Stop mansplaining us out of our own realities

In a country where men have long monopolised both the microphone and the moral compass, it is almost laughable, if it was not so dangerous, to watch the righteous indignation of Hefazat-e-Islam – a hard-line collective that has one senior leader and at least a few sympathisers in the interim government – and their ideological kin, triggered by the recent recommendations of the Women's Affairs Reform Commission. A group of visibly agitated men, swelling with testosterone and moral panic, have taken to the streets, thundering against women’s rights under the garb of “saving Islam”. Yet, in this performance of piety, what we see is not the sanctity of faith but the fragility of power.

Let us be clear: this outrage is not about religion. It is about control. It is about maintaining the last stronghold of patriarchal dominance: the domestic, the private, the gendered. What the recommendations of the Commission really threaten is a meticulously maintained system of gendered authority – a structure where men speak for god, men speak for law, and men, always men, decide what women need, deserve, or must endure. Thus, the moral panic begins.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the hysterics over equal inheritance. Hefazat and others claim Islam already protects women by giving them half of what men receive. Yes, classical Islamic jurisprudence does set specific shares: daughters typically inherit half of what sons do, based on the assumption that men carry the financial burden of the family. But this logic is rooted in the economic structure of 7th century Arabia, not the lived reality of 21st century Bangladesh, where millions of women are primary earners, single mothers, caregivers, and heads of households. In rural Bangladesh, it is not rare for a daughter to work in a garment factory to support her parents and brothers, only to be denied any claim to their land when they die. 

It should neither matter nor warrant repeating, but the Commission has not suggested getting rid of theological family law altogether, but making it optional. Several Muslim-majority countries have already begun rethinking inheritance in light of contemporary realities, without abandoning their religious identities. In 2018, Tunisia's late President Beji Caid Essebsi proposed a draft bill to grant equal inheritance to men and women, with an opt-out clause for families that preferred the traditional Islamic distribution. While fiercely opposed by conservative religious leaders, the bill sparked a critical national debate and pushed the issue into public consciousness. Meanwhile, operating under a secular legal system since the early 20th century, Turkey – whose influence on the thinking of the National Citizen Party’s (NCP) budding ideologues and Bangladesh’s religious right is evident – grants equal inheritance to women and men, consistent with the Swiss Civil Code it adopted. The law applies to all citizens, regardless of religious affiliation. 

While still following Islamic inheritance laws under the Moudawana (family code), Morocco has opened public dialogue on reform. High-profile feminist scholars and Islamic jurists have pushed for reinterpretations (ijtihad) in light of economic realities, pointing to prophet Muhammad's context-specific rulings and the maqasid al-shariah – the higher objectives of Islamic law, which include justice and welfare. Debates have emerged in Egypt and Indonesia over whether inheritance law should evolve to reflect changes in family structures and women’s economic contributions. While reforms are yet to be passed, the conversations themselves signal shifting ground.

These examples highlight the salient fact that Islam is not static. The Quran and Hadith provide principles. Interpretation – fiqh – is a human exercise. Muslim societies throughout history have modified legal applications based on context. Why, then, do so many in Bangladesh pretend that property law is untouchable, even as we change every other law to fit the times? Ironically, even people who accept capitalist banking systems based on riba (explicitly forbidden in Islam), cheerlead exploitative labour markets, or participate in political regimes that commit gross human rights violations, become rabidly devout when it is time to preserve male privilege over property in a sterling display of selective piety.

Our resident mansplainers want to dismiss the Commission’s recommendations as out of touch with “Bangladesh’s reality,” all while clinging to some sort of fantasy that women in this country float through life without a care, lovingly shielded by benevolent male protectors. These learned gentlemen remain blissfully blind to the actual consequences of women’s systemic exclusion from land ownership: the heightened risk of homelessness after divorce or widowhood, restricted access to credit, state subsidies or agricultural inputs, and entrenched economic dependency that traps generations in poverty. 

Our manelists conveniently ignore that Bangladesh’s economy would collapse without women. Women make up the vast majority of the millions-strong workforce in the garment sector, and yet remain underpaid, overworked, and routinely harassed, denied the right to unionise or call out normalised exploitation in the global supply chain. They are also the backbone of Bangladesh’s agricultural and informal economies – sowing the seeds, hauling the nets, running roadside stalls, managing livestock, processing food, selling produce – all while almost exclusively doing the backbreaking, unrecognised and unpaid care work that keeps households running. Yet, as ever, they remain largely invisible in policy, statistics, and public imagination. They are not recognised as “farmers” or “fishers” because the land is not in their name, the nets are not theirs, and the paperwork always skips over their labour. It is economic violence at its worst. 

How ironic, then, that the same men who hoard resources, dictate the rules, and deny women their share now lecture us on fairness! Do we call it hypocrisy or a structural scam masked as tradition?

It is not only the clerics. The reaction to the Commission’s report has laid bare how even secular, progressive men across the political spectrum become suddenly allergic to reform when it threatens the status quo of their own homes. They willl march for democracy, chant for justice, critique the regime – but the moment the issue is marital rape, guardianship, or labour rights for sex workers, they retreat into faux-theoretical debates about “Western feminism,” “moral relativism,” and “cultural imperialism.”

As Maha Mirza so brilliantly notes in a recent social media post, everything in our modern economy – trade, production, governance – is a replica from the West. But let a woman ask for her share of the family home, and suddenly we must decolonise ourselves back into patriarchy.

The Commission did not propose a neoliberal fantasy imported from the West. It offered tangible, grounded reforms, rooted in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi women. Reforms that asked: Can a woman choose her job without fear? Can she inherit property without conflict? Can she leave a violent marriage without losing her child? Can she walk to work without calculating the risk of assault?

But instead of engaging these questions in good faith, what we got was a moral circus. 

Since the uprising – in which, we constantly have to remind people, women played a crucial role – we have been systematically pushed out of the public domain, not gently, not accidentally, but with calculated ease. Every so-called “national” conversation since has been a parade of men – cisgendered, Muslim, Bengali men – playing gatekeepers to the country’s future like it is their birthright. The reform commissions? Male-dominated. The political roundtables? Male-dominated. The decision-making spaces? Male-dominated. Yet, not a single national outcry about why more than half the country was being erased from the conversation, not a whisper about the staggering homogeneity. Apparently, when men monopolise power, it is “expertise”; when women demand a seat at the table, it is “divisive”.

It is no accident that religious populists and authoritarian secularists alike target women when their own legitimacy is in crisis. It is the oldest trick in the book: distract from structural failure by policing women’s bodies, choices, and rights. Turn women into symbols – of tradition, of honour, of threat. Then claim to protect or punish them accordingly.

When the streets erupted last year and the uprising sent tremors through the foundations of authoritarian rule, there was a brief, dazzling moment of belief – a collective hallucination or delusion, perhaps – that a new political settlement was imminent. That we could, finally, dream aloud about a state built not on exploitation but on equity, not on control but care. That the broken compact between power and people would be rewritten in our language, with our demands, in our voices. But as the dust settled, and the old guard re-emerged in newer, glossier avatars, it is becoming brutally clear: this “new settlement” was never meant for workers, nor for farmers, nor for migrants, nor for the women who have carried this country’s economy, on their backs, in their wombs, through their silence.

It is apparent that no amount of sacrifice, economic contribution or political participation will ever earn women their place in the eyes of those invested in their silence. So maybe it is time we stop pleading for recognition and start reclaiming what was always ours. This country runs on women’s labour. We are not asking anymore: we are collecting. Pay us what we are owed.

Sushmita Preetha is a journalist and researcher.