Is Islam unfair to women?

A girl in one of my classes in Belgium once said it the way you’d mention the weather: your religion oppresses women. She wasn’t trying to humiliate me. She’d simply never heard another account, and I had nothing useful to give her that day. I remember the silence because this question deserves more than a defensive slogan.

Muslim women have been controlled, hit or pushed into marriages they didn’t choose, sometimes by a man using Islam to keep the room quiet. That’s oppression. Calling it culture doesn’t repair her, though it matters whether Allah permitted it. He didn’t permit forced marriage or the theft of her money.

Hijab is usually where the conversation starts. A Muslim woman wears it as worship because she believes her body doesn’t belong to the public. It can be difficult, and women don’t all experience it the same way. Still, removing clothing isn’t the only definition of freedom. An economy teaching women to remain desirable and young has demands of its own.

Islam gave a woman ownership of her property, and marriage didn’t hand that wealth to her husband. Her consent was required for the marriage itself. She had a path out of it, and revelation assigned her a share of inheritance where women themselves had once been inherited. Khadijah employed the Prophet before marrying him, and Aisha later taught the men who led the community.

Inheritance still bothers people because in some cases a man receives twice a woman’s share. There he carries financial duties she doesn’t: his family is maintained from his wealth while hers remains her own. Other arrangements give women the same or more, so “a woman is worth half a man” isn’t the rule.

The verse about two women concerns documenting a debt in a market then dominated by men; it doesn’t make every woman’s word half a man’s.

Polygyny is permitted under a severe condition of justice. It isn’t a command or an excuse to wreck one home while building another.

You don’t have to deny the cruelty women have suffered in Muslim homes to answer the question honestly. Bring the accusation to the Qur’an and the life of the Messenger, then bring Muslim conduct to the same standard. Where men fall below it, Islam is the evidence against them.

This is the short answer. Chapter 8 of the book takes it all the way.