When Shri Mataji was renovating Ashley Gardens, in 1978, we used to go down to the McDonalds in Victoria Street nearby sometimes and have our lunch there. When we were sitting down, She used to talk to us.
‘Just imagine that today we can just sit down and talk quite freely about religion,’ Shri Mataji would say, and things like, ‘we can talk freely about anything, whereas in the days of Lord Mohammed, if you said anything, they just came out with swords. People would just kill you because you said something which was out of place.’ She said that now we can’t imagine what it was like.
‘I can remember very well all those times and how we lived in those days,’ She said, ‘and the women were not protected at all,’ in the sense that they were protected by the Prophet. In those days women were in a male-dominated society, and men would just come and ransack a caravan and rape all the women and take them as slaves.
It was a terrible situation and when the Prophet came one of the things he said, so that people recognized the women around him, like Aisha, Fatima and so on, was that they should have a veil. They were dressed in a particular way and they were recognized by people outside. She explained the reason why the Prophet asked the women to cover themselves: it was to stop the men from being attracted by them and then, of course, behaving in a way that was very adharmic.
Shri Mataji said that Lord Mohammed was the one who protected women. He did a lot to further the society. In the days when he was around, She said that the people in his country behaved in a very barbaric way and he came into a very difficult society, and he had to change and improve it.
Mother explained that the Kaaba has vibrations and even the Indian scriptures knew about this, and they called it Makeshvari.
Djamel Metouri