March 8 arrives each year wrapped in corporate logos, hashtags, and performative solidarity. Brands that exploit underpaid female labor in factories across the global south, post empowering slogans. Billionaires who attended sex predator Jeffrey Epstein’s parties posts about “women’s liberation.”
International Women’s Day has its origins in the early 20th century labor movements.
These were working women fighting genuine battles, the right to fair wages, the right to vote, the right not to be worked to death in factories.
But something happened over the following century. The corporate world, which had spent decades resisting every single one of those demands, captured the day.
What began as a protest against capitalist exploitation of women became a marketing calendar event.
Today, International Women’s Day is one of the most commercially lucrative occasions of the calendar year.
Let us be honest about what the dominant, Western-exported brand of “women’s empowerment” actually demands of women. It does not say – rest, be honored, be protected, be valued in your home and in your community. It says: produce more, earn more, give more tax, consume more. The liberated woman is considered as the one who works longer hours, buys more products which are not even needed and are all whimsical to feel confident (definition of confidence again provided by capitalists), her value is defined by her output in the economy, not by her dignity as a simple human being, as a female, daughter, sister, wife or even mother.
This is not liberation. This is an exploitation dressed in the language of freedom.
Under Islam, a woman’s worth is not dependent on her economic productivity. The Quran and the Sunnah established rights for women at a time when the rest of the world treated women as property. The right to own wealth independently like the mahr as her sole property; her right to inheritance. The right to consent in marriage. The right to keep her earnings while her husband bears the financial burden of the household, and the list is long about women’s right in Islam.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said- “The best of you are those who are best to their women.” This is not a statement of a society that needed a single calendar day to remember women exist. It is a way of life. The Islamic tradition does not have a “Women’s Day” and does not need one. SubhanAllah! When a man asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) who was most deserving of his good companionship, the Prophet (pbuh) replied: “Your mother.” The man asked again, and again the answer was: “Your mother.” Only on the fourth time did the Prophet (pbuh) say: “Your father.” A mother, named three times before anyone else. That is a statement about the sacred status of women that no hashtag campaign has come close to.
The rights of women in Islam are not a seasonal campaign. They are obligations written into the deen itself, meant to be lived daily, not hashtagged annually.
When you need a designated day to remind society to respect women, what you are actually admitting is that the rest of the year, the system does not require it. The existence of International Women’s Day is not a sign of liberation. It is a confession of failure. It is proof that the society holding the celebration has not built respect for women into its foundations. It outsources its conscience to a single day on the calendar.
Let’s talk about the Epstein files as well. Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender, the product of capitalistic system, ran for years what investigators described as an international trafficking network targeting and exploiting young women and little girls. His client list and flight logs read like an invitation list to the World Economic Forum. Politicians, celebrities, academics, tech founders, media executives and what not!
Many of these same individuals had, at one time or another, attached their names to women’s rights causes. They made donations. They gave speeches. And all the while, according to investigators, they were either participating in or ignoring the systematic abuse of vulnerable women.
The Epstein files do not just expose individuals. They expose an entire system of capitalists who use the language of “liberation” as a shield. They signal virtue publicly while privately participating or enabling exploitation.
Need not to mention the capitalist’s policies which bombs everyone, even women in the name of so called liberation.
The woman in Islam is not defined by her visibility in the marketplace or her productivity for a corporation or as a commodity. She is defined by her relationship with Allah ta’ala, The Exalted, and by the dignity inherent in her creation. Contrast this with the secular Western model, where women’s rights are only as secure as the political winds allow, where the same institutions that claim to protect women are having people whose names appear in Epstein’s flight logs and contacts, and where the annual Women’s Day campaign is designed by a marketing department to earn more capital in return.
Women deserve better than a day. They deserve a civilization built around their dignity, their protection, and their sacred status as the ones through whom humanity itself continues. Islam does not need women to march with signs to prove their value is recognized. It encoded that value in law, but that’s the tragedy on our part that law as a whole is not implemented anywhere even in muslim world, and that’s where we see even muslim women suffering in many cases. Islam as a complete deen (way of living life) offers that civilization but sadly that deen as an established reality is missing from more than a century now, even in muslim lands.
May Allah Al-Haadi guide us to the straight path of that deen. Ameen.