Woman Between Islam and Western Society
5. Position of Woman in the Islamic Shari‘ah
~ 336 ~
How straitened were the circumstances in which we
were living in those days can be judged by my not
even having one paisa to buy a small piece of
rubber for a catapult I was making. Hearing of this,
one of our acquaintances kindly gave me the money
for it. It was galling to think that once having been
the biggest landowning family in the area, we had
now come to such a sorry pass.
To be quite honest, after our father’s death we had
not even the smallest pittance to call our own. The
hardships my mother faced at that time are now
barely imaginable. It is greatly to her credit that she
bore up as well as any man. And from within the
confines of the four walls of her home -— such as it
was — she contrived to influence the external
world. She gained the upper hand over her
circumstances where such circumstances might well
have proved too overwhelming. The most
remarkable feature of her attainments is that she
succeeded in achieving, within the limits set for her
by Islam, all those objectives for which it is now
considered necessary to make women emerge from
the Islamic fold — in the process, divesting
themselves of their essentially feminine virtues.
