First of all--Andrea Yates is a pretty good example of misogyny at work, not misandry. Here we have a woman who is very clearly mentally ill, yet she was having repeated pregnancies at the behest of her religious nutjob husband who, along with his fuckhead Baptist pastor, persuaded her to homeschool five children while living cooped up in a schoolbus. Their Muslim Pakistani doctor pulled Yates off her medications in spite of her communicating to him her fantasies about killing her children. Who cares about that pesky science dealing with brain chemistry? A good mommy doing God's/Allah's will doesn't hurt her kids, right? And who cares how she feels? Chin up, woman!

The tragedy resulted from a perfect storm of religious ignorance, presumptions about motherhood, and mistreatment of Andrea Yates personally.

And Andrea Yates is the only one who's paying. Her meathead husband remarried immediately and already has a few kids by the new wife.

Okay, now on the C.Bob's point about it's being the culture-- he's right up to a point. The Kurdish teenager who was brutally stoned and the pictures caught on video is widely believed to be a Muslim, but she was a Yazidi, a minority group who follow a little known sect of Christianity. Similarly, the Canadian girl of Indian heritage nicknamed Jessie who was brutally murdered by her mother and uncle for falling in love with the wrong person in India was not Muslim, but a Sikh.

But having said that culture and geography play a role, religion also plays a role, or provides a set of excuses or justifications, if you want to put it that way. Muslims who claim that "Islam offers equal rights and all freedoms to women" are being patently dishonest and trying to twist things around--you only have to read the basic texts of Islam to see that.

In Islam there is no equality or freedom in any sense that we understand it today; rather there is a strict laundry list of injunctions on how to control women's movements/dress/sexual relations/contact with others (including family members) and punishments to be handed out to them if they disobey (ranging from imprisonment within the home to beating to death). This is followed by some vague advice to men to be nice to women because "they belong to you, and it's sort of mean to be cruel to things that Allah has given you to enjoy" (and, you see, "You may be harming something in which Allah has placed some good". Gee--thanks for throwing that in there, Allah. We MAY have some good in us. The jury's still out on it). Just like in the Bible (Deut. 22), where care and feeding of oxen and donkeys is settled in the same chapter as care of women (spoiler: the oxen and donkeys get a better deal).

Saying that Islam gives rights and freedoms to women is something that Muslims not only want others to believe (Taqiyya), many desperately want to believe it themselves. It's kind of sad and desperate that they have to resort to this Orwellian doublespeak, but that's what it is. Ask Muslims about the Hadith which says Hell is going to be full of all the women because women are so naturally sinful and furthermore, they cause men to sin. The Muslims will become very uncomfortable when confronted with this. But it's true. There's a verse that says almost all women are going to Hell, just for being women.

So let's not let Islam off the hook or get confused about its role in these misogynist cultures. It's very clear what the Islamic view of women is.

If a Muslim man is good and kind to his women and really believes in equality, it's in spite of Islam and not because of it.

And you're not really going to make much overall progress in such an environment.