Our contention is not whether there was enough food to feed Nanak’s family nor whether the wife could have been a genuine breadwinner, but whether Nanak could have fulfilled his marital rights in regards to physical and emotional intimacy.
Sikhing Truth misses the forest for the trees by bringing up issues that really have nothing to do with anything. Everything was provided by God himself while Guru Nanak was educating the world on Dharma and while Mata Sulakhani was looking after the Dharmic comunity in India. With regards to Guru Nanak’s family there was nothing that the family did not have in terms of food, clothing, housing etc. Flexibility with regards to family lifestyle is a feature of that spiritual lifestyle. Sikhism is not about “rules”, it is about living our lives with purity and honesty. both men and women could work and both share the responsibility of bringing up the children or if it is the case that the wife has a better and more stable job then it would equally be acceptable that the wife is the breadwinner and the husband brings up the children. However in Sikhism this role can be reversed and also shared. Such an endeavour would be a mammoth task for even the greatest hadith scholars alive today but, perhaps Sikhing Truth will surprise us yet.Ĭertainly from a historical perspective it was true that the husband was usually the bread winner and he would use his money to support his family whereas the wife of the family would help to rear the children. There are close to 100,000 hadiths that have been recorded by Muslim chroniclers the only way Sikhing Truth can prove their assertion is to disclose a statistical breakdown of all these allegedly unfavourable “quotes” in comparison to the favourable ones. For the moment, however, to infer that the treatment of women in Sikhism is better than Islam’s based on the crude assumption that the latter has a greater number of unfavourable hadiths towards women is nothing short of a hasty generalisation. (p.5)Īs to whether Guru Nanak’s message is uncompassionate or not is something we shall ascertain during the course of this response. We will give just one example below as more are given in the second half of the essay. However, it should be mentioned that in Islam, the number of quotes which highlight women as bad exceed the number of quotes which highlight women as good and noble. So for Muslims to infer that Guru Nanak’s message to humanity regarding the treatment of women is in some way uncompassionate is simply not true.