1925 lecture on the "pitiful condition of Muslim womanhood"? by English convert to Islam and Quran translator Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall.

Today I have to speak to you about a delicate subject -- the Islamic position of women -- a subject which is delicate, and to me painful, only because at every turn while examining it I am reminded that I am in a country [India] where, among the Muslims, a woman is emphatically not in her Islamic position, and where men are generally indifferent to the wrongs done to her. The state to which the great majority of Muslim women in India are reduced today is a libel on Islam, a crime for which the Muslim community as a whole will have to suffer in increasing social degradation, in the weak and the sickly, in increasing child mortality, so long as that crime is perpetuated. An unconscious crime on the part of the majority, I know, begun in ignorance, through pursuit of an un-Islamic tradition of false pride. But ignorance of the law is no excuse for anybody to escape its penalties -- least of all, in the case of the operation of natural laws can the mere plea of ignorance exempt a man from undergoing the natural consequences of transgression. The laws of the Shari'ah [Islamic Law] are natural laws, and the consequences of transgressing them are unavoidable, not only? for Muslims, but for everyone. The fool who does not know that fire will burn him, is burnt by fire just like anybody else. And the excuse of ignorance, in the case of Muslims and the Shari'ah, is worse than the offence. Since they, of all mankind, should have that special knowledge which it is their mission to convey to all mankind.

Please do not, upon hearing me thus inveigh against the present pitiful condition of Muslim womanhood in India, think that I am judging it by any foreign standard for wishing to recommend foreign ways. I am judging it only by the Shari'ah and I wish to recommend only the way of the Shari'ah; and I judge the Western status of woman, as I judge her Eastern status, solely by the Shari'ah as I, following the most learned and enlightened Muslims of all ages, understand it.

"Thus have We set you as a middle nation that ye may bear witness against mankind and that the Messenger may bear witness against you." [Qur'an 2:143]

I know that an influential group of men among you have decided in their mind that knowledge [ilm] must be taken here in the restricted "theological" sense as meaning only knowledge of a "religious" nature. The Holy Prophet and the Holy Qur'an never made a distinction between the religious and secular. For the true Muslim, the whole of life is religious and the whole of knowledge is religious. So according to the proper teaching of Islam, the man with the widest knowledge and experience of life is the man best qualified to expound religious truths to resolve the problems which arise among Muslims in connection with the practice of religion. I deny the right of men with limited knowledge and outlook to exclusive interpretation. I deny their conclusions and I also deny their premises. I say that their claim to exclusive interpretation among them to their priestly intervention between the Muslims and the Messenger [the Prophet Muhammad p.b.u.h.] whom Allah sent to them - a thing denounced in the Qur'an repeatedly as against religion and destructive to all true religion in the past. But I am willing to accept their restriction for the moment. Let us agree for the sake of argument that [ilm] means only what such people think it means, the knowledge which such men possess. Is every Muslimah [Muslim woman] in India encouraged or even allowed to seek such knowledge? Does every Muslim woman in India receive that sort of education? Does every Muslimah in India know even the Fateha or even the Kalima? Can every Muslimah in India say her prayers? How many Muslimahs in India know the passages of the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet which ought to govern the progressive evolution of woman's true position in the Muslim brotherhood? Let them all be given that education, in God's name! I ask no more as a beginning. All the rest will follow naturally.