India: Grand Mufti of Kerala says ‘Women should remain confined within their homes. The Holy Quran says so.’
It is indeed in the Qur’an: “And stay in your houses. Do not display yourselves with the display of the time of ignorance. Be regular in prayer, and give alms, and obey Allah and his messenger. Allah’s wish is only to remove uncleanness far from you, O people of the house, and cleanse you with a thorough cleansing.” (33:33) And thus no one can object without being accused of “Islamophobia.”
‘Grand Mufti’s remarks on women are absolutely correct’: Muslim Jamaat chief Shahabuddin Razvi Bareilvi backs Kerala cleric’s call for women to remain at home
OpIndia, August 31, 2026:
Maulana Shahabuddin Razvi Bareilvi defended Kanthapuram AP Aboobacker Musliyar’s remarks, saying women’s honour and dignity are best preserved by remaining at home, while maintaining that Sharia does not prevent Muslim women from working in offices while wearing hijab.
The controversy surrounding Kerala’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad, popularly known as Kanthapuram AP Aboobacker Musliyar, has intensified after Maulana Shahabuddin Razvi Bareilvi, president of the All India Muslim Jamaat, came out in support of his remarks on women’s participation in public life.
Responding to the controversy, Razvi Bareilvi said that the Grand Mufti’s statements were “absolutely correct” from the perspective of Sharia and claimed that his remarks had been misunderstood.
According to Bareilvi, Kanthapuram contended that Islam accords women honour and dignity by protecting them from unnecessary exposure in public spaces. He argued that women are the “adornment of the household” and that their dignity should not be turned into a subject of public display or ridicule.
Bareilvi further claimed that the Grand Mufti had not intended to suggest that Muslim women could not work or perform their professional responsibilities. Rather, he said, women could continue working in offices and carrying out other duties while observing hijab.
His comments come amid a growing controversy in Kerala over Kanthapuram’s recent remarks that women should remain confined to their homes and should not enter the public sphere.
What did Kerala’s Grand Mufti say about women?Kanthapuram AP Aboobacker Musliyar, who is widely known as the Grand Mufti of India and serves as general secretary of the All-India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama and the Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyathul Ulama, made the remarks while speaking at the Hubbul Rasool conference in Kochi.He explicitly said that women should remain within their homes and stay away from the public sphere, attributing the position to the Quran.
“Women should remain confined within their homes. They should not enter the public sphere. The Holy Quran says so,” Kanthapuram said.
France: Leftist women don hijabs in ‘solidarity’ with Muslim women amid call to ban them
The actual oppression related to the hijab is not linked to wearing it, but to not wearing it. Actual incidents of Muslim women being harassed or discriminated against for wearing the hijab in France or anywhere in the West, meanwhile, are extraordinarily hard to find. It’s much easier to find examples of Muslim women who falsely claimed that they were being harassed or discriminated against in order to score points on the left’s insane scale of victimhood worship.
Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself.
Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.
It is against that backdrop that these French women are celebrating the hijab. For innumerable women in Iran, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it.
The Iranian authorities call their morality police the “Guidance Patrol,” an Orwellian name that makes them sound as if they’re a bunch of benign, avuncular individuals selflessly dedicated to helping young Iranians avoid moral pitfalls and stay on the straight and narrow. A more accurate name, however, would be the Terror Patrol, for the morality that these officials enforce is not the virtuous person’s free choice of the good, but the enforced obedience of those who are frightened into submission.
In one such incident, an eleven-year-old girl in Toronto made international headlines with her claim that a man had followed her and cut her hijab with scissors. After an investigation, police concluded that the attack never happened. Likewise, Yasmin Seweid, a Muslim teen, claimed in December 2016 that Trump supporters on a New York subway tore off her hijab and no one in the packed subway car helped her. She, too, gained international media attention, and she, too, made up the whole thing. Shortly before that, a hijab-wearing Muslim student at San Diego State University also falsely claimed that she was assaulted by Trump supporters.
In July 2017, a Muslim in Britain falsely claimed that a man had pulled off her hijab in a “race hate attack.” In November 2016, a University of Michigan Muslim student claimed she was “accosted by a white man who told her to remove her hijab or he would set her ablaze with a cigarette lighter.” She also fabricated the whole event. And there are many others of this kind, but these French feminists, of course, have taken no notice.
Nor have they ever acknowledged the fact that women are far more likely to be oppressed for not wearing the hijab than for wearing it, and not just in Iran. In Mississauga, Ontario, a few years back, Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Amina Muse Ali was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab.
Alya Al-Safar’s Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Women in Chechnya were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.
When do the French feminists plan to recognize all these women, and so many others who have been brutalized or even killed for not wearing hijab?
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