Life Behind the Veil Muhammad boosted women's rights, but today Islam often means oppression

By Lisa Beyer

The wives of the Prophet Muhammad were vibrant, outspoken women. His first, Khadija, ran a prosperous trading business and at one point was Muhammad's employer. A'isha, the Prophet's favorite, was at various times a judge, a political activist and a warrior. Among Muhammad's 11 other wives and concubines were a leatherworker, an imam and an advocate of the downtrodden, revered in her day as the "Mother of the Poor."

Some women hold relatively high positions in Muslim countries today. But if the wives of Muhammad lived in parts of the contemporary Islamic world, they might be paying a high price for their independence. Consider events in the refugee centers of Peshawar, Pakistan, where more than a dozen Afghan women have been "disappeared" by radical Islamic groups for the crime of working in women's centers or with foreign aid organizations; or an episode in the Algerian town of Mascara, where a Muslim nurse was doused with alcohol and set on fire by her brother, who was furious with her for treating male patients.

While such violence represents an extreme, women are under fire wherever Muslim zealots are on the march. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979, which swept away progressive legislation passed under the shahs, extremists in many Islamic countries have whittled away at the legal rights of women. In Egypt, for instance, the Supreme Court in 1985 struck down a 1979 law that gave a woman the right to divorce her husband should he take a second wife. Sudan's military regime, which seized power in 1989, refuses to allow women who are not accompanied by a father, husband or brother to leave the country without permission from one of the three.

The Family Code adopted by Algeria in 1984 gave a husband the right to divorce his wife for almost any reason and eject her from the family home. During debate over the code, one legislator actually proposed specifying the length of the stick that a husband may use to beat his wife. Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, which swept local elections last June, is pushing to forbid women to work outside the home.

Pressures to curtail the rights of women come from various puritanical sects within Islam. "They want to impose a new social order by force," says Khalida Messaoudi, president of an Algerian women's organization. "They start by attacking women because women are the weakest link in these societies." Particularly strict is the Wahhabiyah, a movement founded in the 18th century that counts among its adherents many Afghans and the Saudi ruling family. Wahhabi women live behind the veil, are forbidden to drive, and may travel only if accompanied by a husband or a male blood relative. The demands of the gulf crisis prompted the Saudis to loosen some constraints on women, but it is not clear that such liberalizations will endure.

Some Muslim women argue that the zealots are perverting the very religion they claim to hold so dear. "This terrifying image of unhappy women covered in veils is not Islam," says Leila Aslaoui, an Algerian magistrate. Certainly, Muhammad was a liberal man for his time. He helped out around his various households, mended his own clothes and believed sexual satisfaction was a woman's right. The religion he founded outlawed female infanticide, made the education of girls a sacred duty and established a woman's right to own and inherit property.

But Islam also enshrined certain discriminatory practices. As decreed by the Koran, the value of a woman's testimony in court is worth half that of a man's, and men are entitled to four spouses, whereas women can have only one. Males are superior, some argue, because the Koran says they have "more strength."

The current appeal of such male chauvinist beliefs can be traced to Islam's response to Western expansionism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Fearing the erosion of their culture, the Wahhabis and others chose to assert values that set them apart, including the negative aspects of Islam's treatment of women. Modern Islamic fundamentalism is essentially a revival of this earlier reaction against the West.

Despite such stifling interpretations of Islam, many women have found their liberation in their faith. The veil may be a symbol of oppression to the Western eye, but, to many who wear it, it is freedom -- not just from the tyranny of Western culture but also from unwanted sexual advances. In Cairo veils have become so popular that fashion shows are occasionally staged to show off new styles. Says Leila Takla, a Christian member of the Egyptian parliament: "As long as women are covering their heads and not their minds, it is an individual expression." Unfortunately, however, as laws are revised and rights withdrawn, the cloaking of Islamic women grows ever more profound.

With reporting by William Dowell/Cairo and Kathleen Evans/Peshawar