But Muslim women are neither as badly off as they come across in the Western media, nor do they enjoy the idealized protected lives that some Muslims would have us believe. Some Muslims talk of how Islam liberated women, which it did in Arabia in the seventh century, yet they are silent on the second-class status of women in most Muslim societies today. Let us set aside the polemics of both sides and take stock.

While men are still leading the US and most of Europe and Africa (Germany elected its first woman chancellor in 2005, the same year that Africa got its first woman president, in Liberia), and Japan remained in a state of national anxiety for forty years over the prospect of a woman ascending to the Chrysanthemum Throne (until Princess Kiko, the wife of the second in line, gave birth in September 2006 to a boy, a potential successor to Emperor Akihito), Muslims have readily entrusted their affairs to women.

Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation, has had a woman leader. So has the second largest, Pakistan. And the third largest, Bangladesh. And the fourth largest, Turkey.

Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri, Turkish prime minister Tansu Ciller and Bangladesh prime minister Sheikha Hasina served one term each. Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto and Bangladesh’s Khaleda Zia were elected prime minister not once but twice. Bhutto was poised to be elected to a third term when she was assassinated in December 2007.

In India — whose Muslim minority of about 145 million is, in fact, nearly as large as or larger than the Muslim majorities in Pakistan (158 million) and Bangladesh (120 million) — Muslim women routinely hold cabinet posts and other high-ranking jobs.

In Iran, which has the world’s sixth-largest Muslim population, vice-president Masoumeh Ebtekar condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women in 1998, long before the rest of the world did. The Iranian parliament has also had a higher proportion of women than the US Senate.

In Pakistan, the proportion of female members in the federal parliament, as of December 2007, is 21.3 percent — well above the world average of 11.6 percent; in Indonesia, it is 11.3 percent.3 At the municipal level in Pakistan, women hold a full third of the seats, following a quota system introduced in 2000.4

In Malaysia, the head of the central bank is a woman. So are the attorney general and the solicitor general and the head of the space agency.

In September 2006, Bahrain’s Haya Rashed al-Khalifa became the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly since 1969.

Pakistan’s Arfa Karim Randhawa is one of the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professionals. On meeting Bill Gates, the ten-year-old asked why it was that even in 2005, about 75 percent of Microsoft’s professional employees were men.