Has Islam really improved the lot of women?

Islam refuses to change with changing times.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

The claim that Islam has been beneficial for women is a staple of Islamic apologetics. Yet in Islam, a woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man.

The justification of this is provided by Muhammad in a famous hadith, “for it is the deficiency in her [woman’s] intelligence.”

Such a clearly misogynistc view, by Muhammad, the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct, needs to be kept from Unbelievers.

They might think ill of Muhammad, and that would never do.

What do those who have this rosy view of Islam think of the marriage of Muhammad to the Jewish girl from Khaybar, Safiyya, after he had killed her father and husband?

Was that marriage entered into freely by Safiyya? Could she, taken as war booty, have dared to refuse to marry Muhammad?

Can one really describe her as exercising her own free will?

And there is an even more disturbing example of someone who was married without regard for her own opinion of the matter: little Aisha.

She was six, and playing with dolls, when first betrothed to Muhammad, and nine years old when he, at the age of 54, consummated his marriage to her.

Can a six-year-old, or a nine-year-old girl, be said to have the necessary understanding to give informed consent?

Did Aisha have the right to refuse to marry Muhammad? She did not.

Nor could she be considered old enough to have consented to the consummation of that marriage, that is, to sexual intercourse, at the age of nine.

Today we would consider what Muhammad did to Aisha to constitute rape.

Some claim that Islam improved the lot of women by granting them inheritance rights. The Islamic rules on inheritance have not changed in 1,400 years.

In western Arabia, in the 7th century, these may have represented an improvement on the pre-Islamic Arab pagan custom by which only males inherited.

However, there is still some controversy over how firm that pagan rule of male-only inheritance was.

Khadija, the businesswoman who was Muhammad’s first wife, apparently inherited property from her two previous husbands, both of whom predeceased her.

So she, at least, could inherit property. Were other women in Arabia allowed to do the same?

Save for Khadija, convincing evidence, for or against women inheriting property before Islam arrived, has not been found.

But even if Islam were to be credited for improving the status of women in the 7th century by allowing them to inherit, women were still far from obtaining equal rights.

And Islam’s rules have not changed since then, so that what might have been “progressive” in 7th century Arabia — allowing women to inherit property, albeit at half the amount as for men — is now distinctly retrograde.

Muslim women still inherit, according to the Sharia, half that of a man, while the right of women to inherit equally has been adopted among Unbelievers everywhere.

Islam stood still, as it must, given the immutable Qur’an. The rest of the world, meanwhile, kept advancing toward full gender equality, which has now been obtained.

Sex with slaves is clearly permitted in Islam (23:6). There was no moral objection in Islam to limitless sex with slaves.

Qur’an 4:24 says that if a Muslim man didn’t have enough resources to marry a free woman, which would require certain expenses including providing her with the mahr (a mandatory payment, in the form of money or possessions paid by the groom, to the bride at the time of marriage, that legally becomes her property), he could marry one of his sex slaves for free.

It’s not just members of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the Taliban who think the rights of women should not change.

No devout Muslim thinks there can be changes to what the Qur’an commands and the “authentic” Hadith reinforce.

Many assume that Muslims can change the contents of the Qur’an.

They seem to think that it’s merely a matter of will: if enough Muslims think the “rights” of their women should evolve with changing times, then this will happen.

But Islam refuses to change with changing times; the Qur’an’s verses are not to be tampered with.

1,400 years have passed, and Islam has stayed the same. That is both its strength and its weakness.

This Islamic stasis is something many in the West can’t allow themselves to recognize; it would call into question all the high hopes for a reformation of Islam.