Women’s Rights

“The zina and rape laws of Pakistan are the subject of heated debate both inside and outside the Muslim world. Opponents of the Shari’a law have found in the subject an ideal opportunity to attack Islamic law as patriarchal and unjust to women. Some have even argued that Shari’a law, in its entirety, should be abolished. On the other hand, many […]

By: Asma Afsaruddin “The study of gender as an academic discipline is a fairly recent development in the humanities and social sciences. Pioneering works that have focused on gender have considerably affected academic discourse on how we interpret the paradigms of social, economic, and ultimately power relations between men and women, in both modern and

By: Azizah al-Hibri, Esq. “The crisis of modernity in Islamic societies, generally, and of Muslim women’s rights, specifically, has led some individuals to wonder whether Islam has become outdated. After all, the Qur’an was revealed over fourteen hundred years ago to an illiterate man in the Arabian peninsula. How relevant could that revelation be today

By: Azizah al-Hibri, Esq. “The new millennium is blowing winds of change over the Muslim world. After centuries of relative seclusion, Muslim women have awakened to their critical role in society and are demanding their right to full participation in the public square. Patriarchal customs are being rejected, laws are being revised, and women are

By: Raja El Habti “The recent French law banning visible religious signs that display a student’s religious affiliation in public schools has unleashed heated debates on wearing the Islamic headscarf/veil/hijab (used here interchangeably). Although this law does not apparently target the French Muslim community in particular and will affect other religious minorities such as the Jewish

By: Azizah al-Hibri, Esq. “Muslim women’s rights have been the subject of a great deal of debate, most recently in Beijing and Huairou. While many secular feminists have criticized patriarchal religiously-justified laws in Muslim countries, many Muslim women have defended Islam as the guarantor par excellence of women’s rights. This broad perceptual gap among women was partly

By: Azizah al-Hibri, Esq. “The topic of Muslim women’s rights is vast; Muslim jurists have been writing about it for centuries. Because jurists are partly the product of their societies and these societies were and continue to be highly patriarchal, Islamic literature has been saturated with a patriarchal perspective on women’s rights. This perspective has