For most of recorded human history, women have lived under the weight of oppression — buried alive in pre-Islamic Arabia, dismissed as mentally inferior by Greek philosophers, blamed for the fall of Man in early Christian theology, and reduced to sexual objects by a modern secular culture that mistakes exposure for empowerment. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, in his Farewell Sermon, explicitly condemned the ways of Jahiliyyah — the Age of Ignorance — naming the oppression of the poor and the oppression of women among its defining evils. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, it did not merely tweak existing customs; it dismantled an entire civilisational framework of injustice and replaced it with a divinely guided system that honoured women as mothers, daughters, wives, and full human beings accountable before Allah. Yet a profound irony persists in our time: some Muslim women, living under the most just and comprehensive guidance ever revealed for the protection of women’s dignity, find themselves trapped by imported ideologies that wrongly position Islam as the source of their oppression. Tracing 2,500 years of ideas about women — from Aristotle to the Sexual Revolution — reveals not only how deeply those ideologies have failed, but why Islam remains the only true vehicle for liberation.
Two Millennia of Ideological Oppression: From Aristotle to the Sexual Revolution
- Greek philosophy: Aristotle wrote that women are mentally deficient, lacking in understanding, and cannot be trusted — ideas that became foundational to Western intellectual tradition for centuries, long before Islam’s arrival corrected the record.
- Early Christian theology: The celibacy innovated into Christianity led scholars to view marriage and intimacy as spiritually inferior. The Book of Genesis placed the entire blame for the fall of Man on the woman, fuelling centuries of misogynistic writing by early Church fathers. The Qur’an corrects this directly: it was Adam who disobeyed his Lord — the blame is not exclusively placed on Eve, nor is it weaponised against all womankind.
- Pre-Enlightenment Europe: Just fifty years before the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, bishops were formally convening in France to debate whether women even possessed souls.
- The Industrial Revolution: Women entered the workforce in large numbers but were paid unequally — sparking early demands for rights rooted in economics rather than the spiritual dignity Islam had already affirmed a millennium earlier.
- The Sexual Revolution (1960s–70s): Having swung from religious repression to moral permissiveness, the West redefined “liberation” as the removal of all moral boundaries — and then looked at the Muslim world’s God-given modesty and called it oppression.
- The gender-erasure era (1990s onwards): A new extreme declared there is no meaningful difference between men and women. Islam rejects this not out of prejudice but out of justice: to treat fundamentally different realities as identical is itself a form of injustice — as absurd as requiring a woman in her final trimester of pregnancy to fast exactly like every other adult without exception.
“O Messenger of Allah, who among people is most deserving of my good company?” He said, “Your mother.” The man asked, “Then who?” He said, “Your mother.” He asked again, “Then who?” He said, “Your mother.” He asked once more, “Then who?” He said, “Then your father.”
— Narrated by al-Bukhari (5626) and Muslim (2548)
What Islam Truly Teaches About Women — Honour, Rights, and Complementary Roles
Long before Western philosophy had even begun to entertain the question of whether women deserved education or property, Islam had already enshrined women’s rights in divine revelation. Islam granted women full inheritance rights at a time when no other major civilisation did. It affirmed women’s spiritual equality before Allah — both men and women are accountable, both will be rewarded, both will stand before their Lord. The Prophet ﷺ declared: “Women are the twin halves of men” (Abu Dawud, classed as sahih by al-Albani). He defined the best of men not by wealth, power, or social rank, but by how they treat their wives. He assigned the mother a status of honour so elevated that she is named three times before the father when it comes to who deserves the most devoted companionship. This is not a religion that suppressed women — it is a faith that, from its very foundations, built its civilisational framework around their dignity, protection, and spiritual empowerment.
- As mothers: The Prophet ﷺ named the mother three consecutive times before the father — a revolutionary repositioning of her status at the very heart of Islamic family life.
- As daughters: Whoever raises daughters with care and God-consciousness is promised Paradise (Ibn Hibban, 2/190) — a direct and deliberate reversal of the pre-Islamic shame attached to female children.
- As wives: “The best of you are those who are best to their wives, and I am the best of you to my wives” (al-Tirmidhi, 3895) — the criterion for the finest Muslim man is measured in how he treats women.
- In financial autonomy: Islam gave women defined inheritance rights and independent financial identity — including the right to retain all of her own wealth within marriage — at a time when European women owned nothing in their own name.
- In family structure: Islam assigns complementary roles — each member a shepherd responsible for their flock — grounded in justice and divine wisdom, not hierarchy of human worth.
- In marriage: Islam gives women the freedom to choose their husbands, protects them within the marriage covenant, and — unlike cultures that trap women through economic dependence — ensures a man’s obligation to provide regardless of the woman’s own earnings.
The Modern Illusion of Liberation — And Why Islam Remains the Only True Escape
If the West has truly liberated women, the evidence should be measurable. Instead, studies tell a different story. Research from the University of Brussels found that men process women’s faces the same way they process inanimate objects — not as full persons. A parallel study at the University of Kansas found that women also objectify other women, trained by a society that measures female value almost entirely in terms of physical appearance. A 1989 University of Michigan study conducted across 37 countries reached the same damning conclusion globally. Meanwhile, the political arena exposes the lie most starkly: women who reach positions of power in Western democracies are routinely expected to suppress their femininity — to adopt shorter hair, deeper voices, masculine mannerisms — because a man conditioned to view a woman as a sexual object cannot take her seriously in a leadership role unless she stops looking like one. Margaret Thatcher literally had vocal coaching to deepen her voice; the moment Hillary Clinton showed a flicker of emotion during a campaign, commentators asked whether a woman could be trusted with power. Damned for being feminine, damned for suppressing it. The so-called liberation of the Sexual Revolution did not free women — it simply repositioned the cage and called it progress. The problem facing Muslim women today is not Islam; it is culture, tribalism, and the accumulated weight of non-Islamic ideologies that have been wrongly fused with Muslim identity. Those who genuinely want to liberate Muslim women by attacking the hijab, dismissing authenticated hadith through a secular feminist lens, or “re-evaluating” Qur’anic meanings without the tools of scholarship are not dismantling the cage — they are slaughtering the very camel meant to carry them across the desert.
“By covering myself, I did not cover my femininity. The only thing I covered was my sexuality. Covering the latter allowed me to express more the former — and the more I covered my sexuality, the more I could be free, and be an individual, and be a human being.”
— Chinese-American psychology student, UCLA, reflecting on her experience wearing hijab as a social experiment
The oppression of women is real and its history is long — but its source has never been Islam. It traces back to the Jahiliyyah that Islam came to dismantle: the tribal customs, the cultural misogyny, the philosophical frameworks built by fallible men who saw women as inferior, dangerous, or merely ornamental. Islam’s values were not written by humans who can be voted out, revised by committee, or overturned by social trends — they came from Allah ﻋﺰ ﻭ ﺟﻞ and His Messenger ﷺ, and they represent the most coherent, dignified, and just framework for women’s lives that the world has ever seen. The challenge for Muslim men is to actually live what Islam demands — to be the husbands, fathers, and community members that the Prophet ﷺ exemplified, not the cultural patriarchs that pre-Islamic custom produced. The challenge for Muslim women is to refuse the false choice between Western secular feminism and cultural oppression, and instead reclaim the immense spiritual authority, honour, and rights that Islam already placed in their hands. The liberation that so many are still searching for was delivered fourteen centuries ago. It is called Islam — and it was never the enemy.
