Half a witness, half an heir, half the blood money, one sheep at birth instead of two: in classical Islamic law, a woman often counts as half a man. Two women testify where one man would do, so that one can remind the other if she errs (Quran 2:282). A son inherits twice a daughter's share (4:11). Men stand "a degree" above women (2:228), hold authority over them and may strike wives whose disobedience they fear (4:34). A hadith calls women deficient in reason and religion (Bukhari 304), another warns that a people ruled by a woman will never prosper (Bukhari 4425), and a woman may not travel a day's journey without a male guardian (Bukhari 1088). From Kabul to Baghdad, these rules are being written back into law.
Five years after the Taliban's return, a civil society speaker told the UN Security Council that being a woman in Afghanistan is now a crime. In Geneva, NGOs are pleading with the Human Rights Council to at least keep talking about it: renew the rapporteur, keep the dialogues, launch the investigative mechanism. The rapporteur, for his part, has been banned from the country since 2024.
The Islamic Republic will shut a café over an uncovered head and arrest a woman for a loose headscarf. Behind the walls of Tehran's Evin prison, the same state's guards force female political prisoners to undress during searches, according to sources quoted by Iran International. Modesty, it seems, is a rule for women, not for their jailers.
Since 2025, Iraqi couples can trade the civil family law for a Shia religious code. It sets marriage at puberty, accepts weddings with no witness and no register, hands children to their fathers at seven, and lets a woman divorce only if she is abandoned, unpaid or repeatedly beaten. Iraqi women fought to make the reform less terrible. Six months later, parliament made it worse.
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