A gold necklace kept safely inside a box retains its value, Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar told a gathering in Kochi last month. Once left outside, he argued, anyone can touch it, and that contact diminishes its value.
Kanthapuram, now ninety-four, is described as the "Grand Mufti" of India and serves as general secretary of two of Kerala's largest Sunni organisations. He was using the necklace as an analogy for women and arguing that women should remain inside their homes. Bringing them onto public platforms, he said, could lead to "great destruction."
His faction had already issued instructions preventing women from sharing stages with men at religious events. Following criticism, he softened the wording but did not abandon the underlying metaphor. His organisation, he said, did not "confine" women. It operated schools for girls, and nobody intended to bury women.
The necklace, however, remained firmly inside the box.
Eight days later, a similar logic appeared in an unexpected place: Paris.
The Eiffel Tower was shut down on September 7 after a Hindu delegation that had visited days earlier reportedly objected to interacting with women. The women working at the tower were reportedly removed from their posts and replaced by men. Staff were also instructed not to enter certain corridors while the BAPS delegation moved through the premises.
SETE, the company operating the Eiffel Tower, acknowledged that the arrangement had been agreed upon but said it should not have happened.
Nobody at the Eiffel Tower used the word "necklace."
They did not need to.
A woman who was simply doing her job had become an inconvenience to be removed rather than someone whose presence should be accepted.
A similar controversy had emerged a year earlier when Afghan foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited Delhi. Women journalists were reportedly excluded from a press interaction at the Afghan embassy. Accounts differed over who issued the instruction, but the gathering itself was, by every account, exclusively male.
None of this belongs exclusively to one religion.
And when the box remains closed for long enough, exclusion can sometimes develop into something far more serious.
When Religious Authority Becomes Untouchable
Consider men who have actually been convicted of crimes.
Asaram Bapu, once among India's most prominent and wealthy godmen, is serving a life sentence for the rape of a sixteen-year-old devotee inside his ashram. The assault was allegedly carried out under the pretext of removing evil spirits. His followers reacted with violence following his arrest and again after the verdict.
Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the self-styled guru who had a private film studio and millions of followers, was sentenced to twenty years for raping two women who had approached him as disciples.
After his conviction, his supporters burned train coaches and private vehicles and vandalised property. Around 40 people were killed, mostly as a result of police firing.
The Catholic Church has its own example.
In 2018, a nun in Kottayam accused Bishop Franco Mulakkal of raping her thirteen times over a period of two years. She said that she had taken her complaint as far as Rome before action was taken.
A group of nuns then did something highly unusual within that hierarchy. They stood outside the convent gates for days, publicly demanding his arrest.
Mulakkal was acquitted in 2022, with the court citing insufficient evidence. He reportedly wept with relief in court while supporters distributed sweets.
The Islamic Clergy and Nikah Halala Controversy
Islamic clergy have also faced serious allegations and controversies.
In 2017, an investigation by India Today, followed by a separate BBC investigation, reported on maulvis in Delhi, Bulandshahr and Moradabad who allegedly charged divorced women amounts ranging from ₹20,000 to ₹1.5 lakh for a night of "nikah halala."
The practice was presented as a religious requirement for a woman seeking to remarry her former husband, but the investigations alleged that some clerics had turned it into a paid arrangement involving a temporary marriage.
The arrangements reportedly came with the appearance of religious sanction, including fatwas, mosque affiliations and clerics describing the service to undercover reporters.
When the allegations became public, Muslim clerics themselves called for prosecution.
The head of the Imam Council of India, for instance, said that those involved should be removed from mosques and prosecuted for rape.
There was also the case of Imrana in 2005.
She was raped by her father-in-law, yet the debate within India's top Muslim personal law board focused partly on whether the assault had affected the validity of her existing marriage rather than concentrating solely on prosecuting the alleged perpetrator.
The Common Thread
This is where the necklace metaphor becomes difficult to sustain.
Across these cases, the issue is not simply religion.
It is the transfer of authority to a particular category of men who claim the right to determine what happens to a woman's presence, voice or body.
The underlying assumption is that such authority should not be questioned.
Women are expected to accept the decision, while challenging that authority can itself be treated as an act of transgression.
But there is another side to each of these stories.
The same traditions and institutions that produced such attitudes also produced people who challenged them from within.
The Pushback Often Comes From Inside
The writer Sarah Bessey responded to evangelical pastor John MacArthur after he told Bible teacher Beth Moore to "go home" rather than preach.
Her response, titled "Nope, Not Going Home," directly challenged his position.
At the time, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention also told Moore that she would be welcome at his home at any hour.
In Kerala, the Muslim women's organisation NISA has argued since 1997 that the kind of seclusion described by Kanthapuram as protection represents a male-dominated interpretation presented as religious authority.
Likewise, the imams who demanded action against those accused of exploiting women through halala arrangements were challenging the practice from within the religious community itself.
And the nuns who stood outside the convent gates challenged a hierarchy from within the institution to which they belonged.
That is an important part of the story.
The resistance does not always come from someone outside the house trying to break down the door.
Very often, it comes from people already inside it.
What the Necklace Metaphor Misses
That brings us back to the necklace.
Kanthapuram's analogy assumes that a woman's value is preserved by keeping her away from public view and limiting who can interact with her.
But gold does not lose its value merely because someone looks at it.
And locking a necklace inside a box does not increase its worth either.
A necklace sitting inside a box in an empty room remains worth exactly what it was worth before the box was introduced.
The box does not protect its value.
It controls access to it.
It determines who can look at it, who can approach it and, ultimately, who is permitted to touch it.
That is the question the necklace metaphor never really answers.
Is the box protecting the necklace?
Or is it deciding who gets to control the necklace?
When applied to women, the distinction becomes impossible to ignore.