Jason Abbey
GNDS 102: Understanding LGBT Identities
Loraine Hutchins, Ph. D
March 15, 2015
“Men are in charge of women by [by right] what Allah has given over the other and what they, spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient , guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard.”-Koran 4:34 Under Sharia Law women are not allowed to walk the streets alone and in some countries Islamic women are not even allowed to drive. This basic freedom of transporting themselves needs to be given to women if they are to overcome the oppressive Muslim society. The Quran says that “Men are in charge of women , because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other “ 4:34 If women are to be seen as individuals in Islamic society and not just wives used for making babies, there needs to be to the equality and respect, between men and women. While gender and gender-related issues are without a doubt as old as creation since they have attended the conception of the earliest human society, the emergence of the gender debate and the interest of academia in `gender studies' is a distinctly modern prerogative. A parallel interest in learning about Muslim societies and about gender relations in particular, is also part and parcel of the modern encounter of the West with Islam. The shaping discourse on gender and Islam available to readers today in both the Muslim and contemporary Western worlds is occurring against a changing discourse on modernity in a rapidly changing global context which is becoming as open to technological challenges as it is vulnerable to the noticeable currents of social and cultural entropy.
To understand gender in Muslim society we need to begin by shifting perceptions and attitudes to learning about Islam and gender away from the dominant judgmental and manipulative modes of knowing to a mode of understanding in the