This Brother ZamanH is right where you really start to go wrong.

Brother ZamanH,

Cliche means: An overused expression or idea; something which is superficial.

So, how can cliche be a "self-evident fact"?  If you meant "that man and woman are equal or that man and women complement each other. They are both indespensable for human society to work properly. Each of them is as important as the other" is a self-evident fact, then you should have simply said you believe this is true.  By the way, do you?

PAZ, Khadija

Auzubillahi minash shaitan ir rajeem,

Bismillah ir rahman ir rahim,

Assalamualaikum Brother Israfil,

I agree with all what you have said in your response to me. Alhamdulillah.

Unfortunately this thread is going off topic ... and hope people would take other concerns to a separate string. For this reason I do not wish to respond to the discussion between Zaman and Khadija.

Back to the topic .... just like equality does not mean all families should have equal income, not all professional specializations should have same importance in society etc, equality between a man and a woman does not mean, if a man can go out with his hair uncovered, so should a woman.

In a household the husband and wife have different rights and responsibilities. To allow both, those rights is equality. In the same way, between a son and a daughter, there are different rights on parents ... when the parents give those rights to their children accordingly, then they have observed equality between their children.

In other words, i am trying to echo your thoughts, that the guiding principles for leting the men and women be in society come from the Quran for Muslims. If we tend to borrow these from elsewhere ... it is indeed infiltration of a foreign thing, which can have acceptance only as long as it does not contradict our Sharia.

Infilteration is sometimes intentionally planted in our social system while on others it comes like a mere opinion .... like in a thread in women's section a non-muslim came forward to advocate in favor of a husband's unislamic personal behaviors - not realising what was being forward as "okay" in not okay for a muslim man!

Women like irshad manji are taken seriously by the westers who pay too much attention to islam as a "socially incompatible" set of rules, and the so called mederate and/or apologetic muslims. If it was these women who you referred to as the complaining folks .... I agree.

Therefore i guess there is no dispute about what you are saying. To further the discussion - something that I always profess -  we need to educate our children and youth islamically - which means with authentic islam, give them the sunnah and sharia.  We need to engage people in encouraging discussions, that has a positive impact on them. We need to bring non-practising muslims into our societies, and help them understand the importance of living according to islam ... in a compassionate manner.

Very  often there is resentment among muslims about who is following the right religion and who is not. Resentment of reverts towards born muslims and vice versa ... all these practices are unhealthy, which need to be displaced by active, sincere, efforts of reinforcement of our foundations and weeding of the weeknesses.

Maa salaama,

Nausheen