Reinstating the Queens

Abstract

The leadership of women at the highest political level remains an ongoing controversial issue for Muslims.1 And yet women have led both medieval and modern Muslim societies – Pakistan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh – thereby rendering this debate, in practice, moot. But quite a few Muslim men consider this reality as an abomination and perversion. In his Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭānīyah wa al-Wilāyāt al-Dīnīyah, al-Mawardi (d. 1058) discusses the imamate in the sense of the caliphate (khilāfah: Islamic leadership) and lists its conditions.2 Rather surprisingly, gender is not one of them. However, Asghar Ali Engineer writes that “al-Mawardi maintained that a woman cannot be made head of state.”3 Although the gender clause is not found in Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭānīyah written by the Hanbali Abu Ya‘la al-Farra’ (d. 1113) and other early works, later scholars categorically include it. The Shafi‘i Ahmad ibn Ali al-Qalqashandi (d. 1418) cites masculinity as the first of the fourteen conditions of eligibility. He bases his decision on the hadith reported by al-Bukhari and narrated by the Companion Abu Bakra. This scholar explains how a leader has to mingle with other men to discuss state affairs, an act that Islam prohibits for women. He adds that “because a woman is incomplete in her own right, as she does not even control her marriage, she cannot be made a leader over others.”4 I contend that his and similar remarks are seriously influenced by cultural circumstances, ones that are not truly reflective of Islam.