f protector and authority are assigned to men, and the role of obedient wife assigned to women. The fact that these roles might conflict as a practical matter does not seem to have been anticipated. However, the evidence of the text is that it is addressed to men, which argues their preeminent social role.
In the modern period, especially in so-called Islamic fundamentalist societies, male authority over women appears to have been interpreted less in terms of obligation to women and more in terms of control of them. But not all Islamic cultures are ruled solely by the sharia, and it is applied in different ways in various nation-states where Islam predominates. In such countries as Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria, where fundamentalist activism aims to install the sharia as the unchanging law of the land, fundamentalist successes have been both dramatic and spotty.
It may be the case that, as Quandt notes (164), "Islam has been receptive to almost every misogynist custom it encountered in the great march out of Arabia," but there is a view that this dynamic had more to do with the societies in which Islam was adopted than with Islamic doctrine per se. For example, Schwartz (77) notes that the Ottoman Empire's policy toward women was structured by the sharia and the purdah, the former referring to "unequal personal-status laws governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance," and the latter the equivalent of the harem, which historically restricted women to the home (Alireza passim). But it has also been argued that the harem structure, at least in elite Ottoman circles, gave women back-door influence on public policy, a feature of women's traditional prerogatives in household management (Schwartz 77; Lewis passim).
According to Croutier (20), "Islam holds women in particularly low esteem, considering them intellectually dull, spiritually vapid, valuable only to satisfy the
...