Discussions of Middle Eastern society often turns to the social position of women. Limiting the discussion for the moment to the position of women in Islamic society, the list of inequalities is a long one. These include requiring the burqa covering, that is required in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other dress regulations, such as the chador or head scarf in the rest of the Islamic world are little more than irritating -- except when it comes to sports.

More serious are inequalities in marriage regulations (number of wives, ease of divorce, rights to children) and in the admission or acceptance of testimony in court. In some fundamentalist societies, such as Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to work out of the home or leave the home unattended, or, notoriously, drive a car. For the younger women the worse inequality is in sexual relations. To lose virginity for a women is to dishonor the family. One result, so-called "honor killings" afflict most of the Islamic world. If a women is seen with an unrelated man, in western parlance "has a date", her family feels dishonored. The reaction by her father or brothers is often to kill the man and the woman (that is, their own daughter or sister). Even where such killings are unlawful, judges often let off the perpetrators with little or no punishment.

There is much dispute over whether these inequalities are "really Islamic". In Islamic law, some are based directly on the Quran or hadith (sayings of the prophet). Some have little textual basis, but are still practiced as though they were Islamic. A few extreme rights violations, such as female circumcision, are certainly not Islamic, even though they have been widely practiced in Sudan and other Islamic borderlands. Leaving aside such extremes, whether or not these inequalities are "Islamic" is not be of great importance to the outside observer. Most medieval societies placed similar restrictions on women. Certainly in our tradition women have not until recently had legal equality or voting rights.

Modernizing Islamic societies have generally sought to reduce gender inequality in law, although their accomplishment in real life has been spotty. Nevertheless, societies such as Turkey or Lebanon (or Iraq under Saddam) have raised the position of women to nearly the same degree as has been accomplished in the West.