Quran and Women's Status in Society
The issue of women has been a longstanding issue in human societies. The West’s approach to this issue has been a partial approach that tries to resolve this issue via feminism and giving political and social freedoms to women without paying attention to the structures that reproduce the problem.
A study of the Quran shows that the Holy Book’s approach to this issue in neither partial nor holistic but the Quran does away with the prominence of the issue of gender and in a logical process does policy-making in the field of the society’s thinking and behavior.
The fundamental principle that we believe in is that the Quran has been sent to resolve humanity’s issues. That is, it is not just a moral book that only talks about a series of moral topics but it has resolved humanity’s issues.
For every problem of the society a verse has been revealed by God in a way that we have no verse revealed without attention to problem solving. Each verse is about solving a problem. We should only find the process of problem solving.
Unlike the West that considers the empirical method as the main method of understanding social realities, Islam does not limit itself to this and offers many other methods in addition to it.
The West’s approach to the issue of woman led to feminism that started some four centuries ago and spread in the world over the past 200 years.
In the West, the women pursued to resolve the issue and that led to the launch of a movement but in Islam, it was the Quran that first entered the field of resolving the issue.
Another difference is that in Islam, the source of revelation came to help in problem solving whereas in the West, the revelation sources were abandoned.
While paying attention to the natural differences between men and women, the position of each of them in the system of creation, and their needs, Islam did away with the prominence of the issue of gender in society.
In the Jahilliyah society, women and girls had no position in the society and there was a negative view about them. Since the beginning of the revelation, the Quran discussed this issue and challenged the Jahilliyah traditions about women, by asking why they buried girls alive. The Quran change the society’s culture regarding women. One of the beliefs of the Jahillyah people was that people could have posterity only through boys but the Quran challenged this belief.
Another step was narrating the story of successful women. The Quran mentions the stories of numerous successful women in history, thus transforming the role of women in society.
The fourth step was introducing educational and moral programs that women can do. For example, the Quran said that women, like men, can reach Hayat Tayyiba.
The fifth step was doing away with wrong Jahilliyah traditions regarding marriage and divorce.
And the sixth step was recognizing women’s financial independence.
