Chahira Battou Psycho-Spiritual Mentor

Today I was speaking with one of my clients and something became so clear to me. The more I travel and the more Muslim women I work with from completely different cultures, the more I keep meeting the same woman underneath different stories. She loves Allah deeply, yet there is also anger sitting beside that love because so much of what she learned about God came through control.

I have watched women have their entire relationship with Allah questioned over what they wear while nobody around them is asking the men interrogating their faith whether their own character reflects the Prophet ﷺ, whether their money is clean, whether they fulfill their responsibilities or whether the women around them actually feel safe in their presence. A woman removes her hijab and suddenly people speak as if they have access to the state of her soul, and that alone tells me how much we have reduced a woman’s spirituality to something visible.

This is why I keep thinking Islam needs a feminist revolution, and I mean something much deeper than turning men and women into enemies. I am talking about Muslim women reclaiming the spiritual responsibility Allah already gave them and meeting Allah for themselves. Allah says believing men and believing women are allies of one another, carrying responsibility together for what is right.

What I am seeing instead is generations of women who desperately love God while carrying pain toward an image of God that was handed to them through men. When religion is repeatedly introduced through shame, restriction and fear, eventually the woman can begin resenting Allah for something another human being attached to His name. I want women to meet Allah without somebody standing between them and Him, and I want Muslim men back inside their sacred responsibility too because this cannot become another war between the sexes. Shaytan wins in separation.

Maybe that is the revolution.