Women Rights in Islam -essay

 Women Rights in Islam

There was a time when women were not considered even the human beings. Europe which claims to be the champion of women rights did not give the women their due place. In France and other Europeon countries, a moot continued for four hundred years and topic of the moot was 'is woman a human being” and the conclusion after four hundred of a prolong discussion was that woman is a human being but of an inferior kind.
But on the other hand when this discussion was going on the Muslims had a perfect code of human rights given by Islam many centuries ago.
When the Holy Prophet  preached Islam it was a time the Arabs felt ashamed of being called fathers of daughters. Right after the birth of a daughter she was buried alive. They had no rights in the property. Their position in the society was equal to animals. Any man could marry many women. They were treated like a commodity.
But Islam determined the rights for women. They were given their rights in the property and  were given complete access to education. Their rights as wives were given in Islam.
It has been clearly mentioned in Islam that the men are responsible to provide them. And in the light of rights given by Islam to women the modem civilization is chanting slogans for women rights. In Europe, they are still struggling for the rights which Islam gave to the woman centuries ago. Our society is a primitive society which is still feeling shy of giving the women their rights which are given by Islam. But it will not prolong because literacy rate is going to the boom so we can say that the future for women will be bright.
The subject of women and the family in Islam is a difficult one fraught with stereotypes and misconceptions. 
A commonly accepted belief, fostered by the existence of such practices as the  (burqa) and seclusion (purdah) of women, is that Islam is a religion that grants no rights to women but rather prescribes their total subjugation to men. In fact, this is far from the Qur'anic reality, and from the picture that emer ges from early Islamic histroy. 
A search for the causes of women's low position in Muslim society shows that such a situation reflects neither the original spirit nor content of the Qur'an which had enacted many reforms to improve women's  position in pre-Islamic society. Many of the social and legal practices perpetuating women's low status actually developed through the influence of social customs common in ancient and medieval times.
 Once these customs infiltrated Islamic culture and then became accepted as norms They were naturally identified with Islam. And once identified with Islam, they were viewed as unchanging if not sacrosanct social standards.
 The recognition that these standards, applied to medieval society, are no longer suitable for present social conditions. It has come in the after math of the social and economic upheaval in the twentieth century.