The global Muslim community seems to be sensitive on the topic of women’s rights. Members of the Muslim community tend to get offended and prefer to stay in denial. This is where the problem really begins.

Women are maltreated in most societies. This trend, however, seems to have aggravated in Muslim societies owing to the nature of female participation in the society. However, members of the Muslim community choose to ignore it, or get offended to a point that a conversation is no longer possible. Sadly, some of these members are women themselves who fail to understand the abuse of women’s rights that takes place all over the Muslim world. Simply because the guardians of religion have found ways to justify their actions with the help of religion, nobody objects the wrong.

While the world criticizes the Muslim community of not giving its women the rights they deserve, the Muslim community responds with the belief that Islam is the only religion that treats women fairly. The ‘equality’ of women in Islam is emphasized upon without taking into account the fact that nowhere in Islamic scripture are women ‘equal’ to men.

In our attempts to prove the world wrong and defend our beliefs, we end up worsening the conditions that women in the Muslim world have to face. We fail to understand that the freedom that we enjoy is a rare and often frowned upon thing in the Muslim world. We fail to understand the severity of the problem of a woman’s testimony being considered half in contrast to men. We probably will never realize.

A woman gets executed because she was trying to save herself from being sexually abused. Reyhaneh Jabbali was executed in Iran after she stabbed her employer who tried to sexually abuse her. Reyhaneh’s fate had been decided the minute she entered that office. She would have been executed anyway since she would never have been able to produce four witnesses-the required number of people to testify the rape incident. Had she not reported the case, she would have been accused of adultery and would have been stoned to death anyway. In any case, death was the ultimate outcome for a young woman who was simply trying to pursue her career as an interior designer.

Recently, the Chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology stated that a woman cannot object to her husband taking up another wife and that a man does not need permission from his first wife in order to remarry. While reading this, all I could think of was the blatant lie that I had been fed my whole life, ‘…and polygamy was strictly prohibited.’ This sentence is perhaps a sentence that all students who ever had the chance to (or were made to) study Islamiyat have learnt by heart.

In Afghanistan, a woman named Farkhanda was beaten ruthlessly, her body was set on fire and she was eventually thrown into the Kabul River after being accused of burning the Quran. All this was done in the presence of policemen. However, this is something where a difference could be seen. The woman’s body was carried to the graveyard not by men, as religion requires, but by women, which is something completely peculiar. Women’s rights activists carried Farkhanda’s coffin to the graveyard in an attempt to protest against the sickening crime. Women, out on the streets, speaking up against men is something impossible in Afghanistan. This recent turn of events suggests that perhaps women have now had enough and will finally start standing up for their rights. Who knows, a hundred years from now, maybe a woman’s testimony in an Islamic court might actually be equal to that of a man’s testimony.