Women 'Fit Only to Deliver Children':Cleric

NEW DELHI: A Muslim religious leader in Kerala, who earlier had rubbished the idea of 50 per cent reservations for women in civic polls as “too high”, has again stirred a new controversy on gender front by calling gender equality as ‘un-Islamic” and saying that women can never equal men as "they are fit only to deliver children".

Kanthapuram AP Aboobacker Musliar, who is chief of All India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama, said that women did not have the mental strength and the power to control the universe, which he said “lies in the hands of men."

"Gender equality is something which is never going to be a reality. It is against Islam, humanity and was intellectually wrong," he said, while speaking to Muslim Students’ federation (MSF) in Kozhikode during a camp.

He also wondered how many women are there among thousands of cardiac surgeons, citing it as something of an ‘evidence’ of women’s incompetence.

"Women can never equal men. They are fit only to deliver children. Women cannot withstand crisis situations," he said.

The Sunni leader’s earlier fiasco over women reservation in civic polls had ended in a retracting of his statement when the controversy had become too hot for him to handle.

During his address to the students, he referred to the recent debate about seat-sharing of boys and girls in educational institutes as a "part of a calculated move to destroy Islam and culture." He also discredited the allegations leveled by a woman journalist that sexual exploitation of young is quite rampant in ‘madarasas’, and asked the accusers to prove it and bring evidence to support the charge.

The madarasa controversy was erupted when a woman journalist wrote a post on her Facebook wall exposing the sexual abuse of students in these religious institutions who go there for supplementary primary education.