to Islam. It was a blow for Abu Sufyan to have one of his own to convert to the new faith he had sworn to fight and for which he had effectively mobilised the whole of the tribes of Makka. He did all he could with all the force and power at his disposal to get Ramla abandon her new faith of Islam and return to the religion of their forefathers, to no avail. Ramla stood firm and bore the brunt of the persecution of the whole tribes of Makka, especially the Quraysh, all the more for Ramla’s conversion was hard for them to tolerate. Eventually Ramla, her little daughter Habiba and her husband Ubaydullah ibn Jahsh left for Abyssinia in the fifth year of the mission of the prophet, the first hijra. There, however, her husband reneged on Islam and became a Christian. He did all he could to carry Ramla along with him but Ramla’s commitment to Islam was unshakable. She eventually chose to divorce her husband and accept the stark poverty that awaited a widow in a foreign land but retained her Islam. She bore with immense fortitude the tremendous emotional and economic pressure for many years. At the end of ten years stay the Prophet impressed with her commitment sent to Negus to contract a marriage between him and Ramla, or Umm Habiba as she was popularly known. Thus Umm Habiba joined the blessed family of the prophet.

Here then is woman of strong resolve for whom ties of parenthood and marriage were secondary to those of Islam. Ramla had the courage to accept Islam when only few dared to do so, when few dared to face the enormous social pressure and persecution. It never bothered her what the Makkan society thinks or says of her, top in her mind and scale of priority was what Allah thinks or would say of her. That she reduced marriage to what it is, a means to an end, which to her was Islam, but not an end in itself as many have made it today, is particularly significant. Having sacrificed her marriage for Islam Allah gave her the best of husbands ever.[3]

These then are glimpses of the women who transformed the corrupt and Jahili society of 7th century Arabia to the Islamic model that we all use as the mirror to judge ourselves today. These therefore are true models of Muslim women who should inspire us, these are the models we should seek to learn more about, indeed these are the models that our little ones should be taught and not the pop stars and actresses of the corrupt world we found ourselves today. Indeed it is the absence of these models that have created the vacuum that has been filled by all manners of miscreants who have been tempting our youth into all manners of perversions in the name of education or progress.

In the period that was to follow this first generation of Muslim women, women were to operate as partners of men, partaking in decision making, often challenging the Amir al-mu’minin in the mosque during a Friday khutba, even taking arms in Jihad. Women were participating actively in the running of the affairs of the Ummah through out the period of the Khilafa Rashida. In the period of the Khilafa Ghyaira Rashida, as someone aptly called the period of the Umayyad and the Abbasids and beyond, women were gradually elbowed out from the public arena, but they held out in the field of learning for many centuries, surrendering only very recently. During these centuries they not only partook equally with men in learning but they often excelled, becoming teachers of some of the most illustrious scholars of Islam, including some of the Imams of the four famous schools. Imam Shafi’, for example, drew a lot from the knowledge of Sayyida Nafisa in the writing of his famous Risala. Jalaluddin al-Suyuti, one of the most prolific of the scholars of his time, studied the Risala of Shafi’ at the feet of Hajr bint Muhammad. Similarly Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, one of the greatest names in hadith literature, was taught by a number of women scholars like Juwairiyya bint Ahmad and Aisha bint Abdullahi. Even Ibn Batuta studied with Zaynab bint Ahmad when he was in Damascus. The list is long.[4]

This continued throughout the Islamic lands, not only in Arabia but in Africa, Asia and even Europe, al-Andalus, as Spain was then known. In Africa the women of Timbuktu not only partook in learning and teaching but also in building mosques and Islamic institutions. During the Al-Murabit rule which covered Spain there were women like Tamima bint Yusuf b. Tashfin and Zaynab bint Ibrahim b. Tafilayit who were famous for their knowledge and piety.[5] Coming nearer home, women in Borno took part in running the state even as they remained indoors.[6] But it was in the Sokoto Caliphate that they actually recovered most of their role as scholars and technocrats. The role of the daughters of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, especially Nana Asmau is perhaps now very familiar. She wrote about 80 works, some of them translations of the works of her father into Fulfulde or Hausa. Her greatest contribution is perhaps in the development of the women movement of ‘Yan Taru which mobilised women for the purpose of transforming the society of the Sokoto Caliphate. The role of ‘Yan Taru is yet to be fully studied, European scholars have so far shown more interest and are certainly more informed about it today than our Muslim women. But from the pioneering work of Jean Boyd, [7] the movement has played a crucial role in the development and maintenance of the Islamic ambiance which well over a century dominated their society. Put in other words, without the ‘Yan Taru movement that nurtured, promoted and ensured the continuity of Islamic values our situation today would have certainly been worse.

Since the demise of the Caliphate at the beginning of this century, women have been receding from this important role. This partly explains the speed with which our society has been degenerating. Women today form the majority of the illiterates in society. Their education is not the priority of this decadent society for their perceived role is not beyond satisfying the animal urge in men and bearing children. Women have been allowed to sink below the level that Shehu Usman found them. Those who have been to Western educated institutions on the other hand have only imbibed Western materialistic values which emphasize competition between men and women rather than complimentarity. For this reason the society has been unable to pull itself out of the abyss of the decadence it has sunken. FOMWAN may represent a ray of hope, for if it succeeds in mobilizing women, educating them and instilling in them the role they ought to play as Muslim women, we can begin to hope for the regeneration of our beleaguered society.

It is particularly urgent today for the situation in Nigeria has been deteriorating at an alarming rate. Admittedly our Islamic values have been gradually eroded since the colonial times, but in the last decade or so the rate as well as the magnitude has been unprecedented. Understandably the consequences have been nor less dramatic; our public morality is literally extinct, that embezzlement and inequities that were not conceivable only ten years ago are today not only possible but common; corruption has moved from a crime to a way of life for it is increasingly becoming foolish to be virtuous; worst, our young men and women have been emptied of any values and fed entirely on the materialistic diet of the Western world where accumulation, by what ever means, has become the very essence of living. If, like it seems, we continue on this unholy tract, where are we likely to find ourselves in the next decade? We certainly have a responsibility to arrest this moral decay and social disintegration, not only because we shall clearly be the first victims as our children will be the fodder but also because our Lord and creator, to whom will be our ultimate and inevitable return, will ask us to account for our role in arresting this decay. Complacency itself, in the circumstances, becomes a crime. In undertaking this enormous but necessary responsibility, five issues appear to be particularly important and must therefore be addressed: