Women in the Koran the Term Paper

In the Koran, Muhammad is advising some who want to join the war against the pagans to stay by their mothers and go on in taking care of them, assuring them that it is as worthy in God's eyes as fighting for Him in a battle.

By the time Muhammad had his first revelations, Islam came as a tool of God imposing social justice in a world that was divided between tribal wars where women were simple objects in theirs husbands' and fathers' hands. Social justice is also including a fair attitude toward them and it is acting like a book that guarantees their fundamental rights for the first time in the Arabic world, long before they got any rights in the Western world.

It is true that polygamy was allowed by the Koran, but one has to envision it in the frame of a world divided by tribal fights and, after Islam, by fights to conquer new territories and to protect their own. Women needed protectors in a world where there were few chances of survival without them and the only way to have one was by marriage. The Prophet himself married several of his wives only by political means, to create alliances, or to protect the women left with children and no man to support them.

There are words in the Koran that advice men how to conduct themselves with women that must be seen as completely opposed to the way the Arabic world pre-Islam viewed women. According to the Koran where women and men believers are seen as equals in God's world, women have to be treated with kindness, men are not allowed to take hold of their inheritance against their will and they are expected to treat women righteously.Many parts of the Koran are talking about the women and men as two halves of a complete soul: "O mankind! Reverence your Guardian-Lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, his mate, and from this pair scattered (like seeds) countless men and women. Reverence Allah, through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and reverence the wombs (that bore you); for Allah ever watches over you." (Koran, 4:1).

In this light, the revelations of the Prophet, written in the Koran, are revolutionary not only for the society in the Arabic World of the seventh century AD, but particularly for women who were put on the same level al souls of beings living under God's law and were given rights they were never given before in any other part of the world by the written law.

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