Pakistan, July 25 -- For over a millennium, the position of women in Islam has been one of the most contested subjects in religious scholarship, debated not only between Muslims and outsiders, but fiercely among Muslims themselves. A striking irony runs through this debate; much of the restrictive, patriarchal interpretation of Islamic texts has been sustained not solely by men, but by generations of scholars, jurists, and even women who inherited and reproduced readings shaped more by the cultural norms of seventh-to-tenth-century Arabia, Persia, and beyond than by the Quran's own language.

When the foundational sources, the Quran and the authenticated traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), are approached with rigorous, contextual, ...