Word: koran
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...local healer--who turns out, strangely, to be a black American--can examine her only by peering through an eyehole cut in a blanket; a place where one of her guides is an angry, untrustworthy child who has been expelled from an Islamic school whose only text is the Koran...
Part of the problem dates to Muhammad. Even as he proclaimed new rights for women, he enshrined their inequality in immutable law, passed down as God's commandments and eventually recorded in scripture. The Koran allots daughters half the inheritance of sons. It decrees that a woman's testimony in court, at least in financial matters, is worth half that of a man's. Under Shari'a, or Muslim law, compensation for the murder of a woman is half the going rate for men. In many Muslim countries, these directives are incorporated into contemporary law. For a woman to prove...
Women's rights are compromised further by a section in the Koran, sura 4:34, that has been interpreted to say that men have "pre-eminence" over women or that they are "overseers" of women. The verse goes on to say that the husband of an insubordinate wife should first admonish her, then leave her to sleep alone and finally beat her. Wife beating is so prevalent in the Muslim world that social workers who assist battered women in Egypt, for example, spend much of their time trying to convince victims that their husbands' violent acts are unacceptable...
...Eventually the issue was resolved in Kareem's favor, as are many between them. Their marriage, says Rana, 37, a spirited and sophisticated native of Bombay, is based on "consultation," but in the end, "someone has to take charge. That is my husband." It says as much in the Koran...
Sexual anxiety lies at the heart of many Islamic strictures on women. They are required to cover their bodies--in varying degrees in different places--for fear they might arouse the lust of men other than their husbands. The Koran instructs women to "guard their modesty," not to "display their beauty and ornaments" and to "draw their veils." Saudi women typically don a billowy black cloak called an abaya, along with a black scarf and veil over the face; morality police enforce the dress code by striking errant women with sticks. The women of Iran and Sudan can expose...