Anthropologists working in Islamic cultures hence consistently report a dual hierarchy that requires wives to be dutiful to husbands, while husbands must be dutiful to mothers. Modernity loosens both these ties, the former vehemently, and the latter absentmindedly. The consequence has been a lopsided; a frankly ageist new hierarchy which prioritizes youth over age and imposes ruthless forms of discrimination against those who were once considered the community’s pride and the repository of its memory.

As medical advances prolong average longevity without substantially eroding the differential that separates male and female mortality, modern societies relegate increasing numbers of women to involuntary eremeticism in regimented but prayerless convents. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune recorded that 60 percent of inhabitants of American old people’s homes never receive a visitor. Given the gender ratio normal in such establishments, the percentage among women must be higher still. Hence the irony that young and middle-aged women in the West have broader horizons than hitherto (excluding, for the moment, the religious horizon), but must all fear a decade of solitary confinement at the end, staring into television screens, recycling memories, and fingering months-old greeting cards from relatives who rarely, if ever, appear. Even in the most Westernized of Muslim societies, the confinement of the old to what are, in effect, comfortable concentration camps, is regarded with the disgust that it merits.

Other aspects of Shari`ah discourse also call for elucidation. It cannot be our task here to review the detailed provisions of Islamic law, or to explain in each individual instance the Islamic case that gender equality, even where the concept is meaningful, can be undermined rather than established by enforced parity of roles and rights. Such a project would require a separate volume of the type attempted recently by Haifa Jawad, and we must content ourselves with surveying a few representative issues.

Perhaps the most immediately conspicuous feature of Muslim communities is the dress code traditional for women. It is often forgotten that the Shari`ah and the Muslim sense of human dignity require a dress code for men as well. In fully traditional Muslim societies, men always cover their hair in public and wear long flowing garments exposing only the hands and feet. In Muslim law, however, their `awrah [the parts of the body that must be covered] is more loosely defined. Men have to cover themselves from the navel to the knees as a minimum, but women, on the basis of a hadith, must cover everything except the face, hands, and feet.

Again, the feminine dress code, known as hijab, forms a largely passive text available for a range of readings. For some Western feminist missionaries to Muslim lands, it is a symbol of patriarchy and of woman’s demure submission. For Muslim women, it proclaims their identity. Many very secular women who demonstrated against the Shah in the 1970s wore it for this reason, as an almost aggressive flag of defiance. Franz Fanon reflected on a similar phenomenon among Algerian women protesting against French rule in the 1950s.

For still other women, however, such as the Egyptian thinker Safinaz Kazim, the hijab is to be reconstrued as a quasi-feminist statement. A woman who exposes her charms in public is vulnerable to what might be described as “visual theft,” so that men unknown to her can enjoy her visually without her consent. By covering herself, she regains her ability to present herself as a physical being only to her family and sorority. This view of hijab, as a kind of moral raincoat particularly useful under the inclement climate of modernity, allows a vision of Islamic woman as liberated, not from tradition and meaning, but from ostentation and from subjection to random visual rape by men. The feminist objection to the patriarchal adornment or denuding of women, namely that it reduces them to the status of vulnerable, passive objects of the male regard, makes no headway against the hijab when responsibly understood.

A further controversy in the Shari`ah’s nurturing of gender roles centers around the institution of plural marriage. This clearly is a primordial institution whose biological rationale is unanswerable. As Dawkins and others have observed, it is in the genetic interest of males to have a maximal number of females, while the reverse is never the case. Stephen Pinker notes, somewhat obviously, in his book How the Mind Works, “The reproductive success of males depends on how many females they mate with, but the reproductive success of females does not depend on how many males they mate with.”