Someone should take responsibility for creating prison-like conditions for men and women, and then acting surprised when people develop feelings for the same gender. Where in the Qur'aan does it say, for men and women to be locked away from each other?
Didn't they start gender segregation after the death of the Prophet SAW? Some say 8th Century Iraq.
And some people want to import this behaviour into Somalia.
@Chaseyourdreamzz @Riftvalley: African Islamic societies never had extreme segregation because it was impossible for them to do it. Btw, what you should note is that Pagan Greeks, Persians and the like also had extreme gender segregation.
All of the societies that have extreme female seclusions what do you think they had in common? Letโs assess.
Extreme gender segregation in which women were locked behind lock and key wasnโt even possible in the ancient world unless it was an urban civilization that relied on slavery. Women had to go outside for basic things like going to the toilet and washing their clothes. Hence the average ancient and medieval woman would have more of a need to go outside than even us modern women and theyโd have to walk to even get water to cook and wash themselves. For example: You have female Sahabis like Asma who would walk miles to fetch water .You had female Sahabis working in their fields, you had Omar R.A employing female Sahabis as the controller of markets to make sure people are behaving properly.
In the Medieval period in which Islam become powerful which is also the height of Islamic scholarship, you had mass slavery which meant that Urban dwelling Muslim women could avoid the opp gender completely since they could reply on slaves to do most things that would require one to leave the house. Itโs during that time period you find a lot of Fatwas about how men and women shouldnโt ever be around each other and that women should be at home all the time. During that time period, some Hanafi scholars even went as far as saying women shouldnโt even attend the masjid despite there being authentic hadith saying that one cannot prevent women from doing so.
But the thing is, for many societies much like Ancient Arabia when there wasnโt an influx of slaves, youโll find that extreme anti-freemixing wasnโt common like for example nomadic Somalis and the working class Muslims of the past and Africans. The thing is the survival of society hinged upon women being part of society . With the way society was set up, it was impossible to enforce 24\7 female seclusion and there is a reason why it only really sprang up in civilizations that had an influx of slavery in major urbanized societies like the Persians, The Greeks, The Arabs ect.