What unfolded around the now-deleted X post attributed to Jamaat-e-Islami’s ameer, Shafiqur Rahman, goes far beyond a fleeting social media controversy. It has exposed, in unusually stark language, a worldview that many Bangladeshis already suspected lay at the heart of Jamaat’s politics, but which is rarely articulated so bluntly.
The claim that women should never come into leadership because “Allah did not permit this,” and the suggestion that women’s participation in public life amounts to moral decay or even “another form of prostitution,” struck a nerve precisely because it appeared to strip away any remaining ambiguity about how the party sees more than half of the country’s population.
The party’s insistence that the post was the result of hacking does little to address the deeper issue. The outrage did not arise simply because of one offensive word or one badly timed post. It arose because the ideas expressed in that post closely mirror positions Shafiqur Rahman has already articulated publicly, including in a recent interview with Al Jazeera where he categorically ruled out women leading his party or the state.
Senior Jamaat leaders openly defended those remarks at the time. The only substantive difference between the interview and the X post is linguistic: the interview did not contain the term “prostitution,” while the post used it explicitly. That choice of word is what transformed a familiar ideological stance into a national flashpoint.
Language matters, particularly when it comes from someone who aspires to govern. To equate women’s work outside the home with prostitution is not merely conservative or traditional; it is dehumanising. It reduces teachers, garment workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, police officers and civil servants to a single degrading label.
In a country where women are not a marginal minority but a numerical majority, such language inevitably feels like an attack on mothers, daughters, sisters and grandmothers alike. The fury that followed was not manufactured outrage; it was a visceral response from people who saw their own lives, and the lives of women they depend on, dismissed as morally corrupt.
The political implications are profound. Jamaat seeks electoral legitimacy and, ultimately, state power. That ambition raises an unavoidable question: are women safe, socially and politically, under a party that regards their presence in public life as inherently immoral?
It is difficult to reconcile democratic governance with an ideology that denies women leadership outright and frames their economic participation as a threat to morality. A would-be prime minister who holds such views is not merely expressing personal piety; he is signalling how power would be exercised, whose freedoms would be curtailed and whose voices would be excluded.
Jamaat often justifies its position by invoking Islam, but this claim collapses under even cursory scrutiny. Islamic history does not support the idea that women must be confined to the home or barred from leadership and public engagement.
Khadijah, the first wife of Prophet Muhammad (SM), was a successful and influential businesswoman in Makkah whose commercial acumen underpinned the early Muslim community. Aisha, another of his wives, played an active role in public life and accompanied the Prophet during military campaigns, later becoming a major transmitter of religious knowledge.
Across Islamic civilisation, women have traded, taught, advised rulers and participated in public affairs. To present female visibility as un-Islamic is not a reflection of faith, but of a narrow political interpretation designed to police gender roles.
The Bangladeshi context makes Jamaat’s position even more stark. The state’s social welfare system is limited, and millions of families survive because women work, often as the sole or primary breadwinners.
From garment factories to rural clinics, from classrooms to overseas labour markets, women’s earnings keep households afloat. If Shafiqur Rahman’s vision were implemented in practice, the consequences would be devastating. Families would lose income, children would be pushed deeper into poverty, and the already fragile social safety net would tear further. Moral rhetoric offers no answer to the practical question of who would feed these families.
There is also a historical dimension that cannot be ignored. The dehumanisation of women has long been a feature of Jamaat’s political culture. Only days before this controversy, another party leader reportedly described Dhaka University Central Students’ Union, Ducsu, as a “brothel.” Such language is not accidental; it reflects a pattern in which women’s spaces, bodies and agency are routinely framed as sites of moral danger.
During the country’s War of Independence, women suffered extreme brutality, and Jamaat’s role during that period has left a deep scar in the national memory. For many, today’s rhetoric echoes that legacy of cruelty rather than distancing the party from it.
The personal irony surrounding Shafiqur Rahman only sharpens the criticism. His wife is a medical doctor and has served as a member of parliament, roles that require public presence, leadership and professional authority.
That reality sits uneasily beside the claim that women’s work outside the home is inherently degrading. It underscores a gap between lived experience and ideological pronouncements, and raises questions about whether such views are selectively applied or politically instrumentalised.
The nation’s modern history also undermines Jamaat’s argument. For decades, the country has been governed by women at the highest level, with female prime ministers dominating its political landscape.
Whatever one’s view of their governance, the idea that women are incapable of leadership appears increasingly untenable in light of that reality. In sports, diplomacy, peacekeeping and education, Bangladeshi women have excelled when given opportunity. Their achievements did not emerge despite public participation, but because of it.
In that sense, the backlash to the X post was inevitable. It reflected accumulated anger and frustration, not only with one statement but with a broader attempt to normalise the exclusion and humiliation of women under the banner of morality.
Jamaat’s hacking claim may succeed in muddying the immediate controversy, but it cannot erase the ideological consistency between the post and the party’s long-held positions. The episode has forced a national conversation about what kind of future is being offered, and at what cost.
No country can move forward by sidelining more than half of its population. Development, stability and justice depend on inclusion, not erasure. A political vision that sees women primarily as a moral problem to be contained rather than as citizens with rights and agency is fundamentally at odds with those goals.
The question people of the country are now confronting is not just about one post or one leader, but about whether such a vision deserves power in a society built, sustained and advanced by women as much as men.
