Women’s Rights or Male Authority?

In late January 2026, Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami ameer Dr Shafiqur Rahman told Al Jazeera that women can never lead his party because of purported “God-given differences” between men and women. His remarks spark a critical question:

Are claims of “women’s empowerment in Islam” rooted in genuine equality - or are they rhetorical cover for maintaining male authority under religious-sounding language?

From a secular, atheist standpoint, the latter is closer to the truth.

Reform or Rationalisation?

Supporters of Islam point to early reforms - inheritance, property rights, and marriage contracts - as evidence of women’s empowerment. But here’s the secular critique:

Those reforms were not designed to emancipate women; they were designed to manage male anxieties about property, lineage, and social order.

Yes, Qur’anic law gave women property rights compared with some pre-Islamic norms. But:

• Inheritance rules still stipulate unequal shares in most cases (Qur’an 4:11).

• A woman’s financial agency is only preserved because men are obligated to maintain her financially.

From a secular perspective, this is not liberation - it is patriarchal accommodation with religion as handmaiden.

Text vs Reality: The Gap Is Not Inadvertent

A core tactic of religious defenders is to point to texts that claim spiritual equality (e.g., Qur’an 33:35) while ignoring the very same scripture that assigns legal and social authority to men (e.g., Qur’an 4:34). This isn’t inconsistency - it’s strategy:

“We’ll give you equality in theory, and withhold it in practice.”

Atheist critique: Spiritual equality without structural equality is ideology, not empowerment.

Religious Justification for Patriarchy

The interview with Jamaat’s leader isn’t an isolated quirk - it’s symptomatic of something deeper:

Religious language is repeatedly used to justify patriarchal hierarchy.

We can unpack this -

• Religious authority becomes the ultimate arbiter of social roles.

• “God said it” gets used as shorthand for “this is beyond debate.”

• Actual political power consolidates around men.

In other words, religion becomes a shield for resisting women’s autonomy.

This is a classic pattern seen across faith traditions - not Islam in isolation - but in Islam’s case, it is often couched in appeals to divine will that make secular critique seem “intolerant” or “disrespectful.”

As atheists, we reject divine authority. That means:

• We don’t grant any text inviolable status.

• We evaluate claims based on evidence, logic, and human rights, not scripture.

  
  

“Empowerment” as Marketing

Praise for “Islamic empowerment of women” often comes dressed in scholarly phrases like:

• “Complementary roles”

• “Rights with responsibilities”

• “Differentiated equality”

  
  

But let’s be blunt:

If these doctrines were truly empowering, there would be no need to constantly defend them against demands for real equality.

Look at how:

• Women are excluded from top leadership in some Islamist parties (Jamaat, among others).

• Interpretations of texts are policed by male scholars.

• Legal reforms aimed at equality are blocked or diluted.

This is not empowerment - this is compromise with patriarchy using religion as legitimating rhetoric.

The Real Test: Practice, Not Claims

An honest secular standard for assessing empowerment asks:

Do women have equal agency, equal rights, and equal opportunities - regardless of sex?

In many Muslim-majority societies:

• Personal status laws still discriminate.

• Political representation lags.

• Social norms restrict women’s mobility or freedom.

Defenders might say “that’s culture, not Islam.”

A fair secular counterpoint is:

If a religion’s authoritative institutions allow such discrimination to persist, then religion is part of the problem - not just an innocent bystander.

You can’t wash your hands of responsibility by blaming culture when religious authority is actively invoked to justify discriminatory practices.

Rejecting Divine Authority Doesn’t Mean Denying Agency

Some secular critics fall into a trap: dismissing all religious believers as backwards. That’s neither fair nor accurate.

A sharper atheist critique distinguishes:

• Religious belief as personal worldview

• Institutional religion as social power

It is the intellectual use of religion to shape laws, public policy, and gender norms that deserves scrutiny - not the mere existence of belief.

A Secular Conclusion: Not Empowerment - Subordination with a Smile

From an atheist, secular viewpoint:

Islamic traditions contain elements that can be interpreted as granting women rights - but those elements are not structured to produce gender equality in practice.

They are:

• Historically contingent

• Embedded in male-centric legal systems

• Used politically to justify male authority

So let’s strip away euphemisms like complementarity, balance, or empowerment when they obscure real power hierarchies.

Real empowerment means nothing less than full equality - not just equality in theory, or divine abstraction, but equality in law, society, and practice.

Anything else is just patriarchy packaged in piety.

A Short Reading List On Secular & Scholarly

1. Leila Ahmed - Women and Gender in Islam (Yale, 1992)

2. Asma Barlas - “Believing Women” in Islam (University of Texas Press, 2002)

3. Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel (Free Press, 2007) - secular critique of religion and gender

4. Saba Mahmood - Politics of Piety (Princeton, 2005) - how religion shapes gender politics