Ahmad Musa Jibril is a Detroit-based cleric whose career exemplifies the collapse of religious authority into criminality and extremist propaganda. In 2005, he was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison on 42 counts of fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, with the court also citing his possession of weapons and false identities. Upon his release, Jibril shifted his influence to the digital sphere, where he gained notoriety as one of the most frequently cited online preachers among foreign fighters who joined ISIS in Syria. His lectures are filled with invective against Shia Muslims, calls for violent struggle, and a systematic denigration of women’s independence. To describe him as a “scholar” is misleading: his record is a mix of criminal misconduct, hate speech, and theological justifications for authoritarian domination.
That such a man stands as a mentor to the author of "Muslim Women and University Education" immediately reveals the intellectual and ethical soil from which the book grows, a soil poisoned by fraud, sectarian hatred, and misogyny (I first encountered this book circulating among right-wing groups at Aligarh Muslim University, a university originally founded to provide modern education for Muslims; its propagation there underscores the sad decline of the institution’s founding mission). The author of this tirade against co-ed university education is a woman whose name is never mentioned. Her basic goal is made explicit in passages where she insists that the future of the Muslim community depends upon women’s renunciation of education. She declares flatly: “The Ummah is not in need of bold and driven career women, rather it is in dire need of Īmān-driven women who are bold and fearless in their Dīn and ‘Aqīdah!”
What is left for women is to raise men who will supposedly restore a mythic Islamic past. And such women, she says, “are not produced via PhDs in free-mixed universities, by Allāh! – A slave of Allāh knows there’s no degree worthy of humiliating yourself to slaves of animals for in disobedience of Allāh.” Most revealing, however, is her perverse conclusion: “Growing up illiterate in obedience to Allāh … is more noble, more blessed, than a vanishing PhD Dunyā degree attained in disobedience to Allāh.” In other words, ignorance is elevated as a virtue, while the pursuit of knowledge becomes framed as sin.
Instead of preparing women for life as subjects not dependent on the whims and fancies of men, the author claims the only “degree” worth striving for is Al-Usūl Ath-Thalāthah, a rudimentary catechism designed to ensure compliance in the grave rather than competence in the world. This goal is not simply anti-modern or anti-liberal, but fundamentally anti-knowledge: the very act of learning is condemned if it exceeds the narrowest doctrinal boundaries. By presenting the ideal Muslim woman as an illiterate vessel of obedience, the author reveals that the book’s true project is to entrench women’s subordination under the guise of spiritual nobility.
Given the utter bleakness of this future for women, the author has to garnish it with empty phrases so that women can feel somehow that it will ultimately help them. She says, “the Muslim woman is the backbone of the Ummah, who makes up half of it and raises the other half. Once she has been corrupted, the entire Ummah is corrupted and left in ruins.” However, the assignment of this grand role to women is immediately canceled by the blatant assertion of women’s physical and mental inferiority vis-a-vis men: “Women, in general, are more prone to being affected and indoctrinated by the various ideologies that the Kuffār [disbelievers] seek to impose upon the Ummah. When it comes to Fitan [tribulations], a woman is an easy target to influence because she tends to be more malleable than men and is unable to withstand as much pressure.”
The aforementioned double positioning of women is incoherent: how can one be the constitutive foundation of an entire civilizational order while being inherently feeble and susceptible to corruption? A backbone that collapses under minimal pressure cannot sustain the body of the Ummah. If women are by nature easy prey to “disbelievers” and “foreign ideologies,” then making them the backbone of the Ummah places the entire civilization on a permanently unstable foundation. Either women have the capacity to sustain, resist, and transmit the tradition, in which case the discourse of weakness falls apart, or they do not, in which case the metaphor of the “backbone” is vacuous. The author cannot sustain both positions without collapsing into contradiction. By insisting on both weakness and indispensability, the text creates a logical tension that eats away at its own argument.
This contradiction becomes more acute when the author herself, a woman, occupies the role of a public intellectual, producing discourse, citing canonical sources, and making truth-claims. If she accepts that women are “lacking in discernment and religion,” then her own speech cannot demand authority, since it issues from the very deficiency she ascribes to all women. Her intervention, on her own premises, ought to be dismissed as “malleable,” “weak,” and “susceptible to foreign influence.” Yet the very fact that she writes, argues, and intervenes in the public sphere demonstrates a reliance on the very capacities she denies: reason, will, and discursive strength. She both enacts and denies female intellectual agency.
At this point, the text confronts the impossibility of using reason to convince women of their own irrationality. Implicitly recognizing that appeals to Qur’an and Sunnah presuppose the listener’s capacity for reasoning, the author turns to the authority of Jibrīl, who, in defending gender segregation, invokes the logic of the modern world. He cites, for example, President Bush’s decision to separate boys and girls in schools, framing it as a rational, evidence-based response to observable outcomes: distraction, flirtation, and diminished productivity. By appealing to Bush’s ostensibly rational, capitalist reasoning, the text implicitly acknowledges that purely theological argument cannot alone enforce compliance; it must borrow from a secular, instrumental logic comprehensible to reasoning agents.
In doing so, the author betrays the very project she seeks to advance. Every reference to Bush’s logic, every rationalized claim about the failure of co-education, presumes comprehension, critical judgment, and the ability to follow argument, capacities she simultaneously denies women possess. The text thus exposes itself: to label women as irrational, it must rely on reasoning so universally intelligible that it undermines the claim of inherent incapacity. In short, the discourse collapses into a paradox, deploying modern rationality to enforce a theological argument about women’s irrationality that reason alone cannot sustain.
The same contradiction is visible in Jibril’s foreword. The fraudster attempts to secure the book’s authority by emphasizing that its author is herself a woman: “nor can they allege that the author ‘doesn’t know what women go through,’ as the author is a noble sister herself.” The strategy here is clear: the author’s gender is mobilized as a credential to silence critique from feminists and modernists. Yet this move immediately destabilizes the very claims the book itself advances. If women are, as the author insists, mentally and physically weak, then her authority as an author cannot be grounded in her womanhood. By the logic of her own discourse, her testimony ought to be precisely the least reliable.
The preface thus performs a double positioning. On the one hand, it appeals to the fact that the book was written by a woman to authenticate the arguments within. On the other hand, the book’s very content asserts that women’s reasoning and perception are inherently defective. If this claim holds, then the authority of the book collapses at the moment it is affirmed. The cleric wants to disarm critique by pointing to the author’s gender, but the author’s gender, within the framework of the book itself, can only function as proof of unreliability.
This contradiction is sharpened when the preface states that the book “succinctly tackle[s] a modern-day issue … in an eloquent and classical way, filled with proofs from the Qur’an and Sunnah.” Eloquence, rigor, and the capacity to engage in interpretation are here attributed to a woman who, by the text’s own assumptions, should lack precisely these intellectual capacities. The cleric therefore affirms qualities in the woman author that the text denies to women in general. The preface is forced into a paradox: it elevates the individual woman author as authoritative precisely while affirming the universal incapacity of women to exercise intellectual authority.
Seyla Benhabib helps clarify the structural paradox at work in "Muslim Women and University Education". As she notes, the inegalitarian who wishes to justify exclusion cannot rely solely on force but must argue, must address those excluded in order to persuade them that their exclusion is rightful. “If such inegalitarianism is to be ‘rational’ it must woo the assent of those who will be treated unequally, but to woo such assent means admitting the ‘others’ into the conversation.” This paradox, Benhabib stresses, is insoluble. The very attempt to justify subordination by appeal to reason forces recognition of the rational agency of the subordinated, who are thereby granted the capacity to withhold assent.
By presenting herself as a woman author and interpreter of Qur’an and hadith, the author already undermines the very premise she seeks to defend. In Benhabib’s terms, she inserts herself into “the moral conversation,” claiming the authority of reason and interpretation while simultaneously denying that authority to other women. The attempt to convince women that they are irrational collapses under its own conditions: persuasion presupposes the capacity to reason, and as Benhabib insists, “to assent entails just as much the capacity to dissent, to say no.” Once women are addressed as subjects capable of understanding and assenting, they are equally capable of rejecting the injunction. The book’s project thus repudiates itself, because its very mode of appeal acknowledges women not as mentally and physically beings but human beings with intellectual agency.
In attempting to convince women of their mental and physical weakness, the author relies on the very faculties she seeks to suppress: reasoning, comprehension, and critical judgment. Every argument, every scriptural or moral appeal presumes that the listener can evaluate, reflect, and draw conclusions. The moment women are addressed as capable of understanding, they are implicitly recognized as agents able to resist or reject the claims laid before them. In this sense, the effort to tell them that they are mentally and physically weak is structurally fated to fail.
Even if Islam, its prophets, or other revered figures practiced forms of women’s subordination, this does not strengthen the author’s claim. The problem lies in the logic of the discourse itself. By addressing women through reasoned argument, scriptural citation, and moral exhortation, the author presupposes capacities she claims are absent: comprehension, critical judgment, and the ability to reflect. The very form of the discourse enacts recognition of rational agency, regardless of what historical practice or textual assertion might say. Even if Islam or its figures portray women as mentally or physically weaker, speaking to women as capable of understanding and assent simultaneously repudiates that portrayal. This structural tension ensures that the project cannot coherently achieve its goal through reasoning alone; any attempt to subordinate women through argumentation is preemptively undermined by the very medium of persuasion.
This structural impossibility generates a pressure that the text itself cannot resolve through discourse alone. Persuasion depends on the listener’s capacity to reason, yet the argument simultaneously seeks to negate that very capacity. The contradiction reaches its logical extreme: when rational appeal cannot secure compliance, authority turns toward enforcement, coercion, and the familiar mechanisms of patriarchal violence. The tension between appealing to reason and asserting inherent incapacity generates an inescapable pressure: if women are reasoning subjects, how can any discourse convince them to accept their own irrationality without contradiction? The attempt is destined to collapse, leaving the only alternative as compulsion, sanctions, or coercive enforcement, the inevitable recourse of a system that seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable.
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Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University. He is the author of the book "Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia" (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024), and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books
Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University. He is the author of the book "Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia" (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024), and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books
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