In the national election scheduled for February 12, Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami did not nominate a single woman candidate for any general parliamentary seat. This was not an oversight, a strategic anomaly, or a temporary electoral calculation. It was the logical outcome of a long-standing ideological framework inherited directly from Maulana Abul A’la Maududi, the intellectual founder of Jamaat-e-Islami.

At the same time, Jamaat’s women leaders publicly claimed that the party is advancing women’s rights, providing leadership training, and ensuring representation. This contradiction—between formal exclusion from power and rhetorical claims of empowerment—defines Jamaat’s position on women today.

To understand this tension, one must examine three interlinked layers:
1.

Maududi’s foundational views on women
2.

Contemporary statements by Jamaat leaders on women and leadership
3.

The party’s electoral behavior and internal rhetoric during the February 12 election cycle

Taken together, these elements reveal not a gap between ideology and practice, but their precise alignment.

Maududi’s framework: Visibility as moral threat

Maulana Abul A’la Maududi did not treat women’s participation in public life as a neutral or contextual issue. He defined it as a civilisational danger.

Irfan Ahmad in his book, Cracks in the 'Mightiest Fortress' (2013), shows how Maududi viewed “women’s visibility” as the greatest threat to morality. He described women appearing in bazaars, colleges, theatres, restaurants, and public spaces as signs of moral collapse. Art, literature, music, film, dance, and even women’s use of makeup was framed as symptoms of immorality rather than expressions of culture or agency.

This framing is crucial. The moral problem is not exploitation, coercion, or injustice. The moral problem is presence. Women’s bodies in public space are treated as destabilising forces that must be regulated, hidden, or removed. From this premise follows a comprehensive social programme.

Maududi treats normal gender interaction as dangerous, placing the burden on women to withdraw while excusing men from responsibility. Control, not accountability, becomes the basis of moral order. His rejection of birth control denies women authority over their own bodies and even praises hardship as virtue, especially for the poor. 

Most consequential is his claim that women cannot lead. The proposed “all women legislature” without power is merely symbolic. This framework creates managed subordination: women may work, vote, or serve, but never rule. When Jamaat leaders repeat these ideas, they reproduce this hierarchy, not the lived reality of Bangladeshi women’s leadership.  This does not represent Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s social reality includes women as heads of government, garment-sector labour leaders, grassroots organisers, lawyers, journalists, artists, and voters with lived political agency. 

Jamaat’s model represents a particular ideological enclave, not a national consensus. Bottom line: this is not a paradox; it is a system. Women are mobilised, trained, visible, and vocal, precisely to the extent that they do not threaten male theological authority. The moment leadership becomes real power, the door is closed by divine decree. That is not empowerment. It is managed participation under permanent hierarchy. It is about whether women are full political subjects or permanently managed dependents.

Maududi’s passage in Parda o Islam is not a neutral reflection on social morality. It is a diagnostic framework designed to justify structural control over women by recasting gender regulation as civilisational survival. Individual vice is equated with collective social structure. Personal moral failure becomes a metaphor for national destiny. This jump bypasses evidence. Societies do not collapse because some people drink, gamble, or have sex outside prescribed norms. Societies collapse because of institutional decay, extractive power structures, inequality, repression, and failure of governance. Maududi does not engage these factors because his framework requires moral panic, not structural analysis.

Women function in this text as symbolic terrain. They are not actors but indicators. When women appear more publicly, society is said to be nearing destruction. When women are secluded, society is framed as morally intact. This turns women into moral barometers rather than citizens. Their autonomy becomes a threat by definition.

Crucially, Maududi never tests his thesis against counterexamples. Societies with strict gender segregation have not proven immune to corruption, violence, or collapse. Nor have societies with higher female participation uniformly descended into chaos.  When Jamaat-e-Islami cites Maududi, it inherits this logic wholesale. Women’s progress is not evaluated by outcomes such as safety, education, health, or political voice. It is evaluated by conventionality. Any expansion of choice is reclassified as degeneration. Any resistance is reinterpreted as evidence of decay. This is why Maududi’s framework cannot support women’s progress. It is designed to stabilise hierarchy by moralising control. 

In contrast, the late Shah Abdul Hannan, frequently presented as a leading Islamic scholar in Bangladesh, publicly cited Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Islamic State System, Theory and Practice to argue that multiparty democracy is compatible with Islam and that women can fully participate in politics and discharge all responsibilities of modern democratic governance, as reported by Daily Naya Diganta on 10 April 2015. 

Similarly, the Indian scholar Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi argued, citing the Qur’anic account of Queen Bilqis, that her consultative rule reflected a democratic system.  In Surah an-Naml (27:23–44), Prophet Solomon (Sulayman) learns from the hoopoe bird about “a woman ruling over them, who has been given of everything, and she has a magnificent throne.” (27:23)

He noted that the Qur’an expresses no disapproval of her leadership and that her authority remained intact even after accepting Islam, concluding that women can legitimately lead within a democratic state. 

The ideology in practice: February 12 and the absence of women

Against this background, Jamaat-e-Islami’s decision not to nominate a single woman candidate in the February 12 election appears entirely consistent. The party did not violate its ideology. It obeyed it. Yet publicly, Jamaat’s women leaders framed this exclusion as irrelevant or even progressive.

Nurun Nesa Siddika, secretary of Jamaat-e-Islami’s women’s department, stated clearly that women cannot take the lead in Islamic organisations because “men are the directors of women.” She emphasised that becoming Ameer is not important to women, and that Jamaat is “moving forward with this acceptance.” This argument performs a rhetorical sleight of hand. It shifts the discussion from women’s right to lead to whether female leaders have solved all problems, as though political inclusion must justify itself through perfection. Male leadership, by contrast, is never subjected to such standards.

Another Jamaat figure, Professor Dr. Habiba Chowdhury Sweet, a member of the party’s women’s department, publicly claimed that Jamaat is committed to women’s rights. She stated that Jamaat has 43 per cent female representation within its organisation. She emphasised leadership training, grassroots organisation, and electoral participation as voters and activists. 
Yet within the same statements, she acknowledged that no woman candidate had been nominated by Jamaat. She framed this as a strategic decision rather than a structural exclusion.

The absence of women candidates also invalidates the party’s internal rhetoric about “43 percent female representation.” Representation without candidacy is administrative labour, not political power. It produces legitimacy optics while preserving male monopoly over decision-making. This contradiction is central. Jamaat permits women to organise, campaign, mobilise, and vote—but not to represent. Participation is allowed only up to the threshold of authority. 

When women leaders within Jamaat echo these positions, saying leadership is unnecessary, irrelevant, or unimportant, they are not exercising autonomy. They are articulating an internalised doctrine that defines submission as virtue.

Jamaat’s repeated claim that it respects women because they hold internal positions collapses under scrutiny. Representation without decision-making authority does not constitute empowerment. Training women to operate within a system that permanently bars them from leadership is not equality; it is managed participation. This model mirrors Maududi’s proposed all-women legislature: visible, consultative, and ultimately subordinate.

While reviewing the reading materials circulated within Jamaat e Islami’s student wing, Shibir, to understand the ideological foundations shaping their views on women, there is a book of Maryam Jamila’s Islam o Adhunik Musolman Nari in the Shibir Online Library. Its inclusion is revealing. This text reflects the internal intellectual training of the organisation, and Jamaat’s public commitments to “women’s development” and “women’s dignity” stand in clear contradiction.

The publisher, Md. Nesar Uddin Masud, frames modern society as a “distorted and corrupt civilisation” driven by “nudity and promiscuity,” and claims that Western feminism seeks to destroy human civilisation by encouraging women’s autonomy and public participation. The book argues that women’s primary responsibility is motherhood, that gender interaction is inherently dangerous, and that social decline begins when women step beyond prescribed domestic roles. This is not simply a conservative position; it is an ideological rejection of women’s work, mobility, and equality.

Denial of pluralism in women’s freedom

A central weakness in this ideology is its assumption that there exists a single, universally valid definition of women’s freedom, one that Jamaat and its student wing claim exclusive authority to define. Feminism is treated as a monolithic Western conspiracy rather than a diverse global discourse that includes Muslim women, post-colonial scholars, and faith-based reformers.
The text repeatedly dismisses alternative interpretations as “mental slavery to Western civilisation,” without engaging seriously with Qur’anic interpretation, historical diversity in Islamic jurisprudence, or the lived experiences of Muslim women themselves. This approach forecloses debate. Once dissenting views are labelled foreign, corrupt, or immoral, women’s demands for autonomy become illegitimate by definition.

The fact that such material is promoted within Shibir’s official library suggests that the organisation continues to endorse a worldview in which women’s freedom is treated as a threat and women’s public presence as a source of moral decline. In a country where women have led governments, industries, and social movements, this framework does not reflect Bangladesh’s social reality. It reflects an attempt to impose a narrower moral order on a diverse society.
If these texts remain part of the internal curriculum, then Jamaat e Islami’s assurances about supporting women’s progress are not merely inconsistent, they are structurally incompatible with the ideology they continue to cultivate.

Redefinition of freedom without women’s voice

A central contradiction runs through the text: it repeatedly asserts that Muslim women freely choose veiling, domestic confinement, and male authority, while simultaneously arguing that women must be protected from choice itself. Women’s agency is affirmed rhetorically but denied structurally.

If women truly choose these roles without coercion, there would be no need to denounce alternative choices as satanic, corrupt, or treasonous to civilisation. The intensity of the denunciation suggests anxiety about women choosing differently. Freedom is redefined not as the capacity to choose, but as obedience to a prescribed role. Any freedom defined outside that role is dismissed as illusion, decadence, or Western brainwashing. This is not freedom in any meaningful philosophical or ethical sense; it is conformity.

Bangladesh versus Jamaat’s vision

Bangladesh is approaching its national election on February 12, but the unfolding political landscape casts a harsh light on Jamaat-e-Islami’s enduring stance toward women. Jamaat’s leadership reinforces this outlook publicly. Ameer Shafiqur Rahman has explicitly stated that women cannot lead the party. His now-deleted X post equated women’s public engagement under the banner of “modernity” with prostitution, a statement dismissed as the result of a hacked account, but the ideological undercurrent remains unmistakable. 

Beyond rhetoric, the party has proposed limiting employed women’s workdays to five hours, a policy lauded by nobody except as symbolic compliance. Labour experts have criticised it as hollow, reinforcing domestic roles while ignoring structural barriers to women’s economic empowerment. Together, these actions undermine confidence in Jamaat’s commitment to women’s safety, rights, and meaningful inclusion in democratic life.

Rahman’s comments on sexual violence further illuminate the party’s worldview. He claimed that rape occurs only outside marriage, framing it as an act between two “immoral” individuals, and explicitly rejected the concept of marital rape. By collapsing consent into marital status, Jamaat erases the agency of women after nikah: coercion, threat, or force within marriage is rendered conceptually impossible. This is not mandated by theology. 

Classical Islamic jurisprudence debates harm (darar), coercion (ikrah), and bodily rights, but Jamaat selectively invokes the most restrictive readings to preserve male authority and family hierarchy. The practical effect is legal and moral impunity for spousal sexual violence, systematically silencing victims.

The contrast with Bangladeshi reality is stark. Women in Bangladesh are active in factories, lead unions, manage households, run NGOs, and serve as ministers, judges, and even prime ministers. Their presence in public life is structural, not exceptional. 

The party’s position is not an accidental mismatch with society. It is deliberate, rooted in an exclusionary moral order inherited from mid-20th-century Islamist thought, most prominently through Maududi. From Maududi’s writings to the statements of current leaders—Nurun Nesa Siddika asserting male directorship over women and the absence of any women candidates on February 12—the ideological line remains unbroken. Women may mobilise, vote, and participate in activism, but they may not rule.

This is not a question of modernisation lagging behind. Jamaat-e-Islami’s stance represents an active refusal to reconcile its ideology with social realities. It prioritises hierarchical control over women, moral surveillance over empowerment, and conformity over agency. This refusal places the party in direct conflict with the lived experiences, political history, and aspirations of Bangladeshi women, exposing the enduring tension between ideological rigidity and democratic inclusivity.

Shaila Shobnam is a barrister-in-training at BPP University, Britain, and an LL.B. (Hons) graduate of the University of London.

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