The time has come to come clean and get real. It is therefore absurd to speak of ‘gender equality’ when it comes to Islam. On paper, Muslim men and women are equal, but in real life? It’s a whole different story.

One of the first and most obvious violations and injustices to women according to Islam is the right to education. For example, in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has installed its brand of Islamic law, the girl child is not allowed to go to school. We’re talking about basic education here, something that should be a human right.

Come on now, how can any religion claim to regard women highly yet cage them, and deny them an education? The practice shows that in many Muslims holistically, a girl is meant to stay indoors and look after her husband and family, and nobody cares about what she wants to do in life. This isn’t equality talked about; it is oppression, through and through.

One of the clearest and most intolerable forms of injustice that this Islamic sect claims to have experienced is polygamy. A man can marry four wives if he wishes to, but what about women? Is the similar freedom provided to them? Absolutely not. A woman can only have one husband, and it is accepted that the husband can introduce more than one wife in the home. Where is the equality in that?

To hell with it; let me not pretend that it is just some sort of cultural sensitivity as well. It is an obvious discrimination in the simplest of ways. The usual justification of polygamy in Islam is that men are ‘able’ to support multiple wives, which is a mere excuse that has been advanced to justify male dominance. If in Islam women were given equal rights, then this injustice would have been eliminated centuries ago.

Islamic legal systems, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, always remodel the rights of women unfavourably. In any segregation or division of the marriage bond, women are always considered inferior to men, especially in court. Of course, you cannot turn a blind eye to the bloody acts such as stoning a woman to death for adultery while a man accused of the same crime faces a comparatively mild punishment.
In what way can anyone call this equality? What it is, you ask? Ah, it is a system meant to maintain women as the inferior sex, and they can do nothing about it. This, I believe, is oppression in its worst and most disguised form—that of religious law.

The depressing fact is that equality between men and women has never existed in Islam.

Enough of beating about the bush over the reality we’ve reached! If Islam truly supported women the way that other voices in the religion say it does, then it would be fighting for women rather than against them. Instead of promoting this myth of "gender equality," let’s call it what it is: systemic oppression. Gender equality in Islam? No, that is not the reality; that is a lie.