بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
The Women’s Section in the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir, International Women’s Conference entitled, “The Family: Challenges & Islamic Solutions”
The Opening Speech
(Translated)
Assalamu Alaikum wa Rahmatullah wa Barakatahu,
Allah (swt) says:
﴿وَقُلِ اعْمَلُوا فَسَيَرَى اللَّهُ عَمَلَكُمْ وَرَسُولُهُ وَالْمُؤْمِنُونَ وَسَتُرَدُّونَ إِلَى عَالِمِ الْغَيْبِ وَالشَّهَادَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُمْ بِمَا كُنْتُمْ تَعْمَلُونَ﴾
“Work (righteousness): Soon will Allah observe your work, and His Messenger, and the Believers: Soon will ye be brought back to the knower of what is hidden and what is open: then will He show you the truth of all that ye did.” [9:105]
Our Dear Guests, Dear Sisters, I am pleased to announce the start of this international conference entitled, “The Family: Challenges and Islamic Solutions”.
Our Respected Guests,
With the help of Allah (swt), the Women's Section in the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir, in cooperation with the Women's Section in the Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Wilayah of Tunisia, are pleased to have organized this year’s international women's conference. We once again meet after Tunisia hosted a historic International Conference during the revolution entitled “Caliphate: A Shining Model of Women's Rights and Political Role”.
This conference is the culmination of a global campaign launched on October 3, 2018. The three-week period of work focused on the family's crises and challenges and provided some Islamic solutions to save it and to ensure the building of a healthy and cohesive society.
The crisis that has affected family unity is a vital and important issue because of its rise and spread throughout the world, including the countries in the Muslim world, which have been beset by the effects of family collapse and thus have led to the turmoil and disintegration of the family. In Tunisia, my sisters, for example, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INS), the divorce rate rose by 18% between 2011 and 2015, the marriage rate decreased and the percentage of celibacy in the 25-29 age group rose from 37.7% to 54.4% between 1994 and 2011. Studies from women's organizations have found that 84 percent of women victims of violence are married.
So who among us, dear sisters, does not understand the severity of this crisis, which has been undermining marriage and weakening the bases of the family and tarnishing its components to deteriorate relations between its members, leading to disunity and discord in place of unity and harmony? Unfortunately, aesthetic solutions provided individually to stem family disintegration were improvisational and narrow, and a product of a superficial understanding of the reasons leading to it. Not to mention the policies of existing regimes in the Muslim lands that failed to reduce the deterioration of the family situation and deepened the crisis more; merely applying Western dictates and passing the international conventions that they later adopted in their domestic legislations to entrench the environment of moral decay, spreading vice and displacing the remaining aspects of the Islamic social system. The best evidence to what we have mentioned lies in the Personal Status Code of Tunisia, and the subsequent secularization of laws relating to the family and the social system, and the "amendment" to the provisions of peremptory evidence such as inheritance and marriage of women to non-Muslim men under the pretext of equality, as well as the latest report of the Committee on Individual Liberties and Equality.
Dear Respected Guests,the family is the basic pillar on which societies are based. There is no doubt that the suffering of families in the Muslim world is a product of the invasion of Western civilization with its destructive liberal concepts and the replacement of values that preserve Islamic identity with capitalist values with its materialistic corrupt criterion.
Indeed, the pursuit of fragmenting the Muslim family and destroying its unity is only proof that the unity of the Muslim family is still the obstacle in the face of the West; it is still a safety valve that preserves morality, honour and offspring.
Therefore, we will explain in this conference today, by the will of Allah, the unique view established by the Legislator (swt) to regulate the relationship between the sexes and how He (swt) has perfectly distributed roles (between the sexes). We will outline how only through the application of the Islamic social system will the family and society be reformed, and strong marriages will be established to maintain cohesive family ties with which harmony prevails among its members.
My Dear Sisters, we are pleased today with your presence and participation in this conference, its contents and what is displayed in the gallery exhibition. We ask Allah (swt) to accept it from us, and ask for His (swt) aid until the establishment of His laws Almighty.
Finally I say, Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem, and by the blessing of Allah (swt), I announce the start of this conference: “The Family: Challenges and the Islamic Solutions”.
Our final call is: all Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher of the Worlds:
Ahamdullilah Rabb Al Alameen.
Wassalamu Alaikom wa Rahmatullah wa Barakatuh
Hanan Al Khmairy
Official Spokeswoman in the Women Section of Hizb ut Tahrir
in Wilayah Tunisia