Islam Is Right About Women

[Nouveau Yathrib]

What people tend to believe about what Islam thinks of women is typically what people who are in power in Islamic places and masjids believe about women and don't actually speak to what the Quran actually says.

Adding onto this- Muslims in the US are probably more liberal and better integrated in the whole than those in European countries. What Islam thinks of women is basically just what practicing Muslims think of women.

To my knowledge there’s a movement within Islam called Quranism, which is arguably more liberal on gender relations in that it rejects the validity of hadiths (sayings attributed to the Prophet rather than God).

[The Alma Mater]

What people tend to believe about what Islam thinks of women is typically what people who are in power in Islamic places and masjids believe about women and don't actually speak to what the Quran actually says.

Adding onto this- Muslims in the US are probably more liberal and better integrated in the whole than those in European countries. What Islam thinks of women is basically just what practicing Muslims think of women.

In the Islamic DIscussion thread people got really, really, really upset if you dared suggest that the actual behaviour of muslims and not the literal Qu'ran texts are what defines the faith.

[Neko-koku]

What? This is like saying the concept of opening a jar is unscientific because I put the lid back on.

Female sex organs do not work like the lids of jars or the corks on champagne bottles.

So we agree that chasteness can be considered part of "feminine virtue". It certainly helps keep pair bonding intact. Do you not see why people considering restrictions on women's level of chasteness being "inconvenient" and "not accommodating" because it won't let them do what they want as opposed to chasteness might motivate other people to put restrictions on women's behaviour? Every sedentary society with intensive agriculture, except maybe our modern one in the West (which has contraceptives) on paper, exhibits this to an extent, I don't think it's a coincidence. Is it bad? Men are shamed very hard for not being productive workers and expecting society to take care of them as if they have value for existing, that's their gender role and it is enforced by what could be called ostracism and confinement by social mores. I dunno if it's that bad, I doubt you disagree with the same stuff being applied to men. Feminism has not brought women in the West equal accountability for their actions and they don't seem to be complaining about that at all. As the spawn of a single mother for most of my childhood, the things you are advocating for in the place of a quite wholesome and time-tested form of social organisation because you feel it's "inconsiderate" to what big gamete people feel like doing right now has far-reaching individual and societal consequences. It also demonstrates why that form of social organisation exists in the first place.

My point is that these Islamic conventions restrict women, often unreasonably or unconveniently, while giving men a free pass, and create an environment in many cases that encourages misogyny, forced marriages, sexual harassment/assault, pederasty, and the confinement of women to the private sphere. In more extreme examples, we see the reoccurrence of the good woman/bad woman dynamic that sociologists have observed in Latin America whereby Muslim men may marry non-Muslim women, in times of war this includes forcefully, but Muslim women have no such right to marry non-Muslim men. Essentially, strict adherence to Islam comes with many drawbacks and is certainly not liberating to women in places where it previously did not occur. That's before we even get into limitations on education in many places. Like I said, it depends on the denomination and sect we're discussing. But Wahhabis are bad. Deobandis are bad.

Hey Latin America is an interesting case. Just like in Sub-Saharan Africa Arabs are a dominant ethnic group.

[Neko-koku]

My take?

Islam is right...about cats. Muhammad was a cat lover.