In Defense of Male Headship in Islam

In a recent BBC “Woman’s Hour” interview, Zara Mohammed, the first woman elected Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, found herself pressed by interviewer Emma Barnett on the question of female imams in the country. For Barnett, the concern is a natural one. As she explained in the interview, female rabbis and priests were accommodated long ago, and yet with Muslims the same development remains to be seen. Surely there must be some female imams out there?

The interview has certainly found an audience, with significant reception among Muslims who have circulated it on social media and messaging platforms. Though much discussion has ensued, the discourse has largely focused on in-group/out-group dynamics: Barrett, the elite white liberal, asking Mohammed, the marginalized minority “other,” why Muslims have not yet “gotten with the times” on a matter so essential to female empowerment. This framing of the colonizer inquiring of her subjects has been raised to further cast aspersions — rightly, in my view — of Barrett’s motivations, which, though shrouded in an air of righteousness, often carry more than a hint of derision for insufficiently assimilated “foreigners” in Western lands.

Nonetheless, the underlying question remains largely unconsidered even in Muslim spaces: why aren’t there female imams? And the questions do not end there. Gender asymmetries abound in the Shari‘a, even for seemingly quotidian rituals. What accounts for this? In matters that carry public authority, particularly those that require establishing forms of dominion — of taking charge, governing affairs, and dispensing judgment — male headship is the de facto norm. And this is especially so when the stakes are high. God’s Messengers (rusul), tasked with transmitting revelation to communities, were all men (as distinct from prophets [anbiya’], who a very small minority of scholars held were also female). Allah does not explicitly refer to women in the Quran as prophets or messengers, nor does the Prophet (ﷺ) ever point to the existence of prophetesses/female prophets. This is not to say that women are absent from revelation; quite the contrary, in fact. Women feature prominently in the Quran and Sunnah, though none are identified as prophets, and verses in the Quran explicitly state that God sent male Messengers to call people to His worship.

Going a level down, the dominant positions of jurists and Muslim scholars through the ages took for granted, with much revelatory support, that men were exclusively authorized to hold certain positions of public authority. Khilafa is a male enterprise, and the ultimate political head is to be a man in all circumstances. Only men, according to the dominant view, can be judges (qudat) to the exclusion of women, an essential position of authority for any society and one that carries tremendous weight in advancing and maintaining justice. Domestically, the man is also the head of the household, the qawwam, who bears distinctive responsibilities over those in his custody but who also, correspondingly, possesses the authority to exercise that responsibility in a meaningful way.

Much of this is not news. It is controversial, of course, for many today, but it is also largely without serious dispute at the level of divine command, even if the details are indeed contested. What concerns us here, however, is not the specific examples laid out above but the more fundamental male predominance apparent in the question of public authority in the Sharia, a question that continues to produce considerable consternation when pitted against contemporary gender egalitarian norms and commitments.

Common responses have generally taken two common tacks: historicism and contextualism. Historicism tends to rely on a reading of history that regards medieval societies as largely (perhaps even uniformly) patriarchal and contends that the very concept of a woman acting in a manner expressive of her agency in the public square was simply nonexistent and well outside the interpretive horizon of the time. Were medieval men to have observed female CEOs and heads of state, perhaps they would not have been so quick to interpret revelation the way they did or to have endorsed allegedly disempowering views on women, or so the argument goes. Contextualism, a close handmaiden to historicism, parochializes the divine command by confining it to its immediate context, often with the requirement that contemporary contexts conform in all details to the original context in which a verse was revealed or a hadith uttered in order for the content of the verse or hadith to bear relevance to or be binding upon the contemporary context. Through the adoption of these methods, the veracity and truth content of revelation are upheld, but often more as a relic to be admired than as a living cannon of guidance to be obeyed.

As I have argued previously, it is my contention that one of the primary reasons for these interpretive moves has been the flattening of our conception of gender in the modern West. Gender today appears to possess far more malleability than it has in the past, and the differences between men and women that were once recognized intuitively are regularly being revisited or otherwise written off as irrelevant. Moreover, calls for gender equality are often also calls for gender neutrality: men and women are not only equally capable in all relevant respects but also fully interchangeable. Forceful diversification of spaces far and wide is necessary to prove this interchangeability and to remind ourselves that observed gender differences in the public square subsist through structures of domination, nefarious domestication, and internalized oppression and can never arise from innate differences born of biological or behavioral predispositions, let alone be appreciated as markers of (divinely) intended sexual difference.

But this is certainly not how God conveys sexual difference in revelation, nor is it how God has ordered His creation. Manliness is a rather distinctive thing, related to forms of authority across the created world, and this is as true for the animal kingdom as it is for mankind. Males of varying species oversee their tribes and families, are considerably more aggressive and prone to conflict, and participate in the act of defending and attacking more readily than their female counterparts. Among humans, males likewise exhibit forms of assertiveness and aggression that are not shared by women. It should come as little surprise that men constitute the majority of the world’s prison population (by a large margin), that they comprise the overwhelming majority of the world’s military members, and that they are far more likely to be both the victims and perpetrators of violent crimes. The common argument that attributes these disparities to the construction of social roles has been inadequate in explaining these phenomena. On this note, Dorian Furtuna writes in Psychology Today, “The social emancipation of women in recent decades has barely influenced or enhanced the expressiveness of aggressive behavior in women, which is additional proof that the higher degree of masculine aggressiveness is, first of all, due to genetic factors. Sex differences predetermine, on a genetic level, the differences in aggressive behavior” (Wilson, Herrnstein, 1985). Furtuna later elaborates:

In humans, for example, the arms of men are, on average, 75 percent more muscular than those of women; and the top of a male body is 90 percent stronger than the top of a female body [Bohannon, 1997; Abe et al., 2003; apud Goetz, 2010, 16]. Also, men are taller, they have denser and heavier bones, their jaw is more massive, their reaction time is shorter, their visual acuity is better, their muscle/fat ratio is greater, their heart is bulkier, their percentage of hemoglobin is higher, their skin is thicker, their lungs bigger, their resistance to dehydration is higher, etc. In other words, men are more suited for battle than women, and these skills are native (see reference).

Masculine makeup, however, is hardly an unrestricted license to dominate women. It goes without saying that the life of this world is a world that must be pursued in tandem between the sexes. Men and women share the world, though they experience it remarkably differently. Procreation, for instance, requires the contribution of both sexes, though the process of childbirth (inclusive of pregnancy and parturition) and child rearing bear radically differently upon the two. Societies and cultures throughout time have sought to honor these differences, and when we are at our best, our differences find themselves accentuated, not diminished.

When the empirical world is ignored altogether, God’s command turns arbitrary. Men are designated as imams for reasons unbeknownst to us, and we uphold that designation “just because.” But when revelation is apprehended as the Creator guiding us to live fruitfully in a world whose meaning is reinforced in various ways by observing His creation closely, then our paradigm of sexual difference can make a great deal more sense. And it is precisely why God asks us to do just that. The Quran and Sunnah are replete with instructions to observe the natural world, to view the stars, animals, oceans, and trees. The natural world is a world to be admired, to be reflected upon, and for us to be fascinated by. In reflecting carefully on the state of God’s creation around us, the believer cries out, “Our Lord, you did not create this in vain!”

Male preeminence is a fact of the very created world that we are commanded to meditate upon. Although it is not always polite to point out, much of the world today and throughout history has been shaped by the contributions — both positive and negative — of men. Whether it is war, politics, inventions, or major intellectual works, men have been the primary players in bringing such changes about. Again, not all of these contributions are worthy of celebrating. Some thinkers introduced ideas that led to devastation, chaos, and moral decay. Male commanders and world leaders have pillaged societies and fought in self-interest just as they have fought for virtuous reasons. But the point here is merely to observe the rather basic point that the vast majority of this world has been and continues to be shaped by men in all of the aforementioned ways and more.

Masculinity as a primordial instinct and component of the world is expressed in the form of protection, combativeness, assertiveness, risk-taking, and the exercise of power, and male behavior is predisposed to maintaining and expressing these features far more directly than is the case with female behavior. Women may well be protective, combative, assertive, willing to take risks, and interested in exercising power too, of course, though they often do so in more indirect ways, and in spheres of life that are less visible. In pretechnological societies, not only were these differences the default state of the world, they were also cherished. Women and children have been in need of men throughout history to care for them, to provide for them, and to protect them. This is not to ignore the crucial role women play as part of the created world, of course. Just as men symbolize power in the world, women symbolize the heart of society. Without women, societies are lifeless, chaotic, and lacking in empathy, compassion, and the context required for families to form and subsist. These characteristics are fundamentally maternal, inseparable from and rooted in the very essence of womanhood. The body of the woman is the location in which consummation occurs, it is within her body that a child is formed, and it is from her body that the child feeds and nurtures. Societies throughout history have honored the maternal, doing much to protect and care for women rather than send their vulnerable into battle or expose them to external threats.

It is possible, of course, to argue that these differences did not simply come into existence on the basis of biology alone. Men and women may well be different in significant ways biologically, but that seldom accounts fully for how they participate in society, and there are few societies in which sexual expression is identical cross-culturally. In other words, social conditioning plays a role. Sexual constructionists take this further, arguing for a deconstructing and reconstructing of our sexual and gender norms in terms that would be unrecognizable to much of humanity (past and present) and a rather significant departure from even modern Western standards — take for instance the efforts by some to expand gender to account for a seemingly endless list of alternate gender identities, or the growing call to eliminate “gender at birth” designation as alienating.

However appealing such thinking may be, things are not so simple. For one, a great many things are constructed socially. Language is a social construction, and yet we cannot so easily give up verbal communication, nor can we deconstruct and reconstruct language wholesale. Personhood, and what it entails, is socially constructed as well, as is our concept of community, family, home, race, age, and much more. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann famously argued that reality itself is socially constructed. The mere fact that something is constructed therefore does not make it meaningless, nor does it make it easily manipulable or modifiable. Too often, the claim of social construction is used to dismiss essential aspects of the human condition, ones that trace back centuries and cut across diverse cultures and peoples. In order to determine the degree to which a social construction may be mutable, it is essential to differentiate between those social constructions that speak to our shared humanity, are anchored in our relative dispositions as men and women, and cut across the human community throughout millennia from those that are temporal and contingent on social or cultural factors alone. And even then, a determination of contingent constructedness says nothing as to whether or not something should be reconstructed differently. In the case of sexual difference, though social and cultural factors play an important role in framing how our relative genders participate in the world, they are often subordinate in great measure to how we live and think as naturally differentiated sexes, and this is especially so when we consider the case of headship.

Another complicating factor in apprehending male headship has been the changing of our conception of authority. Modern attitudes towards authority tend to draw most directly on corporate models of leadership. Corporate leadership is highly task-oriented and administrative, with its most concerted focus being on improving the bottom line. Management roles in a corporation today can be challenging vocations, contributed to in no small part by the pastoral and therapeutic skills required to bring together disparate people with differing personalities — and this is more so when team members are recalcitrant or underperforming. It goes without saying that women bring many gifts to such a vocational context, and many will, in fact, outperform men in such capacities. In fact, the confrontational and risk-taking tendencies of men can pose a liability in the many corporate settings where such tendencies are frowned upon and generally avoided.

It should be noted that the references to management here differ greatly from situations and scenarios where businesses are still being built. Clarity of vision and the willingness to take risks on the business, sacrifice comforts, pour into the business personal (and borrowed) finances, and proceed with (at times, unfounded) confidence in the face of often daunting obstacles becomes an asset for those seeking to “make it.” And here, men maintain a considerable advantage. Men are more than twice as likely to start a new business, while female entrepreneurs start businesses that tend to be smaller, slower growing, home-based, and in “female-typed industries, such as retail and interpersonal care.” Statistics released by Fundera, a popular app for requesting small business loans, report that only 1 in 4 applicants through the app were women and that women asked for $35,000 less on average than men. Not a single Fortune 500 company was founded by a woman (two, Cisco and Estee Lauder, had female co-founders), and although the number of female CEOs is rising in Fortune 500 companies, they remain a small minority of the whole and are promoted up to the role as opposed to those situations where the CEO oversees a company he founded, growing a relatively unknown commodity into a global brand.

Given the dynamics at play in corporate life, many women decry the disparities in managerial spaces that continue to favor men, and a growing number of women are orienting their lives towards the pursuit of career success to even the playing field. However, doing so requires considerable sacrifice, sacrifices that take a toll early in life and often come into full view once women hit mid-career. And there is growing evidence that women are unhappy with those tolls. In recent months, the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported a 2.2 million women drop in the number of women in the workforce when compared to the prior year, leading some experts to declare the workplace secession a “she-cession.” Though the statistics are attributed directly to the Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine conditions, it is important to note that women had already been leaving the workforce in droves prior to Covid. Researchers initially speculated motherhood to be the primary reason for women leaving the workforce, though subsequent studies have shown that only 11% of women leaving work are doing so in order to have children. Other reasons floated by researchers include feeling “burned out,” experiencing depression (more than 1 in 5 women ages 40–59 are taking antidepressants, while women in general are twice as likely as men today to be taking them), loneliness from single life and difficulty finding marriageable men, having to bear the responsibilities of elder care for a parent with chronic conditions, and more.

In spite of the growing shift to women-friendly work environments and a corporate culture that preferentially rewards in many capacities female strengths, the reality remains that manliness is one of the greatest obstacles to female advancement in the workplace. Long-term vocational growth often depends on factors such as high ambition, the determination to work long hours and make personal sacrifices for the job, and the willingness to tout one’s accomplishments in the service of personal recognition — all things that tend to play to men’s strengths. Over time, women can come to resent such projections of the masculine while paradoxically having to impersonate those very masculine tendencies themselves in order to compete.

It becomes easy to see in all this how the corporatizing of our world has contributed much to the fractures and distempers that weigh heavily in contemporary gender debates. Men and women in corporate spaces grow accustomed to seeing one another as competitors, not partners, and falling behind in the rat race can quickly breed contempt for the other. But the problem is not restricted to the workplace. As sociologist Mark Regnerus observes in his work Cheap Sex, the corporatizing of our world has radically reconfigured the sexual marketplace, too, by shifting the scales in favor of men. In other societies — including the West not long ago — the social expectation of sexual activity being paired with marriage and its related commitment of care for the spouse and possible offspring did much to limit casual sexual encounters. Men in such societies were expected to be marriageable and to pursue a life that would make them credible spouses to women and the families to which they belonged. Gender neutralizing our economic spaces has mostly eliminated that expectation, leading to a rather dysfunctional sexual market that requires women to consistently behave in ways that are dehumanizing and demoralizing in order to attract men who care little for them and whose primary interest is sexual access. In reflecting on the open sexual marketplace, Regnerus writes that the proliferation of pornography and rise of online dating and the open sexual marketplace have “put the fertility of increasing numbers of women at risk — subsequently driving up demand for infertility treatments — and have arguably even taken a toll on men’s economic and relational productivity, prompting fewer of them to be considered marriage material than ever before.”

The Islamic model of leadership, however, is specifically not a model built on the scaffolding of the contemporary corporation. Instead, the frequent symbol of the prudent Muslim leader is that of the shepherd. The shepherd oversees his flock and represents many things, perhaps most crucially protection. The flock is vulnerable to the advances of predators, and a good shepherd is prepared to combat predators when they attack, even if it means losing his life in the process. The shepherd is also merciful and caring towards the sheep under his aegis and is patient with them as they graze and wander the fields. His firmness — required on occasion when danger is imminent — is expressed for them, not for himself, and his power is exercised for their good, not his own.

On this count, the Prophet (ﷺ) is reported to have said: “Each of you is a shepherd and each of you is responsible for his flock. The amir (ruler) who is over the people is a shepherd and is responsible for his flock; a man is a shepherd in charge of the inhabitants of his household, and he is responsible for his flock; a woman is a shepherdess in charge of her husband’s house and children, and she is responsible for them; and a man’s slave is a shepherd in charge of his master’s property, and he is responsible for it. So each of you is a shepherd and each of you is responsible for his flock.”

It is important to note that the Prophet (ﷺ) did not omit women from the task of shepherding, though he designated their flock as a domestic one, tied to the life of family and the home, though it is also a delegated authority, one that is ultimately under the headship of the man. In other reports, the vocation of shepherding was described by the Prophet (ﷺ) as a training through which God put all of His prophets, and the shepherd is taught in his work to exhibit patience, care, empathy, vigilance, and firmness, as needed.

One of the reasons why many women object to male headship is because of what they see in the behavior of many men. As I have noted in a recent piece on masculinity, the modern world has done much to infantilize men, and far too many assume leadership only to exploit its privileges while brazenly disregarding its duties. At its worst, this leadership can be downright malevolent, with many cases of abuse wherein men demand the most from those in their household while providing little to nothing in return. Members of such homes breathe a rather long sigh of relief when the “man of the house” departs while dreading his return later in the day. Other men can be callously negligent of their household duties, preferring instead a life of play, distraction, amusement, and lethargic nothingness to the responsibilities that being the head of a household entails.

Women who object to male authority also sometimes highlight the many unwise decisions of males who head corporations and states. Several rich males have been mired in controversy in recent years for exploiting their positions of power to take sexual advantage of women who are vocationally subordinate to them. Politically, many male leaders are authoritarian despots (even if they pose as being otherwise), usurping the wealth of their people and crippling the local economy, while others recklessly weaponizing their armies in fits of rage. Many lives have been lost as a result of wars waged by men who were manifestly unfit for their positions.

Recognizing the damage carried out by men in positions of power, it stands to reason that women may well exercise power more prudently and responsibly. And in certain cases, that is certainly true. As we have noted above, women bring many gifts to leadership roles of various sorts given their greater propensity for empathy, care, and cooperation. However, in other roles, the very definition of the role itself is inextricably masculine, and as such will benefit from a responsible male leader. These are positions and roles that require courage of conviction, assertiveness, boldness, and a willingness to confront. The virtues in which they are bound up are martial virtues, which helps explain why the vast majority of the world’s leaders (both today and historically) have not only been men, but men of war (even in the US, the Executive retains the title “Commander in Chief’’) whose military exploits feature heavily in their political persona. By comparison, societies have generally sought to protect women, and this is evident not only in the composition of armies but also in how laws are shaped and written in favor of protecting women from the predations of wicked men.

Moreover, it is important to note that failures in assumed leadership occur in plenty of contexts when the social and cultural ecosystem within which it is situated does not naturally reinforce responsible leadership. For instance, parenthood is a form of assumed authority, devolving upon a man and woman who bear a child. Parenting may well be broken in specific societies, and even in societies with caring parents, there will always be some parents who maliciously abuse, mistreat, and neglect their children. In fact, in many countries today there are parents who outsource the task of parenting to institutions, and in many others, parents leave their children to be raised by low paid “servants” who themselves are treated poorly. Given the rise of poor parenting, one may ask whether we are justified in maintaining, as a default position, that two people who happen to have sexual relations and conceive a child should then be granted custody of and authority over that child for all the child’s pre-adult years. We might also ask whether we might be better suited giving said authority to those who choose to be parents of specific children as part of a pairing process instead of deterministically assigning children to those who conceived them. But this, I imagine, would be taken as a radical proposition by most, for even the most ardent opponent of bad parenting will nonetheless recognize the essential function of parenting and importance of reviving and preserving the institution instead of “reconstructing” it in an entirely different manner.

Like parenting, the authority positions of qawwam and imam (among others) are positions of authority that are assumed and granted as a default matter. This authority, of course, is for men and men alone, and if specific men are incompetent in carrying out the responsibility of being qawwamun or imams, then appropriate recourse should be taken on a situational basis (this, of course, being what plenty of fuqaha’ have instructed as it is). The Prophet (ﷺ) described the worst shepherd as the one who is cruel and lacking in mercy, and the scholars discussed at length those transgressions and deviations which, if done, render a man unfit to lead others in prayer. Indeed, a number of scholars formally prohibited praying behind a morally corrupt man (fāsiq), for instance, using as proof, inter alia, reports of the Prophet (ﷺ) interdicting certain men from leading prayers on account of misbehavior. The late Salafi scholar Ibn Uthaymin (rahimahullah) drew on this concept when discussing the scenario of an obstinate wali — father or male custodian — who prevents his daughter from marrying suitable male suitors, stating that repeated rejections of suitors on the basis of whim, arbitrariness, or irreligiosity render the man a fāsiq who is unfit to be a wali or imam for prayer and thus should not be prayed behind. Therefore, even though specific positions of authority are assumed by men, they are not permanently or unconditionally guaranteed to all men, especially to such men as are neglectful in fulfilling their basic duties. Nonetheless, the failure of specific men does not vitiate the fundamental fact of those positions being designated for males, just as the failure of specific parents does not vitiate the fundamental fact of parents being those who are rightfully accorded default authority over, and responsibility for, their children.

Failing male leadership is therefore even more of a reason to invest in its remediation. Masculinity is required for maintaining the integrity of communities in the face of external threats given the natural relationship between masculinity and protection. Manliness is a prerequisite for a muscular community that values the integrity of its theological norms in the face of those seeking to subvert or undermine religious beliefs and values. Just as the man is needed for the stability of the home, so too is he needed for the mosque and Muslim community at large. The Imam is not merely an authority that is designated arbitrarily as belonging to men, but it is, in fact, a form of authority that relates to the very essence of manliness and the virtues a properly honed masculinity brings into the world. To propose the accommodation of female imams over mixed congregations as many have done today only make sense when gender collapses and families are reconfigured in fungible, unisex terms. Such terms, long regularized in corporate spaces, leave theological communities and households vulnerable and enfeebled.

Women should be listened to and empowered in various spaces, and many have, regrettably, been treated poorly. There are many places where feminine leadership is necessary, especially in mosques and religious spaces. That many women have been and remain ignored in our communities is a lamentable reality, and Muslim spaces can be profoundly alienating for both men and women. This requires urgent rectification. But so too does the headship of our masajid and households. These are institutions that rely on strong masculine headship for the embodying and maintaining of faith with firm conviction and resolve.

May Allah give us the strength to uphold His faith in these times, and may He guide us to live as He intended, men and women committed to Him, ‘azza wa jall. Ameen.

Allah Knows Best.