Forty years after Muslim women established the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN) to promote faith, education and community service, the organisation is using its anniversary to revisit a broader question about the role of women in Islam.

The idea of creating a national umbrella body for Muslim women first emerged between 1983 and 1984 before FOMWAN was formally inaugurated at the Islamic Education Trust in Minna in 1985.

Delegates from Ilorin, Lagos, Minna, Kaduna, Kano, Jos and Zaria attended the inauguration, and the organisation was registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission the same year.

Since then, it has grown into a nationwide body with chapters in all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, more than 600 local council branches, about 550 affiliated groups and over 80,000 registered members.

The organisation’s emergence came at a period when many Muslim women’s associations across Nigeria operated independently, mostly addressing similar challenges without a common national platform. It was against this backdrop that the Secretary-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), Prof. Emeritus Is-haq O. Oloyede, delivered the 40th anniversary lecture of FOMWAN’s Oyo State chapter in Ibadan on Sunday, July 12, 2026, arguing that Muslim communities should distinguish between Islamic teachings and cultural practices when discussing women’s roles.

Oloyede noted that FOMWAN was established to provide that collective voice, enabling Muslim women to engage more effectively with religious institutions, government and development partners while remaining rooted in Islamic principles. Bringing together women from different regions, languages and backgrounds under one umbrella, he said, helped foster a shared identity without erasing the diversity that exists within Nigeria’s Muslim community.

Delivering a lecture titled “FOMWAN at 40: Rethinking the Roles of Women in Islam,” Oloyede described the anniversary as more than a celebration of longevity. Forty years, he said, represents an opportunity for honest reflection on an organisation’s journey, its achievements, its shortcomings and the responsibilities that lie ahead.

According to him, anniversaries should prompt institutions to ask three fundamental questions: where they are coming from, where they currently stand and where they are headed. Those questions formed the framework of his lecture, which examined FOMWAN’s history, the Islamic understanding of women’s roles and the direction the organisation could take over the coming decades.

The anniversary also coincided with a symbolic milestone that Oloyede said carries particular significance within Islamic tradition. He noted that the number forty is often associated with maturity, preparation, spiritual growth and renewal. Prophet Muhammad (SAW) received his first revelation at the age of forty, while several other Qur’anic accounts and Prophetic traditions reference the number in contexts of transformation, testing and development.

Against that backdrop, he congratulated FOMWAN for reaching a period of institutional maturity, praying that the organisation would continue to flourish over the coming decades while expanding its impact within and beyond Nigeria.

Although the anniversary celebrated four decades of organised service, Oloyede maintained that remembrance alone was insufficient. Equally important, he said, was the willingness to rethink inherited assumptions about women’s place within Muslim communities.

According to him, rethinking does not amount to rejecting Islam or reshaping religious teachings to suit contemporary trends. Rather, it requires returning to the Qur’an, the Prophetic tradition and the wider body of Islamic scholarship to examine present-day realities, while distinguishing between divine guidance and social customs that may have developed around it.

For Oloyede, the exercise is neither an attempt to modernise Islam nor to dismiss centuries of Islamic scholarship. Rather, it is an invitation to examine whether some practices commonly presented as religious obligations are, in reality, products of particular cultural and historical circumstances. Such reflection, he argued, should be guided by the objectives of the Shariah and the broader Qur’anic principles of justice, compassion and human dignity, while remaining faithful to the foundations of the faith.

Oloyede argued that many discussions about Muslim women mostly become trapped between two opposing positions. One portrays Islam itself as inherently oppressive to women, while the other insists that because Islam granted women rights centuries ago, there is no longer any need for further discussion.
Neither position, he suggested, fully captures contemporary realities.

While Islamic teachings recognise a woman’s rights to education, property, inheritance and independent legal personality, he observed that the practical enjoyment of those rights can still be limited by poverty, insecurity, family attitudes or longstanding cultural expectations.
“There is a difference,” he noted, “between possessing a right in the scripture and enjoying that right in the society.”

It was against that backdrop that Oloyede called for a process of moral retrieval — one that examines whether social practices continue to reflect the justice, compassion and human dignity emphasised in the Qur’an, while also questioning whether some interpretations inherited from earlier societies should continue to be applied without considering the circumstances in which they emerged. The discussion also provided an opportunity to reflect on the organisation whose anniversary inspired the lecture.

Its growth, Oloyede observed, reflected more than an increase in membership. The organisation emerged at a time when many Muslim women’s associations operated independently of one another, while access to formal education remained uneven in many communities. A coordinated national platform, he noted, created opportunities for Muslim women to engage government institutions, religious bodies, development organisations and wider society through a common structure.

Nigeria’s Muslim population is itself diverse, comprising different ethnicities, languages, theological traditions and social realities. According to Oloyede, one of FOMWAN’s defining achievements has been its ability to create a shared institutional identity while accommodating those differences. Over the years, that identity has increasingly been expressed through education, healthcare, humanitarian work and community development.

The organisation’s records show that it owns 162 schools spread across twenty-four states and the Federal Capital Territory, serving more than 21,000 learners. It also operates health facilities in different parts of the country, providing primary and secondary healthcare services in communities where access to public facilities may be limited.

According to Oloyede, the significance of those institutions extends beyond physical structures.
Every school, he said, represents children receiving education, teachers finding employment and communities investing in future generations. Every clinic reflects women accessing antenatal care, children receiving treatment and families obtaining healthcare that may otherwise have remained beyond reach.

Those institutions, Oloyede observed, illustrate the organisation’s understanding of service as an extension of faith. Beyond religious instruction, he said, FOMWAN’s activities have increasingly addressed education, healthcare and social welfare in communities where public services may be inadequate. In his view, the organisation’s contribution should therefore be assessed not only by the number of facilities it has established but also by the lives touched through those interventions over the past four decades.

He also pointed to the organisation’s increasing involvement in public accountability.

Between 2017 and 2020, FOMWAN received two grants from the MacArthur Foundation worth a combined 560,000 dollars to support accountability in Kaduna State’s Home Grown School Feeding Programme.

Through the initiative, the organisation worked with school-based management committees, parents, women’s groups, youth associations, traditional rulers and religious leaders to monitor budgeting, food quality, contracting processes and service delivery. For Oloyede, the programme illustrated an important shift in the organisation’s evolution.

Rather than limiting its activities to charitable interventions, FOMWAN had also become involved in ensuring that public resources meant for children reached their intended beneficiaries.
“Feeding a hungry child is an act of compassion,” he observed. “Ensuring that public resources allocated to feed thousands of children are not diverted is an act of justice.”

Research cited during the lecture similarly described FOMWAN as an organisation whose activities combine Islamic outreach with education, healthcare, humanitarian services, vocational training, advocacy and community development.

Its contribution, Oloyede argued, lies not only in the number of projects undertaken but also in demonstrating that Muslim women can remain committed to their faith and family while participating actively in education, healthcare, governance, public accountability and national development.

That understanding, he said, challenges attempts to define Muslim women’s responsibilities solely within the boundaries of domestic life.

Instead, he argued that the Qur’anic conception of women presents them as moral agents, seekers and transmitters of knowledge, educators, caregivers, economic actors, counsellors and contributors to social wellbeing whose participation may take different forms depending on competence, circumstance and personal choice.

“They are not domestic furniture, social accessories or mere appendages,” Oloyede said. “They are rainbows with many colours serving various purposes in the society.”
Four decades after its establishment, FOMWAN’s anniversary lecture also turned attention to questions that extend beyond the organisation itself. Oloyede argued that discussions about Muslim women should move away from rigid assumptions that confine them to a single social role.

Drawing from the Qur’an and examples from early Islamic history, he maintained that women have historically contributed as scholars, entrepreneurs, educators and community builders, while remaining rooted in their faith.

He cited figures such as Khadijah, the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife and a successful merchant, A’ishah, whose scholarship made her one of the most influential transmitters of hadith, Umm Salamah, whose counsel was sought during critical moments in Islamic history, and Nana Asma’u of the Sokoto Caliphate, remembered for expanding women’s access to Islamic learning in West Africa.

Together, he said, their experiences illustrate that Muslim women’s participation in public life has long formed part of the Islamic tradition. Rather than presenting those women as exceptional figures detached from ordinary Muslim life, Oloyede cited them to demonstrate the breadth of responsibilities women assumed throughout Islamic history.

Their contributions, he argued, spanned commerce, scholarship, public counsel and education, showing that intellectual leadership and community service have long been part of the Muslim woman’s experience. While acknowledging that historical Muslim societies also contained exclusions and inequalities, he maintained that these examples challenge the notion that women’s participation in public life is incompatible with Islamic teachings.

Building on those examples, Oloyede argued that the conversation should move beyond whether Muslim women have roles in society to how those roles can be better supported within contemporary communities. That, he said, requires renewed attention to education, family life, economic participation, leadership and the institutions that shape opportunities for women across different stages of life.