Timeline of some prominent women in the Muslim world.

610 Khadija bint Khuwaylid, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, becomes the first convert to Islam.

624 Fatima Zahra, one of the daughters of the Prophet Mohammad, becomes the wife of the first Shi'a Imam. Many Mulsims regard her as the greatest woman who has ever lived. She is noted as being a devoted daughter, wife, and a sincere Muslim.

632 Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his third wife, Aisha bint Abu Bakar becomes one of four people to transmit the "hadiths," or the words and deeds of Muhammad considered by many Muslims to be important tools for discerning the Qur'an.

717 Marks the birth of Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya who is considered to be one of the first to practice the mystic tradition of Islam known as Sufism, and acknowledged as the most prominent Sufi poets of her time.

1067 Arwa al-Sulayhi comes to power and rules for over 40 years in Yemen. She is known for her contributions to education, the expansion of religion, and agriculture.

1236 Raziyya al-Din becomes the first female to rule over Delhi. She was chosen by her father over her brothers, due to her capacity to lead.

1250 After defeating a French invasion, ex-slave Sultana Shagrat al-Durr becomes the first leader of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt.

1588 Queen Amina Sarauniya comes to power in her nation-state of Zazzua, located in current day Nigeria. She expands her kingdom more than any previous leader through military expeditions and trade negotiations.

1646 Sati al-Nisa dies after serving as a physician in the court of the Mughal Emperor Shahjahan.

1829 Sayyida Imam-Begum makes her first public appearance as the last famous composer of ginan, or religious hymns important among the Ismaili community.

1923 Hoda Sha'rawi becomes the founder and first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union.

1988 At age 35, Benazir Bhutto becomes Pakistan's youngest and first female prime minister as the result of the first open election in over a decade.

1993 Tansu Ciller becomes the first female to be elected as prime minister in Turkey.

2001 Megawati Sukarnoputri is elected as the first female president of Indonesia.

2003 Iranian lawyer and human rights activist, Shirin Ebadi, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Iranian and Muslim woman to receive this honor. She is the founder of the Association for Support of Children's Rights in Iran.

2004 Queen Rania of Jordan received the honorary rank of colonel in the Jordanian Armed Forces.


The Koran states in the chapter called an-Nisaa (Women) in verse 34: "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them ; but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all)."



My Feminist Awakening
I had experienced gender apartheid long before the Taliban made it headline news. I came to understand that once an American woman marries a Muslim, and lives in a Muslim country, she is a citizen of no country. Never again could I romanticize foreign places or peoples in the Third World—or marriage.

Once a Western woman marries a Muslim and lives with him in his native land, she is no longer entitled to the rights she once enjoyed. Only military mercenaries can rescue her. I have since heard many stories about Western women who have married Muslim men in Europe and America but whose children were then kidnapped by their fathers and kept forever after in countries such as Saudi Arabia,[2] Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and Iran. The mothers were usually permitted no contact.

Today, women in the Islamic world are increasingly pressured into arranged marriages, forced to veil themselves, not allowed to vote, drive, or travel without a male escort, to work at all, or to work in mixed gender settings. Worse, many are genitally mutilated in childhood, and routinely beaten as daughters, sisters, and wives; some are murdered by their male relatives in honor killings, and stoned to death for alleged sexual improprieties or for asserting the slightest independence. Such violations of women's human rights are increasingly taking place among the Muslim community in Europe and in North America.

Westerners do not always understand that Eastern men can blend into the West with ease while still remaining Eastern at their core. They can "pass" for one of us but, upon returning home, assume their original ways of being. Some may call this schizophrenic; others might see this as duplicitous. From a Muslim man's point of view, it is neither. It is merely personal Realpolitik. The transparency and seeming lack of guile that characterizes many ordinary Westerners make us seem childlike and stupid to those with multiple cultural personalities.

A woman dares not forget such lessons—not if she manages to survive and escape. What happened to me in Afghanistan must also be taken as a cautionary tale of what can happen when one romanticizes the "primitive" East.

Did Ali really think that I would be able to adjust to a medieval, Islamic way of life? Or that his family would ever have accepted a Jewish-American love-bride?

There are only two answers possible. Either he was not thinking or he viewed me as a woman, which meant that I did not exist in my own right, that I was destined to please and obey him and that nothing else was really important. He certainly helped shape the feminist that I was to become.

When I returned to the United States, there were few feminist stirrings. However, within five years, I became a leader of America's new feminist movement. In 1967, I became active in the National Organization for Women, as well as in various feminist consciousness-raising groups and campaigns. In 1969, I pioneered women's studies classes for credit, cofounded the Association for Women in Psychology, and began delivering feminist lectures. I also began work on my first book, Women and Madness,[3] which became an oft-cited feminist text.

Firsthand experience of life under Islam as a woman held captive in Kabul has shaped the kind of feminist I became and have remained—one who is not multiculturally "correct." By seeing how women interacted with men and then with each other, I learned how incredibly servile oppressed peoples could be and how deadly the oppressed could be toward each other. Beebee Jan was cruel to her female servants. She beat her elderly personal servant and verbally humiliated our young and pregnant housemaid. It was an observation that stayed with me.

While multiculturalism has become increasingly popular, I never could accept cultural relativism. Instead, what I experienced in Afghanistan as a woman taught me the necessity of applying a single standard of human rights, not one tailored to each culture. In 1971—less than a decade after my Kabul captivity—I spoke about rescuing women of Bangladesh raped en masse during that country's war for independence from Pakistan. The suffering of women in the developing world should be considered no less important than the issues feminists address in the West. Accordingly, I called for an invasion of Bosnia long before Washington did anything, and I called for similar military action in Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

In recent years, I fear that the "peace and love" crowd in the West has refused to understand how Islamism endangers Western values and lives, beginning with our commitment to women's rights and human rights. The Islamists who are beheading civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents, and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West. While some feminist leaders and groups have come to publicize the atrocities against women in the Islamic world, they have not tied it to any feminist foreign policy. Women's studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They do not. More than four decades after I was a virtual prisoner in Afghanistan, I realize how far the Western feminist movement has to go.

Based upon the Death of Feminism by Phyllis Chesler, copyright 2005 by the author, and printed with permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.

[1] The chadari is also known as the burqa', a covering worn by Afghan women.
[2] See, for example, "U.S. Department of State, Marriage to Saudis," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2003, pp. 74-81.
[3] New York: Doubleday, 1972.

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