Which one is that? The Arabs do not consider women to be quite human, and to exist for the sole purposes of producing babies and serving men's every whim. (n/t) <messages/335949.html> - David F Mayer - 7/28/2004 6:27:52 AM

Now from "The Religions of Man", Huston Smith, Harper & Row, Publishers, p 245

The status of women. Chiefly because it has permitted a plurality of wives Islam has been accused of degrading women.

If we approach the question timewise, comparing the status of Arabian women before and after Muhammed, the charge is patently false. In the pre-Islamic "Days of Igno­rance," marriage arrangements were so loose as to be scarcely recognizable. Conditional and temporary contracts were commonplace. Women were regarded as little more than chattel to be done with as their fathers or husbands pleased. Daughters had no inheritance rights and were often buried alive in their infancy.

In the face of these conditions, under which the very birth of ,a daughter was regarded as a calamity, Muham­med's reforms improved the status of women enormously. He forbade infanticide. He required that daughters be in­cluded in inheritance-not equally it is true but to half the proportion of sons, which seemed to Muhammed just in view of the fact that unlike the sons they would not carry economic responsibility for their households. In her rights as citizen---education, suffrage, and vocation-the Koran opens the way to woman's full equality with man, an equality which is being steadily approximated as the customs of Muslim nations become modernized. If in an­other century woman under Islam does not attain the social position of her European sister, a position to which the latter has been brought by industrialism and democracy rather than religion, there will then be time, says the Muslim, to hold Islam accountable.

In the institution of marriage, however, Islam made its greatest contribution to women. It sanctified marriage, first, by making it the sole locus of the sexual act.

Etc.

Arf