blindyeo with all due respect, women in the christian west had to fight for freedoms because the christianity of the 'bible' did not give them any rights. no right to have money, inherit, divorce, vote etc. the Protestant Anglican religion is a mild religion NOW because its teeth have been pulled by the secularists and rightly so. in the process of saying they needed rights they had to argue against their holy book and subvert certain concepts and passages that were there in black and white. you had to go up against the priests and vicars to change that.
its the opposite for muslim women, the Quran and body of scripture called the hadith have many statements in support of women as their own agents but it is not priests who have the power to subvert that but the religious jurists who subvert that. the process of how religious law is made involves canonisation of scripture into law, the scripture itself is not law.
so, where the Quran says women have the right to divorce, marry, inherit, vote, they have the right to alimony, that the Muslim woman's testimony in a case of adultery overcomes the husband's testimony, then Muhammad's own statements - outside of the Quran - against domestic violence, his example in marrying divorcees and widows to forge links with various tribes, etc alot of that means muslim feminists dont see the scripture as hostile. as a PROTOTYPE for womens rights the islamic scripture texts are good, ok. not brilliant. in fact even, very progressive for their time and even up until the last century.
to the west Muhammad is the violent prophet who married a 9 year old girl.
to muslim women his words and statements become an ally. When the prophet muhammad (pbuh) found out that people were having anal sex with their wives in order to prevent pregnancy he forbade that but allowed them to do other methods to prevent pregnancy. it is why as a conservative muslim woman now I feel free to use contraception without being a sinner as a Catholic might. he (pbuh) also declared the fetus has no soul before 120 days and that in the modern times has made leeway for muslim women to use contraception that prevents implantation after fertilisation, even the morning after pill. even abortion in some cases is allowed before 120 days and afterwards only to save the mothers life. a catholic woman cannot do that without breaking a large principle about sanctity of life. whereas muhammad was far more pragmatic.
so islam practised conservatively can still allow alot of leeway for muslim women. the problem as i said early is jurists and the way they canonise certain scripture into law whilst leaving out other scripture. because the jurists are overwhelmingly male, this tends to cement patriarchy, rule by the father.
so some statements in support of muslim women from scripture, we share amongst ourselves as encouragement or morality tales, but we know it has no standing in the sharia court. because it has not been canonised into law. the jurists cannot alter the words of the Quran, nor the hadith. but they can decide what makes it into law.
and this isnt always negative as in the case of fighting islamic extremism, war verses in the Quran are overwhelmingly taken as historical stories by muslims because jurists say this is not to take literally but this is to learn from. where as the ISIS extremist says 'that is the utopia all must strive to gain'. which scripture is 'on' which scripture is 'off', depends on tradition, which tends to mean womens rights get lost in the process, but then the arguments for the extremists are also lost.
and it is because of that muslim women step carefully on this:what route to take? accept it passively because the bigger conflagration of violent extremism needs fighting first? get rid of the conservatives but then the liberal muslims do not have the common language with the extremists to truck with them.