The West has a fixed image of the Muslim woman. She is a second-class citizen.

She is forced to wear a veil — or worse, a head-to-toe tent-like cloak — when going out, if she is allowed to go out at all. She may be subjected to genital mutilation. If she has premarital sex or an affair during marriage, she may be publicly stoned to death or murdered in “honor killings.” She may not marry a non-Muslim — an edict that does not apply to men, who can wed Christians and Jews and take four wives. She may not have an abortion. She will inherit less property than a man. Her testimony is worth only half that of a man.

Western stereotypes of Islam have been around for centuries. “The treatment of women provided Europeans with an excuse to declare the inferiority of Muslims and their religion, and also justification for Europe’s imperialist and colonialist policies and practices,” writes Guity Nashat, professor of history at the University of Illinois.1 A telling example was that of Lord Cromer, British consul in Egypt toward the end of the nineteenth century, who said the “degradation of Muslim women” proved the “backwardness of Islam,” even while he was a founding member of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England.2

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.