It is universally recognized that discrimination against women is an integral part of all cultures and religions. Today, however, only Islam, both as a civilization and as a religion, continues to be mercilessly blasted, put on the defensive, and denounced for what is regarded as its unequal treatment of women, which in turn leads to making the topic of gender inequality central to any discussion of Islam, making it extremely difficult to offer an alternative objective methodology to tackle the question. Moreover, one continues to perceive the issue through a double prism—that of the news media, with its display of stereotypes and widespread Islamophobia, and that of the political ideology of predominantly Muslim societies. This, added to the current transnational political situation, has resulted in Islam being perceived as the religion of the oppression of women par excellence, in total disregard of the significant discrimination vis-à-vis differing societies, traditions, or religions practiced by the accusing cultures.

Persistent discourse and media hype surrounding Muslim women with their precarious legal status, their trailing emancipation, their confining cultural guardianships, and their various burqas¹ and “veils” has created, in the contemporary collective imagination, a fixed image of a Muslim woman, eternally submissive and totally overlooked. Such an underhanded image serves to preserve the view that inequality between the sexes is intrinsic exclusively to the Islamic ideology, thereby removing any need for further analysis or reflection. This in turn creates a relentless determination to liberate and empower these Muslim women who, without exception, suffer from a tyrannical and biased religion, with barbaric overtones. And such liberation can be realized only through idealized Western pathways and led by those prepared to battle in favor of the victims until the bitter end.

This “need” to liberate Muslim women, brought about by a no-longer disguised Western intellectual ethnocentrism, serves to exempt other cultures and societies, especially in the West, from any charges of discrimination against their own women, as if these women were born liberated and in full possession of all of their rights.

This “intellectual” entitlement to meddle, deeply rooted in Western ideology, has virtually become a prerequisite in politically correct rhetoric. Free the poor Muslim women, victims of Islam has become a political formula that “sells” and reaffirms the speaker’s membership in the “civilized” world, thus further defining the cultural boundaries between Us and Them.

Herein, it would be worth bringing two pieces of evidence to the reader’s attention. The first concerns the great diversity among Muslim societies and Muslim women: from Indonesia to Morocco, passing through Saudi Arabia or Central Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, each of which displays a range of sociocultural heterogeneity and geography. This clear plurality is a blatant contradiction to the constant and unvarying images of Muslim women as projected by Western stereotypes that methodically reduce such women to a single cultural stereotype. The second evidence we tend to overlook is that of the “universality” of a culture of discrimination against women. Unequal rights of women have been the norm for millennia, and despite the undeniable achievements we witness today, women, generally speaking, continue to hold junior positions compared to men, a reality that endures in varying degrees in all cultures and civilizations.

In this postmodern and extremely globalized world of ours, it is the interweaving of patriarchy and ultraliberalism that leads to new forms of exploitation and domination. In the South, as in the North, women find themselves in the same precarious situation. Today, we need to recognize that despite some remarkable progress, equality, this fundamental principle of democratic systems everywhere, remains one of the most unfulfilled promises of the modern world—the struggle for recognition and institutionalization of equal rights for men and women remains incomplete.²

That said, the point here is not to reject all criticism of the actual discrimination that Muslim women suffer, particularly when it comes from the West, as some Islamic discourse has done, entirely fixated on the notion of a fantastical Western plot against Islam. What must be rejected is not so much the criticism itself, which may be valid, but the tendency for this criticism to be directed almost uniquely at Islam. This biased criticism, in addition to disregarding the general condition in which most women around the world live, ignores many forms of discrimination, religious, and/or other that women outside the Muslim world are subjected to.

Like other women in the world, Muslim women live subject to the degree of development in their respective societies and their own set of discriminatory rules. Unfortunately, the presence in the mainstream religious arena of a common set of “religious data” and understanding has become the source of cultural discrimination against Muslim women. From where does this “unquestionable” universal image of Islam as a religion that oppresses women, and inevitably hinders their emancipation, originate? It cannot be repeated often enough that it is not Islam as a spiritual message that oppresses women. It is rather the never-reformed legal provisions and interpretations, endorsed for centuries by Muslim scholars (‘ulamā), which have displaced the sacred text and transformed it into inflexible religious laws.

It is very important to distinguish between Islam as a spiritual message and Islam as a culture with its institutions, ideologies, and interpretations. This distinction becomes even more critical when this issue is analyzed, not an easy task in view of the current state of intellectual confusion within Muslim communities and societies. It should also be noted that beyond a Western rhetoric that occasionally borders on indecency, and whose objective might not be as innocent as it may appear, this question of women—especially given what it entails in terms of legal and other rights, such as the equality between men and women—touches one of the major problems of Arab-Muslim societies, namely the absence of a genuine democratic space.

The ability to debate and promote the equal rights of women and men in a society is to accept and promote the fundamentals of political democratization. It is this democratic deficiency that is responsible for the failure of a great majority of the reforms undertaken in the Arab-Muslim world, including those concerning the issue of gender equality.

In parody, to a certain extent, of the current situation in Muslim societies regarding gender disparity, we might say that the debate oscillates between two converging discourses. The first is official, a marginally legitimizing policy of “tolerance” that is highlighted by some, usually minor policy actions for the benefit of women, as a symbol of its modernization policy while, at the same time, safeguarding the viability of a rigorous religious interpretation. The other is illustrative of a collective Muslim reality that, in religious debates, makes the “status quo” regarding the issue of women a banner of its cultural resistance to Westernization.³ In short, in the Muslim world, the concept of equality between men and women continues to be perceived as a Western hegemonic imposition, completely foreign to Islamic tradition. Thus, the issue of women becomes the pole around which all resistance is erected and recurrent frustrations crystallized, which results in it remaining a hostage of a range of interlocking factors, thus making any attempt at understanding it, let alone finding resolutions, problematic.

Accordingly, the subject of Muslim women and their rights has been and remains a hostage of an anticolonial struggle and its postmodern geopolitical consequences (Palestine; Iraq; Afghanistan; September 11). These conflicts serve to invigorate identity crises in the Muslim world and delegitimize any attempt at reform, particularly on the issue of Muslim women, who are regarded as the guardians of the last Islamic bastion and hence in need of protection.

The issue of women and equality in Islam can be understood only by seeing through multiples lenses—from the central point of view of political governance in the majority of Arab-Islamic autocracies to the unending problem of endless updating (aggiornamento) and reform of Islamic tradition and thought—while passing through the problems of economic and technical underdevelopment. Because the question is multifaceted, solutions to offer can only derive from a pluralistic and consensual reflection that takes into account all of these factors.

This book in no way pretends to address all of these concerns. Rather, it is an attempt to decipher and discern the meaning of some Qur’ānic references that favor equality between men and women. This is done by tracing the origin of religious disputes while attempting to deconstruct—as much as possible—the countless interpretations and erroneous ideas that surround these references. Thus, this contemporary analysis of the interpretations of the Qur’ān is primarily a modest contribution to the ongoing debate of equality between men and women in Islam. It should be noted that while referring essentially to the Qur’ān, and to a lesser degree, to the hadīth (the sayings and doings of the Prophet Mohamed),⁴ this analysis never loses sight of the relevant sociopolitical and cultural conditions of this time of history. It is simply a matter of returning to the basics of the spiritual message of Islam concerning human relationships and to reflect on the countless passages that emphasize the importance of shared responsibility, mutual support, and respect between a man and a woman. And it is an exercise of reflecting on the relational ethics between men and women as conceived by the scriptural sources of Islam in which the reader is invited to partake.

Values, so simple, so beautiful, reiterated in this profound Qur’ānic language that, unfortunately, the hearts have not retained, and tightly sealed mentalities have ousted and relegated to the recesses of history. Human values, truly universal, are sorely lacking in our present daily lives—lives that have sadly been turned upside down by the turmoil of muddled modernity and the loss of crucial points of reference.

Before proceeding further in our discussion, it would be useful to clarify a conceptual blunder that, at first glance, may seem unimportant, but is in fact indicative of the shallowness of the debates regarding different issues related to women in Islam. These issues are often analyzed in categorical terms that encapsulate the totality of the problems encountered by Muslim women everywhere, within a single designation—the Muslim Woman. Here, the question that begs an answer is, which Muslim woman are we talking about? The Asian or the African? The North African or the Middle Easterner? The Muslim women of the Gulf or those from Balkan states? Western Europeans or North Americans? Residents of Dubai or those living in the Egyptian countryside? The Bengali Muslim woman who lives like a slave in the palaces of Riyadh, or the young Turkish woman living in the suburbs of Istanbul?

It is true that one may easily identify a common denominator for all these women that of religion—Islam—which has become associated with a set of rules and regulations, often derived from misogynistic interpretations, justified in the name of religion. But even there, the manner in which such culture of discrimination in the name of religion manifests itself is very diverse depending on the geopolitical and sociocultural environments of these women, their academic and economic backgrounds, and their ability to battle for their rights. So, residing in very different environments, Muslim women cannot but interact differently with the oppressive discriminatory rules and regulations under which they live and operate. Reducing such diversity of contexts and reactions to a single rigidly defined entity—the Muslim Woman—is absurd.

Historically speaking, it is important to remember that this designation of “the Muslim Woman” is quite recent. Indeed, ever since the late nineteenth century Arab Renaissance (Nahda), a women-focused Islamic discourse tends to trap these women into slogans of “rights and responsibili...