Weekly Poll: Does Islam Oppress or Liberate Women?
Many argue that the restrictions Islam places on women like wearing a veil or being denied contact with men they aren’t married to makes them second-class citizens. Many Muslims, including women, counter that suppressing public sexuality and sexual temptation gives women more freedom. Although many, if not most, of the defenders of the latter view are surely sincere, I’m not certain that there is a legitimate debate here. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the key concept of “freedom” is being defined differently and it surely is it’s implausible that women are really as “free” as men in traditional Islam. Perhaps the easiest way to see that there’s something fundamentally wrong is to imagine if the different standards applied to men and women within Islam were shifted so that they applied to non-Muslims and Muslims in the wider society. Imagine for a moment that all Muslims, men and women, had to cover up but non-Muslims could move about freely with faces, heads, arms, et
