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.

Across the Muslim world, female enrolment in schools and universities is at record levels, as is the number of women teachers and professors. The Arab world is showing the fastest improvement in female education of any region. Arab women’s literacy rates have tripled since 1970. Their primary and secondary enrolment rates have doubled. In Jordan, the literacy rate for women is 84 percent, and in Iran it is 80 percent. In Lebanon, girls outnumber boys in both primary and secondary schools. In Saudi Arabia, more women are graduating from universities than men. In Iran, women outnumber men in post-secondary institutions, and a third of faculty members are women.

Yet amid much progress, patriarchy is alive and well.

The Taliban were toppled from power in Afghanistan, thanks to the United States. Yet Taliban-like rules prevail in Saudi Arabia, thanks in large measure to the US, its biggest patron and protector, which turns a blind eye to the suffocating restrictions on Saudi women. They must be covered head to toe in black before venturing out in public, which they may do only if escorted by a male member of the family. So strict has the enforcement of the dress code been that in 2001, fifteen girls at a school in Mecca died in a fire when the mutawwah (religious police) reportedly did not let them out of the burning building because they were insufficiently covered.

Saudi women are, as of this writing, not allowed to drive. On November 6, 1991, when forty-seven of them drove in protest in Riyadh for fifteen minutes, they were denounced as morally lax. Many were fired from their jobs. It was only after much lobbying that they were quietly allowed to return to work.

Not all the Saudi restrictions are Islamic. The taboo against women drivers, for example, is not haram (forbidden), but it is not permitted, in deference to tradition.