Islam and Women

Muslim fundamentalists nowadays mostly are known through the strict customs they are imposing upon women in Muslim countries. Such a contemporary debate results from varied contingencies as it may in no case be rattached, strictly, to the deeds or the founding texts of Islam

A women, Khadijah, is playing a fundamental role in Muhammad's predication. Khadijah was a rich widow, who was older than Muhammad and who became her wife. She encouraged and comforted Muhammad when the latter faced his visions and revelations, the which began as he was 40 years of age. Khadijah, finally, was the first to convert to the new religion. Some seemingly easy approaches, on a other hand, state that Muhammad had lost his mother early and that his relations with women would have thus be impacted. In such a direction could go only the fact that Muhammad himself was considering his aunt, the mother to Sene Ali, like a second mother. Khadijah might well be the true model of muslim women as she had been one founding woman of Islam. By 622 A.D., one year after Khadijah died, Muhammad maried Aicha. She was a child of nine years only, which matches the customs and the epoch of the Arabic peninsula. That mariage was instigated to him through Archangel Gabriel, who had brought to him a picture of a child. Aicha was the daughter to Abu Bakr, the first of the Islam believers, and his fried. Aicha was a child-woman of sort for Muhammad. After Khadijah had been older than him, he then became the image of a father and participated into the childish games of her new wife

As far as polygamy is concerned, it has to be noted that Muhammad, when maried to Khadijah, had her like his sole spouse. He took concubines and instaured polygamy from Aicha onwards. Such a polygamy, generally, was tied to politic considerations. He had, through such women, to consolidate or ground new tribal alliances, or it was about protecting widows who otherwise would have had to be sent back to Qurayshits. Seven women thus lived with Muhammad. One of those was a Coptic Christain one, or Mary the Copt who did not convert to Islam. She gave one son to the Prophet, named Ibrahim. Another concubine was a Jewish woman, Safia, who was the sole survivor of a massacredtribe. She converted to Islam and also bore a boy. From Khadijah, Muhammad had had 4 daughters, of them Fatima, and one son who died young like Ibrahim. In Islam, polygamy was to be limited to four women as a number beyond was authorized to Muhammad only, by God's agreement

Islam certainly constituted a improvement of mores in the Arabic peninsula as some women, before Muhammad's predication, boasted to have met twenty men, one only being the father to their child. Islam, on the other hand, really imposed a notion of pudeur, if not the veil. The main reason is that, contrarily to the previous times, lineages have to be firmly established as genealogies have a great importance by the Arabs and as Muhammed considered them like the base of a development of Islam. As far as the veil is concerned, a passage only in the Quran is referring to as it mention a fabric which is thrown ahead. One does not know for sure what part of the body it is supposed to hide. As far as law is concerned, Islam improved the fate of women. A married woman, since, was able to keep bearing her maiden name and she was authorized to inherit half a part. Only one sort of marriage now is lawful, as it allows up to four women. Adultery, as it requires four witenesses before a judge, is condemned mostly in terms that it is a social evil. Women at last acquire the right to separate themselves from their husband. They can propose a divorce, with a patrimonial arrangement. Or they can ask a divorce to the Muslim judge, or cadi, when their husband does not provide them enough subsidies

Such bases, as Islam eventually came to beheld a whole world, from Morocco to Central Asia or Indonesia, will be those upon which diverse situations, political systems and epochs will build as they will hesitate between rigorism or openness