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I argue that Islam gave women objective morality 1400 years ago while other ideologies haven't thought about it.
islam
secularism
I argue that Islam gave women objective morality 1400 years ago while other ideologies haven't thought about it.
The modern world congratulates itself on "giving" women rights, as if rights are something humans invent, vote on, and award... well, to themselves. But this reveals the core weakness of every secular and Godless system; rights that come from man can be taken away by man. What Islam established in the 7th century was categorically different. Allah, the Creator of men and women, defined their rights in divine revelation rooted in the nature of the human being itself. The fact that Muslims have to talk about this subject is a testament to the degeneracy we have plunged into, but from the secular perspective, it's a relatively niche matter that's "progressing."
At the beginning I wanted to examine why other nations have been hailed for a more progressive system and women rights but that doesn't answer anything, because, what constitutes a woman's right? So I'll argue directly against what secularism hail as them giving women their rights.
Before seculars (atheists) can talk about women's rights, they must answer simple but foundational questions that would shape how to approach this matter:
What are women's rights?
Why should they have them?
Is having rights a good thing?
If your answer to Q3 is "yes," why is having those specific rights a good thing?
Would we be immoral now if after a decade we gave women another "right" they don't already have?
Many atheists would, and want you to assume that we all know what women's rights are, that it's a no-brainer because it's "good," because they don't want you questioning their core "beliefs," and yes, atheism has a, rather repulsive, belief system that rejects God. The argument I'm using is the same one for general morality, it could be used with any other topic.
Let me take the horrible task of standing in the disgusting shoes of an anti-women male to clarify my point. I'll make this argument:
The relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled. A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave. The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities — a natural defectiveness. Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly. Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species, and are not destined for anything else. The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them — these are the duties of women at all times.
As you might've guessed, these weren't my words, but collection of quotes from "thinkers." Now tell me, how would you rebut them? Were these statements objectively wrong or are they just another opinion that you respectfully disagree with? It depends on how you see morality.
There are only two options: morality is objective, or it is subjective. Both horns of this dilemma destroy the secular case for women's rights; because either answer comes with a fatal follow-up.
The atheist who believes in objective morality is already smuggling in a theistic assumption. Objective moral values require a transcendent source. They cannot float in the air. They need to be grounded in something beyond matter, chemicals, and preferences.
This is why philosophers call it the moral argument for God's existence: if objective moral truths exist, they require an ontological anchor that atheism simply cannot provide. Even the secular law proves this. Think about what secular law actually has: a system where everyone, politicians, judges, ordinary citizens, is held to the same standard regardless of personal belief or status. Anyone who runs a red light is fined. Two people who commit the same crime receive the same sentence. That uniformity, that universality, that "you must obey this even if you disagree" that is the structure of objective morality. Seculars built a system that functions like divine law, but then insist there is no divine lawgiver.
David Hume himself, the patron saint of secular ethics, destroyed this position from the inside with his is-ought problem: no collection of facts about the world (is) can ever logically produce a moral obligation (ought) without importing a hidden value premise first. "Women are oppressed" is a fact claim. "Therefore women ought to have rights" requires a moral premise that does not come from the fact itself. Where does that hidden premise come from? The secular has no answer.
If the atheist retreats and says morality is subjective and evolving, they have now conceded the entire women's rights argument. Why? if morality is relative to individuals or cultures, then the question "Do women have better rights now than before?" becomes literally unanswerable. "Better" requires a fixed standard. Without one, you can only say: "different societies had different preferences." That is all.
When the atheist says women now have "more options" or "more autonomy" than before, so: "which criterion makes optionality itself the supreme value?" Answer without assuming objectivity, answer that autonomy is really and truly better than, say, security, stability, or a defined social role. But we have already rejected objectivity a while back. So now we are going in circles.
In fact, their own social science undermines them. Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice (2004) argues empirically that more options do not make people happier, rather they increase anxiety, paralysis, and dissatisfaction. So even within secular thought, you can legitimately argue that expanding women's choices has made women measurably less satisfied. If morality is subjective and evolving, and if "more choice" is not objectively better, the secular has no weapon to counter this argument.
The atheist faces an inescapable fork. If morality is objective; welcome to theism, because objective moral truths need an objective moral lawgiver. If morality is subjective, then women's rights are just a current cultural preference, no more "correct" than any other era's arrangement, and you cannot call the past immoral without contradiction. Either way, the secular case for women's rights collapses before it even engages with Islam. Let's now talk about their objective rights in Islam. You shouldn't be surprised that I will keep hammering that Islam gave women all the rights I'm going to explain 1400 years ago.
1400 years ago, in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, the revelation from Allah came down to an illiterate man living in a predominantly pagan and anti-women society, commanding him to take up the heavy responsibility of reviving Allah's law, Islam, which has established a comprehensive system that governs our life, men and women. These laws honored women from that time until the day of judgement, and any objection against it needs to prove itself, if a law that claims to be from God contradicts Islam, it needs to prove that it's indeed from God. As for secular laws, they're subjective, changing, baseless, and thus, indefensible.
In Islam, we don't have separate rights for men and women; a guiding principle is that both men and women have the same foundational rights, with circumstantial and guarding laws that men or women need to achieve the same goal. Here are two verses summarize that there's no discrimination between men and women; we are all the children of Adam.
There are general rights that encompass all women regardless of her role or relation to others, let's see some examples to substantiate the claim that Islam honored women since the 7th century. The Quran is always unambiguous about it, the verses are not open to interpretations.
Islamic jurisprudence builds on this to establish that a woman's property is entirely her own. What she owns before marriage remains hers. What she earns during marriage remains hers. What she inherits remains hers. Her husband has no legal claim to any of it.
In pre-Islamic Arabia (the Jahiliyyah), women could not inherit, they were inherited. A man's wife and daughters were treated as property that passed to male relatives upon his death. Islam overturned this entirely. A daughter, wife, mother, and sister all have fixed, legally guaranteed shares of inheritance that no one can strip from them. The Quranic inheritance system (Quran 4:7–14) is the world's first detailed, written legal code guaranteeing women specific, non-negotiable inheritance shares.
Critically, what a woman inherits is hers alone. She is not required to spend it on the household, that obligation falls entirely on men. This means a Muslim woman's inherited wealth is net wealth, free from conjugal obligation.
The occasion of revelation for Quran 4:7 makes the revolutionary nature of this legislation vivid: when a man died and left a widow and daughters, his male cousins seized the entire estate on the grounds that "only those who fight on horseback are entitled to inherit." The widow appealed to the Prophet (peace be upon him). The revelation came down and overturned the cousins completely. This is precisely the kind of divine intervention that no other legal system (secular, Christian, or pagan) offered women.
Women’s testimony in Shari‘ah is accepted and sometimes equal to men’s, but its form and conditions differ by the type of case (financial, family, penal law, etc.).
The verse most controversially cited regarding women's testimony is Quran 2:282, the longest verse in the entire Quran, which is why I won't quote it entirely, deals specifically with written contracts for debt. It states: "Call in two men as witnesses. If two men are not there, then call one man and two women out of those you approve as witnesses, so that if one of the two women should forget, the other can remind her."
The verse is context-specific. It pertains to financial debt contracts in a 7th-century environment where women were generally not involved in commercial transactions and had lower financial literacy. The Oxford World's Classics commentary by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem notes explicitly that "A further example of discrimination against women due to disregard of context is found in the way some scholars interpreted 2:282. In urging the recording of a debt in writing." but this generalization exceeded the Quran's own context.
In many areas of Islamic law, women's testimony stands alone and unchallenged. In matters unique to women such as breastfeeding, menstruation, childbirth, and matters of the inner household, a single woman's testimony is accepted and decisive. The testimony of a woman confirming she breastfed a child, for instance, establishes a prohibition degree of marriage (a ruling with lifelong legal consequences) on her word alone.
The main way in which the hadith was transmitted to us is through the rigorous oral tradition called "Isnad" and the testimony of each narrator for and against the other, which is called "al-Jarḥ wa al-Taʿdīl" or the field of "Narrator Criticism and Accreditation" in terms of their righteousness, manners, memory, orthodoxy. Women's testimony for other women's character was taken, and one was sufficient.
The hadith of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) demonstrates the depth of female testimonial authority in Islam. Thousands of hadith, comprising the foundational legal texts of Islamic jurisprudence, were transmitted by Aisha alone. The rulings derived from her testimony govern the entire Muslim world to this day. If female testimony were categorically inferior, this edifice would collapse.
The reasoning is practical. The word "tadilla" in classical Arabic means to forget, not to be intellectually deficient. The rule is a safeguard for accuracy in financial record-keeping, not a judgment on women's minds.
The word "Muslim" here carries no gender distinction. Women themselves asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) for dedicated teaching sessions, and he obliged, setting a fixed day to teach them directly.
As mothers, there are several clear statements in the Quran and the hadith; at least seven clear verses in the Quran that command us to honor our parents, in four of them Allah includes it along with worshiping Him alone (Quran 2:83, 4:36, 6:151). I'm struggling to write anything to go with the quotes as they're clear as day.
We all know that committing shirk (worshiping something beside Allah) is the highest form of sin in Islam, and when you see that Allah has placed honoring parents with the command to not commit shirk, it meant that it's a grave sin, which the prophet has confirmed:
And perhaps the most famous hadith about that topic that all Muslim children learn is this:
Islam honors sisters as close kin whose rights must be preserved, treated with mercy, protection, and good companionship, and whose care is a means to Paradise. Sisters are part of the rahm (ties of kinship) that Allah commanded to be maintained; whoever upholds these ties is promised Allah’s care, and whoever cuts them off is warned.
Brothers and sisters share all general Muslim rights: the Islamic greeting, visiting when sick, attending funerals, sincere advice, avoiding backbiting, and loving for them what one loves for oneself. For example; It is forbidden to harm sisters by tongue or hand; as the prophet said that a true Muslim is the one from whom other Muslims are safe from harm. The Prophet (peace be upon him) repeatedly promised Paradise and protection from Hellfire for anyone who fears Allah and treats his daughters and sisters with patience, kindness, and justice.
In the pre-Islamic Arabia it was shameful for a man to have a daughter as they believed they bring bad omen and lower their status, so much so that it's known that they used to bury them alive. So the revelation struck down at this repulsive act in a sharp language.
This verse exposes a mindset that Islam came to eradicate. The birth of a daughter was not an "evil" at all, it was only considered evil by those whose values had been corrupted. Allah condemned this way of thinking and reminded mankind that children are His gift alone. Islam also removed the social stigma attached to having daughters. Before Islam, some fathers felt humiliated when a daughter was born, fearing ridicule from their society. Others treated daughters as second-class members of the family, depriving them of inheritance and favoring sons in wealth and care. The Quran condemns this mentality as one of the corrupt remnants of Jāhiliyyah.
The verse presents the father with two shameful choices that existed before Islam: either to keep the daughter while treating her with humiliation and contempt, or to bury her alive. Both are condemned. The first is emotional oppression; the second is outright murder.
Whether a family is blessed with daughters, sons, both, or neither is entirely by Allah's decree. No parent chooses this outcome, and it is therefore irrational and unjust to blame or resent the mother for giving birth to a daughter.
The Quran completely rejects the idea that daughters are somehow inferior to sons. The true measure of a child is not gender but righteousness. A righteous daughter is better than countless unrighteous sons, just as a righteous son is better than countless unrighteous daughters. In Islam, honor comes through piety, not gender.
The life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is itself a powerful refutation of the belief that sons are superior. His first children were four daughters: Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthūm, and Fāṭimah (may Allah be pleased with them all). Although he later had three sons, all of them died in infancy, while his daughters lived and became among the most honored women in Islamic history. Had sons been inherently more noble than daughters, Allah would have granted them first to the noblest of His creation.
Islam did not merely prohibit the killing of daughters, rather it transformed society's view of them. Daughters became honored members of the family, entitled to inheritance, kindness, education, dignity, and love. The Quran replaced shame with gratitude, reminding believers that every child, whether male or female, is a gift from Allah and that His decree is always wise and perfect.
For a man to have access to women, he has only one path, marriage. Showing commitment is mandatory before the marriage could commence.
Islam describes wives as honored partners in marriage, with mutual rights and duties built on tranquility, love, and mercy. He says about spouses: “They are your garments and you are their garments.” (Quran 2:187), meaning mutual protection, cover, and closeness. Allah says: “And they (women) have rights similar to those (of men) over them, in kindness…” (Quran 2:228), confirming that wives have rights just as husbands do, and those rights must be fulfilled with kindness. Husbands are commanded to spend on, protect, and live with their wives in kindness, and it is forbidden to wrong them or abuse them.
The mahr (dowry) is a financial commitment from the husband to the wife, enshrined in Quran 4:4: "And give the women their bridal gifts graciously." This gift is given to the woman, belongs to her exclusively, not her family, and cannot be reclaimed by the husband unless she freely gives it back. Even if she was coerced to give it back and say that it was willful, Allah knows what happened and the coercer has committed a grave sin.
Under Islamic law, marriage concretely cements a woman’s rights and forces a man to think deeply before taking on the responsibility. A husband must provide a bridal gift (mahr) directly to his wife and assume full responsibility for her financial maintenance and well-being. These uncompromising requirements hold men accountable and demonstrate that Islam grants women robust, enforceable rights that no other ideology has ever matched.
The dowry: as stated before, it could be anything that the woman accepts as mahr (gift for marriage).
Full financial and emotional support which includes, but not limited to, food, separate housing, raising kids.
The wife is not obliged to spend anything for the family even if she was much wealthier than her husband, but if she wanted to, Allah will reward her for that.
The Right to Divorce, Initiated by the Woman
This is called khul', a woman-initiated divorce. It existed in Islamic law from the very beginning of the revelation. No secular society codified a woman's legal right to divorce until the 19th century at the earliest.
I would like to give a simple example to illustrate how Islam cares about what we might think are trivial:
Islam even protects women's right to get her desires met of the marriage.
Christianity, in its raw theological claim, is not a religion revealed through an incorruptible, preserved divine text. It is a religion mediated through human authors, human councils, human translations, and human institutional power, all of which were overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly reflecting the patriarchal norms of their era. This creates a fundamental problem: when the Church used scripture to justify women's subjugation for fifteen centuries, how does one distinguish divine mandate from male cultural preference dressed in theological language?
The answer is: you often cannot. And in the case of the two most damaging texts: 1 Timothy 2:11-12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. The secular view among biblical scholarship is that they reflect Paul's cultural moment, not God's timeless command (for obvious reasons).
1 Timothy was written to Ephesus specifically, a city dominated by the cult of Artemis, a goddess whose worship elevated women to a perceived, back then, spiritual superiority over men. Paul was responding to a local heresy in which uneducated women were spreading, in his view, doctrinal error. 1 Timothy clearly addresses false teaching in the Ephesian church (“myths and endless genealogies,” speculation, asceticism, etc.).
Some egalitarian scholars argue that uneducated women, influenced by Artemis myths or other local ideas, were among those spreading doctrinal error, and that Paul’s restrictions in 2:11–12 target that situation rather than all women everywhere.
Complementarian scholars reply that the text itself does not explicitly say the false teachers were women, and that Paul grounds his instructions in creation (Adam/Eve) as a universal pattern, so they see the prohibition as normative for the whole church, not merely local.
Egalitarian writers sometimes speak of a “consensus” that 1 Timothy deals with a specific problem in the Ephesian churches, criticizing older readings that ignore context. But complementarian scholars explicitly reject this and maintain that the broader consensus of historic church tradition and much contemporary scholarship still sees a general rule about authoritative teaching and oversight, even if applied first in a particular setting.
Some scholars argue that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is a later interpolation rather than original Pauline writing, noting that the passage appear in different positions in Western manuscripts; after verse 33 in most, after verse 40 in some.
Regent University's academic journal notes: "It cannot be denied that Paul was influenced by the culture in which he lived" acknowledging that patriarchal bias shaped the Pastoral Epistles.
Whatever Paul's actual intent, the Church Fathers amplified and systematized women's subjugation into theological doctrine. Tertullian (c. 155–220 CE) called women "the devil's gateway," holding them responsible for the Fall and for humanity's susceptibility to sin. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) argued that Eve's creation from Adam's rib established her inherent subordination in the natural and spiritual order. These interpretations, built by men in a patriarchal Greco-Roman world, were treated as divine truth and enforced institutionally for over a thousand years.
By the 4th century, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, women were progressively excluded from all leadership roles. The Council of Laodicea (c. 363 CE) formally prohibited women from presiding at the Eucharist. Theological arguments were used to justify marital rape, physical abuse, exclusion from education, denial of property rights, and institutional invisibility. The witch trials of the 15th through 17th centuries, which burned tens of thousands of women across Europe, were explicitly authorized by Church institutions and justified through theological arguments about women's susceptibility to demonic influence.
The Quran is not the product of a man's culture, It's the divine revelation that wasn't stained by any human. Muslims believe, and the internal evidence of the Quran's historical context supports, that it reversed the prevailing culture precisely because it came from outside human cultural preference. It banned female infanticide when Arabia practiced it. It gave women inheritance when Arabia denied it. It mandated women's consent in marriage when Arabia did not require it. It did all of this against the grain of 7th-century Arabian male interest, which is one reason why the male tribal leaders who were knee-deep into the subjugation of women, resisted it.
Paul's letters went with the grain of Roman and Jewish patriarchal culture in most of their statements about women. Through the lens of secularism he wasn't wrong (we are getting there). The Quran went against the grain of Arabian patriarchal culture in all of its statements about women's rights. That is the difference between a human author shaped by his world and a divine revelation sent to correct it.
For many centuries in England and other common‑law countries, married women’s legal rights were heavily restricted under the doctrine of coverture. Upon marriage, a wife’s legal identity was largely merged with that of her husband, so that in ordinary common‑law courts she generally could not own most types of property in her own name, enter binding contracts independently, sue or be sued on her own, or make a will without his involvement.
This remained the law in England until 1882, when the Married Women's Property Act finally granted married women the right to own, buy, and sell property independently. That is more than 1200 years after Islam had already enshrined this right in divine revelation.
The United States did not meaningfully extend property rights to married women until similar legislation was passed state by state through the late 19th century.
Christian theologians today debate whether Paul's instructions were cultural or universal. That debate itself is the problem: Islamic women's rights are not subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, or ecclesiastical vote. They are fixed by Allah's direct command.
Secularism frames itself as the champion of women's rights. But look at when it actually acted:
1792: Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest major works arguing for women’s equal education and rational capacity, influencing later reforms in Europe and America.
1848: The Seneca Falls Convention in New York issues the “Declaration of Sentiments,” formally demanding legal equality and suffrage for women and launching a structured women’s rights movement in the West.
1882: England grants married women property rights.
1893: New Zealand becomes the first country to grant women the vote.
1918–1928: The United Kingdom gradually grants women suffrage, first to certain women over 30 (1918), then to women on the same terms as men at age 21 (1928).
1920: The United States grants women suffrage, 1,300 years after the Quran declared women's financial independence.
1948: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms equal rights for “men and women” in its opening articles, giving global human‑rights recognition to women’s legal equality in principle.
1963–1972 (U.S.): Laws like the Equal Pay Act (1963) and Title IX (1972) prohibit sex-based wage discrimination and sex discrimination in federally funded education, expanding women’s rights in work and study.
1979: The UN adopts the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a global treaty used as a framework for reforming national laws on women’s rights.
Everything secularism "gave" women in the 19th and 20th centuries, Islam gave in the 7th century, instead of being grounded in a suffrage movement, political lobbying, or cultural shift, it's a revelation from the Creator of all people. And the rights Islam upheld are objective; transcendental and incontestable. A quick search of the first university in the whole world will show you that, not just the fact that the first university to ever be established was by Muslims in the 9th century (almost 10 centuries before the west started recognizing women as worthy humans), it was created by an honored woman.
Secular rights are negotiated rights. They depend on who holds power, which movements succeed, and which political winds are blowing. There is no objective grounding for why a woman must have rights in a secular worldview, only utilitarian arguments, social contracts, or appeals to sentiment. This is why the same secular West that "liberated" women also:
Built economies on the trafficking and exploitation of women.
Continues to debate abortion, pay equity, and domestic violence protections as political issues subject to reversal.
Produced waves of feminist theory that contradict each other.
There is a question worth asking plainly: if secular liberalism has been the dominant force in the West for over two centuries, and if it genuinely prioritizes women's dignity and rights, why are the outcomes getting worse?
The answer becomes clear when you look past the language of liberation and examine what secularism's treatment of women actually produces. When a society removes objective moral standards from how women are valued, perceived, and treated, what fills that vacuum is the market. And the market has one consistent interest: maximizing male access to women's bodies, while minimizing the moral, legal, and social cost of that access.
A conspiracy theory? I'n afraid not. It is documented, measurable, and hiding in plain sight.
For centuries the west defaulted to marriage and raising their families with the help of extended families of both parents, thanks to the Judeo-Christian tradition they inherited, but it was a factor of the degeneracy we see now. Marriage provided women with the much needed security, stability, and future that their nature seeks, but that meant the man had to work for it, to show commitment. Secularism wants otherwise; secular culture stripped away the legal, financial, and social obligations that made a man responsible for a woman, and rebranded the resulting instability as "freedom."
Modern secularism has presided over a drastic erosion of the traditional family unit. Society increasingly normalizes casual cohabitation, pushing couples to live together without the formal bonds of marriage. While secular ideologies often market this shift as the ultimate form of liberation, it actually destabilizes the home and promotes a culture of degeneracy. This casual approach removes the social and moral gravity required to build a stable, lasting foundation for future generations.
In reality, cohabitation disproportionately disadvantages women by stripping away vital legal and social protections. Living together without a marriage contract allows men to enjoy the physical and emotional benefits of a marriage while easily dodging long-term commitment. Without binding vows or clear responsibilities, women are left completely vulnerable to the whims of partners who can walk away without consequence. It is an arrangement that ultimately enables exploitation rather than fostering true equality.
Research consistently shows that women in secular workplaces are evaluated not only on competence but on physical appearance in ways men are not. A landmark 1985 study by Heilman and Stopeck found that physical attractiveness helped women in non-managerial, traditionally "feminine" roles, but hurt them when they sought managerial positions. The implication is obvious: be attractive and you'll be rewarded for being appealing, but not for leading.
A 2024 study published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology confirmed this pattern: evaluations of women at work depended heavily on their physical attractiveness in ways that simply did not apply to male colleagues. Another study found that attractive women were disadvantaged when applying for historically male roles because their attractiveness made their gender more visible, triggering bias.
This creates a documented double bind unique to women: be attractive, and you are a sex object, not a professional. Be less attractive, and you are penalized for not meeting aesthetic expectations. Men are not subjected to this. The research literature on what is called the "beauty is beastly" effect spans decades, but secular society has never resolved it, because it would require an objective moral standard for how women are valued. And that is precisely what it refuses to adopt.
Some professions run almost entirely on female appearance as a functional prerequisite. The secretary, or administrative assistant role, overwhelmingly occupied by women, has historically combined clerical labor with the aesthetic labor of being pleasant, presentable, and physically attractive to male bosses. Research from the sociology of organizations documents that "women's appearance" is a persistent, often invisible mechanism of discrimination and evaluation that is treated as legitimate in ways no equivalent male standard would be.
Flight attendants represent perhaps the starkest example. University of Surrey research based on interviews with Virgin Atlantic, Qantas, and Emirates cabin crew found that airlines actively regulate female attendants' appearance down to makeup application, hairstyles, and body weight, enforcing standards through detailed "look books," peer pressure, and what's called "naming and shaming". These appearance standards were not extended to male colleagues. The women were required to embody a specific feminine aesthetic, slim, groomed, visually pleasing as a condition of employment.
Cheerleaders represent another case so normalized it goes unquestioned. Research on cheerleading's evolution documents that the role transformed over the 20th century from a student activity into a performance of female bodies for male spectators. Female cheerleaders exist at the edges of the playing field not as participants in the sport but as visual entertainment, their bodies, uniforms, and movements choreographed for the gaze of predominantly male audiences. Academic analysis is explicit: "Females as cheerleaders are reserved for the eyes of men and their entertainment".
The secular "nightlife" economy is built on a documented business model: attract men with the presence of women. Cover charges are routinely lower, or zero, for women, creating what economists acknowledge is a pricing strategy designed to populate venues with female bodies that attract paying male customers. Women are incentivized into environments where alcohol consumption is normalized and sexual availability is implied, albeit not through force, but through the architecture of the system. The "liberation" to be in bars without restriction is, in practice, a pipeline into environments structured for male access to women.
The academic literature on women in advertising is vast and consistent. A content analysis of 1,988 advertisements from 58 popular U.S. magazines found that one in two advertisements featuring women portrayed them as sex objects. Women appeared as victims in nearly 10% of advertisements, with men's, fashion, and female adolescent magazines being the worst offenders.
A 2025 systematic review confirmed that advertising has a "multifaceted psychological impact" on women's self-perception, producing negative body image, self-objectification, and disordered eating. A UK Advertising Standards Authority survey found that 44% of the British public expressed concern about the objectification of women in advertising, with women far more likely to report concern than men.
Most critically, the effects extend beyond self-image. A meta-analysis of 166 independent studies involving 124,236 participants found a consistent, significant correlation between exposure to sexualized media and aggression-related thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors toward women. The effect was stronger for violent sexualized content but remained "significant and nontrivial" even for non-violent sexual objectification. To consume media that treats women as objects is, the research confirms, to begin treating women as objects.
A review synthesizing 87 key articles on female sexualization and objectification in advertising concluded that it "can have negative societal effects, including long-term effects on consumers' attitudes and behaviours towards sexual relationships, at times leading to normalization of sexual violence and harassment". This is the secular media economy. This is what "freedom" has built.
If advertising objectifies women indirectly, the pornography industry does so directly, industrially, and with the full sanction of secular liberal law.
A study published in the journal Dignity based on interviews with women in pornography production in Sweden found that they described the experience using a consistent phrase: "In this industry, you're no longer human." Research published in a 2025 peer-reviewed study on individuals filmed for pornography found a documented "history of continuous polyvictimization and ongoing mental health challenges" meaning the women who appear in pornography are typically already victims of prior abuse, and the industry compounds it.
A French governmental assessment found that 90% of mainstream online pornography contained acts of physical or verbal violence directed at women. A meta-analysis of 22 studies from 7 countries found that pornography consumption was significantly correlated with committing actual acts of sexual aggression, across cultures, across cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, among both males and females.
Five separate studies reviewed by a harm-reduction research organization found pornography "normalizes violence against women by packaging it as entertainment". The research on pornography's link to attitudes that diminish women's humanity is documented and consistent. What is contested is whether secular society will do anything about it. So far, the answer is no: the pornography industry is legal, growing, and increasingly accessible to minors.
Meanwhile, 82% of women in the United States have experienced sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime, a figure unchanged from 2018 to 2024 despite the entire #MeToo movement. In the workplace, 37% of women report experiencing sexual harassment, a rate that has not improved in five years according to the McKinsey 2024 Women in the Workplace report. In Europe, 31% of working women have experienced workplace sexual harassment, rising "alarmingly" to 42% among women aged 18 to 29.
Are these statistics from a society that has solved the problem of women's rights? No, they are statistics from a society that has had 200 years of "progress" and over 60 years of feminist activism and still cannot protect women from the men it claims to have educated, 14 centuries after Islam.
The 1960s sexual revolution promised women liberation from moral constraint. What it delivered was the removal of moral constraints on men's access to women. Consider the logic carefully: before the sexual revolution, social norms and religious expectations created barriers to casual sexual access. Women were protected, imperfectly, yes, but structurally by norms of courtship, marriage, and female modesty. The sexual revolution dismantled those barriers in the name of women's freedom.
Who benefited most? Research by analysts of the "case against the sexual revolution" including journalist Louise Perry, whose work draws extensively on social science argues that the revolution primarily delivered freedom of access to men, while women bore the disproportionate physical, psychological, and social costs: unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, exploitation in casual sex markets, and the normalization of male sexual demands as baseline expectations.
The mental health data supports this. Studies tracking the happiness and mental health of young women in liberal secular societies show worsening outcomes over the very decades in which "liberation" supposedly progressed. Young liberal women, the demographic most ideologically committed to the sexual revolution's framework show disproportionately high rates of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress.
On the other, cleaner, hand, a 2011 study published in PubMed examining 118 Muslim women in the United States found that wearing the hijab was negatively associated with reported sexual objectification experiences. Women who wore hijab reported fewer incidents of being treated as sexual objects. The study confirmed the theoretical argument: when a woman's appearance is not presented as a commodity for male consumption, she is treated more as a full person, who would've thought!
This is exactly what Islam's system of modesty (haya') is designed to produce. The Quran commands both men and women to guard their modesty. The requirement is a firewall against the objectification machine. And the research confirms it works. How could an illiterate man living in the 7th century come up with a comprehensive and harmonious system that unequivocally gave women rights that his milieu was vehemently against? There is no other explanation that he could be incentivized to forge such a doctrine.
Islam did not merely react to modern societal failings; it preemptively protected women from such vulnerabilities over 14 centuries ago. By establishing the sacred contract of Nikah, Islam elevated relationship dynamics from casual agreements to serious moral and legal obligations. This divine framework ensures that a woman’s dignity, financial security, and future are never left to chance or the changing moral compass of secular society.
After everything we've examined, the question is no longer simply whether women have rights, but who has the authority to define those rights in the first place. Secularism treats rights as something discovered, negotiated, and expanded by human beings, meaning their definition ultimately depends on changing values, political movements, and whoever holds power. Islam begins from the opposite direction: rights come from Allah, the Creator of men and women, and therefore do not depend on human preference. Islam did not wait for centuries of political movements to recognize that women could own property, inherit wealth, receive education, consent to marriage, or seek divorce; these principles were established through revelation in the 7th century.
The pattern across both comparisons is the same. The Christian tradition's scriptural legacy produced a legal system that erased women as legal persons for over a millennium. Secularism stumbled toward recognizing women's rights across several centuries of political struggle, and considers those rights perpetually open for renegotiation.
The law of Islam arrived in the 7th century CE with a complete, divinely-sourced framework:
Property: Hers alone, untouchable by husband or father, Quran 4:4, 4:20-21
Inheritance: Guaranteed by Allah, Quran 4:7
Marriage: Only with her consent, Quran 4:19, Sahih Muslim
Divorce: Available to her, Quran 2:229
Education: Obligatory upon her equally, Ibn Majah 224
Allah, who created women, knew their rights before any civilization thought to discuss them. And He did not leave those rights to human whim.
It's a shame that women in the western world didn't have the chance to experience being an honored human being; from being treated as inferior to men because of a sin that she didn't commit, to being the man's property, to being forced into prostitution, to experience a "revolution" that claims to restore her rights, but ended up keeping her as a sex object, and expecting them to be grateful.
The Inca Empire (1438–1533 CE) is often referenced in academic and popular discourse as a civilization that "valued" women. A closer look at the historical record reveals something far darker.
Inca state representatives would travel through communities and select the most physically beautiful girls, between the ages of eight and fifteen. These girls were forcibly removed from their families and taken to the acllahuasi, the "House of the Chosen Women," where they served the empire for life. They had no say in this selection. They did not choose their path. The state chose for them.
Inside the acllahuasi, these women spent four years weaving cloth and brewing chicha (corn beer) for religious and imperial use. After evaluation, they were assigned one of several fates: concubine to the Sapa Inca, a "gift wife" to nobles or military officers the ruler wished to reward, or a permanent laborer, all while remaining forcibly celibate for life. Any woman caught breaking her forced celibacy was buried alive along with the man involved.
The most revered girls among the acllas were not elevated to honor, they were selected for capacocha, ritual human sacrifice. Archaeological evidence from mountaintop shrines in Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador confirms that girls as young as four were taken, drugged with chicha and coca leaves, and left to die of exposure or killed by strangulation and blunt-force trauma. Forensic analysis of frozen mummies has confirmed these killing methods.
Modern bio‑anthropological work notes that victims came from provincial elites and often had elevated status and careful preparation, so being chosen could be seen socially as an “honor,” but from a moral standpoint it meant being designated for death.
A Nature report on the Llullaillaco mummies notes that one 13‑year‑old girl (“the Maiden”) was likely an aclla, trained in weaving and brewing chicha, and that acllas could be marked for sacrifice as part of capacocha.
Researchers from the Smithsonian confirm: "The state would issue a levy for all provinces within the empire to tribute young children. Girls generally came from the ranks of the acllas."
Islam declared that a woman cannot be forced into marriage, cannot have her wealth taken, and cannot be inherited like property, all in the 7th century CE. The Inca Empire, which arose nearly eight centuries after the revelation of Islam, institutionalized the forced conscription, sexual assignment, and ritual sacrifice of women as a pillar of its religious state. There is no meaningful comparison.