These days it is no longer a surprise to hear discussions and debates regarding to the growing strength of Islamist movements and lives of Muslim women living in the Middle East and south Asia. We see, from time to time, contradictions between a western feminist view of Muslim women as a mistreated, oppressed, and objectified beings, while Muslims themselves see it as a positive improvement for women compared to the times in pre-Islamic era. In some cases, this holds true, but as we saw in the readings these changes doesn`t necessarily brought fortune as it claims to be.
This religion’s understanding of women and gender can be described as quite ambiguous as anyone can imagine. Islam’s ethical vision, which seems highly egalitarian, including …show more content…
In many instances, their patriarchal readings of the Qur`anic text were driven by the cultural contexts supplied by the expansion of Muslim rule over former Byzantine and Sassanid territories, where patriarchy was already a well-established form of social organization. She provides the fact that the “Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian, and eventually Islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors” (pg18). Then she go over, for example, some of the leading features of Byzantine society and notes that the birth of a boy (but not that of a girl) was greeted with cries of joy, that, “barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled” (pg26), and that the system of relying on eunuchs to enforce the separation of the sexes was already in place. Ahmed turns to Classical Greek, and specifically Aristotelian, theories which conceived of women “as inherently and biologically inferior in both mental and physical capacities and thus they should be in a subservient position by ‘nature’” (pg29). Such authorities justified their system of inequality by drawing upon commentaries on certain verses of the Qur`an and traditions of the Prophet, along with local practices, which were then inscribed into Islamic
This religion’s understanding of women and gender can be described as quite ambiguous as anyone can imagine. Islam’s ethical vision, which seems highly egalitarian, including …show more content…
In many instances, their patriarchal readings of the Qur`anic text were driven by the cultural contexts supplied by the expansion of Muslim rule over former Byzantine and Sassanid territories, where patriarchy was already a well-established form of social organization. She provides the fact that the “Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian, and eventually Islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors” (pg18). Then she go over, for example, some of the leading features of Byzantine society and notes that the birth of a boy (but not that of a girl) was greeted with cries of joy, that, “barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled” (pg26), and that the system of relying on eunuchs to enforce the separation of the sexes was already in place. Ahmed turns to Classical Greek, and specifically Aristotelian, theories which conceived of women “as inherently and biologically inferior in both mental and physical capacities and thus they should be in a subservient position by ‘nature’” (pg29). Such authorities justified their system of inequality by drawing upon commentaries on certain verses of the Qur`an and traditions of the Prophet, along with local practices, which were then inscribed into Islamic