By Zunaira Syeda
In this current world of extremes, we, as women have become very good at carrying things. We carry our families, our responsibilities, our careers, our relationships, our expectations and, sometimes, even carry the emotions of everyone around us. We wake up with a list of things that need to be done and go to sleep thinking about the things we couldn’t finish. We move from being daughters to sisters, wives to mothers, professionals to caregivers, friends to supporters, and somehow, through all of these roles, we are expected to remain patient, present, graceful and strong.
There is always something waiting for us. Someone needs our attention. Someone needs our time. Someone needs our care. There is a deadline to meet, a home to manage, a message to answer, a family expectation to fulfil, a career to build, a body to maintain, a relationship to nurture and a version of ourselves that we are constantly being told we need to improve.
And somewhere in this endless movement, we begin to forget ourselves. Not because we don’t care about ourselves, but because we have become so accustomed to being needed that resting starts to feel like guilt. Saying no feels selfish. Asking for help feels like weakness. Slowing down feels like falling behind.
We have somehow reached a point where being exhausted is often mistaken for being successful. And perhaps the deeper question we need to ask is not, “How can we manage everything better?” Perhaps it is, “Why do we feel that we were created to carry everything in the first place?” This is where the idea of fitrah becomes so important.
For many people, the word fitrah may sound familiar, but its meaning is often misunderstood. And when we speak about Embracing Femininity, some may immediately associate it with feminism, as of embracing femininity means opposing men, rejecting society or demanding a particular political role or identity.
But fitrah is not feminism. Fitrah is much deeper than an ideology. Allah says in the Qur’an, “So direct your face toward the religion, inclining to truth, the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created people.” (The Qur’an 30:30)
Fitrah refers to the natural disposition upon which Allah created us. It is that original inclination towards truth, goodness and our Creator. It is not something society invented, and it is not something that changes according to whichever ideology happens to be popular in a particular era.
It is part of our human nature. And when we talk about embracing femininity through fitrah, we are not asking women to become smaller, quieter or less capable. We are asking a much more fundamental question: What does it mean to be a woman in the way Allah intended, rather than constantly allowing the world to tell us what a woman should be?
Because the modern woman is caught between extremes. On one side, she is told that strength means never needing anyone, that independence means carrying everything alone, and that vulnerability is something to overcome. On the other side, she can be burdened with expectations of endless sacrifice, endless availability and endless giving.
One world tells her to prove that she can do everything. Another expects her to do everything. And somewhere between these two demands, she becomes exhausted trying to satisfy both.
We have started measuring ourselves by how much we can accomplish, how much we can tolerate and how little we need from anyone else. We compare our marriages, our careers, our appearance, our homes, our motherhood, our achievements and even our spirituality. We scroll through carefully edited lives and quietly wonder why ours doesn’t look the same.
The pressure is no longer coming from one direction. It comes from everywhere. And perhaps that is why so many women today are not necessarily lacking ambition, intelligence or opportunity. They are lacking inner stillness, inner peace.
We have become incredibly connected to the world and increasingly disconnected from ourselves and our creator. We know what everyone else is doing, what everyone else is achieving, what everyone else is wearing and what everyone else thinks. But how often do we stop and ask ourselves what our soul actually needs?
Islam does not ask a woman to reject her strength. It teaches her where that strength should come from. It does not tell her that femininity is a weakness. Nor does it tell her that strength requires her to abandon softness.
There is something deeply beautiful about being able to hold both. To be strong without becoming hard. To be soft without becoming weak. To be ambitious without becoming consumed by ambition. To care for others without completely disappearing within their needs. To contribute to society without allowing society to define our worth.
This is where fitrah gives us something that the modern conversation around womanhood often struggles to provide: balance.
Because Allah did not create us to live in extremes. He created us with needs, emotions, strengths, limitations and responsibilities. He created us with the capacity to nurture, to think, to lead, to love, to build, to create and to serve. None of these qualities need to compete with one another.
The problem begins when we allow one part of our identity to consume everything else. When career becomes our worth. When motherhood becomes our entire identity. When marriage becomes the measure of our value. When appearance becomes our confidence. When independence becomes our personality. When even religious devotion and practice becomes another performance through which we measure ourselves against everyone else.
Fitrah brings us back from all these extremes. It reminds us that before we are someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s employee, someone’s friend or someone’s leader, we are servants of Allah.
That is not a limitation. It is an anchor. Because when our identity is rooted in Allah, the expectations of people begin to lose their power over us.
We no longer have to become everything for everyone. We can say no without believing we are selfish. We can rest without feeling that we are failing. We can ask for help without feeling incapable. We can pursue meaningful work without making productivity our whole purpose. We can care deeply for our families without believing that self-neglect is the definition of goodness.
And perhaps this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of embracing femininity. It does not mean returning to a version of womanhood where women have no voice, no education, no ambitions or no rights and vision. Neither does it mean adopting an identity that asks women to prove their worth by becoming indistinguishable from men.
It means understanding that we do not have to reject our womanhood in order to be powerful. A woman can be educated and feminine. She can be intellectually ambitious and feminine. She can be a professional, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a doctor, a researcher, an artist or a leader, a mother, a wife, a sister and still be deeply connected to her femininity.
Because femininity is not a costume or it is not a colour palette. Neither it is not simply softness, nor a particular lifestyle. And it certainly isn’t something that needs to be defended through comparison with men.
It is about understanding the nature that Allah has given us and learning to live with it rather than constantly fighting against it. Perhaps returning to fitrah is therefore less about becoming and more about remembering and returning to the natural state. Remembering that our worth was never determined by how much we could accomplish in one day. Remembering that our bodies are not projects that need to be constantly corrected. Remembering that rest is not laziness. Remembering that vulnerability is not failure. Remembering that needing people is part of being human. Remembering that we were never created to find our ultimate validation in the eyes of people.
And it is all about most importantly, remembering Allah. Because peace was never meant to be something we chase after by rearranging every part of our lives until everything finally feels perfect. The Qur’an tells us, “Surely, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.” (The Qur’an 13:28)
There is something profound about that. The world keeps telling us that peace will come when we finally become – successful enough, beautiful enough, wealthy enough, loved enough, accomplished enough.
But Allah directs us somewhere else. Back to Him. That is what returning to fitrah really means. It is not escaping the modern world. It is learning how to live in it without allowing it to rewrite who we are. It is learning to navigate ambition without becoming enslaved to achievement, relationships without losing ourselves, responsibilities without allowing them to consume us, and femininity without reducing it to either weakness or imitation.
It is finding the middle ground in a world that constantly pulls us towards extremes. And that is what so many of us need today, not another identity to perform, another standard to achieve or another version of ourselves to become. We simply need an anchor. Something that reminds us that we were created intentionally. That our femininity is not a flaw to overcome. That our softness does not cancel our strength. That our strength does not require us to abandon our softness. That caring for ourselves does not make us selfish. And that our value was never something the world had the authority to give us in the first place.
Because returning to fitrah is not about becoming someone new. It is about peeling away the expectations, comparisons, extremes and identities that have accumulated over us until we can finally recognise ourselves again.
Returning to Fitrah is understanding the natural disposition Allah placed within us. Not the woman the world demanded. Not the woman social media designed. Not the woman comparison produced. Not the woman, exhaustion forced us to become. Not the woman running behind everyone’s expectations. But the woman who, beneath all the noise, was always searching for her way back to Allah.
Because fitrah is not about becoming someone new, it is about remembering who we are before the world makes us become everyone else.
