Women's Rights in Historical Perspective: A Comparative Study of Islam and the West

Muhammad Harris Suhaib; Abdul Majid; Muhammad Afzal; Talib Ali Awan

doi:10.5281/zenodo.17470946

Research · Society and rights

Women's rights in Islam and the West

Women's rights are often seen as a modern Western achievement. The authors argue Islam set out many of them in the seventh century, over a thousand years before Western reform.

Summary

In brief

A common assumption holds that women's rights began with Western liberalism and the campaign for the vote. This paper tests that assumption by comparing the legal position of women in nineteenth-century Britain and America with the rights set out in the Qur'an and hadith during Islam's formative period.

On the Western side, the authors draw on the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments from Seneca Falls and on historians such as Linda Kerber and Gerda Lerner. Under the English common-law doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's: she could not own property, sign contracts or go to court, and her wages belonged to him. The Declaration protested that married women were “civilly dead”. Change came slowly, through the Married Women's Property Acts between 1839 and 1882, and votes for women in the United States in 1920 and in Britain, partly in 1918 and fully in 1928.

On the Islamic side, the paper cites the Qur'an's guarantee that women, like men, have “an obligatory share” of what their parents and relatives leave (4:7), that men and women are each rewarded for their own deeds (4:32), and that believing men and women alike are promised forgiveness and a great reward (33:35). Hadith in al-Bukhari require a woman's permission before she is married, and record the Prophet granting a divorce to the wife of Thabit ibn Qays once she agreed to return the garden he had given her as her mahr, or marriage gift, a form of divorce known as khul'. The saying “Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon every Muslim” is used to support women's education. The authors point to early Muslim women who ran businesses, farmed, traded or taught, such as Khadija, Aisha, Asma' bint Abi Bakr and Zaynab bint Jahsh.

The authors conclude that Islam codified these rights long before similar reforms in the West. They add that practice has often fallen short on both sides: some Muslim societies still deny women inheritance, education or mobility despite the Qur'an, while coverture became entrenched in the West through custom rather than scripture. They call for separating religious texts from cultural practice, and for avoiding sweeping claims about “Islamic” or “Western” views.

Key points

What the paper argues

01Under coverture, a married woman in England or America had no separate legal identity.
02The Qur'an gave women fixed inheritance shares and the reward of their own earnings in the seventh century.
03Hadith affirm a woman's consent to marriage and her right to seek divorce through khul'.
04The authors stress that culture often fell short of scripture in Muslim and Western societies alike.

The paper