Women in Islam

Islam is a monotheistic religion founded by the Prophet Muhammad (or Mohamed) during the seventh century CE in the Middle East. The sacred book of Islam is the Qur’an, or Koran, and contains the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. The first wife of Muhammad, Khadija, and his daughters played an important role in the early development of Islam. Islam expanded through the world and developed several branches. As of 2015, there were 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide, with significant populations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and increasingly, on the North American continent. According to the Pew Research Center in 2017, Islam is not only the world’s second-largest religion, but is also the world’s fastest growing religion. Islam is a wide set of diverse religious practices and beliefs shaped by region, nationality, sect, class, and ethnicity. There is no clear-cut separation between the secular and religious aspects of Islamic life. Many view Islam as a religion that subordinates women in the private and public spheres. However, a surprising number of women in Western societies are converting to Islam today.

Background

Muhammad married more than ten times, often having multiple wives, but he did not marry another woman until his first wife had died. Muhammad always acknowledged the importance of his first wife in the development of his religious philosophy. As a family man he doted on his wives and daughters. His sons died in infancy, and his grandchildren by his daughter Fatimah carried on his lineage and teachings. His theology significantly improved the status of women in the seventh-century Middle East. For example, Islam forbade the live burial of female newborns, a practice common at the time, and made the education of women a sacred duty. Moreover, Muhammad provided for the right of women to own, inherit, and dispose of their own property. Some of the prophet’s wives were known to have engaged in warfare, trade, and teaching and to openly speak their minds. His wives and daughters were instrumental in the dissemination of his teachings during his life and after his death.

In many Muslim countries, Muhammad’s teachings were codified into civil law. In the twenty-first century, the condition of women in many countries ruled by Islamic law, or shari’a, is far from progressive compared to the status of men. Some of this is due to inequities between men and women established in the Qur’an as sacred law. For example, according to the Qur’an, women may inherit only half what is allotted to men. Women’s rights are also compromised by biased interpretations of the Qur’an in conservative societies. Women in Islamic countries, for example, may have only one spouse, while men may have up to four. Women face great difficulties obtaining a divorce, while it is considerably easier for Muslim men to obtain one. Women in such countries also tend to have lower levels of education than men. Often women need the permission of a male relative in order to travel, among many other instances of women’s subordination. Sometimes religious philosophy becomes confused with cultural customs, such as the tribal custom of killing a woman for tainting her family’s honor, which is not sanctioned in the Qur’an. In some Islamic societies, such as Turkey and other westernized cultures, however, Muslim women enjoy greater liberty, because shari’a has been tempered by more progressive secular legislation.

Topic Today

In the last decades, the impact of Islam on the cultural and political arena in nations and communities around the world has caused dramatic changes in the practice of the religion itself. Partly as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath, the religion of Islam has been brought to the forefront of public consciousness in the West, especially due to the actions of some of its more radical groups. Also to the forefront have come issues related to women in Islam, such as the political and cultural meaning of hijab, the Muslim practice of women covering their head and neck in public. In France, for example, a controversial law was passed in 2004 prohibiting the usage or donning of any kind of religious symbols, including head coverings, in the public school system. There have also been prominent terrorist attacks on girls' schooling by Islamist groups, such as the 2012 shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year-old Pakistani female-education activist, by a Taliban gunman in northwestern Pakistan, and the 2014 abduction of 276 teenage girls from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria, by Boko Haram. Such issues often receive a great deal of attention from the media, locally and worldwide. The numbers of women embracing Islam in Western societies, however, continues to grow.

While there is no single factor, or set of factors, that can explain why women worldwide are adopting or deepening the traditions and theology of the Islamic faith, some common elements emerge. Studies have found that some of the motivations that drive women to Islam include an appreciation of core elements of Islam’s philosophy. Among these are its deep regard for family and community, its strong moral standards, and the spirituality of its religious philosophy. Although critics often believe the contrary, many Muslim societies and countries do work toward enacting a wide range of reforms, and the status of women is often a core dimension of such reforms. In some Muslim countries, for example, women can run their own businesses, engage in a profession, and run for public office. Although shari’a is based on sacred scripture and as such, considered immovable, religious and cultural norms in the modern Muslim world interact with legal norms, creating change in contemporary societies. Muslim scholars often engage in reinterpretations of scripture in order to search for more egalitarian ways of dealing with women’s needs and rights.

Among the more salient examples of cultural and religious interaction, besides the custom of honor killings, is that of female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation, in conservative Muslim societies. This practice involves removing part of the female genitalia in young girls, for cultural and religious reasons. In 2018, the World Health Organization reported that over 200 million girls and women in thirty countries have had some version of the procedure performed on them. While many Muslim individuals in these communities note that the practice is praised (though not mandated) in Islamic scriptures, experts argue that the practice predates Islam and is common, as well, in some non-Muslim societies. The joint efforts of international and local organizations in raising awareness about the harmfulness of this practice is making great strides today in eradicating it.

Today, Muslim women around the world are slowly but surely gaining victories such as education and political power, including participating in elections, holding office at all levels, and furthering legal and civil rights for women in their communities. In fact, a wave of Islamic "feminism" has risen in some Middle Eastern countries as well as in the United States. Islamic feminists claim that the law forbidding gender equality is an antiquated interpretation of one specific verse in the Qur’an. These same women have taken it upon themselves to point to other verses in the Qur’an that seem to imply equality among the sexes. Nonetheless, some Muslim women have taken to wearing traditional dress, such as head coverings, in order to assert their identity, instead of having such dress represent patriarchal domination.

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