Dr Manzur Ahmad, Rector of the Islamic International University, has urged the government to give top priority to women development. Giving his concluding remarks after the lecture on Women Development by distinguished scholar Dr Shabana Mir at the IIU here on Friday evening.
He said that Quran does not discriminate between men and women on the base of gender. Dr Shabana Mir, who was main speaker on this occasion, has written a dissertation on an ethnographic study of American Muslim women undergraduates' experiences of campus climate in two private universities on the East Coast of the USA.
She has lived, worked and studied in Pakistan, the UK and the US. Dr Mir in her lecture said that the Muslims societies had unfortunately been considered man-dominated for centuries, which was totally wrong and deadly contrary to the spirit of Quranic injunctions.
'The Quran commanded rights and equity in dealing with men and women, since both males and females have the same status, rights, obligations and duties," she observed.
Dr Mir regretted that women were treated as second class citizens in many Muslim homes due to prevailing misperception that women were not equal to men. It was obligatory for Muslim scholars to confront these un-Islamic concepts. In this regard she gave examples of noble women who had provided exemplary guidelines for the conduct of women for all times to come.
Referring to these outstanding women characters of which the Quran speaks, she highlighted the fact that Islam has nothing to do with any sort of gender discrimination, since women were an independent entity.
She asked the audience not to confuse Islam with our own misperceptions because two-third of Fiqh and commentaries on Shariah bears the name of Hazrat Ayesha (RA) Mother of All Believers.
She said it was sad to reflect that in the face of such overwhelming evidence, some of us should continue to believe that women were inferior to men in all spheres of life.