If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

by Carla Power

In the context of seventh-century Arabia, the notion that women had rights of any kind, and were God’s creations, on a par with men, was revolutionary. In pre-Islamic Arabia, girls were considered a liability. They were mouths to feed, and bodies requiring expensive dowries when they married, so they were sometimes murdered at birth, buried in the desert dunes—a practice the Quran explicitly condemns. Those females who made it past childhood were nearly always prohibited from inheriting or owning property. Indeed, a woman was effectively part of a man’s goods and chattels: if her husband died, she passed to his male heir, along with the rest of the property. With the arrival of Islam, women gained the right to inherit: the Quran states they are entitled to half as much as their male relatives. The formula may not meet contemporary Western notions of equality, but in seventh-century Arabian society, it was a model of fairness. In the traditional Islamic setup, it is the man, not the woman, who supports a family financially. A woman’s inheritance is her own, to be spent as she wants; a man’s duty is to use his inheritance to support his family.