Muhammad the Liberator of Women — Page 10
10 M U H A M M A D S A W — T H E L I B E R A T O R O F W O M E N cover any other additional costs that a woman incurs on account of looking after her children. Women hold a permanent status and all spiritual awards were available to them. They were not to be deprived of the excellences of the hereafter and even in this life they could participate in all walks of civil and civic life and the rights of women were to be as safely guarded as that of men. Such was the teaching which the Holy Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, brought with him at a time when the ideals of the world were diametrically opposed to it. With these injunctions, he reclaimed women from the enslavement they had endured in the world for thousands of years and also from the shackles with which previous religions had bound them. In a single moment, one man cut the chains of a long-standing servitude at a stroke. He gave freedom to mothers and at the same time saved their progeny from servile inclinations. In this way he sowed the seed of great ambition and high resolve. However, the world did not value this service and a great blessing was branded a tyranny. The idea of divorce and separation was declared a disorder; inheritance laws were considered ruinous for the institution of the family and the independence of women was rejected as a disruption of domestic life. For 1300 years the world blindly ridiculed the precepts which the Holy Prophet saw had taught for the betterment of humankind. It condemned his teaching as being opposed to the natural human state. Then there came a time when the sublimity of the Word of God could no longer be gainsaid and it began to shine forth. Those same people who once viewed themselves as the