the Children of Israel.”

Accordingly, a woman’s going out to the mosque is governed by weighing benefit against harm: if the harm predominates, she must be forbidden to go.
If this is the rule for attending the mosque, then in all other outings the need for caution and for avoiding situations of temptation is even more pressing.

Today some voices demand that women leave their homes to take up salaried employment, exactly as is done in the West and by those who pattern themselves after the West. Such calls open the door to temptation, drive women toward misery, and rob them of their dignity. It is therefore obligatory to curb these agitators and silence their tongues and pens from promoting this pre-Islamic slogan. The disasters that have already overtaken women in Western lands—and in every society that has imitated them—the painful realities that make their communities groan, should suffice as a lesson for us; blessed is the one who learns from the misfortune of others.

These advocates have no argument to justify their appeal except to say, “Half of society is unemployed.” By this they want women to work alongside men, jostling them shoulder to shoulder, while they have forgotten—or deliberately ignored—the noble labor a woman performs within her own home and the tremendous service she renders to society, a service no one else can fulfill, one that suits her physical makeup and accords with her innate disposition. She is the wife in whom her husband finds tranquility; she is the mother, the pregnant woman, the nursing mother; she is the one who rears the children and manages the household. If she were removed from the home and made to compete with men in