Although the condition of women under Muslim law is most unsatisfactory, it must be admitted that Muḥammad effected a vast and marked improvement in the condition of the female population of Arabia.

Amongst the Arabs who inhabited the peninsula of Arabia the condition of women was extremely degraded, for amongst the pagan Arabs a woman was a mere chattel. She formed the integral part of the estate of her husband or father, and the widows of a man descended to his son or sons by right of inheritance, as any other portion of patrimony. Hence the frequent unions between step-sons and mothers-in-law, which were subsequently forbidden by Islām, were branded under the name of Nikāḥu ʾl-Maqt, or “odious marriages.”

The pre-Islāmic Arabs also carried their aversion to women so far as to destroy, by burying alive, many of their female children. This fearful custom was common amongst the tribes of Quraish and Kurdah. For although they used to call the angels “daughters of God,” they objected (as do the Badawī to this day) to female offspring, and used to bury their infant daughters alive. This horrible custom is referred to in the Qurʾān, where it is said, Sūrah vi. 138: “Thus have their associates made seemly to many of the idolaters the killing of their children to destroy them.” And, again, Sūrah xvi. 60, 61: “When any one of them has tidings of a female child, his face is overclouded and black, and he has to keep back his wrath. He skulks away from the public for the evil tidings he has heard;—is he to keep it in disgrace, or to bury it in the dust?”

It is said the only time on which ʿUs̤mān shed a tear, was in the days of ignorance, when his little daughter, whom he was burying alive, wiped the dust of the grave-earth from his beard.

The ancient Arabic proverbs illustrate the ideas of pre-Islāmic Arabia as to the position of women, e.g.:—

“A man can bear anything but the mention of his wives.”

“Women are the whips of Satan.”

“Trust neither a king, a horse, nor a woman.”

“Our mother forbids us to err and runs into error.”

“What has a woman to do with the councils of a nation?”

“Obedience to a woman will have to be repented of.”

It has often been asserted by European writers that the Qurʾān teaches that women have no souls. Such, however, is not the case. What that book does teach on the subject of women will be gathered from the following selections:—

Sūrah xxxiii. 35:—

Sūrah xxiv. 31:—

“Speak to the believing women that they refrain their eyes, and observe continence; and that they display not their ornaments, except those which are external; and that they throw their veils over their bosoms, and display not their ornaments, except to their husbands or their fathers, or their husbands’ fathers, or their sons, or their husbands’ sons, or their brothers, or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or their slaves, or male domestics who have no natural force, or to children who note not women’s nakedness. And let them not strike their feet together, so as to discover their hidden ornaments. (See Isaiah iii. 16.) And be ye all turned to God, O ye Believers! that it may be well with you.”

Sūrah lx. 10–12:—

“O Believers! when believing women come over to you as refugees (Muhājirs), then make trial of them. God best knoweth their faith; but if ye have also ascertained their faith, let them not go back to the infidels; they are not lawful for them, nor are the unbelievers lawful for these women. But give them back what they have spent for their dowers. No crime shall it be in you to marry them, provided ye give them their dowers. Do not retain any right in the infidel women, but demand back what you have spent for their dowers, and let the unbelievers demand back what they have spent for their wives. This is the ordinance of God which He ordaineth among you: and God is Knowing, Wise.

“And if any of your wives escape from you to the Infidels from whom ye afterwards take any spoil, then give to those whose wives shall have fled away, the like of what they shall have spent for their dowers; and fear God in whom ye believe.

“O Prophet! when believing women come to thee, and pledge themselves that they will not associate aught with God, and that they will not steal or commit adultery, nor kill their children, nor bring scandalous charges, nor disobey thee in what is right, then plight thou thy faith to them, and ask pardon for them of God: for God is Indulgent, Merciful!”

Sūrah iv. 1:—

“O Men! fear your Lord, who hath created you of one man (nafs, soul), and of him created his wife, and from these twain hath spread abroad so many men and women. And fear ye God, in whose name ye ask mutual favours—and reverence the wombs that bare you. Verily is God watching you!

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“And entrust not to the incapable the substance which God hath placed with you as a means of support; but maintain them therewith, and clothe them, and speak to them with kindly speech.”

“Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God had gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful during the husband’s absence, because God hath of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness ye have cause to fear; remove them into sleeping-chambers apart, and scourge them, but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them; verily God is High, Great!

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“And if a wife fear ill-usage or aversion on the part of her husband, then shall it be no fault in them if they can agree with mutual agreement, for agreement is best. Men’s souls are prone to avarice, but if ye act kindly and piously, then, verily, your actions are not unnoticed by God!

“And ye may not have it at all in your power to treat your wives with equal justice, even though you fain would do so; but yield not wholly to disinclination, so that ye leave one of them as it were in suspense; if ye come to an understanding and act in the fear of God, then verily, God is Forgiving, Merciful!

“But if they separate, God can compensate both out of His abundance; for God is Vast, Wise!”

Sūrah xxiv. 4–9:—

“They who defame virtuous women, and bring not four witnesses, scourge them with fourscore stripes, and receive ye not their testimony for ever, for these are perverse persons—

“Save those who afterwards repent and live virtuously; for truly God is Lenient, Merciful!

“And they who shall accuse their wives, and have no witnesses but themselves, the testimony of each of them shall be a testimony by God four times repeated, that he is indeed of them that speak the truth.

“And the fifth time that the malison of God be upon him, if he be of them that lie.

“But it shall avert the chastisement from her if she testify a testimony four times repeated, by God, that he is of them that lie;

“And a fifth time to call down the wrath of God on her, if he have spoken the truth.”

will be gathered from the following quotations:—

“I have not left any calamity more detrimental to mankind than women.”

“A bad omen is found in a woman, a house, or a horse.”

“The best women are those that ride on camels, and the virtuous women of the Quraish are those who are affectionate to young children and who are most careful of their husband’s property.”

“The world and all things in it are valuable, but more valuable than all is a virtuous woman.”

“Look to your actions and abstain from the world and from women, for verily the first sin which the children of Israel committed was on account of women.”

“God will reward the Muslim who, having beheld the beauties of a woman, shuts his eyes.”

“Do not visit the houses of men when they are absent from their homes, for the devil circulates within you like the blood in your veins. It was said, ‘O Prophet, in your veins also?’ He replied, ‘My veins also. But God has given me power over the devil and I am free from wickedness.’ ”

“Two women must not sit together, because the one may describe the other to her husband, so that you might say the husband had seen her himself.”

“Do not follow up one look at a woman with another; for verily the first look is excusable, but the next is unlawful.”

An adult woman may contract herself in marriage without her guardian’s consent, and an adult virgin cannot be married against her will. When divorced or a widow, she is at liberty to marry a second husband. She must be treated with respect, and it is not lawful for a judge to see more than her face and the palms of her hands. She should go abroad veiled. She is not required to engage in war, although she may be taken by her husband on a military expedition, but she can have no share in the plunder. She is not to be slain in war.

The fine for a woman is half that of a man, and in evidence the testimony of two women is but equal to that of one man, except in the case of a birth, when the evidence of one woman is to be accepted. Her evidence is not accepted in the case of retaliation. [QISAS.] In the event of a person being found slain in the house or village belonging to a woman, the oath (in the matter of evidence) is administered to her fifty times repeatedly before the fine is imposed. If she apostatize from the faith of Islām, she is not to be put to death, but to be imprisoned until she return to the faith; for although Imām ash-Shāfiʿī maintains that she is to be put to death, Imām Abū Ḥanīfah holds that the Prophet has forbidden the slaying of women, without making any distinction between those who are apostates or those who are original infidels. But, according to an express injunction, they are to be stoned to death for adultery, and beaten for fornication. Women who have no means of subsistence are to be supported by the state.

(The law of divorce is treated under the article DIVORCE.)

It is a curious arrangement of Muslim law, that (according to the Hidāyah, Grady’s ed., p. 340) a woman may execute the office of a Qāẓī or judge, except in the cases ḥadd and qiṣāṣ, in conformity with the rule that her evidence is accepted in every legal case except in that of ḥadd and qiṣāṣ, or “retaliation.” There is, in fact, no distinct prohibition against a woman assuming the government of a state. The rulers of the Muḥammadan State of Bhopal in Central India have been women for several generations.

has been the subject of severe criticism as well as of some controversy. Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole says:—

“The fatal blot in Islām is the degradation of women.… Yet it would be hard to lay the blame altogether on Moḥammad. The real roots of the degradation of women lie much deeper. When Islām was instituted, polygamy was almost necessitated by the number of women and their need of support; and the facility of divorce was quite necessitated by the separation of the sexes, and the consequence that a man could not know or even see the woman he was about to marry before the marriage ceremony was accomplished. It is not Moḥammad whom we must blame for these great evils, polygamy and divorce; it is the state of society which demanded the separation of the sexes, and in which it was not safe to allow men and women freely to associate; in other words, it was the sensual constitution of the Arab that lay at the root of the matter. Moḥammad might have done better. He might boldly have swept away the traditions of Arab society, unveiled the women, intermingled the sexes, and punished by the most severe measures any license which such association might at first encourage. With his boundless influence, it is possible that he might have done this, and, the new system once fairly settled, and the people accustomed to it, the good effects of the change would have begun to show themselves. But such an idea could never have occurred to him. We must remember that we are dealing with a system of the seventh century, not of the nineteenth. Moḥammad’s ideas about women were like those of the rest of his contemporaries. He looked upon them as charming snares to the believer, ornamental articles of furniture difficult to keep in order, pretty playthings; but that a woman should be the counsellor and companion of a man does not seem to have occurred to him. It is to be wondered that the feeling of respect he always entertained for his first wife, Khadeejeh, (which, however, is partly accounted for by the fact that she was old enough to have been his mother,) found no counterpart in his general opinion of womankind: ‘Woman was made from a crooked rib, and if you try to bend it straight, it will break; therefore treat your wives kindly.’ Moḥammad was not the man to make a social reform affecting women, nor was Arabia the country in which such a change should be made, nor Arab ladies perhaps the best subjects for the experiment. Still he did something towards bettering the condition of women: he limited the number of wives to four; laid his hand with the utmost severity on the incestuous marriages that were then rife in Arabia; compelled husbands to support their divorced wives during their four months of probation; made irrevocable divorce less common by adding the rough, but deterring, condition that a woman triply divorced could not return to her husband without first being married to some one else—a condition exceedingly disagreeable to the first husband; and required four witnesses to prove a charge of adultery against a wife—a merciful provision, difficult to be fulfilled. The evil permitted by Moḥammad in leaving the number of wives four instead of insisting on monogamy was not great. Without considering the sacrifice of family peace which the possession of a large harem entails, the expense of keeping several wives, each of whom must have a separate suite of apartments or a separate house, is so great, that not more than one in twenty can afford it. It is not so much in the matter of wives as in that of concubines that Moḥammad made an irretrievable mistake. The condition of the female slave in the East is indeed deplorable. She is at the entire mercy of her master, who can do what he pleases with her and her companions; for the Muslim is not restricted in the number of his concubines, as he is in that of his wives. The female white slave is kept solely for the master’s sensual gratification, and is sold when he is tired of her, and so she passes from master to master, a very wreck of womanhood. Her condition is a little improved if she bear a son to her tyrant; but even then he is at liberty to refuse to acknowledge the child as his own, though it must be owned he seldom does this. Kind as the Prophet was himself towards bondswomen, one cannot forget the unutterable brutalities which he suffered his followers to inflict upon conquered nations in the taking of slaves. The Muslim soldier was allowed to do as he pleased with any ‘infidel’ woman he might meet with on his victorious march. When one thinks of the thousands of women, mothers and daughters, who must have suffered untold shame and dishonour by this license, he cannot find words to express his horror. And this cruel indulgence has left its mark on the Muslim character, nay, on the whole character of Eastern life.” (Selections from the Ḳur-án, 2nd ed., Preface.)

The strict legislation regarding women as expressed in Muḥammadan law, does not affect their position amongst wild and uncivilized tribes. Amongst them she is as free as the wild goats on the mountain tops. Amongst the Afreedees in the Afghān hills, for example, women roam without protection from hill to hill, and are engaged in tending cattle and other agricultural pursuits. If ill-treated by their husbands, they either demand divorce or run away to some neighbouring tribe. Not a few of the tribal feuds arise from such circumstances.

Amongst the Bedouins (Badawīs), Mr. Palgrave tells us, their armies are led by a maiden of good family, who, mounted amid the fore ranks on a camel, shames the timid and excites the brave by satirical or encomiastic recitations. (Arabia, vol. ii. p. 71.)

The influence which Afghān women have exercised upon Central Asian politics has been very great, and, as we have already remarked, the Muḥammadan State of Bhopal in Central India has for several generations past been governed by female sovereigns. [CONCUBINES, DIVORCE, MARRIAGE, WIVES.]