SPIRIT OF ISLAM JULY 2O18

8 Spirit of Islam Issue 67 July 2018 and, in royal circles, with greater social exposure, they had better opportunities to exert their influence. One such woman was MaryamMakani, the mother of Akbar, the Mughal emperor of India. Once, Mullah Abdun Nabi, Akbar’s teacher, insulted the emperor before the entire court. Akbar was enraged and wanted to punish him. This could have meant even the death sentence for the offender. But Akbar’s mother intervened and successfully managed to calm him down. She told him that his pardon would go down in history; that history would remember that ‘an emperor, having all the power at his disposal, forgave an offender’. Such incidents abound in history, but because the central figures were usually either a mother, like Maryam Makani, or a daughter or wife of an emperor—women who were already famous because of their royal kinship—people failed to perceive how their roles could go beyond this framework and become applicable to general situations in society. Both biological and historical studies show that women have been specially gifted with qualities required for the establishment of social harmony. In the Muslim case, this potential of women has never been properly realized because of the failure to institutionalize their role in Muslim society. Had Muslim women been trained to perform this task, they would have been able to play this role far more effectively, and on a far greater scale. The need of the hour today is to institutionalize this role and give proper training to women so that this capability with which women have been so abundantly endowed by nature may be fully harnessed. Once this feminine potential has been realized, the world will definitely be a better place for all to live in. o Dr. Farida Khanam hub@thespiritofislam.org The spiritual role of women has never been properly realized because of the failure to institutionalize their role in society.