![]() Her contacts with persons outside the family were similarly subject to restriction at her husband's wishes. Obedience included never leaving the house without the husband's blessings a husband could gel the assistance of the police to forcibly return his wife to the marital home if she were absent without his leave. Women were legally required to be submissive and obedient to their husbands were they not, their husbands were entitled to beat them and to suspend all maintenance payments. While a woman could marry only one man at a time, men were allowed up to four wives and an unlimited number of concubines. Under traditional Islamic law, child marriages were allowed a girl could be forced into marriage by a qualified male relation. While the situation of women has been generally worse under customary than under Islamic law, Islamic law itself has many provisions that leave women at a clear disadvantage - an irony of history, since these same provisions at the time of their promulgation in seventh century Arabia originally advanced women's rights vis-a-vis the then existing norms. In contrast, where Middle Eastern women have been severely disadvantaged has been in the areas of family law and inheritance, where women are accorded fewer rights than men and are subordinated to male authority. Even in medieval times Muslim women enjoyed rights that Western women only won much later, such as the right to own and manage property, to sue and to be sued, and to enter into contracts and conduct business. ![]() Moreover, Islamic law has from the outset given women full legal capacity once they attain puberty. Generally, Middle Eastern women enjoy something close to legal equality with men in political life, access to education, professional opportunities, and salaries - goals for which Western women have long had to struggle. It is important to remember that the problems of male-female inequality that have most typically concerned Western feminists are different from those facing Middle Eastern feminists. Thus, the effects of legal changes in these societies tend to trickle down gradually. While reform may be immediately significant for educated women in major urban centers, illiterate women, particularly those in nomadic or rural communities, may not understand their legal rights or enjoy the independence and resources required to benefit from legal reform. Often these legal changes have been far in advance of the state of social evolution it may take many years before some segments of Middle Eastern societies feel the impact. It is where political leadership has judged that legal reforms in the status of women would promote the achievement of full modernization that reforms have been made. ![]() Thus, the improvement in the status of women has not resulted from pressures from women's groups as much as from the desire of male members of the political elite to modernize and industrialize their societies, using law reform as a tool of social engineering. Although there are feminist organizations in Middle Eastern countries, they tend to be small and to lack significant input into the political process. ![]() Legal issues involving women's status in the Middle East tend to be quite different from those in the West. Customary laws, Islamic laws, imported European laws, and reformed versions of Islamic laws affect women in" Varying degrees in the different Middle Eastern legal systems, and the status of women does not seem to have been settled in any of them. The legal status of women in the modern Middle East has been in transition since the early part of the twentieth century.
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