The wives of the Prophet Muhammad were vibrant, strong-willed women. His first , Khadijja, was a prosperous businesswoman who at one point engaged himas her agent for caravan trade. Ayesha, was at various times a judge, a political activist and , after his death , an interpreter of his teachings . Among Muhammad's 11 other consorts were a leatherworker and an advocate of the downtrodden revered as the "Mother of the Poor."

Some women hold relatively high positions in Muslim countries today. But if wives of the Prophet Muhammad lived in the contemporary Islamic world, they might be paying a high price for independence. Consider events in a refugee center of Peshawar, Pakistan , where more than a dozen Afghan women have been "disappeared" by radical Islamic groupsfor the crime of working in women's centers or with foreign aid organisations ; or an episode in the Algerian town of Mascara , where a Muslim nurse was doused with alcohol and set on fire by her brother, who was furios with her, for treating male patients.

While such violence represents an extreme, women are under pressure wherever Muslim zealots are on the march. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979, which swept away progressive legislation passed under the shahs, extremeists in many Islamic countries have whittled away at the legal rights of women. In Egypt, for instance the supreme court in 1985 struck down a 1979 law that gave women the right to divorce her husband should he take a second wife. Sudan's military regime , which seized power in 1989, refuses to allow women who are not accomapnied by a father, husband or brother to leave the country without permission from one of the three.

The Family Code adopted by Algeria in 1984 gave a husband the right to divorce his wife for almost any reason and eject here from the the family home. During debate over the code, one legislator actually proposed specifying the length of a stick that a husband may keep and use to beat his wife. Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, which swept local elections, has been pushing to forbid women to work outside the home.

Pressures to curtail the rights of women come from variuos puritanical sects within Islam. "They want to impose a new social order by force," say Khalida Messaoudi, president of the Algerian women's organisation. "They start by attacking women because women are the weakest link in these societies." Particularly is the Wahhabiyah, a movement found in the 18th century that counts among its adherents many Afghans and the Saudi ruling family. Wahhabi women live behind the veil, are forbidden to drive, and may travel only if accomapnied by a male blood relative. The demand for the gulf crisis prompted the Saudis to loosen some constraints on women, butt whether such liberalization will endure is questionable.

Some Muslim women argue that the zealots are perverting the very religion they claim to hold so dear."This terrifying women of unhappy women covered in veils is not Islam," says Leila Aslaoui, an Algerian megistrate. Certainly, Muhammad was a liberal man for his time. He helped manage his various households, mended his own clothes and indicated that sexual satisfaction was a woman's right. The religion he founded outlawed female infanticide, made education of girls as a sacred duty and established women's right to own and inherit property. Women in Islam , have the right to make their own decision about choosing a life partner.

But Islam also enshrined certain discrimintaory practices. As decreed by the Quran , the value of woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's, and men are entitled to four spouses if and only if they can take good care of them all, whereas women can have only one. "Males are superior," many people argue, because they say that they have "more strength."

The current appeal of such male chauvinist beliefs can be traced to Islam's response to Western expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Fearing the erosion of their culture, the Wahhabis and other chose to assert values that set them apart, including the negative aspect of Islam's treatment of women. Modern Islamic fundamentalism is essentially a revival of this earlier reaction against the West.

Despite such stifling interpretations of Islam , many women have founded their liberation in their faith. The veil maybe a symbol of oppression to the Western eye, but to many who wear it, it is freedom- not just from the tyranny of the Western culture, but also from unwanted sexual advances. In Cairo veils have become so popular that fahion shows are occasionally staged to show off new styles. Says Leila Takla, an Egyptian lawyer and politician : "As long as women are covering their heads and not their minds, it is an indivisual expression." Unfortunately, however, as laws are tightened and rights withdrawn, many Islamic women are losing the ability to choose.

Source : TIME
(edited)