According to a report in the Telegraph, the Blackburn Muslim Association has mandated that a woman has to have her husband by her side or at least a close male relative if she is traveling long distances.
The group’s “Department of Theology” published these instructions in the question and answer section of the site, asserting that traveling alone is not ‘permissible’ for Muslim women. It also advised women to cover their faces and men to grow beards.
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The section where these ‘instructions’ were put up, answers queries of members on social, religious and financial issues based on Sharia laws. The catchphrase of the section was “Allah knows best.”
Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, hit out at the Asscociation and called its views “disgraceful” and that such regressive belief had “no place” in modern
Her remarks came after a Tory MP raised the matter in the Commons and wondered if the governments effort to fight for gender equality ‘would be made easier if organisations like the Blackburn Muslim Association were not putting out information to people that women should not be allowed to travel more than 48 miles without a chaperone?’.
Leading Mulim scholars too condemned the association for its views and felt it was regressive.
“I believe this is offensive in this day and age that such a restriction should be placed on any woman against her wishes. This practice was a very old tradition which had been followed by some when there was no security for women and when women were at risk of being abducted when travelling alone. - this was a tradition at the very beginning of Islam,” said Dr Sheik Howjat Ramzy, an Oxford-based scholar and former head of the MCB’s education committee.
