Amana Begam Ansari is a columnist, writer, and TV news panellist. She runs a weekly YouTube show called ‘India This Week by Amana and Khalid’. She tweets @Amana_Ansari.
This author makes sweeping claims about Islamic egalitarian principles while conveniently ignoring a fundamental question: Assuming that Islam truly promises the equality she describes, why hasn’t a single Islamic-majority country successfully implemented it?
She hasn’t lived a day in Afghanistan, yet uses the Taliban to make her point. Fine. But where’s her example of an Islamic society that got it right? Saudi Arabia with its royal oligarchy? Iran with its clerical dictatorship? Pakistan with its feudal structures? The Gulf states with their kafala system that treats migrant workers as sub-human? Turkey? Indonesia? Malaysia? Egypt?
Every single Islamic-majority country has rigid hierarchical structures. This isn’t coincidence—it’s a pattern. And these societies didn’t develop under “Hindu influence.”
The author criticizes Hindu society for its caste system, but then paradoxically praises it for “at least acknowledging caste as wrong.” This is intellectually dishonest. She’s comparing India’s honest self-critique with Muslim societies’ denial, while refusing to ask the harder question: Why do Islamic societies universally fail to implement the egalitarian principles she claims are central to Islam?
Hierarchy itself isn’t inherently wrong—every functional society has structure. The question is: what kind of hierarchy, and is it just? But more importantly, if 1400 years and 50+ Islamic nations haven’t produced her egalitarian ideal, perhaps she’s arguing for a version of Islam that exists only in theory, not in practice or historical reality.
Instead of dragging Hindu society into this as a rhetorical device, she should explain why there’s no Islamic country she can point to as proof that her interpretation works
This author makes sweeping claims about Islamic egalitarian principles while conveniently ignoring a fundamental question: Assuming that Islam truly promises the equality she describes, why hasn’t a single Islamic-majority country successfully implemented it?
She hasn’t lived a day in Afghanistan, yet uses the Taliban to make her point. Fine. But where’s her example of an Islamic society that got it right? Saudi Arabia with its royal oligarchy? Iran with its clerical dictatorship? Pakistan with its feudal structures? The Gulf states with their kafala system that treats migrant workers as sub-human? Turkey? Indonesia? Malaysia? Egypt?
Every single Islamic-majority country has rigid hierarchical structures. This isn’t coincidence—it’s a pattern. And these societies didn’t develop under “Hindu influence.”
The author criticizes Hindu society for its caste system, but then paradoxically praises it for “at least acknowledging caste as wrong.” This is intellectually dishonest. She’s comparing India’s honest self-critique with Muslim societies’ denial, while refusing to ask the harder question: Why do Islamic societies universally fail to implement the egalitarian principles she claims are central to Islam?
Hierarchy itself isn’t inherently wrong—every functional society has structure. The question is: what kind of hierarchy, and is it just? But more importantly, if 1400 years and 50+ Islamic nations haven’t produced her egalitarian ideal, perhaps she’s arguing for a version of Islam that exists only in theory, not in practice or historical reality.
Instead of dragging Hindu society into this as a rhetorical device, she should explain why there’s no Islamic country she can point to as proof that her interpretation works