FOR HIS DAY, THE PROPHET MOHAMMAD WAS A
FEMINIST. The doctrine he laid out as the revealed word of
God considerable improved the status of women in 7th century
Arabia. In local pagan society, it was the custom to bury
alive unwanted female newborns; Islam prohibited the
practice. Women had been treated as possessions of their
husbands; Islamic law made the education of girls a sacred duty
and gave women the right to own and inherit property.
Muhammad even decreed that sexual satisfaction was a woman's
entitlement. He was a liberal at home as well as the
pulpit.
The Prophet darned his own garments and among his
wives and concubines had a trader, a warrior, a leatherworker and an
imam.
Of course, ancient advances do not mean that much to
women 14 centuries later if reform is, rather than a process, a
historical blip subject to reversal. While it is impossible,
given their diversity, to paint one picture of women living under
Islam today, it is clear that the religion has been used in most
Muslim countries not to liberate but to entrench inequality.
The Taliban, with its fanatical subjugation of the female sex,
occupies an extreme, but it nevertheless belongs on a continuum that
includes, not so far down the line, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan
and the relatively moderates states of Egypt and Jordan. Where
Muslims have afforded women the greatest, degree of equality - in
Turkey - they have done so by overthrowing Islamic precepts in favor
of secular rule. As Riffat Hassan, professor of religious
studies at the University of Louisville, puts it, "The way
Islam has been practiced in most Muslim societies for centuries has
left millions of Muslim women with battered bodies, minds and
souls."
Part of the problem dates to Muhammad. Even as
he proclaimed new rights for women, he enshrined their inequality in
immutable law, passed down as God's commandments and eventually
recorded in scripture. The Koran allots daughters half the
inheritance of sons. It decrees that a woman's testimony in
court, at least in financial matters, is worth half that of a
man's. Under Shari'a, or Muslim law, compensation for the
murder of a woman is half the going rate for men. In many
Muslim countries, these directives are incorporated into contemporary
law. For a woman to prove rape in Pakistan, for example, four
adult males of "impeccable" character must witness the
penetration, in accordance with Shari'a.
Family law in Islamic countries generally follows
the prescriptions of scripture. This is so even in a country
like Egypt, where much of legal codes has been secularized. In
Islam, women can have only one spouse, while men are permitted
four. The legal age for girls to marry tends to be very
young. Muhammad's favorite wife A'isha, according to her
biographer, was six when they wed, nine when the marriage was
consummated. In Iran the legal age for marriage in nine for
girls, 14 for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by
pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and
then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted
to raise the minimum age for girls to 14, but this year, a
legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed
the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal
minimum age of 15 for girls failed, but local experts say it is
rarely enforced anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an
appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated.)
Wives in Islamic societies face great difficulty in
suing for divorce, but husbands can be released from their vows
virtually on demand, in some place merely by saying "I divorce
you" three times. Though in most Muslim states, divorces
are entitled to alimony, in Pakistan it lasts only three months,
long enough to ensure the woman isn't pregnant. The same
three-months rule applies even to the Muslim minority in
India. There, a national law provides for long-term alimony,
but to appease Islamic conservatives, authorities exempted Muslims.
Fear of poverty keeps many Muslim women locked in
bad marriages, as does the prospect of losing their children.
Typically, fathers win custody of boys over the age of six and girls
after the onset of puberty. Maryam, an Iranian woman, says she
has stayed married for 20 years to a philandering opium addict she
does not love because she fears losing guardianship of her teenage
daughter. "Islam supposedly gives me the right to
divorce, " she says. "But what about my rights
afterward?"
Women's rights are compromised further by a section
in the Koran, sura 4:34, that has been interpreted to say that men
have "pre-eminence" over women or that they are
"overseers" of women. The verse goes on to say that
the husband of an insubordinate wife should first admonish her then
leave her to sleep alone and finally beat her. Wife beating is
so prevalent in the Muslim world that social workers who assist
battered women in Egypt, for exam ample, spend much of their time
trying to convince victims that their time husband's violent acts
are unacceptable.
Beatings are not the worst of female
suffering. each year hundreds of Muslim women die in
"honor killings" - murders by husbands or male relatives
of women suspected of disobedience, usually a sexual indiscretion or
marriage against the family's wishes. Typically, the killers
are punished lights, if at all. In Jordan a man who slays his
wife or a close relative after catching her in the act of adultery
is exempt from punishment. If the situation only suggests
illicit sex, he gets a reduced sentence. The Jordanian royal
family has made the rare move of condemning honor killings, but the
government, fearful of offending conservatives, has not put its
weight behind a proposal to repeal laws that grant leniency for
killers. Jordan's Islamic Action Front, a powerful political
party, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying the proposal
would "destroy our Islamic, social and family values by
stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or
female relatives committing adultery."
Honor killings are an example of a practice that is
commonly associated with Islam but actually has broader roots. It is
based in medieval tribal culture, in which a family's authority and
ultimately its survival, was tightly linked to its honor. Arab
Christians have been known to carry out honor killings.
However, Muslim perpetrators often claim their crimes are justified
by harsh Islamic penalties, including death for adultery. And
so religious and cultural customs become confused.
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