Islam's Response to Contemporary Issues — Page 89
Social Peace 89 Segregation of Sexes People in the West grossly misunderstand the Islamic social system of purdah seen as the segregation between the two sexes. This misunderstanding partly arises out of a misapplication of the true teachings of Islam in many parts of the Muslim world and the negative role of the Western media. It has become a rule with Western media to associate the ugliness of behaviour wherever it occurs with Islam, but to refrain from associating Jewish, Christian, Buddhist or Hindu behaviour to their respective religions. The Islamic injunction of segregation is certainly not borne out of a narrow-minded attitude of the past dark ages. In fact, the question of promiscuousness or otherwise in a society, has no relationship whatsoever to the advancement or backwardness of time. Societies throughout history have either ridden along the crest or descended to the troughs of social or religious waves. The concept of Women’s Lib is not at all a progressive trend of human society. There is strong evidence that both in the remote past as well as in the closer period of human history, women as a class have held a very powerful and dominant position in human society in different parts of the world. Free and uninhibited intercourse between the male and female sections of the society is nothing new and novel. Civilizations came and went. Behaviour patterns kept oscillating between one style and another. The myriads of social tendencies have been falling and settling down into different patterns only to go through new experimentation and formation at each twist of the kaleidoscope. Yet, no trend has ever been fixed by which we could conclude with certainty that throughout history, society travelled from segregation to