title: Granuloma

text: Crohn's disease is an inflammatory condition of uncertain cause characterized by severe inflammation in the wall of the intestines and other parts of the abdomen. Within the inflammation in the gut wall, granulomas are often found and are a clue to the diagnosis.


title: Granuloma

text: "Listeria monocytogenes" infection in infants can cause potentially fatal disseminated granulomas, called granulomatosis infantiseptica, following "in utero" infection.


title: Granuloma

text: Leishmaniases are a group of human diseases caused by "Leishmania" genus and transmitted by a sandfly bite can lead to granulomatous inflammation in skin (cutaneous form of the disease) and liver (visceral form), with research suggesting effective granuloma formation to be desirable in the resolution of the disease.


title: Granuloma

text: Pneumocystis infection in the lungs is usually not associated with granulomas, but rare cases are well documented to cause granulomatous inflammation. The diagnosis is established by finding Pneumocystis yeasts within the granulomas on lung biopsies.


title: Granuloma

text: Aspiration pneumonia is typically caused by aspiration of bacteria from the oral cavity into the lungs, and does not result in the formation of granulomas. Granulomas may form, though, when food particles or other particulate substances such as pill fragments are aspirated into the lungs. Patients typically aspirate food because they have esophageal, gastric, or neurologic problems. Intake of drugs that depress neurologic function may also lead to aspiration. The resultant granulomas are typically found around the airways (bronchioles), and are often accompanied by foreign body-type, multinucleated giant cells, acute inflammation, or organizing pneumonia. The finding of food particles in lung biopsies is diagnostic.


title: Granuloma

text: Necrotizing granulomas can develop in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, typically manifesting as bumps in the soft tissues around the joints (so-called rheumatoid nodules) or in the lungs.


title: Granuloma

text: Granuloma annulare is a skin disease of unknown cause in which granulomas are found in the dermis of the skin, but it is not a true granuloma. Typically, a central zone of necrobiotic generation of collagen is seen, with surrounding inflammation and mucin deposition on pathology.


title: Granuloma

text: A foreign-body granuloma occurs when a foreign body (such as a wood splinter, piece of metal, glass etc.) penetrates the body's soft tissue followed by acute inflammation and formation of a granuloma. In some cases the foreign body can be found and removed even years after the precipitating event.


title: Granuloma

text: Childhood granulomatous periorificial dermatitis is a rare granulomatous skin disorder of unknown cause. It is temporary and tends to affect children, usually of African descent.


title: Granuloma

text: Certain inflammatory diseases are characterised by a combination of granulomatous inflammation and vasculitis (inflammation of the blood vessels). Both the granulomas as well as the vasculitis tend to occur in association with necrosis. Classic examples of such diseases include granulomatosis with polyangiitis and eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis.


title: Granuloma

text: The term is and "-oma", a suffix used to indicate tumors or masses. The plural is granulomas or granulomata. The adjective granulomatous means "characterized by granulomas".


title: Algonquian languages

text: The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Indigenous Ojibwe language (Chippewa), which is a senior member of the Algonquian language family. The term "Algonquin" has been suggested to derive from the Maliseet word (), "they are our relatives/allies". A number of Algonquian languages are considered extinct languages by the modern linguistic definition.


title: Algonquian languages

text: Speakers of Algonquian languages stretch from the east coast of North America to the Rocky Mountains. The proto-language from which all of the languages of the family descend, Proto-Algonquian, was spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. There is no scholarly consensus about where this language was spoken.


title: Algonquian languages

text: This subfamily of around 30 languages is divided into three groups according to geography: Plains, Central, and Eastern Algonquian; of these three, only Eastern Algonquian constitutes a true genetic subgroup.


title: Algonquian languages

text: The languages are listed below, following the classifications of Goddard (1996) and Mithun (1999). Extinct languages are marked with †, and endangered languages are noted as such. For dialects and subdialects, consult the separate main articles for each of the three divisions.


title: Algonquian languages

text: "Eastern Algonquian" is a true genetic subgrouping. The "Plains Algonquian" and the "Central Algonquian" groups are not genetic groupings but rather areal groupings. Although these areal groups often do share linguistic features, these commonalities are usually attributed to language contact. Paul Proulx has argued that this traditional view is incorrect, and that "Central Algonquian" (in which he includes the Plains Algonquian languages) is a genetic subgroup, with Eastern Algonquian consisting of several different subgroups. However, this classification scheme has failed to gain acceptance from other specialists in the Algonquian languages.


title: Algonquian languages

text: Instead, the commonly accepted subgrouping scheme is that proposed by Ives Goddard (1994). The essence of this proposal is that Proto-Algonquian originated with people to the west, perhaps in the Plateau region of Idaho and Oregon or the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains boundary of Montana, and then moved east, dropping off subgroups as people migrated. By this scenario, Blackfoot was the first language to branch off, which coincides well with its being the most divergent language of Algonquian. In west-to-east order, the subsequent branchings were:


title: Algonquian languages

text: This historical reconstruction accords best with the observed levels of divergence within the family, whereby the most divergent languages are found furthest west (since they constitute the earliest branchings during eastern migration), and the shallowest subgroupings are found furthest to the east (Eastern Algonquian, and arguably Core Central). Goddard also points out that there is clear evidence for pre-historical contact between Eastern Algonquian and Cree-Montagnais, as well as between Cheyenne and Arapaho-Gros Ventre. There has long been especially extensive back-and-forth influence between Cree and Ojibwe.


title: Algonquian languages

text: It has been suggested that the "Eastern Great Lakes" languages – what Goddard has called "Core Central", e.g., Ojibwe–Potawatomi, Shawnee, Sauk–Fox–Kickapoo, and Miami-Illinois (but not Cree–Montagnais or Menominee) – may also constitute their own genetic grouping within Algonquian. They share certain intriguing lexical and phonological innovations. However, this theory has not yet been fully fleshed out and is still considered conjectural.


title: Algonquian languages

text: Algonquian is sometimes said to have included the extinct Beothuk language of Newfoundland, whose speakers were both in geographic proximity to Algonquian speakers and who share DNA in common with the Algonquian-speaking Miꞌkmaq. However, linguistic evidence is scarce and poorly recorded, and it is unlikely that reliable evidence of a connection can be found.


title: Algonquian languages

text: The Algonquian language family is known for its complex polysynthetic morphology and sophisticated verb system. Statements that take many words to say in English can be expressed with a single word. Ex: (Menominee) "paehtāwāēwesew" "He is heard by higher powers" ("paeht"- 'hear', -"āwāē"- 'spirit', -"wese"- passivizer, -"w" third-person subject) or (Plains Cree) "kāstāhikoyahk" "it frightens us". These languages have been extensively studied by Leonard Bloomfield, Ives Goddard, and others.


title: Algonquian languages

text: Algonquian nouns have an animate/inanimate contrast: some nouns are classed as "animate", while all other nouns are "inanimate". There is ongoing debate over whether there is a semantic significance to the categorization of nouns as animate or inanimate, with scholars arguing for it as either a clearly semantic issue, or a purely syntactic issue, along with a variety of arguments in between. More structurally inclined linguistic scholars have argued that since there is no consistent semantic system for determining the animacy of a noun, that it must be a purely linguistic characterization. Anthropological linguists have conversely argued the strong connection between animacy and items viewed as having spiritual importance.


title: Algonquian languages

text: Another important distinction involves the contrast between nouns marked as "proximate" and those marked as "obviative". Proximate nouns are those deemed most central or important to the discourse, while obviative nouns are those less important to the discourse.


title: Algonquian languages

text: There are personal pronouns which distinguish three persons, two numbers (singular and plural), inclusive and exclusive first person plural, and proximate and obviative third persons. Verbs are divided into four classes: transitive verbs with an animate object (abbreviated "TA"), transitive verbs with an inanimate object ("TI"), intransitive verbs with an animate subject ("AI"), and intransitive verbs with an inanimate subject ("II").


title: Algonquian languages

text: A very notable feature of the Algonquian languages is their "direct-inverse" (also known as "hierarchical") morphosyntactic alignment, distinguishing between an unmarked voice where the subject outranks the object in a person hierarchy and a marked voice where the opposite relation obtains.


title: Algonquian languages

text: Because Algonquian languages were some of the first with which Europeans came into contact in North America, the language family has given many words to English. Many eastern and midwestern U.S. states have names of Algonquian origin (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.), as do many cities: Milwaukee, Chicago, et al. Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is named after the Algonquian nation, the Odawa people.


title: Algonquian languages

text: For a more detailed treatment of geographical names in three Algonquian languages, see the external link to the book by Trumbull.


title: Female hysteria

text: Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis for women, which was described as exhibiting a wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, (paradoxically) sexually forward behaviour, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others". It is no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for hundreds of years in Western Europe.


title: Female hysteria

text: In Western medicine, hysteria was considered both common and chronic among women. Even though it was categorized as a disease, hysteria's symptoms were synonymous with normal functioning female sexuality. In extreme cases, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or to have undergone surgical hysterectomy.


title: Female hysteria

text: The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times. Dating back to 1900 BC in ancient Egypt, the first descriptions of hysteria within the female body were found recorded on the Kahun Papyri. In this culture, the womb was thought capable of affecting much of the rest of the body, but "there is no warrant for the fanciful view that the ancient Egyptians believed that a variety of bodily complaints were due to an animate, wandering womb". Uterine prolapse was also known.


title: Female hysteria

text: In ancient Greece, wandering womb was described in the gynecological treatise of the Hippocratic Corpus, "Diseases of Women", which dates back to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Plato's dialogue "Timaeus" compares a woman's uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman's body, "blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease". Aretaeus of Cappadocia described the uterus as "an animal within an animal" (less emotively, "a living thing inside a living thing"), which causes symptoms by wandering around a woman's body putting pressure on other organs. Timaeus also argued that the uterus is "sad and unfortunate" when it does not join with a male or bear child. The standard cure for this "hysterical suffocation" was scent therapy, in which good smells were placed under a woman's genitals and bad odors at the nose, while sneezing could be also induced to drive the uterus back to its correct place. The concept of a pathological "wandering womb" was later viewed as the source of the term "hysteria", which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, ὑστέρα ("hystera"), although the word "hysteria" does not feature in ancient Greek medicine: 'the noun is not used in this period'.


title: Female hysteria

text: While in the Hippocratic texts a wide range of women were susceptible – including in particular the childless – Galen in the 2nd century omitted the childless and saw the most vulnerable group as "widows, and particularly those who previously menstruated regularly, had been pregnant and were eager to have intercourse, but were now deprived of all this" ("On the Affected Parts", 6.5). He also denied that the womb could "move from one place to another like a wandering animal". His treatments included scent therapy and sexual intercourse, but also rubbing in ointments to the external genitalia; this was to be performed by midwives, not physicians.


title: Female hysteria

text: While most Hippocratic writers saw the retention of menstrual blood in the womb as a key problem, for Galen even more serious was the retention of "female seed". This was believed to be thinner than male seed and could be retained in the womb. Hysteria was referred to as "the widow's disease", because the female semen was believed to turn venomous if not released through regular climax or intercourse. If the patient was married, this could be completed by intercourse with their spouse. Other than participating in sexual intercourse, it was thought that fumigating the body with special fragrances would supposedly draw the uterus back to its natural spot in the female body. Foul smells applied to the nose would drive it down, and pleasant scents at the vulva would attract it.


title: Female hysteria

text: Through the Middle Ages, another cause of dramatic symptoms could be found: demonic possession. It was thought that demoniacal forces were attracted to those who were prone to melancholy, particularly to single women and the elderly. When a patient could not be diagnosed or cured of a disease, it was thought that the symptoms of what would now be diagnosed as mental illness, were actually those of someone possessed by the devil. After the 17th century, the correlation of demonic possession and hysteria were gradually discarded and instead was described as behavioral deviance, a medical issue.


title: Female hysteria

text: In the 16th and 17th centuries, hysteria was still believed to be due to the retention of humour or fluids in the uterus, sexual deprivation, or by the tendency of the uterus to wander around the female body causing irritability and suffocation. Self-treatment such as masturbation, was not recommended and was also considered taboo. Marriage, and regular sexual encounters with her husband, was still the most highly recommended long-term course of treatment for a woman with hysteria. It was thought to purge the uterus of any built-up fluid, and semen was thought to have healing properties, In this model, ejaculation outside the vagina was conducive to uterine disease since the female genitalia did not receive the health benefits of male emission. Some physicians regarded all contraceptive practices as injurious to women for this reason. Giovanni Matteo Ferrari da Gradi cited marriage and childbearing as a cure for the disease. If pleasure was obtained from them, then hysteria could be cured. If a woman was unmarried, or widowed, manual stimulation by a midwife involving certain oils and scents was recommended to purge the uterus of any fluid retention. Lack of marriage was also thought to be the cause of most melancholy in single women, such as nuns or widows. Studies of the causes and effects of hysteria were continued in the 16th and 17th century by medical professionals such as Ambroise Pare, Thomas Sydenham, and Abraham Zacuto, who published their findings furthering medical knowledge of the disease, and informing treatment. Physician Abraham Zacuto writes in his "Praxis Medica Admiranda" from 1637,


title: Female hysteria

text: There was continued debate about whether it was morally acceptable for a physician to remove excess female seed through genital manipulation of the female patient; Pieter van Foreest (Forestus) and Giovanni Matteo da Grado (Gradus) insisted on using midwives as intermediaries, and regarded the treatment as the last resort.


title: Female hysteria

text: In the 18th century, hysteria slowly became associated with mechanisms in the brain rather than the uterus. This is also when it was noted both men and women could contract hysteria. French physician Philippe Pinel freed hysteria patients detained in Paris' Salpêtrière sanatorium on the basis that kindness and sensitivity were needed to formulate good care. Another French physician, Francois de Sauvages de La Croix believed some common signs of female hysteria were "tears and laughter, oscitation [yawning], pandiculation (stretching and yawning), suffocating angina (chest pain) or dyspnea (shortness of breath), dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), delirium, a close and driving pulse, a swollen abdomen, cold extremities, and abundant and clear urine."


title: Female hysteria

text: Jean-Martin Charcot argued that hysteria derived from a neurological disorder and showed that it was more common in men than women. Charcot's theories of hysteria being a physical condition of the mind and not of the body led to a more scientific and analytical approach to hysteria in the 19th century. He dispelled the beliefs that hysteria had anything to do with the supernatural and attempted to define it medically. Charcot's use of photography, and the resulting concretization of women's expressions of health and distress, continued to influence women's experiences of seeking healthcare. Though older ideas persisted during this era, over time female hysteria began to be thought of less as a physical ailment and more of a psychological one.


title: Female hysteria

text: George Beard, a physician who cataloged an incomplete list including 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria, claimed that almost any ailment could fit the diagnosis. Physicians thought that the stress associated with the typical female life at the time caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts. One American physician expressed pleasure in the fact that the country was "catching up" to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.


title: Female hysteria

text: According to Pierre Roussel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, femininity was a natural and essential desire for women: "Femininity is for both authors an essential nature, with defined functions, and the disease is explained by the non-fulfillment of natural desire." It was during the industrial revolution and the major development of cities and modern lifestyles that disruption of this natural appetite was thought to cause lethargy or melancholy, leading to hysteria. At the time female patients sought medical practitioners for the massage treatment of hysteria. The rate of hysteria was so great in the socially restrictive industrial period that women were prone to carry smelling salts about their person in case they swooned, reminiscent of Hippocrates' theory of using odors to coerce the uterus back into place. For physicians, manual massage treatment was becoming laborious and time-consuming, and they were seeking a way to increase productivity.


title: Female hysteria

text: Rachel Maines hypothesized that physicians from the classical era until the early 20th century commonly treated hysteria by manually stimulating the genitals of, i. e. masturbating, female patients to the point of orgasm, which was denominated "hysterical paroxysm", and that the inconvenience of this may have motivated the original development of and market for the vibrator. Other hysteria treatments included pregnancy, marriage, heterosexual sex, and the application of smelling oils on female genitals. Although Maines's theory that hysteria was treated by masturbating female patients to orgasm is widely repeated in the literature on female anatomy and sexuality, some historians dispute Maines's claims regarding the prevalence of this treatment for hysteria and its relevance to the invention of the vibrator, describing them as a distortion of the evidence or that they are only relevant to a very small group. In 2018, Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg of Georgia Institute of Technology challenged Maines's claims for the use of electromechanical vibrators to treat hysteria in the 19th century. Maines stated that her theory of the prevalence of masturbation for hysteria and its relevance to the invention of the vibrator is a hypothesis and not proven fact.


title: Female hysteria

text: Frederick Hollick was a firm believer that a main cause of hysteria was licentiousness present in women.


title: Female hysteria

text: During the early 20th century, the number of women diagnosed with female hysteria sharply declined. This decline has been attributed to many factors. Some medical authors claim that the decline was due to gaining a greater understanding of the psychology behind conversion disorders such as hysteria.


title: Female hysteria

text: With so many possible symptoms, historically hysteria was considered a catchall diagnosis where any unidentifiable ailment could be assigned. As diagnostic techniques improved, the number of ambiguous cases that might have been attributed to hysteria declined. For instance, before the introduction of electroencephalography, epilepsy was frequently confused with hysteria.


title: Female hysteria

text: Sigmund Freud claimed that hysteria was not anything physical at all but an emotional, internal condition that could affect both males and females, which was caused by previous trauma that led to the affected being unable to enjoy sex in the normal way. This would later lead to Freud's development of the Oedipus complex, which connotes femininity as a failure, or lack of masculinity. Although these earlier studies had shown that men were also prone to have hysteria, including Freud himself, over time, the condition was related mainly to issues of femininity as the continued study of hysteria took place only in women. Many cases that had previously been labeled hysteria were reclassified by Freud as anxiety neuroses. Sigmund Freud was fascinated by cases of hysteria. He thought that hysteria may have been related to the unconscious mind and separate from the conscious mind or the ego. He was convinced that deep conflicts in the mind, some concerning instinctual drives for sex and aggression, were driving the behavior of those with hysteria. Freud developed psychoanalysis in order to help patients that had been diagnosed with hysteria reduce internal conflicts causing physical and emotional suffering. While hysteria was reframed with reference to new laws and was new in principle, its recommended treatment in psychoanalysis would remain what Bernheimer observes it had been for centuries: marrying and having babies and in this way regaining the "lost" phallus.


title: Female hysteria

text: New theories relating to hysteria came from pure speculation; doctors and physicians could not connect symptoms to the disorder, causing it to decline rapidly as a diagnosis.


title: Female hysteria

text: Today, female hysteria is no longer a recognized illness, but different manifestations of hysteria are recognized in other conditions such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, conversion disorder, and anxiety attacks.


title: Female hysteria

text: The most vehement negative statements associating feminism with hysteria came during the militant suffrage campaign.


title: Female hysteria

text: The American Psychiatric Association did not drop the term "hysteria" until the 1950s. By the 1980s, feminists began to reclaim hysteria, using it as a symbol of the systematic oppression of women and reclaiming the term for themselves. Especially among sex-positive feminists, who believe sexual repression and having it called hysteria is a form of oppression. The idea stemmed from the belief that Hysteria was a kind of pre-feminist rebellion against the oppressive defined social roles placed upon women. Feminist writers such as Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous wrote in "The Newly Born Woman" from a place of opposition to the theories proposed in psychoanalytical works, pushing against the notion that socially constructed femininities and hysteria are natural to being female. Feminist social historians of both genders argue that hysteria is caused by women's oppressed social roles, rather than by their bodies or psyches, and they have sought its sources in cultural myths of femininity and in male domination.


title: Women in Islam

text: The experiences of Muslim women ( "Muslimāt", singular مسلمة "Muslimah") vary widely between and within different societies. At the same time, their adherence to Islam is a shared factor that affects their lives to a varying degree and gives them a common identity that may serve to bridge the wide cultural, social, and economic differences between them.


title: Women in Islam

text: Many women are mentioned in the Quran, but only one is named: Mary, who appears more times in the Quran than in the Bible. According to the Quran, divine grace surrounded Mary from birth, and, as a young woman, she received a message from God through the archangel Gabriel that God had chosen her, purified her and preferred her above all "the women of the worlds".


title: Women in Islam

text: Among the influences which have played an important role in defining the social, legal, spiritual, and cosmological status of women in the course of Islamic history are the sacred scriptures of Islam: the Quran; the "ḥadīth", which are traditions relating to the deeds and aphorisms attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his companions; "ijmā'", which is a scholarly consensus, expressed or tacit, on a question of law; "qiyās", the principle by which the laws of the Quran and the "sunnah" or prophetic custom are applied to situations not explicitly covered by these two sources of legislation; and "fatwā", non-binding published opinions or decisions regarding religious doctrine or points of law. Additional influences include pre-Islamic cultural traditions; secular laws, which are fully accepted in Islam so long as they do not directly contradict Islamic precepts; religious authorities, including government-controlled agencies such as the Indonesian Ulema Council and Turkey's Diyanet; and spiritual teachers, which are particularly prominent in Islamic mysticism or Sufism. Many of the latter, including the medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn Arabi, have themselves produced texts that have elucidated the metaphysical symbolism of the feminine principle in Islam.


title: Women in Islam

text: There is considerable variation as to how the above religious and legal sources are interpreted within the Sunni branch of Islam. In particular, extremist and fundamentalist Sunni movements such as Wahhabis and Salafists tend to reject Islamic mysticism and theology outright; this has profound implications for the way that women are perceived within these ideological sects. Conversely, within Islamic Orthodoxy, both the established theological schools and Sufism are at least somewhat influential.


title: Women in Islam

text: There are four sources of influence under Islam for Muslim women. The first two, the Quran and "ḥadīth" literature, are considered primary sources, while the other two are secondary and derived sources that differ between various Muslim sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence. The secondary sources of influence include "ijmā'", "qiyās", "fatwā", and "ijtihad".


title: Women in Islam

text: Within Sunni Islam, women are provided a number of guidelines prescribed by the Quran and "ḥadīth" literature, as understood by "fiqh" (Islamic jurisprudence), as well as in accordance with the interpretations derived from the "ḥadīth" that were agreed upon by majority of Sunni Muslim scholars as authentic beyond doubt based on "ḥadīth" studies. The Quran holds that men and women have equal moral agency and they both receive equal rewards in the afterlife. These interpretations and their application were shaped by the historical context of the Muslim world at the time they were written.


title: Women in Islam

text: During his life, Muhammad married nine or eleven women, depending upon the differing accounts of who were his wives. In pre-Islamic Arabian culture, marriage was generally contracted in accordance with the larger needs of the tribe and was based on the need to form alliances within the tribe and with other tribes. Virginity at the time of marriage was emphasized as a tribal honor. William Montgomery Watt states that all of Muhammad's marriages had the political aspect of strengthening friendly relationships and were based on the pre-Islamic Arabian custom.


title: Women in Islam

text: "Women" or "Sūrat an-Nisāʼ" is the fourth chapter of the Quran. The title of the surah derives from the numerous references to women throughout the chapter, including verses 4:34 and 4:127 – 4:130.


title: Women in Islam

text: The above primary sources of influence on women of Islam do not deal with every conceivable situation over time. This led to the development of jurisprudence and religious schools with Islamic scholars that referred to resources such as identifying authentic documents, internal discussions, and establishing a consensus to find the correct religiously approved course of action for Muslims. These formed the secondary sources of influence for women. Among them are "ijmā'", "qiyās", "ijtihad", and others, depending on the sect and the corresponding schools of Islamic law. Included in secondary sources are the "fatwā", which are often widely distributed, orally or in writing by Muslim clerics, to the masses, in local language and describe behavior, roles, and rights of women that conforms with religious requirements. "Fatwa" are theoretically non-binding, but seriously considered and have often been practiced by most Muslims. The secondary sources classify the lawful and unlawful behaviors of Muslim men and women which typically fall into the five categories ("al-ahkam al-khamsa"): "wajib/fard" (obligatory), "mustahabb/mandub" (recommended), "mubah" (neutral), "makruh" (disapproved), and "haram" (forbidden). There is considerable controversy, change over time, and conflict between the secondary sources.


title: Women in Islam

text: Gender roles in Islam are simultaneously colored by two Quranic precepts: (i) spiritual equality between women and men; and (ii) the idea that women are meant to exemplify femininity, and men masculinity.


title: Women in Islam

text: Islam's basic view of women and men postulates a complementarity of functions: like everything else in the universe, humanity has been created in a pair (Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt, 51:49)neither can be complete without the other. In Islamic cosmological thinking, the universe is perceived as an equilibrium built on harmonious polar relationships between the pairs that make up all things. Moreover, all outward phenomena are reflections of inward noumena and ultimately of God.


title: Women in Islam

text: The emphasis which Islam places upon the feminine/masculine polarity (and therefore complementarity) results in a separation of social functions. In general, a woman's sphere of operation is the home in which she is the dominant figureand a man's corresponding sphere is the outside world. Women are highly respected in many aspects of domestic life such as being praised for their knowledge as ritual specialists, healers, caretakers, and those who arrange marriages in their community.


title: Women in Islam

text: However, this separation is not, in practice, as rigid as it appears. There are many examplesboth in the early history of Islam and in the contemporary worldof Muslim women who have played prominent roles in public life, including being sultanas, queens, elected heads of state and wealthy businesswomen. Moreover, it is important to recognize that in Islam, home and family are firmly situated at the centre of life in this world and of society: a man's work cannot take precedence over the private realm.


title: Women in Islam

text: The Quran dedicates numerous verses to Muslim women, their role, duties and rights, in addition to "Sura" 4 with 176 verses named "An-Nisa" ("Women"). And according to Hadith, prophet Muhammad commanded his male followers to be kind towards their wives.


title: Women in Islam

text: While Islam has sometimes been lauded for a historically more progressive portrayal of women, others criticize the Islamic religion for the discriminatory nature of its personal status laws and criminal code as applied to women. Islam's patriarchal values remain one of its most contested principles, although it is important to note that these values vary in the context of different Muslim-majority countries. Generally, however, male and female rights differ considerably according to Islamic personal status laws. For instance, Muslim men are permitted to engage in polygamy and marry Non-Muslim women while Muslim women are forbidden from having multiple husbands and marrying Non-Muslim men, and female inheritances are half of their male siblings’. Furthermore, conviction by Islamic criminal jurisprudence further discriminates against women, as it relies heavily on witness testimony. Female testimonies alone are considered insufficient to convict a murderer, requiring a male testimony for validation.


title: Women in Islam

text: Some interpretations of the Quran suggest that Islam does not explicitly require women to cover their heads or faces, though the observance of sexual modesty and plain dress for both Muslim men and women is prescribed by the "ḥadīth" literature and "sunnah" (deeds and sayings attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his companions). In practice, this is interpreted by most contemporary Muslims as requiring headcoverings for women and clothing from the navel to the knee for men. The practice of forced veiling is not due to any universal Islamic code; rather, the practice has risen under different contextual circumstances. The dress codes imposed in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, and Islamic schools that require girls to wear a headscarf, have all been cited as examples of forced veiling. These policies of forced veiling have been criticized as coercive instruments for gender segregation that deny female autonomy and agency. However, objections to this argument suggest that forced veiling does not constitute gender apartheid and that social constructions of the veil have wrongfully made it a symbol of gender inequality. During the five-year history of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime interpreted the "Sharia" law in accordance with the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence and the religious edicts of Mullah Omar. Women were banned from working, girls were forbidden to attend schools or universities, were requested to observe "purdah" and to be accompanied outside their households by male relatives; those who violated these restrictions were punished. Men were forbidden to shave their beards and required to let them grow and keep them long according to the Taliban's liking, and to wear turbans outside their households. Among other things, the Taliban also forbade both male and female participation in sport, including football and chess, as well as recreational activities such as kite-flying and keeping pigeons or other pets were also forbidden, and the birds were killed according to the Taliban's ruling.


title: Women in Islam

text: Women's rights activist Mahnaz Afkhami writes that the Islamic fundamentalist worldview "singles out women's status and her relations to society as the supreme test of the authenticity of the Islamic order." This is symbolized by the institutions of "purdah" (physical separation of the sexes) and "awrah" (concealing the body with clothing). As in much of the world, institutions suppressing women were becoming less powerful until the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism at the end of the 20th century. Walid Phares writes that Marxism in the Soviet Union and China, as well as "secular anticlericalism" in Turkey forced women to "integrate themselves into an antireligious society" resulting in a backlash of "gender apartheid" by Islamic fundamentalists. He notes that other religions also have "witnessed similar historical struggles".


title: Women in Islam

text: There are location-variations for women within mosques and congregations. Within some Islamic schools and branches, there are specific prayer variations for women. Women are not obligated to pray during their menstruation and for a period of time after childbirth. Majority of mosques worldwide have dedicated ladies-only prayer spaces. These include mosques in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as mosques in countries where Muslims are a minority group, like Singapore, South Korea, Japan and the United States. In India, as well as some mosques established by South Asian migrant communities in the UK, however, women are not permitted to enter mosques. This causes considerable concern and psychological distress for many Muslim women.


title: Women in Islam

text: The Quran, "ḥadīth" literature, and "sunnah" (the spoken or acted example attributed to Muhammad) advocate the rights of women and men equally to seek knowledge. The Quran commands all Muslims to exert effort in the pursuit of knowledge, irrespective of their biological sex: it constantly encourages Muslims to read, think, contemplate and learn from the signs of God in nature. Moreover, Muhammad encouraged education for both males and females: he declared that seeking knowledge was a religious duty binding upon every Muslim man and woman. Like her male counterpart, each woman is under a moral and religious obligation to seek knowledge, develop her intellect, broaden her outlook, cultivate her talents and then use her potential to the benefit of her soul and her society. Copyists made it evident that women were entitled to seek an education just as much as any man by stating in the "ḥadīth" literature that it is everyone's duty, whether male or female, to seek knowledge. Along with these ideals came with hesitation from some who believed an educated woman who could read and write was described as poisonous. Many women throughout the Muslim world took this opportunity to receive as much education that was permitted under the law.


title: Women in Islam

text: Muhammad's teachings were widely sought by both sexes, and accordingly at the time of his death it was reported that there were many female scholars of Islam. Additionally, the wives of Muhammadparticularly Aishaalso taught both women and men; many of his companions and followers learned the Quran, "ḥadīth", and Islamic jurisprudence ("fiqh") from Aisha. Notably, there was restriction placed on the type of knowledge acquired: a woman was free to choose any field of knowledge which is religious not other subject that interested her. Because Islam recognises that women are in principle wives and mothers, the acquisition of knowledge in fields which are complementary to these social roles was specially emphasized.


title: Women in Islam

text: James E. Lindsay states that Islam encouraged religious education of Muslim women. According to a "ḥadīth" in "Saḥih Muslim" variously attributed to Aisha and Muhammad, the women of the "ansar" were praiseworthy because shame did not prevent them from asking detailed questions about Islamic law.


title: Women in Islam

text: While it was not common for women to enroll as students in formal religious schools, it was common for women to attend informal lectures and study sessions at mosques, "madrassa" and other public places. For example, the attendance of women at the Fatimid Caliphate's "sessions of wisdom" ("majālis al-ḥikma") was noted by various historians, including Ibn al-Tuwayr, al-Muṣabbiḥī, and Imam. Historically, some Muslim women played an important role in the foundation of many religious educational institutions, such as Fatima al-Fihri's founding of the al-Karaouine mosque in , from which later developed the University of al-Karaouine. Many royal women were founders of educational institutions, including "madrassa". In Mamluk Cairo, women were responsible for endowing five "madrassa" and could even have the responsibility of being a supervisor of a madrasa administration if they had familial ties to a founder. According to the 12th-century Sunni scholar Ibn 'Asakir, there were various opportunities for female education during the Islamic Golden Age. He writes that women could study, earn "ijazah" (religious degrees) and qualify as "ulama" and Islamic teachers. Similarly, al-Sakhawi devotes one of the twelve volumes of his biographical dictionary "Daw al-Lami" to female religious scholars between 700 and , giving information on 1,075 of them.


title: Women in Islam

text: During the colonial era, until the early 20th century, there was a gender struggle among Muslims living under the British Empire; educating women was viewed as a prelude to social chaos, a threat to the moral order, and man's world was viewed as a source of Muslim identity. Muslim women in British India, nevertheless, pressed for their rights independently of men; by the 1930s, 2.5 million girls had entered schools, of which 0.5 million were Muslims.


title: Women in Islam

text: The mid-14th century saw a rise in women's participation, such as the teaching of "ḥadīth". This increase was due to the greater contribution to the education of women and greater encouragement in women's religious participation. Contact with scholars as well as the mosque allowed women to learn and obtain the credentials to teach the "ḥadīth". This newfound movement allowed for greater mobilization on the role of women in the passage of knowledge. The expansion of women's religious involvement helped challenge the role of women in the domestic sector and paved the way for a greater expansion of knowledge. "ḥadīth" transmission also allowed women to gain status by putting them in a pedigree that connected them to the time of Muhammad. Women who participated in the transmission of the "ḥadīth" were known as "muhaddithat".


title: Women in Islam

text: One way that Islamic scholars obtained knowledge was through traveling. Traveling for knowledge is highly encouraged not only among men but also among female scholars. Women could travel with their "mahram" or relatives to other towns to learn and acquire education in the study of "ḥadīth" literature. Furthermore, women scholars also took journeys to different cities to teach the "ḥadīth" as well as other genera of knowledge, such as literature and law. Students would undertake long journeys just to hear their teachings. Traveling for knowledge allows women scholars the ability to take part in religious teachings outside of their homes. Through traveling and other venues, women hadiths were able to contribute a tremendous amount to the transmission of knowledge in the Islamicate world.


title: Women in Islam

text: Zaynab bint al-Kamal (1248–1339 CE) was a famous "ḥadīth" scholar. She is known to have obtained numerous amounts of "ijazah" (permission to teach the "ḥadīth") throughout her life, especially in her early years. At the age of one, she received her first "ijazah" from Abd al-Khaliq al-Nishtibri. Her father was not a famous hadith transmitter, and there was no account of his role in her studies. However, it was noted that her uncle, Shams al-Din Muhammad, excel in the field of transmission and was most likely the one that facilitated her studies. Her reputation came from her association with al-Nishtibri, with students traveling far to hear her teachings. She was known as a reliable authority that encompasses different genera of studies. She held mixed classes in al-Madrasa al-Diya’iyyah, a congregational mosque, and her home. Students would come from afar to listen to her teachings. She is also known to travel to Egypt and Medina to teach her works. In her later years, she continued to thrive as a teacher. She also repeated her cycle by giving out "ijazah" to her students during their early years. In a field where male "ḥadīth" teachers predominate, her reputation helped pave the way for more female transmitters of the "ḥadīth". Furthermore, she acts as the last connection to the work of famous scholars that might have passed during her time.


title: Women in Islam

text: In a 2013 statement, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation noted that restricted access to education is among the challenges faced by girls and women in the developing world, including OIC member states. UNICEF notes that out of 24 nations with less than 60% female primary enrollment rates, 17 were Islamic nations; more than half the adult population is illiterate in several Islamic countries, and the proportion reaches 70% among Muslim women. UNESCO estimates that the literacy rate among adult women was about 50% or less in a number of Muslim-majority countries, including Morocco, Yemen, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Niger, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Chad. Egypt had a female literacy rate of 64% in 2010, Iraq of 71% and Indonesia of 90%. Literacy has been improving in Saudi Arabia since the 1970s, the female literacy rate in 2017 for women ages 15–24 was 99.3%, equivalent to the male literacy rate of 99.3%. Western ideals have had an influence over education in Muslim countries due to the increased demand of literacy in males and females. It is evident that more women are making an effort to receive an education by attending primary and secondary school in Muslim countries.


title: Women in Islam

text: Some scholars contend that Islamic nations have the world's highest gender gap in education. The 2012 World Economic Forum annual gender gap study finds the 17 out of 18 worst performing nations, out of a total of 135 nations, are the following members of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC): Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, (Nepal), Turkey, Oman, Egypt, Iran, Mali, Morocco, Côte d'Ivoire, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Chad, Pakistan, and Yemen.


title: Women in Islam

text: In contrast, UNESCO notes that at 37% the share of female researchers in Arab states compares well with other regions. In Turkey, the proportion of female university researchers is slightly higher (36%) than the average for the 27-member European Union as of 2012 (33%). Comparably, at 36.5%, the overall share of women researchers at universities and science centres in North Africa is above world (22.5%), European (33%) and developed country (26%) averages. In Iran, women account for over 60% of university students. Similarly, in Malaysia, Algeria, and in Saudi Arabia, the majority of university students have been female in recent years, while in 2016 Emirati women constituted 76.8% of people enrolled at universities in the United Arab Emirates. At the University of Jordan, which is Jordan's largest and oldest university, 65% of students were female in 2013.


title: Women in Islam

text: In a number of OIC member states, the ratio of women to men in tertiary education is exceptionally high. Qatar leads the world in this respect, having 6.66 females in higher education for every male as of 2015. Other Muslim-majority states with notably more women university students than men include Kuwait, where 41% of females attend university compared with 18% of males; Bahrain, where the ratio of women to men in tertiary education is 2.18:1; Brunei Darussalam, where 33% of women enroll at university vis à vis 18% of men; Tunisia, which has a women to men ratio of 1.62 in higher education; and Kyrgyzstan, where the equivalent ratio is 1.61. Additionally, in Kazakhstan, there were 115 female students for every 100 male students in tertiary education in 1999; according to the World Bank, this ratio had increased to 144:100 by 2008.


title: Women in Islam

text: A notable development specific to the study of physics is that women in Muslim-majority countries enjoy significantly greater representation than their counterparts in the United States: in the US, women make up 21% of physics undergraduates and 20% of PhD students, while the equivalent figures for Muslim-majority nations are 60%+ and 47% respectively. Female physicists who studied in Muslim-majority states and then moved to the US for academic positions noted that when they were in their previous locations, 'they did not feel they had to suppress their femininity to have their intellect – and not their appearance – be the focus of the interaction'.


title: Women in Islam

text: Similarly, the very high (c.50%) female engineering enrolment rates in three diverse OIC member states – Tunisia, Jordan and Malaysia – have prompted the incorporation of Women in Engineering in Predominately Muslim Countries ('WIEPMCS') at three American universities (Washington State, Purdue and Western Washington). The aim of this project is to 'shed light more generally on how context shapes women's successful participation in STEM in ways that inform our efforts to broaden participation in the US', where female enrolment rates in engineering are typically 15–20%.


title: Women in Islam

text: In the United States, a recent study done by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that Muslim American women (73%) are more likely than Muslim American men (57%) to achieve higher education (post-high school education or higher).


title: Women in Islam

text: Some scholars refer to verse 28:23 in the Quran and to Khadijah, Muhammad's first wife, a merchant before and after converting to Islam, as indications that Muslim women may undertake employment outside their homes.


title: Women in Islam

text: Traditional interpretations of Islam require a woman to have her husband's permission to leave the house and take up employment, though scholars such as Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa and Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Ebrahim Jannaati have said that women do not require a husband's permission to leave the house and work.


title: Women in Islam

text: During medieval times, the labor force in Spanish Caliphate included women in diverse occupations and economic activities such as farming, construction workers, textile workers, managing slave girls, collecting taxes from prostitutes, as well as presidents of guilds, creditors, religious scholars.


title: Women in Islam

text: In the 12th century, Ibn Rushd claimed that women were equal to men in all respects and possessed equal capacities to shine, citing examples of female warriors among the Arabs, Greeks and Africans to support his case. In the early history of Islam, examples of notable female Muslims who fought during the Muslim conquests and Fitna (civil wars) as soldiers or generals included Nusaybah bint Ka'ab a.k.a. Umm Amarah, Aisha, Kahula and Wafeira.


title: Women in Islam

text: Medieval Bimarestan or hospitals included female staff as female nurses. Muslim hospitals were also the first to employ female physicians, such as Banu Zuhr family who served the Almohad caliph ruler Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur in the 12th century. This was necessary due to the segregation of male and female patients in Islamic hospitals. Later in the 15th century, female surgeons were employed at Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu's "Cerrahiyyetu'l-Haniyye" (Imperial Surgery).


title: Women in Islam

text: Islamic faith states that in the eyes of God, men and women should be equal and are allowed to fulfill the same roles. Therefore, they also are required to complete all the duties of a Muslim worshiper, including the completion of religious traditions, specifically the pilgrimage to Mecca. Islamic culture marked a movement towards liberation and equality for women, since prior Arab cultures did not enable women to have such freedoms. There is evidence that Muhammad asked women for advice and took their thoughts into account, specifically with regard to the Quran. Women were allowed to pray with men, take part in commercial interactions, and played a role in education. One of Muhammad's wives, Aisha, played a significant role in medicine, history and rhetoric. Women, however, did not hold religious titles, but some held political power with their husbands or on their own. The historic role of women in Islam is connected to societal patriarchal ideals, rather than actual ties to the Quran. The issue of women in Islam is becoming more prevalent in modern society.


title: Women in Islam

text: Patterns of women's employment vary throughout the Muslim world: as of 2005, 16% of Pakistani women were "economically active" (either employed, or unemployed but available to furnish labor), whereas 52% of Indonesian women were. According to a 2012 World Economic Forum report and other recent reports, Islamic nations in the Middle East and North Africa region are increasing their creation of economic and employment opportunities for women; compared, however, to every other region in the world, the Middle East and North African region ranks lowest on economic participation, employment opportunity and the political empowerment of women. Ten countries with the lowest women labour force participation in the worldJordan, Oman, Morocco, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Syriaare Islamic countries, as are the four countries that have no female parliamentarians.


title: Women in Islam

text: Women are allowed to work in Islam, subject to certain conditions. For example, an acceptable circumstance is if a woman is in financial need and her employment does not cause her to neglect her important role as a mother and wife. It has been claimed that it is the responsibility of the Muslim community to organize work for women, so that she can do so in a Muslim cultural atmosphere, where her rights (as set out in the Quran) are respected. Islamic law however, permits women to work in Islamic conditions, such as the work not requiring the woman to violate Islamic law (e.g., serving alcohol), and that she maintain her modesty while she performs any work outside her home.


title: Women in Islam

text: In some cases, when women have the right to work and are educated, women's job opportunities may in practice be unequal to those of men. In Egypt for example, women have limited opportunities to work in the private sector because women are still expected to put their role in the family first, which causes men to be seen as more reliable in the long term. In Saudi Arabia, it was illegal for Saudi women to drive until June 2018. It is becoming more common for Saudi Arabian women to procure driving licences from other Gulf Cooperation Council states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.


title: Women in Islam

text: According to the International Business Report (2014) published by global accounting network Grant Thornton, Indonesiawhich is the world's largest Muslim country by populationhas ≥40% of senior business management positions occupied by women, a greater proportion than the United States (22%) and Denmark (14%). Prominent female business executives in the Islamic world include Güler Sabancı, the CEO of the industrial and financial conglomerate Sabancı Holding; Ümit Boyner, a non-executive director at Boyner Holding who was the chairwoman of TÜSİAD, the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen Association, from 2010 to 2013; Bernadette Ruth Irawati Setiady, the CEO of PT Kalbe Farma Tbk., the largest pharmaceutical company in the ASEAN trade bloc; Atiek Nur Wahyuni, the director of Trans TV, a major free-to-air television station in Indonesia; and Elissa Freiha, a founding partner of the UAE-based investment platform WOMENA.


title: Women in Islam

text: In the United States, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that, "Instead of hiding, Muslim women responded to a Trump win with greater giving." Nearly 30% of Muslim women vs. 19% of Muslim men have increased their donations to an organization associated with their faith community since the 2016 US presidential election, demonstrating a level of financial independence and influence.


title: Women in Islam

text: According to all schools of Islamic law, the injunctions of the sharia of Islam apply to all Muslims, male and female, who have reached the age of maturityand only to them. All Muslims are in principle equal before the law. The Quran especially emphasises that its injunctions concern both men and women in several verses where both are addressed clearly and in a distinct manner, such as in Sūrat al-Aḥzāb at 33:35 ('Verily, men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender...').


title: Women in Islam

text: Most Muslim-majority countries, and some countries with a considerable population of Muslim minorities, follow a mixed legal system, with positive laws and state courts, as well as "sharia"-based religious laws and religious courts. Those countries that use sharia for legal matters involving women, adopt it mostly for personal law; however, a few Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen also have sharia-based criminal laws.


title: Women in Islam

text: According to Jan Michiel Otto, "[a]nthropological research shows that people in local communities often do not distinguish clearly whether and to what extent their norms and practices are based on local tradition, tribal custom, or religion." In some areas, tribal practices such as "vani", Ba'ad and "honor" killing remain an integral part of the customary legal processes involving Muslim women. In turn, article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code, which reduces sentences for killing female relatives over adultery, and is commonly believed to be derived from Islamic law, was in fact borrowed from French criminal law during the Ottoman era.


title: Women in Islam

text: Other than applicable laws to Muslim women, there is gender-based variation in the process of testimony and acceptable forms of evidence in legal matters. Some Islamic jurists have held that certain types of testimony by women may not be accepted. In other cases, the testimony of two women equals that of one man.


title: Women in Islam

text: According to verse 4:32 of the Quran, both men and women have an independent economic position: 'For men is a portion of what they earn, and for women is a portion of what they earn. Ask God for His grace. God has knowledge of all things.' Women therefore are at liberty to buy, sell, mortgage, lease, borrow or lend, and sign contracts and legal documents. Additionally, women can donate money, act as trustees and set up a business or company. These rights cannot be altered, irrespective of marital status. When a woman is married, she legally has total control over the dowerthe "mahr" or bridal gift, usually financial in nature, while the groom pays to the bride upon marriageand retains this control in the event of divorce.


title: Women in Islam

text: Quranic principles, especially the teaching of "zakāh" or purification of wealth, encourage women to own, invest, save and distribute their earnings and savings according to their discretion. These also acknowledge and enforce the right of women to participate in various economic activities.


title: Women in Islam

text: In contrast to many other cultures, a woman in Islam has always been entitled as per sharia law to keep her family name and not take her husband's name. Therefore, a Muslim woman has traditionally always been known by the name of her family as an indication of her individuality and her own legal identity: there is no historically practiced process of changing the names of women be they married, divorced or widowed. With the spread of western-style state bureaucracies across the Islamic world from the nineteenth century onwards, this latter convention has come under increasing pressure, and it is now commonplace for Muslim women to change their names upon marriage.


title: Women in Islam

text: Bernard Lewis says that classical Islamic civilization granted free Muslim women relatively more property rights than women in the West, even as it sanctified three basic inequalities between master and slave, man and woman, believer and unbeliever. Even in cases where property rights were granted in the West, they were very limited and covered only upper-class women. Over time, while women's rights have improved elsewhere, those in many Muslim-dominated countries have remained comparatively restricted.


title: Women in Islam

text: Women's property rights in the Quran are from parents and near relatives. A woman, according to Islamic tradition, does not have to give her pre-marriage possessions to her husband and receive a "mahr" (dower) which she then owns. Furthermore, any earnings that a woman receives through employment or business, after marriage, is hers to keep and need not contribute towards family expenses. This is because, once the marriage is consummated, in exchange for "tamkin" (sexual submission), a woman is entitled to "nafaqa" – namely, the financial responsibility for reasonable housing, food and other household expenses for the family, including the spouse, falls entirely on the husband. In traditional Islamic law, a woman is also not responsible for the upkeep of the home and may demand payment for any work she does in the domestic sphere.


title: Women in Islam

text: Property rights enabled some Muslim women to possess substantial assets and fund charitable endowments. In mid-sixteenth century Istanbul, 36.8% of charitable endowments (awqāf) were founded by women. In eighteenth century Cairo, 126 out of 496 charitable foundations (25.4%) were endowed by women. Between 1770 and 1840, 241 out of 468 or 51% of charitable endowments in Aleppo were founded by women.


title: Women in Islam

text: The Quran grants inheritance rights to wife, daughter, and sisters of the deceased. However, women's inheritance rights to her father's property are unequal to her male siblings, and varies based on number of sisters, stepsisters, stepbrothers, if mother is surviving, and other claimants. The rules of inheritance are specified by a number of Quran verses, including "Surah" "Baqarah" (chapter 2) verses 180 and 240; "Surah" "Nisa(h)" (chapter 4) verses 7–11, 19 and 33; and "Surah" "Maidah" (chapter 5), verses 106–108. Three verses in "Surah" "Nisah" (chapter 4), verses 11, 12 and 176, describe the share of close relatives. The religious inheritance laws for women in Islam are different from inheritance laws for non-Muslim women under common laws.


title: Women in Islam

text: The Islamic teaching of going out of one's way to treat women equitably in financial dealings is exemplified by a story featuring Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān ibn Thābit ibn Zūṭā (700–767) – the founder of the Ḥanafī School of Law, who in his earlier life was a textile merchant in a garrison town – and a woman who came to his store offering to sell Abū Ḥanīfa a silk garment. The author and investment banker Harris Irfan narrates the story as follows:


title: Women in Islam

text: "The lady offered to sell the garment to Abu Hanifa for 100 dirhams but Abu Hanifa would not buy it. 'It is worth more than a hundred', he told the surprised woman. 'How much?' he asked her again. She offered to sell it for 200 dirhams and he turned her down. Then she asked for 300, then 400, at which point the exasperated woman scolded him. 'You are mocking me', she declared, and prepared to walk away from the deal to try her luck elsewhere. So they summoned another merchant and he solemnly valued the garment at 500 dirhams. Rather than profit from the woman's ignorance, Abu Hanifa had opted to settle for a fair trade, a principle he would abide by all his life – that the greedy should be regulated from taking advantage of the vulnerable."


title: Women in Islam

text: Zina is an Islamic legal term referring to unlawful sexual intercourse. According to traditional jurisprudence, zina can include adultery (of married parties), fornication (of unmarried parties), prostitution, bestiality, and, according to some scholars, rape. The Quran disapproved of the promiscuity prevailing in Arabia at the time, and several verses refer to unlawful sexual intercourse, including one that prescribes the punishment of 100 lashes for fornicators. Zina thus belong to the class of "hadd" (pl. "hudud") crimes, which have Quranically specified punishments.


title: Women in Islam

text: Although stoning for zina is not mentioned in the Quran, all schools of traditional jurisprudence agreed on the basis of hadith that it is to be punished by stoning if the offender is "muhsan" (adult, free, Muslim, and having been married), with some extending this punishment to certain other cases and milder punishment prescribed in other scenarios. The offenders must have acted of their own free will. According to traditional jurisprudence, zina must be proved by testimony of four adult, pious male eyewitnesses to the actual act of penetration, or a confession repeated four times and not retracted later. Any Muslim who accuses another Muslim of zina but fails to produce the required witnesses commits the crime of false accusation (qadhf, القذف). Some contend that this sharia requirement of four eyewitnesses severely limits a man's ability to prove zina charges against women, a crime often committed without eyewitnesses. The Maliki legal school also allows an unmarried woman's pregnancy to be used as evidence, but the punishment can be averted by a number of legal "semblances" ("shubuhat"), such as existence of an invalid marriage contract. These requirements made zina virtually impossible to prove in practice.


title: Women in Islam

text: Aside from "a few rare and isolated" instances from the pre-modern era and several recent cases, there is no historical record of stoning for zina being legally carried out. Zina became a more pressing issue in modern times, as Islamist movements and governments employed polemics against public immorality. After sharia-based criminal laws were widely replaced by European-inspired statutes in the modern era, in recent decades several countries passed legal reforms that incorporated elements of hudud laws into their legal codes. Iran witnessed several highly publicized stonings for zina in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. In Nigeria local courts have passed several stoning sentences, all of which were overturned on appeal or left unenforced. While the harsher punishments of the Hudood Ordinances have never been applied in Pakistan, in 2005 Human Rights Watch reported that over 200,000 zina cases against women were underway at various levels in Pakistan's legal system.


title: Women in Islam

text: In 'qazf' when someone accuses a chaste woman without four witnesses then he is to be punished with being flogged with eighty lashes. His testimony will become inadmissible forever unless he repents and improves (24:4–5) However, in 'lian', when the husband accuses the wife of adultery without witnesses, he have to swear five times each to support his case. If he takes oaths she is to be punished with 100 flogging and stoning unless she too takes oaths in similar way to support her case, her oaths are upheld over his and she will not be punished(24:6–9).


title: Women in Islam

text: Rape is considered a serious sexual crime in Islam, and can be defined in Islamic law as: "Forcible illegal sexual intercourse by a man with a woman who is not legally married to him, without her free will and consent".


title: Women in Islam

text: Sharia law makes a distinction between adultery and rape and applies different rules. According to Professor Oliver Leaman, the required testimony of four male witnesses having seen the actual penetration applies to illicit sexual relations (i.e. adultery and fornication), not to rape. The requirements for proof of rape are less stringent:


title: Women in Islam

text: Rape charges can be brought and a case proven based on the sole testimony of the victim, providing that circumstantial evidence supports the allegations. It is these strict criteria of proof which lead to the frequent observation that where injustice against women does occur, it is not because of Islamic law. It happens either due to misinterpretation of the intricacies of the sharia laws governing these matters, or cultural traditions; or due to corruption and blatant disregard of the law, or indeed some combination of these phenomena.


title: Women in Islam

text: In the case of rape, the adult male perpetrator (i.e. rapist) of such an act is to receive the ḥadd zinā, but the non-consenting or invalidly consenting female (i.e. rape victim) is to be regarded as innocent of zinā and relieved of the ḥadd punishment.


title: Women in Islam

text: Rape laws in a number of Muslim-majority countries have been a subject of controversy. In some of these countries, such as Morocco, the penal code is neither based on Islamic law nor significantly influenced by it, while in other cases, such as Pakistan's Hudood Ordinances, the code incorporates elements of Islamic law.


title: Women in Islam

text: In Afghanistan and Dubai, some women who made accusations of rape have been charged with fornication or adultery. This law was amended in Pakistan in 2006.


title: Women in Islam

text: Regarding the hadith, that is used to prove the half-testimony status, Ghamidi and members of his foundation, Al-Mawrid, argue against its reliability and its common understanding. Ghamidi also contends that the narration cannot be used in all general cases because it is related to the Qur'an verse whose subject is related only to financial matters. Another Pakistani religious scholar Ishaq argues that acquiring conclusive evidence is important, regardless of whether it can be obtained from just one man or just one woman. According to Ghamidi, regarding the verse Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyya also held similar views to his.


title: Women in Islam

text: Al-Qayyim argued that the verse relates to the heavy responsibility of testifying by which an owner of wealth protects his rights, not with the decision of a court; the two are completely different from each other. It is also argued that this command shows that the Qur'an does not want to make difficulties for women. Ibn Taymiyya also reasoned the deficiency of using Qur'an 2:282 to prove evidentiary discrimination against women. However, both Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyya "did" believe in the difference of probative value of men's and women's testimony. It is argued that even though Ibn al-Qayyim believed that women were more prone to making errors, instead of concluding a general discrimination from this, women's testimony was to be treated on an individual basis. This is because Ibn al-Qayyim contended that in cases where a woman and man share all the Islamic good qualities of a witness, a woman's testimony corroborated by another woman may "actually" be considered stronger than the uncorroborated testimony of a man. Additionally, Ibn al-Qayyim also regarded the testimony of some exceptional women like those who transmitted the Hadith as doubtlessly greater than a single man of lesser esteem.


title: Women in Islam

text: Ibn Taymiyyah wrote:"فَمَا كَانَ مِنْ الشَّهَادَاتِ لَا يُخَافُ فِيهِ الضَّلَالُ فِي الْعَادَةِ لَمْ تَكُنْ فِيهِ عَلَى نِصْفِ رَجُلٍ"


title: Women in Islam

text: "Whatever there is among the testimonies of women, which there is no fear of habitual error, then they are not considered as half of a man."Ibn al-Qayyim writes:"وَالْمَرْأَةُ الْعَدْلُ كَالرَّجُلِ فِي الصِّدْقِ وَالْأَمَانَةِ وَالدِّيَانَة إلَّا أَنَّهَا لَمَّا خِيفَ عَلَيْهَا السَّهْوُ وَالنِّسْيَانُ قَوِيَتْ بِمِثْلِهَا وَذَلِكَ قَدْ يَجْعَلُهَا أَقْوَى مِنْ الرَّجُلِ الْوَاحِدِ أَوْ مِثْلَهُ" "The woman is equal to the man in honesty, trust, and piety; otherwise, whenever it is feared that she will forget or misremember, she is strengthened with another like herself. That makes them stronger than a single man or the likes of him."In Islamic law, testimony ("shahada") is defined as attestation of knowledge with regard to a right of a second party against a third. It exists alongside other forms of evidence, such as the oath, confession, and circumstantial evidence. In classical sharia criminal law men and women are treated differently with regard to evidence and bloodmoney. The testimony of a man has twice the strength of that of a woman. However, with regard to "hadd" offenses and retaliation, the testimonies of female witnesses are not admitted at all. A number of Muslim-majority countries, particularly in the Arab world, presently treat a woman's testimony as half of a man's in certain cases, mainly in family disputes adjudicated based on Islamic law.


title: Women in Islam

text: Classical commentators commonly explained the unequal treatment of testimony by asserting that women's nature made them more prone to error than men. Muslim modernists have followed the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh in viewing the relevant scriptural passages as conditioned on the different gender roles and life experiences that prevailed at the time rather than women's innately inferior mental capacities, making the rule not generally applicable in all times and places. According to other explanations, the reason behind this inequality is that in a household a portion of the male's share has to go on into caring for the family and providing their needs, meanwhile the female can act freely with her share


title: Women in Islam

text: The word "strike" in this verse which is understood as "beating" or "hitting" in English – w'aḍribūhunna – is derived from the Arabic root word ḍaraba, which has over fifty derivations and definitions, including "to separate', "to oscillate" and "to play music". The common conservative interpretations translate and understand the word to mean as strike or beat in this verse, with many making a special note of the striking being specifically of low severity, however, there does exist Islamic thought that suggests a different interpretation also. Even within the Quran itself, the most common use of this word is not with the definition "to beat", but as verb phrases which provide a number of other meanings, including, as argued by some, several which are more plausible within the context of 4:34, such as "to leave [your wife in the event of disloyalty]", and "to draw them lovingly towards you [following temporarily not sleeping with them in protest at their disloyal behaviour].


title: Women in Islam

text: Sharia law addresses domestic violence through the concept of darar or harm that encompasses several types of abuse against a spouse, including physical abuse. The laws concerning darar state that if a woman is being harmed in her marriage, she can have it annulled: physically assaulting a wife violates the marriage contract and is grounds for immediate divorce.


title: Women in Islam

text: Sharia court records from the Ottoman period illustrate the ability of women to seek justice when subject to physical abuse: as a notable 1687 case from Aleppo demonstrates, courts gave out penalties such as corporal punishment to abusive husbands.


title: Women in Islam

text: A sixteenth-century fatwa issued by the Şeyhülislam (Shaykh al-Islam, the highest religious authority in the jurisdiction) of the Ottoman Empire stated that in the event of a judge becoming aware of serious spousal abuse, he has the legal authority to prevent the husband hurting his wife "by whatever means possible", including ordering their separation (at the request of the wife).


title: Women in Islam

text: Jonathan A.C. Brown gives the wider scholarly tendency when it comes to the verse: The vast majority of the ulama across the Sunni schools of law inherited Muhammad's unease over domestic violence and placed further restrictions on the evident meaning of the 'Wife Beating Verse'. A leading Meccan scholar from the second generation of Muslims, Ata' bin Abi Rabah, counseled a husband not to beat his wife even if she ignored him but rather to express his anger in some other way. Darimi, a teacher of both Tirmidhi and Muslim bin Hajjaj as well as a leading early scholar in Iran, collected all the Hadiths showing Muhammad's disapproval of beating in a chapter entitled 'The Prohibition on Striking Women'. A thirteenth-century scholar from Granada, Ibn Faras, notes that one camp of ulama had staked out a stance forbidding striking a wife altogether, declaring it contrary to Muhammad's example and denying the authenticity of any Hadiths that seemed to permit beating. Even Ibn Hajar, the pillar of late medieval Sunni Hadith scholarship, concludes that, contrary to what seems to be an explicit command in the Quran, the hadiths of Muhammad leave no doubt that striking one's wife to discipline her actually falls under the sharia ruling of 'strongly disliked' or 'disliked verging on prohibited.


title: Women in Islam

text: In recent years, numerous prominent scholars in the tradition of "orthodox Islam" have issued fatwas (legal opinions) against domestic violence. These include the Shī'ite scholar Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who promulgated a fatwa on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 2007, which states that Islam forbids men from exercising any form of violence against women; Shakyh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, the Chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, who co-authored "The Prohibition of Domestic Violence in Islam" (2011) with Dr. Homayra Ziad; and Cemalnur Sargut, the president of the Turkish Women's Cultural Association (TÜRKKAD), who has stated that men who engage in domestic violence "in a sense commit polytheism ("shirk")": "Such people never go on a diet to curb the desires of their ego...[Conversely] In his "Mathnawi" Rumi says love for women is because of witnessing Allah as reflected in the mirror of their being. According to "tasawwuf", woman is the light of Allah's beauty shed onto this earth. Again in [the] "Mathanawi" Rumi says a man who is wise and fine-spirited is understanding and compassionate towards a woman, and never wants to hurt or injure her."


title: Women in Islam

text: Some scholars claim Islamic law, such as verse 4:34 of Quran, allows and encourages domestic violence against women, when a husband suspects "nushuz" (disobedience, disloyalty, rebellion, ill conduct) in his wife. Other scholars claim wife beating, for "nashizah", is not consistent with modern perspectives of Quran.


title: Women in Islam

text: There are a number of translations of this verse from the Arabic original, and all vary to some extent. Some Muslims, such as Islamic feminist groups, argue that Muslim men use the text as an excuse for domestic violence.


title: Women in Islam

text: In Muhammad's Farewell Sermon as recorded in al-Tabari's History, and in a Sahih Hadith collected by Abu Dawud, he instructed husbands to beat their wives, without severity (فَاضْرِبُوهُنَّ ضَرْبًا غَيْرَ مُبَرِّحٍ "fadribuhunna darban ghayra mubarrih"; literal translation: "beat them, a beating without severity") When asked by Ibn Abbas the cousin and companion of Muhammd Ibn Abbas replied back: "I asked Ibn Abbas: 'What is the hitting that is Ghayr Al-Mubarrih (Without Severity) ?' He replied [with] the siwak (toothbrush like a twig) and the like'. This is obtained not only from the context of the sermon and the hadith cited, but also from the cited Cliff Note 772 in Vol. IX of Al-Tabari's history. Ibn 'Abbas, a companion of Muhammad also the uncle of Muhammad, is recorded in the Tafsir of al-Tabari for verse 4:34 as saying that beating without severity is using a "siwak" (small tooth cleaning object) or something similar to it. There are sources that say that Muhammad himself never hit a woman and forbade it. In a hadith collected by Abu Dawud, Muhammad told men not to hit their wives on the face.Narrated Mu'awiyah al-Qushayri:


title: Women in Islam

text: Mu'awiyah asked: Messenger of Allah, what is the right of the wife of one of us over him? He replied: That you should give her food when you eat, clothe her when you clothe yourself, do not strike her on the face, do not revile her or separate yourself from her except in the house. Abu Dawud said: The meaning of "do not revile her" is, as you say: "May Allah revile you".


title: Women in Islam

text: Another hadith narration of the Farewell Sermon appears in Sunan Ibn Majah. The Arabic phrase mentioned above is here translated, "hit them, but without causing injury or leaving a mark."


title: Women in Islam

text: Some conservative translations suggest Muslim husbands are permitted to use "light force" on their wives, and others claim permissibly to strike them with a Miswak and chastise them. The relationship between Islam and domestic violence is disputed by some Islamic scholars.


title: Women in Islam

text: The Lebanese educator and journalist 'Abd al-Qadir al-Maghribi argued that perpetrating acts of domestic violence goes against Muḥammad's own example and injunction. In his 1928 essay, "Muḥammad and Woman", al-Maghribi said: "He [Muḥammad] prohibited a man from beating his wife and noted that beating was not appropriate for the marital relationship between them". Muḥammad underlined the moral and logical inconsistency in beating one's wife during the day and then praising her at night as a prelude to conjugal relations. The Austrian scholar and translator of the Quran Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss) said: It is evident from many authentic traditions that the Prophet himself intensely detested the idea of beating one's wife...According to another tradition, he forbade the beating of any woman with the words, "Never beat God's handmaidens."'


title: Women in Islam

text: In practice, the legal doctrine of many Islamic nations, in deference to sharia law, have refused to include, consider or prosecute cases of domestic violence, limiting legal protections available to Muslim women. In 2010, for example, the highest court of United Arab Emirates (Federal Supreme Court) considered a lower court's ruling, and upheld a husband's right to "chastise" his wife and children with physical violence. Article 53 of the United Arab Emirates' penal code acknowledges the right of a "chastisement by a husband to his wife and the chastisement of minor children" so long as the assault does not exceed the limits prescribed by Sharia. In Lebanon, as many as three-quarters of all Lebanese women have suffered physical abuse at the hands of husbands or male relatives at some point in their lives. In Afghanistan, over 85% of women report domestic violence; other nations with very high rates of domestic violence and limited legal rights include Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In some Islamic countries such as Turkey, where legal protections against domestic violence have been enacted, serial domestic violence by husband and other male members of her family is mostly ignored by witnesses and accepted by women without her getting legal help, according to a Government of Turkey report.


title: Women in Islam

text: Turkey was the first country in Europe to ratify (on March 14, 2012) the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, which is known as the Istanbul Convention because it was first opened for signature in Turkey's largest city (on May 11, 2011). Three other European countries with a significant (≥c.20%) Muslim population – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro – have also ratified the convention, while Macedonia is a signatory to the document. The aim of the convention is to create a Europe free from violence against women and domestic violence. On December 10, 2014, the Serbian-Turkish pop star Emina Jahović released a video clip entitled "Ne plašim se" ("I'm not scared") to help raise awareness of domestic violence in the Balkans. "Ne plašim se" highlighted the link between alcohol consumption and domestic abuse. The film's release date was timed to coincide with the United Nations' Human Rights Day.


title: Women in Islam

text: In the United States, a recent 2017 study done by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that, "Domestic violence occurs in the Muslim community as often as it does in Christian and non- affiliated communities, but Muslim victims are more likely to involve faith leaders.". Data from the study demonstrates that among American Muslims 13% of those surveyed said they knew someone in their faith community who was a victim of domestic violence, a number similar to that of Catholics (15%), Protestants (17%), of non-affiliated (14%), and even the general public (15%). Among Americans Muslims who knew of a domestic violence incident in the past year, the percentage of them who said the crime was reported to law enforcement (50%) is comparable to other groups and the general public as well. American Muslim respondents reported that a faith leader was informed of the domestic violence about half the time, a significantly higher rate than any other faith group surveyed in the poll.


title: Women in Islam

text: Among classical Muslim authors, the notion of love was developed along three conceptual lines, conceived in an ascending hierarchical order: natural love, intellectual love, and divine love. The notion of 'ishq or passionate love is absent in the Qur'an and was introduced by the Persian writer Ahmad Ghazali.


title: Women in Islam

text: In traditional Islamic societies, love between men and women was widely celebrated, and both the popular and classical literature of the Muslim world is replete with works on this theme. Throughout Islamic history, intellectuals, theologians, and mystics have extensively discussed the nature and characteristics of romantic love ("'ishq"). In its most common intellectual interpretation of the Islamic Golden Age, "ishq" refers to an irresistible desire to obtain possession of the beloved, expressing a deficiency that the lover must remedy to reach perfection.


title: Women in Islam

text: The Arab love story of Lāyla and Majnūn was arguably more widely known amongst Muslims than that of Romeo and Juliet in (Northern) Europe, while the Persian author Jāmī's retelling of the story of Yusuf (Joseph) and Zulaykhā — based upon the narrative of Surat Yusuf in the Quran – is a seminal text in the Persian, Urdu, and Bengali literary canons. The growth of affection ("mawadda") into passionate love ("ishq") received its most probing and realistic analysis in "The Ring of the Dove" by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm. The theme of romantic love continues to be developed in the modern and even postmodern fiction from the Islamic world: "The Black Book" (1990) by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is a nominal detective story with extensive meditations on mysticism and obsessive love, while another Turkish writer, Elif Şafak, intertwines romantic love and Sufism in her 2010 book "The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi".


title: Women in Islam

text: In Sufism, romantic love is viewed as a metaphysical metaphor for the love of God. However, the importance of love extends beyond the metaphorical. This is evident in the romantic relationship between Rumi, who is widely recognised as the greatest poet of Sufism, and his mentor Shams Tabrizi. IbnʿArabī posited also that for a man, sex with a woman is the occasion for experiencing God's 'greatest self-disclosure' (the position is similar vice versa):


title: Women in Islam

text: The most intense and perfect contemplation of God is through women, and the most intense union is the conjugal act.


title: Women in Islam

text: This emphasis on the sublimity of the conjugal act holds true for both this world and the next: the fact that Islam considers sexual relationships one of the ultimate pleasures of paradise is well-known; moreover, there is no suggestion that this is for the sake of producing children. Accordingly, (and in common with civilisations such as the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese), the Islamic world has historically generated significant works of erotic literature and technique, and many centuries before such a genre became culturally acceptable in the West: Richard Burton's substantially ersatz 1886 translation of "The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight", a fifteenth-century sex manual authored by Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Nafzawi, was labelled as being 'for private circulation only' owing to the puritanical mores and corresponding censorship laws of Victorian England.


title: Women in Islam

text: Particularly within the context of religion – a domain which is often associated with sexual asceticism – Muḥammad is notable for emphasising the importance of loving women. According to a famous ḥadīth, Muḥammad stated: "Three things of this world of yours were made lovable to me: women, perfume – and the coolness of my eye was placed in the ritual prayer". This is enormously significant because in the Islamic faith, Muḥammad is by definition the most perfect human being and the most perfect male: his love for women shows that the perfection of the human state is connected with love for other human beings, not simply with love for God. More specifically, it illustrates that male perfection lies in women and, by implication, female perfection in men. Consequently, the love Muḥammad had for women is obligatory on all men, since he is the model of perfection that must be emulated.


title: Women in Islam

text: Prominent figures in Islamic mysticism have elaborated on this theme. Ibn 'Arabī reflected on the above ḥadīth as follows: "...he [Muḥammad] mentioned women [as one of three things from God's world made lovable to him]. Do you think that which would take him far from his Lord was made lovable to him? Of course not. That which would bring him near to his Lord was made lovable to him.


title: Women in Islam

text: "He who knows the measure of women and their mystery will not renounce love for them. On the contrary, one of the perfections of the gnostic is love for them, for this is a prophetic heritage and a divine love. For the Prophet said, '[women] were made lovable to me.' Hence he ascribed his love for them only to God. Ponder this chapter – you will see wonders!"


title: Women in Islam

text: Ibn 'Arabī held that witnessing God in the female human form is the most perfect mode of witnessing: if Muḥammad was made to love women, it is because women reflect God.


title: Women in Islam

text: Rūmī connected women with the female attributes of the Divine: "She [woman] is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is the Creator – you could say that she is not created."


title: Women in Islam

text: According to Gai Eaton, there are several other ḥadīths on the same theme which underline Muḥammad's teaching on the importance of loving women:


title: Women in Islam

text: Another well-known ḥadīth explicitly states that loving conduct towards one's wife is synonymous with advanced religious understanding:


title: Women in Islam

text: Both the concept and the reality of beauty are of exceptional importance in the Islamic religion: beauty (iḥsān, also translated as "virtue", "excellence", and "making beautiful") is the third element of the canonical definition of Islam after belief (īmān) and practice (islām). At 53:31, the Quran emphasises the importance of avoiding ugly actions, while at 10:26 it states: "Those who do what is beautiful will receive the most beautiful and increase [or more than this]."


title: Women in Islam

text: Female beauty is a central theme in Islam, which regards it as "the most direct visible manifestation of God's beauty, gentleness, mercy and forgiveness". This theme is developed most famously in Islamic mysticism or Sufism. In her work "The Mystical Dimensions of Islam", Annemarie Schimmel records the position of Ibn ʿArabī – who is generally regarded as the greatest Sufi – on "perceiving the divine through the medium of female beauty and seeing the female as the true revelation of God's mercy and creativity" as follows:


title: Women in Islam

text: "The closing chapter of the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, that on the Prophet Muhammad, centers around the famous tradition according to which the Prophet was given a love for perfumes and women and joy in prayer. Thus, Ibn 'Arabī could defend the idea that 'love of women belongs to the perfection of the gnostics, for it is inherited from the Prophet and is a divine love' (R 480). Woman reveals, for Ibn Arabī, the secret of the compassionate God. The grammatical fact that the word dhāt, 'essence', is feminine offers Ibn Arabī different methods to discover this feminine element in God."


title: Women in Islam

text: Marriage is the central institution of family life and society, and therefore the central institution of Islam. On a technical level, it is accomplished through a contract which is confirmed by the bride's reception of a dowry or "mahr", and by the witnessing of the bride's consent to the marriage. (Silence by the woman when being introduced to her husband to be is considered consent.) A woman has the freedom to propose to a man of her liking, either orally or in writing. Muḥammad himself was the subject of a spoken marriage proposal from a Muslim lady which was worded "I present myself to you", although ultimately Muḥammad solemnized her marriage to another man.


title: Women in Islam

text: Within the marriage contract itself, the bride has the right to stipulate her own conditions. These conditions usually pertain to such issues as marriage terms (e.g. that her husband may not take another wife), and divorce terms (e.g. that she may dissolve the union at her own initiative if she deems it necessary). In addition, dowries – one on marriage, and another deferred in case of divorce – must be specified and written down; they should also be of substance. The dowry is the exclusive property of the wife and should not be given away, neither to her family nor her relatives. According to the Quran (at 4:2), the wife may freely choose to give part of their dowry to the husband. Fiqh doctrine says a woman's property, held exclusively in her name cannot be appropriated by her husband, brother or father. For many centuries, this stood in stark contrast with the more limited property rights of women in (Christian) Europe. Accordingly, Muslim women in contemporary America are sometimes shocked to find that, even though they were careful to list their assets as separate, these can be considered joint assets after marriage.


title: Women in Islam

text: When agreement to the marriage has been expressed and witnessed, those present recite the Al-Fatiha prayer (the opening chapter of the Quran). Normally, marriages are not contracted in mosques but in private homes or at the offices of a judge ("qāḍi"). The format and content of the ceremony (if there is one) is often defined by national or tribal customs, as are the celebrations ("'urs") that accompany it. In some parts of the Islamic world these may include processions in which the bride gift is put on display; receptions where the bride is seen adorned in elaborate costumes and jewellery; and ceremonial installation of the bride in the new house to which she may be carried in a litter (a type of carriage). The groom may ride through the streets on a horse, followed by his friends and well-wishers, and there is always a feast called the "walīmah".


title: Women in Islam

text: In contrast to the Western and Orient world where divorce was relatively uncommon until modern times, divorce was a more common occurrence in certain parts of the late medieval Muslim world. In the Mamluk Sultanate and Ottoman Empire, the rate of divorce was high. The work of the scholar and historian Al-Sakhawi (1428–1497) on the lives of women show that the marriage pattern of Egyptian and Syrian urban society in the fifteenth century was greatly influenced by easy divorce, and practically untouched by polygamy. Earlier Egyptian documents from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries also showed a similar but more extreme pattern: in a sample of 273 women, 118 (45%) married a second or third time. Edward Lane's careful observation of urban Egypt in the early nineteenth century suggests that the same regime of frequent divorce and rare polygamy was still applicable in these last days of traditional society. In the early 20th century, some villages in western Java and the Malay peninsula had divorce rates as high as 70%.


title: Women in Islam

text: Marriage customs vary in Muslim dominated countries. Islamic law allows polygamy where a Muslim man can be married to four wives at the same time, under restricted conditions, but it is not widespread. As the Sharia demands that polygamous men treat all wives equally, classical Islamic scholars opined that it is preferable to avoid polygamy altogether, so one does not even come near the chance of committing the forbidden deed of dealing unjustly between the wives. The practice of polygamy is allowed, but not recommended. In some countries, polygamy is restricted by new family codes, for example the "Moudawwana" in Morocco. Iran allow Shia men to enter into additional temporary marriages, beyond the four allowed marriages, such as the practice of "sigheh" marriages, and Nikah Mut'ah in Iraq.