Spirit and Progress

The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of crimination against Women (General Assembly Resolution, adopted cm 7th November, 1967) condemned, at the highest level of the Work). Forum, the past, traditional status quo of women, and stated the need for its thorough transformation. After laudable rethinking of past attitudes on, the subject, it recommends a re-evaluation of established norms and deplores, in its very first article discrimination against women as an offence acaint human dignity. Women's right to participate in the social, economic, educational, cultural and political fields of endeavour was granted equal recognition with the right of men. Hence the equal right for women and men to acquire, administer, dispose of, and inherit property, and to legal exercise thereof; equal freedom to choose or refuse a spouse, to consent or not to enter into marital status; equal rights for women and men during the subsistence of a marriage as well as during its dissolution. The Declaration bars child marriage; it grants the right to equal conditions in the matter of education, of free choice of revised vocational training, of employment, of remuneration and of treatment in respect of work of equal value.

The above resolution was found necessary in spite of the United Nations Declaration of Fundamental Human Rights in order to ensure the dignity and worth of the Human person, and the rights of women who have for centuries been geared, if I may use the expression, into Second class roles in a generally patriarchal society. In this light I would like to review the role Islam has played in the lives of women. A detailed analysis of the historical perspective on women's position from the inception of Islam to the present times is beyond the scope of the ……

Length the Quranic vision and the prophet’s instruction regarding women. It seems to me that a dichotomy exists between the instruction and its spirit on the one hand and the present understanding and practice on the other, The wide gulf which separates them is due to cultural and economic factors, and a generally accepted patriarchaI view of society.

The recognition the Quran grants to women's material and spiritual conditions seem to be the same as those granted to men.