Islamic women's status: The question of equality

Abstract

The Western idea relative to Islamic women's status is linked to the representations generally held on Islam and Muslim people. These representantions are riddled by esterotypes, reductionist schemas and conceptual confusions. Islam and Muslim societies' reality is much more nuanced and common held ideas do not correspond to it. The inferior status and poverty in which most of Muslim women are confined show the hegemony of a mentality and a patriarchal system that uses its readings of religion in order to legitimate the domination, violence and exclusion of women. Beginning with this idea, the author proposes another reading of Islam and a reflection about the equality notions in the Coran and in the Sunna in the context of revelation, Chari'a objectives and the perspectives of evolution that may reveal the Islamic ways. Working at these roots it may be possible to reduce the distance between the sexes equality principles written at the international conventions and its Islam equivalents.