Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami’s ameer, Shafiqur Rahman, has said in an interview with Al Jazeera that a woman can never become the head of his party. Why? Because men and women are not equal. Each has distinct roles. Women give birth to children; men cannot. It is the Creator who has laid down this order. Earlier, the party had said it does not support any woman as head of government or head of state.
If one breaks down this argument, the core message that emerges is that women are not equal to men. What men can do, women cannot. Men will be the leaders of the party and the country. Women, on the other hand, are best suited to giving birth to children and raising them. Therefore, keep them confined to the home. That is deemed their most appropriate place.
That Jamaat, along with at least 30 other parties, did not field a single female candidate in any of the 300 seats in the upcoming national election makes clear just how deep this gender divide runs in their eyes.
When such an attitude becomes the basis of state or government policy, what the consequences look like can be seen clearly in today’s Afghanistan. There, citing divine decree, girls have been barred from school after the age of 12. With the exception of one or two very limited areas, participation in the workforce has been prohibited. Women have been barred from moving alone in public. Even speaking loudly has been designated a punishable offence.
In Bangladesh, where for a large part of its history the centres of power have been occupied by two women leaders of two major parties, the claim that a woman cannot be a party chief or head of government is not only laughable but also deeply antiquated. These two women leaders did not merely rule the country with authority; many of their male colleagues would even address them with the honorific “sir” before speaking to them.
At one time, women were not equal to men, and in many respects, they still are not. The reason is that women are not allowed to become equals. Both rule and discipline remain in male hands. The situation changes entirely if women are allowed to step out of the home, or if the path to competing on equal terms with men is made a little more level. It is precisely because they have been given such opportunities that Bangladeshi women are now winning football titles. They are carrying the national flag of Bangladesh to the peaks of the Himalayas. Female police officers from the country have competently carried out peacekeeping duties in war-ravaged countries such as Haiti.
Girls face many obstacles. If they are able to break through and step outside, how well they can perform is wonderfully illustrated by their success in education. In Bangladesh today, more girls than boys are accessing education. As of 2024, while the enrolment rate of boys at the primary level stood at 90 per cent, the rate for girls was 98 per cent.
In recent years, at the secondary-school level, girls have outperformed boys in the results of every major public examination. In the 2025 HSC examinations, the pass rate for girls was 8 percentage points higher than that for boys, 62 per cent compared with 54 per cent. At the next stage, university, girls are unable to progress at the same pace because of familial and social barriers.
But in countries where such barriers are comparatively weaker, girls are performing far better than boys at the top tiers of higher education. For example, in the United Kingdom, according to the latest statistics, while the pass rate for men at the graduate level in the universities there is 81 per cent, the rate for women is 86 per cent. Among 19-year-olds, 56 per cent of girls enter college, compared with only 40 per cent of boys of the same age.
Boys’ lagging behind girls has become so alarming that the UK’s Higher Education and Policy Institute has proposed not only developing new strategies to help boys catch up, but also appointing a junior minister for the purpose. Right-wing politician Nigel Farage has even proposed creating a post called “Minister for Boys.”
In fact, modern science has shown that girls are in no way inferior to men in any field, if anything, the opposite. While intelligence quotient (IQ) scores are equal for men and women, girls are better able to multitask. Similarly, girls have greater memory retention capacity, because communication between the left and right hemispheres of the female brain is comparatively more effective.
Put simply, girls have no inherent shortcomings, physically or intellectually. The reason they do not get to lead parties like Jamaat is not gender or sex; it is because they are not given the opportunity. The Jamaat ameer has cited women’s capacity for childbearing as his argument. That capacity is a biological process; it has no connection to leadership. Leadership requires strategic intelligence, managerial skill, and the ability to guide a party or a country with a cool head in times of crisis. In none of these areas are women any less capable than men.
Think of India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1971. Economist Amartya Sen offers another example. In his data-driven research on the 1974 famine in Bangladesh, he showed that during that severe disaster many families survived primarily because women were in charge of running households. Through advance planning in the use of scarce food, preservation, proper distribution, and devising ways to endure for long periods, they protected their children, husbands, and relatives. Think of present-day Gaza or war-ravaged Sudan. In these regions, many may be swept away or die slowly, but those who survive often do so because of the capable leadership of the women in their families.
The Jamaat ameer, like many others, invokes religion as the justification for keeping women out of leadership. Yet from the time of the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him), we see women in decision-making roles. We see them as commanders on the battlefield. The Jamaat ameer ought to know this better than we do.
Jamaat now speaks of women’s equal rights and makes various promises. It even claims that, to make childrearing easier, it will introduce a five-hour workday for female employees instead of eight. The problem is that it is not only women who raise children; in many cases, men must do so as well.
Why, then, are women excluded despite being equally, or in many cases more, competent? The answer lies in hierarchy and social stratification. Nearly a thousand years ago, the renowned Islamic scholar Abu Rushd made this clear. In the introduction to the Arabic translation of Plato’s Republic, he wrote that there is no difference between men and women in terms of knowledge, virtue, or fitness for leadership. The exclusion of women from leadership, he argued, stems from social conventions, not from any natural or divinely ordained rule.
A thousand years later, a Bengali woman echoed the same truth. Her name was Begum Rokeya. In Sultana’s Dream, she illustrated through allegory that women are excluded from leadership not because of religious injunctions or women’s biological nature, but simply because of rules made by men for their own convenience.
Jamaat now speaks of women’s equal rights and makes various promises. It even claims that, to make childrearing easier, it will introduce a five-hour workday for female employees instead of eight. The problem is that it is not only women who raise children; in many cases, men must do so as well. The issue is not employment, it is childcare. Recognising this basic reality, New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has launched an initiative to provide publicly funded childcare for every family.
Jamaat in Bangladesh could adopt this wisdom if it wanted to, but will it?
* Hasan Ferdous is writer and columnist.
* The views expressed here are the author’s own.