Islam's Response to Contemporary Issues — Page 100
100 islam’s response to contemporary issues unfaithful men to live with a sense of crime and guilt will further generate psychological complexes and propensity towards more crime. The noble concept of love and loyalty would be among the prime victims. Romance would begin to lose sublimity and descend to commonplace, transient infatuation. Those who talk of equality in every sphere forget that the issue of equality becomes irrelevant in those areas where male and female are built differently. It is only women who can give birth to children. It is they alone who can go through more than nine months of nourishing the seed of human generation for the future. It is women again who can look after their babies, at least during the early period of infancy and childhood, as no man ever could. Because of the long and extremely intimate blood relationships with their offspring, it is the women who have far more powerful psychological bonding with the children as compared to men. If social and economic systems ignore this constitutional difference between man and woman and the corresponding difference in the role of the two sexes in society, then such a socio-economic system is bound to fail to produce a state of healthy equilibrium. It is mainly because of these constitutional differences between male and female that Islam proposes correspondingly different roles for each. A woman must be kept free, as far as possible, from the responsibility of earning bread for the family. In principle, this responsibility must fall on the shoulders of men. Yet, there is no reason why women should be debarred from playing their part in turning the wheel of economy provided that they find themselves free to do so, i. e. , without neglecting their prime responsibility of human