In the Womb and the Waiting Room
Women’s status in many Indian Muslim homes begins to show even before birth. Long before her eyes meet the world, a daughter often carries a burden she never chose. During pregnancy, wishes for a baby boy slip into conversations and prayers.
Our culture has trained many families to see sons as assets and daughters as liabilities. A boy promises financial support in old age. Whereas a girl signals future costs in education, marriage, and practically no return on investment. This thinking settles deep into family psychology and shapes reactions long before childbirth.
The mindset does not end here. It grows with the girl and surfaces clearly at marriage. Weddings and dowry turn into public measures of a daughter’s worth, a reality I discussed in detail in another piece.
Indian Muslim Weddings: Dowry, Extravagance and the Lost Sunnah.
So when the doctor announces, “It’s a girl,” joy does not always follow. Silence often fills the room. Forced smiles replace celebration.
What makes this tragedy even heavier is that this mindset grows in communities that claim to follow a faith in which daughters are honoured beyond measure. A faith where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ stood up for daughters, carried them with love, cried at their pain, and promised Jannah to the one who raises them with kindness.
Women’s Status Before Islam
To understand how deeply Islam transformed the status of women, we must return to pre-Islamic Arabia. That era, known as Jahiliyyah (The age of Ignorance), treated women as lesser human beings. Tribal law gave them no independent legal standing. Men arranged marriages without their consent. Property remained out of reach. Fathers viewed daughters as burdens, not blessings.
Tribes valued sons for war and lineage. Daughters offered no material return under this system. This warped sense of worth led some tribes to kill their newborn daughters simply because they were girls, choosing death over the burden of raising them.
Allah exposed this cruelty in the Quran:
“And when the girl who was buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed.”
(Surah At-Takwir 81:8–9)
Another set of verses captures the moral decay of that society:
“Whenever one of them is given the good news of a baby girl, his face grows gloomy, as he suppresses his rage.”
(Surah An-Nahl 16:58)
“He hides himself from the people because of the bad news he has received. Should he keep her in disgrace, or bury her alive in the ground? Evil indeed is their judgement!”
(Surah An-Nahl 16:59)
These verses do not merely narrate history. They condemn a mindset and shame an attitude that viewed women as an economic loss and a social embarrassment. Islam rejected that thinking completely.
Women’s Status After Islam: A Moral Revolution
Islam entered this Jahili society and it changed that reality step by step. The faith affirmed women as full human beings with equal moral worth. Accountability before Allah did not depend on gender, and honour did not depend on lineage.
Islam granted women rights unknown to the world at that time. A woman gained the right to own property and keep her wealth. Inheritance became her entitlement, not charity. Consent became essential for marriage. No man could force her into a union. Marriage shifted from a transaction between male relatives to a legal contract that essentially protected women.
Islam also changed how society viewed daughters. What culture once labelled as shame, Islam turned it into a reward. Raising girls became worship, and caring for them became a path to Paradise.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:
“Whoever has three daughters and is patient towards them, and feeds them, gives them to drink, and clothes them from his wealth; they will be a shield for him from the Fire on the Day of Resurrection.”
(Sunan Ibn Majah 3669)
With these teachings, Islam lifted women’s status from the soil to the heavens.
Women’s Status Today: Remembered in Masajids, Ignored at Home
All of this was never meant to remain wrapped inside books, repeated in lectures, or quoted in sermons that move us to tears for a moment and then leave our lives unchanged. Allah intended these teachings to be implemented in our daily lives.
The real question today is not whether Islam honours women. It is whether Muslims as a community honour women.
Especially in the Indian subcontinent, we must ask ourselves honestly: are we giving our girls their due rights or do we even know what those rights are? Do we speak about them with the same urgency with which we speak about their duties, their modesty, and their obedience? How sincerely are we working to remove the cultural evils that quietly strip women of what Allah gave them?
It begins with learning, and learning requires humility, the willingness to unlearn the degraded ideas we inherited about women. Yet when a woman dares to learn and then ask for her rights, she is often dismissed as a feminist. Her voice is disregarded.
But have we ever paused to ask ourselves, if feminism offers women some of the dignity and rights that are already God-given and rooted in fitrah, yet we as a community fail to uphold them, why would our girls not be drawn toward that ideology?
If only we treated our daughters as Islam commands, we would raise more proud Muslimahs grounded in faith than feminists searching elsewhere for justice.
Women’s status in Islam remains clear. The responsibility to uphold it rests with us.