Letters to the Editor
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Muslims and women
Apparently the way Muslims view women is far from immutable. Check out Broadsheet -- they're linking to an article stating that the new leader of the largest pan-Islamic organization in North America is a woman.
The problem with Islam is that it took hold in the *most* misogynistic cultures on the planet. Ancient Judaism was just as bad, but because the Jews were forced to leave the Middle East and spread out around the world, they were forced to adapt more to the rest of the world's cultures and became much more cosmopolitan. Actually, Islam is no more misogynistic than Christianity in and of itself, and in places like Malaysia and Indonesia it's not unusually sexist. Some aspects of it are actually more enlightened about women than Christianity is. But the Middle East has always been the breeding ground for the most overall inhumane treatment of women in the world (other places are bad, but in, say, Ethopia, a woman who is raped is often forced to marry her rapist, whereas in the Middle East, her family or the government will murder her.)
One has to look at the context. Arabs were still treating their women as chattel when Mohammed told them that it was a man's duty to sexually satisfy his wife and that all people, including women, were required to learn to read so they could understand the Koran for themselves. Similarly, Jesus Christ's prohibition on divorce wasn't intended to lock women into loveless abusive marriages, but to prevent Jewish men from throwing aside wives and failing to provide for them on basically no grounds whatsoever aside from "she bores me". If there are still Christians who believe it is wrong for a woman to leave a man who beats her because Christ said there is no divorce, that's because they're bringing their personal prejudices from their own culture into the mix (god knows, Jesus said *nothing* about abortion or homosexuals). The same goes with Muslims.